Fearless Jones

each other that there was a deep love between those women.

Gella went with the ambulance, and the police finished their searches.

16

I PACED the somber house, taking inventory of the tokens of the Tannenbaums’ life. On their bedroom dresser were more than a dozen photographs in little stand-up frames. Old black-and-whites, and even older sepia-and-whites showing stern- faced, soft-skinned people in dark clothes. Even the children put on frowns for the camera. I didn’t know which one was Sol Tannenbaum, but I recognized Fanny sitting in a high-backed chair, holding a bouquet of lilies. Her face was so sour in that picture that I had to laugh. I knew her well enough that I could see past the pose into the woman who was now dead.

Her rings and bracelets were in a jewelry box. Perfume was a single bottle. One scent was enough at her age. On matching night tables on either side of the bed there were pictures of Gella. Fanny’s photo was a more sedate one of the girl becoming a woman with someone else’s baby in her arms. Sol had one of her in a flaring summer dress, smiling and impatient. I imagined the plain girl was feeling beautiful that night, and she wanted to run away to dance.

Sol’s top drawer had about sixty dollars in bills and change in it. I took the money without feeling like a thief. The money Fanny had given me wouldn’t last long, and I needed cash to keep me and Fearless afloat.

There were papers of many sorts in Sol’s drawers. Mixed in among them were cuff links and thick rings, keys, and a pocketknife. Many of the papers were letters in foreign languages. I made out postmarks from Israel, Germany, and Argentina. There were old newspaper clippings of many things, including a recital that Gella had performed on the violin at a Jewish temple not far away. There was one article, clipped and circled in red, about Lawson and Widlow, the accounting company Sol had worked for. The firm was acting as broker for a French company that was selling an antique collection of jewelers’ tools to a museum in New York. The Cuthbert and Rothstein Museum of the Jeweler’s Art had purchased the eighty-seven instruments that were used to create the crowns of French royalty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The article was a few years old and yellowing. I put it in my pocket and opened the bottom drawer.

There was a clip-loading .38 in its original box down there. The maker’s name was Belson-Teeg. The gun was made from dark metal, and it was well cared for. I checked it out. It was open for business. The safety was off, and there was a bullet in the chamber.

I spent the longest moment thinking about that gun. Should I take it? I wasn’t a good shot, but I knew how to pull a trigger. Since Elana Love had taken Fearless’s piece I felt vulnerable. But if I took Sol’s fancy pistol and the cops found it on me, I’d be in trouble.

Would you rather be in trouble or be dead? The voice that came into my head was that of Lonnie “two-hand” Samuels, my pretend uncle and the number one troublemaker of Avery Island at one time. In his youth he had been on the chain gang twice. The sheriff of our sleepy community always braced Lonnie when a crime had been committed. But Lonnie didn’t do crimes by the time I was twelve. He just spoke out loud about what a man had to do if he wanted to keep his dignity and his life.

Remembering Lonnie’s advice usually made me do the opposite of what he said, because even though I loved my uncle, I knew he had a head harder than cast iron and he never worried about consequence.

“Hello?” a man’s voice called from downstairs. “Is anybody home?”

That made up my mind for me. I put the pistol in the belt under my loose shirt and went cautiously out of the bedroom.

The man I found standing at the foot of the stairs was smaller than I by a head, and that’s short. I could also tell that he was slight of frame in spite of the heavy overcoat he wore. But I didn’t regret my pistol. Even a little man can carry a gun. The visitor’s hands were in plain sight, so I went the rest of the way down to meet him.

“Hello,” he said, looking up at me with an expression too mild to be honest. I mean, here I was a black man in elderly white folks’ house with the door obviously left unlocked, and he didn’t so much as frown. Instead, all he did was ask, “Is Fanny or Sol here?”

“He’s in the hospital and she’s dead,” I said casually.

It’s hard to tell from a man’s face how he responds to terrible news. Sometimes tears are a blind for guilt. But the little man in the big coat didn’t cry. His eyebrows knitted a quarter inch. His lips pressed ever so slightly tighter.