Fearless Jones

“What about Bernard Latham?” he asked.

At first I thought we were experiencing an earthquake. The ground seemed to swell under my feet. I regretted my decision to stand.

“What about ’im?”

“What did he ask you?”

“He wrote it down, man.” I got dodgy, hoping to figure out where these questions came from — and where they were going.

“Don’t get wise, son,” the uniform said.

“He wanted to know why we were at Fanny’s house. He thought maybe we were the ones who stabbed Sol.” I decided to skim the truth off a little at a time.

“Who’s we?”

“Me an’ Fearless.”

“Fearless the other boy outside?”

“Latham brought us here,” I said.

“Who was he riding with?” Binder asked.

I tried to remember. I was handcuffed and in the backseat next to Fearless.

“He was in uniform,” I ventured. “White guy. Pink really.”

“Billings?” Binder asked. “Pullman? Nazareth?”

It’s a mess, Naz, I remembered Latham saying to the cop next to him in the front seat. At the time it meant nothing to me.

“I think I heard him call somebody Naz,” I said.

Binder considered me then. He could have delved deeper into my story, or he could let me go.

“And…,” I said.

“And what?”

“I seen where Sergeant Latham been all over town. I mean I saw in the newspapers that he was interrogatin’ that guy who got shot down in Watts and died over in Mercy Hospital. I just figured that he was on some kinda citywide police unit to be showin’ up all over.” I was hoping that Binder didn’t read all the papers. He probably didn’t. He probably didn’t know any more about that crime than any other citizen.

“What paper did you read that in?”

“I forget. Either the Times or the Examiner. It was just on the counter in a coffee shop I was at. You know I was surprised to see Latham’s name over south when I knew he was a Hollywood cop and I had just seen ’im in East L.A.”

Again those eyes considered me. They probed so deep that I began to wonder what he could have on me. I hadn’t done anything wrong except maybe to take that money from Sol’s drawer. That’s when I remembered the pistol I had hitched up in my belt. They wouldn’t frisk me unless I was going to be arrested, but if they found an illegal, and stolen, concealed weapon on me, prison was right around the corner.

I cursed Elana Love in silence.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Like what?”

He stuck out his lower lip and raised his right shoulder an inch or two. “I don’t know. Maybe something Latham asked you. Something the Jews might have said.”

I counted three breaths and considered my situation. I wanted the policeman to trust me, to think that I was too scared to be anywhere but on his side.

“Latham said that the old man stole some money,” I said. “A lot of it. And they never recovered it even though they caught him and had him in jail.”

“Did the sergeant say that he was investigating the case?”

“He didn’t say, but I guessed he was.”

“Did you find out anything?”

“I asked Fanny about it, but she said that her husband would never steal a thing.”

Binder snorted his contempt and then asked, “What about the niece and her husband?”

I shook my head. “I ain’t really talked to them at all. Morris didn’t like us much, and Gella’s kinda scared.”

Binder frowned, and then he smiled. He offered me his hand, but when I took it he pressed down hard with his