“I don’t know many people,” she said. “Just Hedva and Sol, and Morris. We don’t have many friends. And the police didn’t like Morris. That’s why he was upset, because they weren’t trying to find the black man who stabbed Sol.”
“I’m a black man.”
“But Fanny trusted you. She told me that it wasn’t you who came after Sol. And I can see that you and Fearless are good men, not murderers.”
I have never been as certain of anything as Gella was of me.
SIMON JONAS LIVED on the left side of a one-story two-family house on Cassidy in Culver City. The light was on, but that didn’t mean that Morris Greenspan was around. Gella didn’t want to go to Jonas’s door, so I went alone.
“Yeah?” a very large and blond specimen of Americana said. He answered after the fourth ring. “What do you want?”
“Morris Greenspan.”
“Who the fuck are you, nigger?” He enjoyed the last word. It brought a grin to his big mouth. He was wearing blue jeans and no shirt. His skin was streaked with oily grime.
“Byron Leeds,” I said in an amiable enough tone. “I’m a friend of the aunt and uncle of his wife. He drove off, and his wife hasn’t seen him. She said you and him were friends, and, well, I was in the neighborhood.”
“His aunt got killed,” Jonas said. Light began to dawn on his filthy face. “Hey. He said it was a nigger did it, stabbed his uncle too.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“What you say?”
Mr. Jonas and I were at a crossroads. He was measuring my size and disposition while glancing behind me to see if I had come alone. I, on the other hand, had split into two separate personalities. The first and foremost of these was the one that felt an intense hatred for the blond mechanic who hated me and insulted me without the slightest knowledge of my personal worth.
The second character in my internal drama was experiencing pure amazement at this hatred I felt. I never knew that such an emotion was in me. My whole life I had merely been cautious of whites, like I was cautious in a thunderstorm. I didn’t hate lightning but merely took cover when rumblings came in off the gulf.
“I said, tell me when Morris talked to you about his uncle.”
“Or what?”
Simon Jonas reached out for me as he asked his question. I, in turn, leaned away from the clumsy lunge, stuck my hand into my pocket, and pulled out Sol Tannenbaum’s .38.
“Or no more Simon,” I said, pointing the muzzle at one blue eye.
The fear that came into that eye was immediate and absolute.
“Wh-wh-wh-what do you want?” His voice, his posture, even the color of his grimy face changed just that quickly.
“Morris Greenspan,” I said again.
Someone might think that I would feel on top of the world at a moment like that. There I was, alone with the drop on somebody who represented the enemy of the spirit of my whole race in this inhospitable country. But all I was thinking was that with that gun in my hand, there was a good chance for it to go off.
“I don’t know where Mo is,” he stammered.
“Has he been here today?”
“Yeh. Yeh. We had a drink about noon.”
“Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know. Really.”
“Guess.”
“He’s got a girl.”
“A girlfriend?”
“Yuh. A girlfriend named Lily. He said that he was fed up. He said that he was tired of trying so hard and that he was going to leave, go away, maybe to Mexico.”
“And you think he went with this Lily?”
Simon didn’t answer. I don’t think he even heard me. The skin about his eyes had begun to cringe, telling me in its wordless way that it was time for the gun to go off.
