delight. And I think that she saw my reaction.
She smiled and nodded by moving her head in an elegant semicircle.
“Are you here to see Milo?” she asked.
“No.”
Her lips pursed. “Fearless?”
“Have I ever told you how happy I am to see you whenever I come to this office?” I asked.
“Come on in, Paris,” she said.
I followed her up the three steps to the circular room that she and Milo shared.
When Milo told Loretta that they were moving offices again, the thirteenth time in nine years, she informed him that she would only go if he let her find the place and design and furnish it. What came of it was a thing of beauty.
22
FEAR OF THE DARK
The room wasn’t actually round. It had eight walls of equal size. Every other wall had a large window with a roll-up bamboo shade. The floor was the most wonderful part. It was a perfect circle, twenty feet in diameter, raised half a foot above the original floor and made from cherrywood. Fearless had constructed it. He had also built the oak file cabinets that sat against the windowless walls and on the floor outside the circle.
Loretta’s desk was a simple plank of ebony wood on white ash legs. She had no drawers or doodads to obstruct the elegant lines.
On the other side of the circle, Milo had his hideous drab green desk made from sheet metal. His chairs didn’t match, and he was perpetually swaddled in a thin blanket of cigar smoke. When you looked at the room you got the feeling that it represented a planet, one side of which was in permanent midnight and the other washed in eternal noon.
No one would have expected this particular meeting of East and West in a third-floor office in black Los Angeles. It might be that no one, outside of Milo’s clients and friends, ever knew it was there. People from the style section at magazines went to see how John Wayne and Clark Gable lived. They wanted to see foreign queens’ palaces when they should have been looking at that bail bondsman’s office on Slauson.
Wh e n I t o o k a s t e p and faltered, Loretta noticed my bare feet. A moment after that she saw that I was bleeding on her cherry floor.
“What happened?” she asked.
“It’s kinda hard to explain,” I said. “But it’s not all that bad.”
“Come sit down.”
23
Walter Mosley
Milo had a favorite guest chair. It was a spindly light brown creature that most resembled a half-starved dog. The legs didn’t look as though they could bear the weight of a big cat, but there Fearless sat with his feet on Milo’s desk, leaning back on the two quivering hind legs of that chair.
Fearless wore a charcoal shirt and blue jeans. He was drinking a glass of water.
“Paris,” he said with a true friend’s smile.
“The prodigal son,” Milo rumbled. If they ever put him in a choir, he’d have to be placed somewhere behind the bass section.
“Gentlemen,” I hailed, allowing Loretta to help me to a red stool that Milo had also refused to give up. Behind him there was an open window with a fan blowing out; another demand of Loretta’s.
“What happened to you, Paris?” Milo asked.
Looking at Milo you would have thought he was once tall but somewhere along the way he’d gotten jammed up in a compactor that had made a shorter, broader specimen.
He had the big hands of a heavyweight and the shoulders of a bull. For all that, Milo was not a physical man. Nine times out of ten when I saw him he was sitting, and the only sport he excelled in was darts. He was most often the darkest man in the room, that is unless he was in the room with Fearless.
“Cut myself runnin’ barefoot through an alley,” I said. I didn’t need to say any more.
Loretta came up with a glass of water and a first aid kit. She knelt down in front of me and started ministering to my wound.
“I come to borrow my friend,” I said, wincing from a dab of iodine.
24
FEAR OF THE DARK
“This is prime time right here, Paris,” Milo said, shaking his big head at me. “And Fearless is on the clock.”
“What you need, Paris?” Fearless asked, as if Milo had not said a word.
I told them the story. It didn’t bother me that Loretta was there listening. Milo’s assistant never passed judgment on someone for being the victim of his instincts.
“Unless the man come to your house is Albert Rive, Fearless ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Milo said when I finished my tale.
Fearless had grinned now and then while I spoke, and Loretta had let out with an “Oh, no” here and there. But Milo was all business.
There was a thug in Los Angeles named Albert Rive. He was an armed robber who got caught, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in the California penal system. But before he could be sent away, his lawyer, Philip Reed, a friend of Milo’s, got the conviction set aside on a technicality. Rive came to Milo for bail with his mother’s
