“What? Useless?”
“That’s hurtful. I don’t call you Dog Shit, now, do I?”
“You bettah not.”
“Well, I might.”
“And I might go to the cops an’ say about Martin Friar and Brian Motley, not to mention Mad Anthony. I might tell ’em that you was in business with Lionel Sterling and Hector LaTiara. That’s all I got to say, Useless. Because you know I never call you. I never drop by your house askin’ for ice water.
I don’t need you, not at all. To me you truly are Useless. So get your ass back up in the house with your cockeyed mama and wait for us to call you again.”
If I didn’t know better I would have thought that Useless’s feelings were actually hurt. He pouted and stared at the ground.
“Go on, Useless,” I insisted.
He turned and walked away slowly.
For my part, I stood there refusing to feel guilty.
“ Wh a t y o u t h i n k , Pa r i s ? ” Fearless asked me when we were in my kitchen smoking cigarettes and drinking schnapps.
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“I don’t know.”
There was a duffel bag on the floor between us. Above that was a table piled high with twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills. I had stopped counting at sixty thousand dollars.
Adding that to the money we had found at Sterling’s, we had over one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand.
In 1956 that was enough to retire on.
“We got to give it back, Paris,” Fearless said. “We got to.”
“Why, man? They already stole it. We might get caught tryin’ to put it back.”
Fearless shook his head and started shoving the money in its bag.
“I got the addresses,” I said. “Why don’t you just let me send it?”
“First we need to make sure the cutthroat ain’t a problem,”
Fearless said.
“What you gonna do with the money and Hector’s car?”
“I’ll just leave Hector’s car on the street to get towed and then I’ll borrah Mickey Dean’s white Caddy, put the money in the trunk, an’ bring it ovah to Bubba.”
“You sure you wanna mess wit’ that man again?” I asked seriously. “I think he wanna test you.”
“Naw,” Fearless assured me. “I mean yeah, he wonders, but Bubba’s business. The minute I’m a payin’ client, thatta put fightin’ right out his mind.”
Fearless hefted the bag of money over his shoulder and carried it out to the Caddy.
I accompanied him out to the street and watched as he drove away.
A hundred thousand dollars in free money, and my potential partner in crime was the most honest man in L.A.
285
Th e p h o n e b e g a n r i n g i n g about ten minutes after Fearless had driven off with my 44 windfall retirement fund.
I could have taken that money and moved to Paris, my namesake city, lived on the Champs-Elysee, and listened to American jazz in the bistros and nightclubs. I could have learned Latin and French and married an African princess.
The phone kept on ringing.
I was almost as leery of the phone as I was of people at my front door. Anybody could have been calling me: the police, Three Hearts, the killer pretending to be somebody else.
Why should I answer?
What I needed to do was to find an out-of-the-way motel where I could sleep and read until there was no more trouble roiling around me.
The phone stopped ringing.
I always forgot that it was Fearless’s moral side that did me in in the end. No matter how much money passed through our hands, he always wanted to do the right thing. Here we had money that nobody expected to see again. I had sent the victims the blackmailers’ evidence — wasn’t that good enough?
The phone started ringing again. That worried me. Some-286
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body wanted to get through. If I didn’t answer they might come by.
“Hello?”
