Fear of the Dark

by Walter Mosley

  But that wasn’t the real reason. I just needed to do something. I needed to move my legs to exercise my heart. I was in deep trouble and if I stopped moving I worried that the fear would overtake me and I’d be frozen like a child in the arms of a make-believe monster.

  I walked down the block, feeling cool on my left side, the side that faced the hidden Albert and Rex. The bouncer, Harold Crier, was gone from his post. I glanced up at Jerry Twist’s windows. They were dark, but that didn’t mean anything.

  I passed under the red lantern of the restaurant, across the street from the unseen killers, and into darkness. As night shadows fell on me, I thought of Tiny Bobchek’s corpse. The image upset my equilibrium. My toe kicked the concrete. At any other time I would have righted myself and kept on going, but in that sudden darkness, with the apparition of the man I had cuckolded in my mind, I tried too hard, lost my balance, and fell.

  I looked back to see Fearless and Whisper running toward a recessed doorway. Then I saw a movement above. It was a window coming open just as Fearless approached the darkened entrance.

  “Fearless!” I screamed. “Up above your head!”

  My friend took flight without even a glance upward. A rifle appeared at the window. Whisper came into view and pressed himself against a wall. When the first shot came, I expected to see the nondescript detective crumple and fall, but instead the bullet ricocheted two feet from where I lay. I looked up at the window, trying to understand how the assassin’s shot could have been so far off. The next shot shattered a barbershop window next to my head, and I understood in a flash that Whisper had made himself invisible, and I, with my loud cry, was the only target in sight.

  Instead of running, I looked for Whisper. He was gone.

  A series of shots exploded inside the assassins’ hiding place across the street from Good News. I could see them glimmer weakly through the windows.

  I got myself to a standing position and staggered away, around the corner. There I leaned against a wall, breathing as if I had just run a mile.

  More gunshots.

  A siren sounded somewhere.

  The sirens continued. I moved down the street and into an alley. I crouched behind a group of metal cans.

  “What’s happenin’?” someone hissed, and I almost leaped up.

  Behind me on a ledge big enough to hold him was a man who’d made his bed there. He was black and dressed in nighttime grays. There was hair all over his face and a frightened glint in his eyes.

  The sirens were getting louder.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was walkin’ down the street an’ all of a sudden there was shots.”

  Three police cars careened down the street I had run from.

  “Who was it?” the alley dweller asked.

  “Loud and Dangerous,” I said.

  My new friend and I waited a while. There were no more shots. After a few minutes there was shouting: military-like orders were being given. At that point I got up and walked down toward the hubbub—just a neighborhood resident wondering what was going on.

  There were at least a dozen people in front of Good News, gaping at the commotion across the street. Smaller groups of Watts’s denizens appeared on stoops and in the street.

  The police were taking five men from the building, all of them in handcuffs. Whisper and Fearless were among the prisoners. They’d be arrested, but that was all right; both men were certified to take in bail jumpers.

  I saw Albert Rive, his brawny body sagging under the beating that Fearless had surely given him. The other men, except for Fearless and Whisper, also seemed a little worse for wear.

  The moon hung at the end of the street. Under its constant stare a paddy wagon came, gathered my friends and their quarry, and took them someplace where Milo could go and set things straight.

  “Hey, Paris,” a man said from behind me. His hand on my shoulder weighed as much as a Christmas ham.

  “Jerry.”

  “Wasn’t that Fearless in there with them?”

  “Was it?”

  “That why you boys hangin’ out around here?” he asked. “Layin’ for Al Rive?”

  “Did Lionel Sterling call you, Jerry?” I asked.

  That slapped the smug certainty off the amphibian’s face.

  “Yeah,” he breathed.

  “He tell you to tell Useless to call him?”

  “If that’s what Ulysses say, then maybe so.”

  “You know a man named Hector LaTiara?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “What about —”

  “I have to go in now, Paris,” he said. “You got what you wanted. The next time I see ya, yo’ mouth bettah be filled with Ha Tsu’s noodles.”

  Jerry turned his back on me and walked up the stairs to Good News.

  I rummaged through my pockets, looking for Mum’s phone number. When I found it I felt as though I had located something precious, like a doctor’s prescription for a whole life’s worth of pain.

  39

  SHE BROUGHT MY JASMINE TEA to the bed. The night before she had bathed me and loved me and even sung a Chinese lullaby while I drifted off to sleep in her arms. But Mum’s greatest gift to me was that cup of fragrant tea. I sat up, realizing that her bed was positioned to receive the morning sun through a high window on the far wall.

  Even in that overbuilt part of town you could hear birds chirping. I took a deep breath and a sip; Mum kissed me and said, “Your mustache tickle.”

  “I’ll cut it off.”

  “No. I like it when a man tickle me.”

  It was a moment that I never wanted to end. We made love again, but the seconds were ticking at the back of my mind while she laughed at my mustache against her thighs.

  She asked me if I had really read The Odyssey. I recited the first book, translated by Samuel Butler. I’d memorized those lines after I’d read that many Europeans in the old days had committed hundreds, even thousands of poems to memory and then recited them on many occasions.

  But even Homer couldn’t save me that morning.

  I kissed the young waitress good-bye and walked out into the sultry morning—two parts serenity and three parts terror.

  “GOOD MORNING, PARIS,” Loretta Kuroko said with a humorous and playful suspicion in her eye.

  I felt guilty under that gaze.

  “Paris,” Milo shouted. “I hear I owe you a favor, boy.”

  “You get Fearless outta jail, Miles?” I asked the bail bondsman.

  “Come on over here an’ sit with me,” he said.

  I turned to Loretta.

  “Why are you looking at me?” she asked.

  “Can I go?”

  Her smile lost its insinuation, and we were friends again. She nodded graciously, and I went to Milo’s spindly visitor’s chair, my favorite piece of furniture in the whole wide world, and sat down hard.

  “I need information, Mr. Sweet.”

  “Shoot.”

  I wasn’t ready yet. I had relied on the habit Milo had of resisting sharing what he knew. He usually got coy and then cagey before getting up off of information. And so, because he hadn’t, I took on his evasive role.

  “Where’s Fearless?” I asked.

  “That’s what you wanna know?”

  “That’s the first thing.”

  “He went off wit’ that girlfriend Mona. She was already at the police station when I got there at two.”

  “Who was the third man?” I asked then. “The one with the rifle.”

  “Steven Borell,” Milo said. “I don’t know how Al Rive managed to fool him into that.”

  “Rive is in jail?” I asked, just to make sure.

  “For a long time,” Milo promised.

  “You know a big ugly brother with a scar run up the center’a his face?”

  “That’s the information?” Milo asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What for?”

  “Milo, I got problems. You know that. I helped Whisper and Fearless wit
h your mess, now please just tell me who he is.”

  “Lonnie Mannheim,” Milo said.

  “Mannheim?”

  “Yeah. I guess the Germans had slaves too.”

  “Does he have a gang?”

  “Uh-huh. Sure do,” Milo said. “Bobo and Gregory Handsome. Two Arkansas brothers who need to go home. All of ’em have worked for me at one time or another.”

  “Trackin’ down bail jumpers?”

  “That and other things.”

  “You know where I can find them?” I asked.

  “Why would you want to?”

  “Because Lonnie an’ them know somebody don’t like me,” I said as clearly and candidly as I could. “Because I got to find him.”

  “If Lonnie only the door to the problem, then you in trouble deep, Paris.”

  “That’s no news to me.”

  Milo frowned. He wasn’t the kind of friend that would put his neck on the line for me. But he did care in his way. He didn’t want to think that I’d come to harm. And if the worst happened, he’d put on a good dark suit and come to my funeral. He might even send some lilies—if he could deduct them from his taxes.

  “I don’t know where they are,” he told me. “When we did business together they were mostly legal. But nowadays I hear they break legs and worse for people don’t like to hear bones snappin’ and men breathin’ their last.”

  That was Milo at his friendliest. He was trying to tell me to find another way in, to avoid men I couldn’t stand up to. And I appreciated his concern, such as it was.

  “Can I use your phone, Milo?”

  The legal intellectual let his shoulders rise, indicating that he’d done all he could do. He gestured toward Loretta with one of his huge hands, and I rose from the orphan chair like an acolyte dismissed by a great teacher who had failed his task.

  “HELLO,” the nondescript voice hummed.

  “Whisper.”

  “What’s up, Paris?”

  “Can I come over?”

  “Always welcome,” he said.

  The words were friendly if the tone was not.

  WHISPER’S OFFICE WAS on Avalon. The building was perfect for the elusive sleuth. It was three stories and narrow, made from dark red brick. The front door of the building didn’t face the street. Instead you entered into a little recess, turned to the left, and walked up a small set of granite stairs that brought you to an old white door that was locked and far too pulpy to sustain a serious knock.

  But for those in the know there was a buzzer inside of a black mailbox that the postman knew not to use. All the letters were put through a slot in the door; packages were held at the post office for pickup.

  I pressed that button.

  Two minutes later the detective opened the door, giving a rare, and momentary, grin.

  “Paris.”

  He led me up a carpeted stairway to the top floor, where he had his office. Over the years I had been to Whisper’s sanctum a few times. The visits were always about hard business, but still I stopped to appreciate his sense of style and decorum.

  The main office was paneled with real oak, giving it that rich woody-brown feel. The carpet was maroon, edged in royal blue, and there were tall bookshelves on either side of his heavy oak desk. The shelves reached all the way to the ceiling, which was at least fourteen feet high. It was an intelligent room that invited you to sit and contemplate until the problem was solved.

  I liked the chamber very much, but it was his one window that always grabbed me.

  He must have had it put in specially. It was only a foot and a half in width but ran from a foot above the floor to six inches below the ceiling. It presented a view of the northern mountains and L.A.’s blue-and-amber skies. Something about the slender slice of the outdoors made your mind want to expand.

  Whisper gestured to the blue cushioned chair that looked upon the window. I sat down, feeling almost as tranquil as I had in Mum’s arms.

  “What’s up, Paris?”

  You could have spoken to the man for half a dozen years and he would have used only a couple of hundred words, excluding proper names and numbers.

  “I need your help on something,” I said.

  His hands, raised palms upward toward his shoulders, asked me what.

  “I need to speak to Bobo and Gregory Handsome,” I said. “Them or Lonnie Mannheim. I don’t know where they are and I need that information.”

  From his appearance, Whisper could have been a bus driver or a teacher’s aide at a public school; he could have been a deacon at a small church or a single father raising nine kids. He looked like anything but a man who’d run into an open door to root out armed gunmen shooting wildly and intent on taking life.

  “Thanks for last night,” he said.

  “Sure. You know I didn’t do nuthin’ except for trip ovah my own big feet.”

  “You might’a saved Fearless and you shoutin’ took that rifleman’s aim on you.”

  Even the thought of such an action put fear in me.

  “What happened in there?” I asked.

  “Fearless had knocked out both Al Rive and Rex Hathaway before I got inside. Then we went up the stairs. I started shootin’. It was an office buildin’ so I didn’t have to worry about people gettin’ hurt. Steven Borell was shootin’ down the stairs at me while Fearless went out a window and then back in through a side stairway. He jumped Borell and knocked him ovah. Nobody got killed an’ the cops had their bail jumper, so they didn’t question how we got it done.”

  Those were the most words I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  “You the ones did the work,” I said.

  “I’ll find the Handsome brothers and Mannheim for you, Paris,” he said. “Gimme a day, two at most, an’ I’ll have what you want.”

  “I can pay you,” I said.

  “No, brother. You already have.”

  40

  FINALLY I DROVE HOME. I wasn’t worried about losing business; people were used to my being closed at odd hours now and then. And it wasn’t like there was any other bookshop in the neighborhood. The customers I had would come back when my problems were over—that is, if I lived that long.

  I carried Useless’s leather suitcase upstairs to my desk, thinking about the trouble he’d caused. I hadn’t even let him in the front door and still my fat was in the fire. It was so pathetic that I had to chuckle. Useless was more deadly than an outbreak of smallpox in a tuberculosis ward.

  I put the suitcase on the far side of my big desk.

  Sun was streaming down from the window behind me. There was the scent of Mum’s floral perfume rising from my shirt. A sheath of sweat was forming at the back of my neck, and I felt unsure about opening Useless’s bag.

  Instead I tried to think my way back along the path I had taken. It was what I did whenever I got lost on the road; I’d pull my car to the side and sit there remembering all the turns I had taken and directions in which I had gone. Whenever I did that, the right way would come to me.

  I thought about Useless at my front door and Jessa after him. I remembered running down Central and being saved by Sir and Sasha. There was Ha Tsu, Jerry Twist, Auntie Three Hearts, and an Angel with horns. I thought about Tiny Bobchek with the hole in his temple. Hector had killed him. But who had killed Hector? Lionel Sterling? No. Jessa?

  Mad Anthony had been murdered too. Useless had admitted to that killing. He claimed self-defense and I believed him. Mad Anthony was a killing machine. Shooting him from the back with a tommy gun was self-defense in my book.

  I made a turn at Mad Anthony. He was the leg breaker. That made sense. I went from him to Hector. Hector was deep into all of this mess. He was after Useless because my cousin was going to take the money and run. Angel and Useless had found out about the counterplot and bolted. It was all falling together. There was reason in the mayhem. I was somewhere near home when I ran into Sterling. He wasn’t afraid of some unknown assassin. His
fear was of someone he knew and worked with.

  A dead end. As if I thought that murder would ever be as neat as a road map.

  I eyed the worn leather of Useless’s suitcase, wondering idly who had owned that luggage before my cousin. It looked old enough to belong to Useless’s great-grandfather: the general who had either loved or raped, as some versions of the story went, Three Hearts’s husband’s father’s mother. The name was given as a kind of oral history that would pass down from father to son, memorializing both the greatness and base nature of our beginnings.

  Who had owned that suitcase? There was a leather tag holder strapped to the handle. I flipped it open, but the name, written in purple ink, had gotten wet and was nothing more than a blur.

  I had spent half an hour trying to work out that name when I realized that I had gotten lost again.

  From the bottom drawer of my desk I took a pair of thin cotton gloves that I kept for just such a purpose.

  I undid the straps and flipped the latch of the suitcase. Inside, there was a large accordionlike folder made from durable brown paper. The folder had eighteen separate sections. Fifteen of these were in use. Fourteen of them contained an accounting sheet, between three and six black-and-white photographs, letters of love, and a little bag of receipts from hotels, restaurants, and upscale luxury stores that sold expensive clothing and jewelry.

  The photographs were of the men in question gambling and in compromising positions with Angel. Some of the pictures were quite explicit, making me wonder if Useless was the photographer. The accounting sheet listed every transfer of funds from the mark to the blackmailers, also the probable dates on which the monies had been embezzled.

  The letters were the most embarrassing. It surprised me that every man had written to Angel. My mother had told me a long time ago never to sign my name to anything unless I was compelled to by law or the possibility of profit. She hadn’t used those words exactly, but that’s what she meant.

  Some of the letters were romantic, talking about forbidden love and freedom. Others were down in the gutter. I supposed that Angel had written to them first and they replied, hoping for something that they didn’t even understand.