Fear of the Dark

Chapter 14

“What was all that stuff about U-man and what Ulysses like t’talk?” Three Hearts asked me when the big man was gone.

I knew she would take umbrage at any hint of an accusation toward her son.

“I was just tryin’ to get him to remember, Auntie,” I said. “You know sometimes you just have to say the first thing come in your head when you talkin’ to a rough man like that.”

“But why did you say what you said?”

I swear I saw her left eye flashing.

“Hearts,” Fearless said in an impossibly reasonable voice. Impossible for me, that is. My heart was fluttering like a sheet in a Santa Ana wind at that moment.

“What?” she said to my friend.

“You know Ulysses,” he said. “You know what he do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t’a got on a bus and gone hundreds of miles ovah a lettah where he said he was doin’ good.”

“My son is a good man,” she said.

“I’m not sayin’ he ain’t,” Fearless said. “But you know that he was doin’ somethin’ wit’ Tony there. An’ you can see what Tony is like.”

“But Ulysses did not order him to beat up anyone,” she said.

“I don’t know about any’a that. All I know is that Paris here is tryin’ to help you, an’ you givin’ him grief.”

When Three Hearts looked Fearless in the eye, he gazed back with a sanguine expression on his handsome face. It was like the meeting of two heads of warring tribes. Anyone seeing them would have known that something very important hung in the balance.

“He’s my only child, Fearless,” she said at last. Tears sprouted from her eyes.

Fearless put his big hand across the table and held both of hers therein. Her forehead lowered to the knot of fingers and the tears flowed freely.

“An’ Paris an’ me wanna help, baby,” Fearless said, “but a lotta people gonna be callin’ your boy Useless and U-man and all kinds’a things. An’ you know Paris here smart as they come. He cain’t be answerin’ to you every time he have to ask somethin’.”

She raised her head to look at her momentary father. She nodded and freed her hands from his loving grip.

“I know,” she said.

She turned to me and smiled, her eyes lowered.

“You wanna go stay at Paris’s while we look?” Fearless asked.

There was a moment where Three Hearts seemed to be considering Fearless’s ill-conceived offer.

“No. I better not,” she said after what felt like a very long minute.

I exhaled, hoping that they didn’t register the sigh.

“Where you wanna go, then?” Fearless asked.

“Ovah to Nadine’s, I guess,” she said.

Nadine Grant was Useless’s father’s sister. She had moved to L.A. with her first husband, but he had died in a warehouse fire and Nadine had married his brother Otem. Otem got pneumonia and passed six months after the wedding. After that Nadine, who was a very handsome woman, got engaged to a man from Tennessee called Morley. Morley had a college education and two houses. The problem was that his real name was Henderson and he’d murdered a man in southern Louisiana in the late twenties. He’d run to Tennessee, changed his name and his way of life. But when he got engaged to Nadine, one of her cousins recognized Henderson and told a relative of the murdered man. Morley/Henderson was extradited to Louisiana, tried, convicted, and hanged.

After that, Nadine swore off men. She lived in a nice house on Sixty-third Street, where she had a front yard that sported dozens of different kinds of flowers. Nadine worked as a librarian in Compton, and so I saw her from time to time when I’d drop by to pick up books she was discarding at the end of the summer and fall seasons.

“Hi, fearless,” Nadine said after greeting Three Hearts when we appeared at her door.

Nadine never seemed to recognize me when we met away from her library. She’d always give me a quizzical look and then fail to place my face.

“Ms. Grant,” Fearless said in greeting.

The women gabbled at the front door for a minute or two, then I cleared my throat.

“Oh,” Three Hearts said. “Honey, would you mind if I stayed here with you for a couple’a days? Ulysses has gone missin’ and my nephew here has agreed to go look for him.”

“Missin’?” the black widow exclaimed. “I hope he ain’t in no trouble.”

“I don’t think it’s nuthin’ serious,” Three Hearts said, rather unconvincingly. “But I wanna stay around until Paris find him.”

“Oh sure, darlin’,” Nadine said with a big forced grin. “I could use the company.”

We left them there standing on the porch: old Evil Eye and Typhoid Mary among the flowers, counting up the dead.

Back in the car I informed Fearless of what I knew.

“Seventy-two thousand dollars?” he said. “Ulysses? Where that poor son gonna come up wit’ money like that?”

“Blackmail, extortion, intimidation, and threats,” I said.

Fearless laughed.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

“That cousin’a yours is sumpin’ else, man. I mean, I never seen any boy get in as much trouble as him. Damn, he’d be runnin’ numbahs in heaven an’ sellin’ holy water in hell.”

“Whole gotdamned family,” I said. “There you got Nadine cuttin’ down men like wheat and people fallin’ dead all ovah Three Hearts. I don’t know how I lived through a Christmas dinner back in the old days when they’d come by.”

“Yeah,” Fearless said with a nod. “But you ain’t much bettah, Paris.”

“What you mean?” I said. “I ain’t cursed.”

“No?”

“Naw.”

“Paris, I know men who run in the streets every night don’t have half the trouble you got. I know people live more peaceable lives in prison.”

“Fuck you, man. All I do is run my bookstore. Ain’t nuthin’ more peaceful than readin’ a book.”

“That’s what that white boy thought when somebody put that bullet in his head.”

This was no simple banter. Fearless wouldn’t have brought up Tiny Bobchek unless he was thinking that my current problems had something to do with him.

“Uh-uh, Fearless. No,” I said. “Tiny was just a, a coincidence.”

“Ulysses comes to your door one minute and then just a few hours later there’s a dead white man on your flo’ and that’s just a coincidence? You know I ain’t that fast when it comes to figurin’, Paris, but this one looks clear as a bell.”

“It was Jessa,” I said. “Jessa did it.”

“Li’l white girl killed that Goliath?”

“He was shot,” I said. “Shot in the head. Women carry guns. Look at Three Hearts.”

“You said Jessa didn’t even have a bag or drawers,” Fearless argued. He had a good memory when he wanted to.

“Tiny could have been armed. She could have pulled out his pistol and opened fire.”

Fearless threw up a hand and let it fall. “Yeah,” he admitted.

“It couldn’t have been Useless,” I continued. “He ain’t a natural killer in the first place. He never carries a gun and he would run from a big fool like Bobchek.”

“Yeah, but that just proves my point.”

“What are you talkin’ about?”

“First you got Ulysses comin’ to your door, sayin’ how he got to run,” Fearless said. “Then the white girl and her boyfriend aftah yo’ ass. Now Ulysses is gone an’ Three Hearts comes, gettin’ you into trouble up to your ears. If that ain’t some kinda bad luck, I don’t know what is.”

It was my turn to laugh. Fearless wasn’t making fun of me. He was reading my life like I’d read a dime novel.

“So what we gonna do about Ulysses?” Fearless asked.

“What can we do?” I replied. “You heard Anthony. Useless is either gone or dead. And with seventy-two thousand dollars in his pocket, he’s way beyond where we gonna find him.”

“The girl could have took the money,” Fearless said.

“Then he’s runnin’ on empty.”

“Come on, Paris. You know we cain’t turn our backs on Hearts. You know you don’t want that evil eye’a hers on yo’ ass.”

I knew it. I knew it.