Fear of the Dark

Chapter 26

Not whimpering or sobs but deep, soul-wrenching howls came from Three Hearts’s chest. She made the sounds that women made when they heard that a child or a husband had died. It was a funeral cry.

Fearless put his arms around my auntie, and she fell into the embrace. He supported her across the threshold while she bawled and shrieked.

For her part, Angel was dismayed at the elder woman’s desolate abandon. She clasped her hands together and guided Fearless to a broad black couch in the center of a very modern room. In front of the couch was a console that had a TV and a record player inside the red-stained maple box. There were copies of abstract paintings on the walls that seemed to be influenced by a jazz sensibility. There was one bookcase and various chairs that went together but did not match. The wood floor was bright white pine and the walls were also white. There were a dozen lamps placed haphazardly around the large space. Some were standing posts, others table lamps. All of them were on.

I liked a brightly lit room; made me feel that nothing underhanded was going on. Of course I knew brightness and honesty weren’t necessarily friends.

Three Hearts moaned and shouted for some time. There could have been bloody murder being committed in that bungalow, but no neighbor called the cops. I was glad that they didn’t, but then again, it bothered me too.

Angel, who was wearing a pink dress that would have been a shirt had it been any shorter, brought ice water and knelt down in front of Three Hearts.

“Here, baby,” the boundless beauty said. “Take some water. Drink it down. Let it cool you.”

Then Angel put her hand to Three Hearts’s forehead as if she were the older woman’s mother feeling for fever.

And my auntie accepted the attention. Here I would have told you that Three Hearts would have bitten that hand if it got too close. Instead she let her head loll back and her eyes close, allowing the Jezebel to minister to her.

Fearless found a bottle of whiskey and some ice and poured us both a draft. That liquor was just what I needed.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Grant,” Angel said just as soon as Three Hearts settled down. “I know how much pain you must be in. Ulysses got in a whole mess of trouble, and I didn’t know what to do.”

As I have said, Three Hearts is my blood. I have known that woman since I could speak my own name. Never in all the time before that moment had I witnessed her allow man, woman, or child to lay blame at her son’s feet.

“What did he do to you, child?” Three Hearts asked Angel. “I see it stitched in your face. What did he do?”

“It wasn’t him,” Angel said. “He couldn’t help it. He got mixed up with those men and before he knew it we were in too deep.”

“He tries so hard,” Three Hearts sobbed.

The women hugged over their love. It was almost as if they were competing over who could love the little rat more.

I drained my glass. Fearless refilled it. I drained it again and Fearless was right on the job.

Half the way through my third glass of bourbon I looked around me. There I was, a mortal man flanked by Venus, Mars, and Juno. I wondered if Fate was standing outside the door, if he would allow me to stand up and walk away, just walk away from all that craziness. Maybe if I asked her right, Mum would take me in. We could discuss Spinoza and Karl Marx over dumplings and white rice.

That was a beautiful thought. I allowed myself fifteen seconds to wallow in it. I’d go to college and teach English at a boarding school in Jamaica.

“Excuse me,” I said when the daydream was done.

Angel and Three Hearts turned to me.

Fearless refilled my glass for the fourth time.

“What is it, Paris?” my auntie asked. She didn’t like her grief being interrupted.

“I know you ladies can read each other’s minds and all,” I said. “You seein’ invisible scars and like that. But for the menfolk here who don’t have your powers, could somebody please tell me where Ulysses has gone to?”

“I don’t know where he is,” Angel said. She rose up from her knees as if there were no gravity at her feet.

I felt some consternation because when I looked at her the rest of the room got fuzzy. At first I told myself that it was the whiskey, but then I looked at Fearless — the world around him was clear.

So I tried not to look directly into Angel’s eyes. That way I could converse with her without falling into some kind of crazy enchantment.

“But you an’ him was in business,” I said, all business myself.

“No,” she replied.

“What about Mr. Katz and Reverend Drummund?” I said. “Mad Anthony and Hector LaTiara?”

“You know about them?” Angel asked, seeking but not finding my eyes.

“I know about thirteen churches, banks, insurance companies, and investment firms,” I said. “I know about at least seventy thousand dollars that you and Use... Ulysses had in your apartment at Man’s Barn.”

Angel gasped at every other syllable. She fell onto a chair that sat next the sofa. Three Hearts was glaring at me for being so cruel to her new best friend — the woman she had wanted to murder less than half an hour ago. But I didn’t feel the effect of my auntie’s evil eye. I realized then that alcohol was proof against her spells.

“How did it work, Angel?” I asked.

“You know my name,” she replied, “but I don’t know either of yours.”

“Jones,” my friend said first. “Fearless Jones.”

“Oh,” Angel crooned. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re famous.”

Fearless smiled. Even he could be flattered by an angel.

“Paris,” I said. “Paris Minton.”

“Oh, yes. You’re Ullie’s cousin. He felt really bad about that time the police arrested you. He didn’t know that they’d come to your house.”

“Who was the man you left with when you ran out on Ulysses?” I asked.

“It’s not like it seems, Mrs. Grant,” she said. “I left, but it was because Ulysses wanted me to. He said that LaTiara was after him and he didn’t want me to get hurt.”

I laughed then.

I don’t get drunk all that often. And I don’t believe that inebriation is any panacea to a poor man’s problems. But now and then a good buzz will help you through when the ground is trembling and the mountains are coming down.

“Angel,” I said slowly and deliberately, “Hector is dead, had his throat cut.”

“Whaaat?” Three Hearts sang.

“I have reason to believe that Hector killed somebody else tryin’ t’find my cousin. So I really wish you’d stop bein’ all beautiful an’ perfect for just a minute and answer some simple fuckin’ questions.”

“Paris,” Fearless said.

“You could leave any time you want, Fearless. This girl here got us up to our necks in crocodiles, and I cain’t help what comes outta my mouth.”

“Excuse him, ma’am,” Fearless said. “He’s been under some strain. He needs to know who it is killin’ who out here. He needs to know it or he won’t be able to sleep in his bed.”

“I, I didn’t know about Hector,” Angel said then. Maybe she didn’t.

“What were Hector and Ulysses doin’?” I asked.

Angel looked to be full of information, but she didn’t say a word.

“I got to know, girl,” I said, the whiskey awash in my brain.

“I don’t know you, Paris,” she said. “The kind of trouble Ullie is in could put him... and me in jail.”

“I bet Hector would take jail over what he got,” I opined.

“Hector was a friend of Ullie’s,” she said. “Not so much a friend but an acquaintance. Hector knew a white man named Sterling. Sterling knew about men,” she said tentatively.

“What kind of men?” I asked.

“Men like Katz and Reverend Drummund.”

“Rich men?”

“Not rich but in charge of great wealth.”

“Oh, Lord,” Three Hearts moaned.

“What was the hook?” I asked.

“Me,” Angel said softly but without any deep sense of shame that I could tell.

“How so?”

“I’d go to them with a purse full of money. Five thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds and the promise that I had ten times that. I’d say that I wanted to invest the money in their companies or, in the case of the church, that I wanted to use it for the greater good. When they’d wonder how I made the money, I told them about a system I used in betting in poker games. Hector would set up a fake game and I’d go there with the reverend or V.P. and show them how I’d win. The game was always fixed. After a few nights they’d be hooked and get into a big game where I’d lose ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars of their institution’s money. After that Hector would blackmail them, threatening to tell their employers that they’d put the company’s money on the line.”

At the last words, she shed a tear and swallowed a sob. I believed that they were cheating those men but not that poor Angel was an innocent who regretted her part in the scheme. She regretted Ulysses running away with her money. She regretted some killer hungering after her soft throat. But she didn’t give a damn about the men whose lives she’d ruined.

I didn’t care about them either, but I wasn’t the one who brought them down.

“You poor child,” Three Hearts said.

“You have any idea where my cousin is?” I asked.

“There’s a cabin in the Angeles National Forest. Sterling owns it. Ullie liked to go up there.”