Fear of the Dark

Chapter 45

Whisper dropped me off at my bookstore. I hadn’t told him a thing about what I’d learned.

He shook my hand and smiled at me again.

“You got all the right instincts,” he told me. “You don’t tell nobody nuthin’ they don’t need to know and you keep your cool.”

I smiled, thinking that Whisper didn’t know how scared I really was.

“When you want a real job, call me,” Whisper said. “I could always use a partner.”

I drove straight from the sidewalk to Fearless’s bungalow. When I got to the door, I heard Mona crying, “That’s it. That’s it. Oh yeah, baby, you got it.”

At any other time I would have turned away. But I had to knock. Had to.

The protestations of love stopped. Two hard footsteps crossed the floor.

“Who is it?” Fearless asked, not nearly as angry as I would have been.

“Paris.”

The door came open, and Fearless stuck his head out.

“Yeah?”

“I know the whole thing. All of it.”

“We got to do sumpin’ right now?” he asked me.

“No. But I need a place to stay an’ I ain’t got no cash.”

The head went away. A few words were traded in the room, and he returned holding out a key ring with two keys on it.

“Go stay at Mona’s, man. She gonna be here tonight. Stay ovah there an’ I get ya in the mornin’.”

I took the keys and walked across two dewy lawns to Mona’s place.

Her tiny house was well appointed, as I have said, but the best thing about it was her bed. It was high and soft, with ever so lightly scented sheets and blankets. There were half a dozen pillows and an azure night-light plugged into the socket to the right.

I fell instantly to sleep. And I didn’t have even one bad dream.

I woke up once in the night wondering why Fearless didn’t marry Mona. She was the perfect woman from where I lay. I glanced over at the sky-colored night-light and thought about blue tomorrows.

I’m sure that there was something psychological about my emotions, but I didn’t want to know. It was rare that I came upon a night of bliss. I wasn’t about to question it.

I was sound asleep when someone came knocking on the door.

“Yes?”

“It’s Mona, Paris.”

I put on my pants and went to the door.

The look on her face told me that she’d had a pleasant night too.

“You know I almost got mad at you,” she said.

She was wearing a white terry cloth robe and Fearless’s big brown slippers.

“Sorry, babe. I just wanted a couple’a bucks to get a room someplace. But I tell ya this much — stayin’ here made me feel like I was at the Waldorf in the presidential suite. That was the best night’s sleep I ever had since I was a child in my mother’s arms.”

I only meant it as a show of gratitude, but I could see that my words touched Mona. She put her hand on my elbow, leaned forward, and gave me the softest kiss on the lips.

“Fearless waitin’ on you,” she whispered.

I put on my shirt but carried my socks and shoes across the lawns to my friend’s place. Mona had shaken me up with that kiss. It wasn’t a passionate thing, but there was something to it, something I didn’t want to know about when my best friend had just spent the night with her.

Fearless was already dressed in a loose silvery shirt and gray slacks. His brown shoes looked new they were so shiny, and he had a fancy gold watch on his wrist.

“Watch?” I asked.

“Mona gimme it,” he said. “I don’t want her to think I don’t appreciate it.”

Reese roundtree owned a café a few blocks from Fearless’s court. Fearless bought me fried eggs and bacon there. He had pancakes with pecan-flavored syrup.

“I thought Mona wasn’t your girlfriend,” I said at one point, thinking about that soft kiss.

“She ain’t.”

“Sounded like she was last night.”

“We friends, Paris,” Fearless said. “It was just a night together.”

“So that was just like shakin’ hands?”

Reese only had two tables inside his place, but it was early enough that his only customers were people on the way to work.

“No,” Fearless said.

“She looked like a chicken sittin’ on a ostrich egg when I seen her this mornin’,” I said.

“What you sayin’, Paris?”

“I’m sayin’ that Mona wasn’t just bein’ friendly up in there.”

Fearless took in every word and nuance, making them into convictions and feelings that held more truth than most men were capable of. He might never have understood what I was saying, but after hearing my words he would do the right thing, which was better than most men could ever do.

After twenty seconds of serious consideration, Fearless smiled.

“What’s wrong, Paris?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean why you pesterin’ me? Ain’t you got a problem to solve?”

“Thomas Benton Hoag,” I said.

“Who?”

I explained about Angel’s old boyfriend, the high-yellow real estate man.

“He hired the Handsome brothers to grab Three Hearts and Angel.”

“But he was Angel’s boyfriend,” Fearless said.

“Was.”

Fearless squeezed the slender bone between his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “How does he get in this?”

“Real estate,” I said. “His company is a white company, and Sterling was in real estate too. Maybe Sterling knew some white dude, a potential client, who liked black girls and he came to Tommy askin’ ’bout a girl who could show him a good time. That brings us to Angel. One thing leads to another, and an opportunity for blackmail emerges. After a while Tommy’s in the catbird seat, targeting white men who have their hands on money but don’t have no money themselves.”

“So Angel was in on it from the beginning?”

“Maybe her. Maybe there was other girls. I don’t know. Angel don’t mattah. It’s Tommy the one.”

Fearless let the words wash over him. You could see him imagining not so much the details of the crime but the qualities of the man.

“So he like a pimp?” Fearless said at last.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not to mention a kidnapper, a killer, and a blackmailer.”

Fearless nodded and asked, “So what next?”

“There’s one problem,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That suitcase.”

“Where is it?”

“I burned it.”

“Then it ain’t a problem,” Fearless reasoned.

“Where it came from is the problem,” I said.

“Ulysses said he took it from Hector’s house.”

“But we know he didn’t,” I said. “How’s he gonna be so lucky to get there after the killer kills Hector and before the deaf neighbor calls the cops?”

“So what you think?”

“I think Angel had the bag.”

“An’ where’d she get it from?” Fearless asked. He was getting nervous, tapping the toes of his left foot on the wood floor.

“Either from Hector after she killed him or from Thomas after he did.”

“You think she in it wit’ him?”

“I know they were in it together at the beginning,” I said. “At least that’s what makes the most sense.”

Fearless frowned and began tapping the toes of both his feet.

“Naw,” he said. “That girl loves Ulysses. You know he’s the apple’a her eye.”

“How come you say that about Angel but you don’t see it in Mona?” I asked.

“Mona don’t love me, man,” Fearless said with certainty. And before I could ask another question, he said, “She wants me. I’m everything she wants, but I ain’t what she need. I ain’t the man she gonna love, not really.”

“But Angel loves Useless?”

“Down to the jam between his toes,” Fearless said, accenting his words with a vigorous nod.

I took a deep breath and then another. I watched the line of workingmen and women waiting for their coffees and pastries, then looked back at Fearless in his silver and gray.

We were at the end of the road. The journey had started with Useless at my doorstep, plying his star-crossed fate. Now there was just one thing to do.

“We go to Schuyler Real Estate and deal with Thomas,” I said.

Fearless nodded, put the last corner of hotcake into his mouth, and stood up straight.