Fear of the Dark

Chapter 10

I had a tan Studebaker at that time. It was old when I got it, but I didn’t care much for style when it came to cars. I hardly drove anywhere except maybe to the supermarket now and then and to libraries when they were getting rid of old books.

I opened the passenger’s side for Three Hearts and placed her carpetbag in the trunk. There was never any question about my auntie staying with me; she would not do it. A woman her age needed a room or house appropriate for her. There also was no question that I would have to find her a place to stay where she would be comfortable.

“Why did you come up here?” I asked as we cruised down Central. “I mean, did you have some reason to be worried about Use... Ulysses?”

“Ulysses send me a lettah ’bout a month ago. Said that he had a new girlfriend and a new business and he was expecting to make a lotta money and buy me a house in Lake Charles.”

“Nuthin’ wrong about that,” I sang, hoping to keep the mood light and uncursed.

“It’s always bad to have love and money on the same page,” she said sagely. “The more I thought about it, the more I worried that he was gettin’ himself into a mess. And then too it was the name that girl had.”

“Angel,” I said, remembering Useless’s last words.

“What’s she like?”

“I really don’t know, Auntie. He said somethin’ like he wasn’t good enough for her. Somethin’ about bein’ mudfoot, that’s what he said.”

“Lord.”

“That means somethin’?”

“Feet of clay,” my churchgoing, devil-eyed aunt said. “I told him all the time that men had feet of clay. It means that that woman, that Angel, made him wanna overcome his base nature and try to be a real man.”

“That sounds good, right?”

“Maybe,” she said in a voice so soft that it might have been Whisper Natly speaking in the next room.

I knew that useless liked pool; it was the one thing he was good at. So the first place Three Hearts and I went was Rinaldo’s, a half-block-long storefront that sported eleven tables.

Rinaldo had copper skin and slicked-back hair that did not seem straightened. He was missing one tooth and stood and walked in a hunched-over posture that he blamed on forty years leaning over pool tables.

Rinaldo was a busy man. He took numbers, delivered messages to some of Watts’s most important gangsters, and sold property, both stolen and otherwise. There was usually a line of people waiting to speak to him. There was that day. I waited my turn and when I got to him he looked at me.

“Fearless’s friend, right?” he asked.

“Lookin’ for Useless Grant,” I said as I nodded.

“Man’s Barn,” Rinaldo said, and I hustled back out to the car where I’d left my auntie.

Man’s barn was a barnlike building that sat in Man Dorn’s backyard. It was once some hangar or shed that the black Kansan had acquired along with his little blue house. He had subdivided the building into eight apartments and spent most of his time moving tenants in and malingerers out.

Los Angeles was a nomadic city in the fifties. Rent was cheap, and jobs were so plentiful that people were willing to pull up stakes and go for the promise of a neighborhood swimming pool or a change of employer.

Man was a short guy with brick brown skin. He wasn’t much older than I, but he seemed to be so, with his bald dome and beefy body. His hands were fat with muscle and his neck was a third the length it should have been. He wore overalls and a faded gray T-shirt. Whatever it was his wife loved him for, he didn’t display it on the outside.

“Yeah, yeah,” Man was saying to Three Hearts and me. “Useless got the back right corner apartment.” He was leading us down the driveway to the building everybody called Man’s Barn.

“Ulysses,” Three Hearts said, correcting him.

“Oh, sorry. It’s just that everybody calls him Useless,” Man said.

“I don’t,” she informed him, “and I’m his mother.”

“Well,” Man said, “he ain’t paid his rent in two weeks, so maybe you wanna take his things with you, you bein’ his mama an’ all.”

“How much does he owe?” Three Hearts asked.

“Forty-three dollars and fi’ty cent,” Man said.

Three Hearts carried a brown cloth bag for a purse. She reached in with one hand and rummaged around for a minute or so. She came out with a wad of bills and two quarters. Man counted the bills and seemed satisfied.

“Now it’s your place,” he said. He handed me a brass key.

“Did he live alone?” I asked before Man could walk away.

“He had a girl...” The landlord had to smile. “... called herself Angel, and I do believe she was that. She went away a few days before the last time I saw him.”

“How would you know that?” I asked.

“One day a tall man came and helped her put her suitcase in his car.”

“What did Ulysses have to say about that?”

“He wasn’t around as far as I could see.”

Man Dorn left me wondering what kind of trouble Useless had gotten himself into.

I opened the front door and we entered the slender hall of the made-up apartment building. The ceiling was low and there were only three weak lightbulbs to make the natural darkness into gloom.

The floor was concrete and the walls were unpainted plaster.

The doors were constructed from pine. Not one of them looked new. One actually had a hole punched into it; another the tenant had started to paint green but then run out of paint and finished the job with dull brown primer.

Useless’s door was okay except for a few dozen pinholes in the upper half. I supposed Three Hearts’s son and the Angel left each other love notes — for a while.

I worked the key in the lock and ushered my aunt in. There was a light switch to the left of the door. When I flicked it, soft white light bathed the room.

Useless’s apartment surprised me. Over all the years I’d known him he had been slovenly at best. His sink would be filled with dishes. The floor was his closet.

But this room was neat as a pin. The ceiling was very high, maybe eighteen feet, and there was a window maybe ten feet from the floor. The table had matching chairs. A rainbow-colored throw rug sat at the foot of the small bed, and paintings of flowers hung on three of four walls.

“My God,” Three Hearts breathed. “He must have been in love to let her change his home like this here.”

She went over to a bureau and opened the drawers one at a time. I didn’t know what she was looking for and I didn’t care.

I knew that men kept their secrets in the trash. And so I looked under the sink, pulled out a blue rubber bin, and placed a kitchen chair before the shaft of sun coming in from the window.

There were napkins and white cardboard tubs from some Chinese takeaway restaurant. Under that were envelopes addressed to U. S. Grant, most of them bills, all of them unopened.

Under that layer were a number of tiny white and green slips of paper with “$1,000” printed on each one.

Three Hearts settled on a stool next to the bed. She had a journal or diary in her hand and was turning the pages more quickly than she should have been able to read.

The denomination for the wrappers was probably twenties. I counted seventy-two slips while Three Hearts perused the diary.

Seventy-two thousand dollars. Useless was either in Honolulu or dead. This last thought didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t want Three Hearts to think that I might have saved her boy when he was in dire need.

I didn’t feel guilty about whatever had happened to my errant cousin, far from it. There was no way that he could have garnered that much money legally, and we all knew what the price was for stealing from white people.

I knew that the money came from whites because they were the only ones who had that kind of cash. That is except for religious leaders and black gangsters, and even Useless wasn’t fool enough to mess with them.

I rummaged around in the garbage until I came up with a typewritten list on a sheet of white paper. There were thirteen entries on the list: banks, insurance companies, large white churches, and financial management firms.

Useless and I were first cousins; we were of the same blood. I wondered how someone so closely related to me could have been such a fool as to leave a trail like that in his trash.

I stuffed my pockets full with the damning evidence.

I called across the room, “What you got there, Auntie?”

She slapped the book shut and said, “Nuthin’, baby.”

“Not nuthin’. It’s a book.”

“It’s private.”

“Angel’s diary?” I asked.

“Just because you’re smart does not mean you have good sense,” my aunt told me. “These is private papers, and I intend to return them to her.”

“Will they help us find Ulysses?” I asked.

“No.”

“How can you be sure? You haven’t read the whole thing.”

“Have you found anything in the trash?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I didn’t think so.”

With that, Three Hearts Grant stood up and marched toward the door. I followed her, wondering if her evil eye was powerful enough to protect me from the people that worked for the companies on Useless’s list.