Fear of the Dark

Chapter 22

If Hector LaTiara had been to my store, he was probably there looking for Useless — that was the thought going through my mind when I was almost awake, lying there between floral-scented sheets. And if Hector had been to my place once, he might have been there twice, even three times. He might have been armed and he might have run into Tiny Bobchek.

But what did any of that have to do with smoked bacon?

I hated Useless, hated him in that way you can only despise a family member. All of a sudden I was worried that the Bobchek murder could be tied to me in some way. If the police could somehow identify the corpse, they might tie him to Useless and then Useless to me. The next thing I knew, somebody who knew more than I did would be confessing to the crime, incriminating me, and getting a reduced sentence as he did so.

I would have liked to pour orange juice and hot butter all over him.

“Paris,” the breeze whispered.

I should have agreed with Fearless the night before. We should have gone to Hector’s house. It was too late to go to the police. They wouldn’t understand us taking Tiny to the strawberry field. Killer Cleave wouldn’t understand me telling them about it.

“Breakfast,” the gentle wind sighed.

I opened my eyes to see Mum kneeling before me, naked and proffering a silver tray holding bacon and eggs, orange juice, and coffee.

My waking dream had put a pall on the day, but I smiled for Mum and kissed her gently.

“This what you call a Chinese breakfast?” I asked the young woman.

“No. But you’re not what I call a Chinese girl’s boyfriend either,” she replied.

We ate and talked about her family. I asked where they had come from in China and why were so many people killed.

Mum told me that her clan hailed from central China originally. She blamed the Japanese for their demise. She hated that people with a virulence that rivaled the worst white racists I had met in the South. While she spoke I thought of Loretta. I wondered if Mum would have hated my Japanese friend.

Then I wondered about the people I hated because of their skin color or whatever. It seemed rather arbitrary to me — unnecessary, or maybe not that, maybe it was necessary to hate someone, just capricious who it was that you hated.

After breakfast I put on my clothes. At the door Mum hugged me and we kissed. She peered deeply into my eyes then.

“You cannot be my boyfriend,” she said very seriously.

“You’re very beautiful,” I replied with a smile.

“But—”

“So I’m happy for what I got here,” I said. “It’s like a dream in here. And now when I come to Good News I know I can talk to you about philosophy over hot and sour.”

Mum’s eyes widened, and maybe there was a gleam of disappointment there. She might have been thinking that I took it so well maybe I could have been a good secret lover. Or maybe she wanted me to be a little brokenhearted after that night of perfect love.

Either way, she kissed me again and, unknowingly, sent me off to war.

Sex with a woman is always a two-edged sword for me. The last woman I had been with, Jessa, was the source of all kinds of trouble. I was still deep in that morass, my clothes newly perfumed with Mum’s exotic scents, when I decided that it would be okay for me to go to the address on Saturn where Hector LaTiara lived.

There were many forces that brought me to his block. There was the manhood I felt from the act of love with Mum. There was the urgency I felt about the murder that had happened in my home. And there was the feeling of invisibility I had at times.

I didn’t expect to confront Hector. I just wanted to get the lay of the land before Fearless and I went up against the French-assed nigger.

I got in my car and sat there for a while. I thought about the assumptions I had made and the mistakes that attended those assumptions.

Very often I blamed Fearless for my problems. He’d get into trouble trying to do right in a world where everything was wrong. When he felt that he needed to think his way out of a problem, he always came to me. And if I got involved, trouble came down in a deluge.

Sometimes I wouldn’t answer Fearless’s calls. Sometimes I would refuse him bail money.

But now here I was, in trouble deep, and I didn’t question whether or not Fearless would be there the moment I needed him. I can’t say that I felt guilty about my infidelity, but I did see the truth of it. If Fearless wasn’t in my life, I’d already be in jail over Tiny Bobchek’s murder. And if not for my friend, knowing anything about Hector LaTiara wouldn’t have done me one lick of good.

It was about eleven when I drove down the 1600 block of Hauser, then left onto Saturn. It was a narrow street there below Pico. The dwellings were single-family houses and two- and three-unit apartment buildings. Most everybody was at work. The yards were empty. The birds were cheeping.

There was no car at the address given for Mr. LaTiara. The apartment building was red and cream stucco, tall for L.A., three floors. I sat there patiently, remembering Mum’s kisses, fearing the iron bars of California justice.

At twelve fifteen Jessa stumbled out of the arched entrance to Hector’s building. She was wearing a pale green dress that didn’t seem done up right. She looked confused standing there on the concrete path to the first-floor entrance of the building.

Another problem I have is that I don’t have enough respect for women. I’m not saying that I don’t try to be civil by opening doors and keeping my eyes in check. The problem is that I don’t fear women enough.

Seeing Jessa, I jumped out of my car and made it across the street before considering what her presence there might have meant. She was turning in a slow circle, looking up as if the sun had robbed her of her senses.

“Jessa, what are you doing here?” I asked, coming up to her.

At first she didn’t respond. Then she looked me in the eye. After a moment, I think she recognized me. I thought she was going to tell me something, but then she screamed and socked me in the jaw.

Then next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the lawn.

I sat up, befuddled. Jessa was screaming again but she was also running. I watched her go down the street at a good clip and wondered what I should do.

I decided that going back to my car would be a mistake. If anyone saw me, they might get the license plate, and then the police would have my name and Jessa’s face at least. I couldn’t walk down the street — I just couldn’t. And so I decided that going into the red building was my best choice.

It might not have been a good decision, but I was a little shaken by Jessa’s sucker punch.

Once inside the entrance of the building, I was presented with two choices. To the left was a circular stairway that led to the apartments above, and straight ahead was the doorway to the first-floor abode.

Another easy choice. The door to the first-floor apartment was open.

I walked in gingerly. If there was someone there, I didn’t want to scare them.

The foyer was a small room in its own right. Salmon pink walls and a dark wood chair with an ivory white cushion in the seat. The carpet was a yellow background supporting dozens of woven red roses. There was a telephone on the floor, marking a place where a stand should have been, I imagined. And there was a portrait of a white woman on a horse. The woman and horse were on a path in front of a white fence. In the distance was an apple orchard, beyond that a mountain range.

I remember much more about that foyer. I remember the baseboard around the floor and the yellow-and-red light fixture on the ceiling. I could spend a great deal of time on the dimensions of the room and the odd shape of it... but that’s because of what happened in the next room, the room I should never have entered.

It was a den of some sort: half office, half study. It was dark. There was a desk behind which were closed drapes. There was a high-backed office chair, and sitting on it was Hector LaTiara, the man who had come to me looking for a French dictionary, the man Useless was so frightened of.

He was wearing a vanilla-colored jacket and a white shirt, both of which were bad choices because of his throat being slashed open. Thick, gelatinous blood had flowed, lavalike, down the fair material. An arc of blood had sprayed across the papers on his desk.

One of his eyes was wide with fright, the other half closed. His lips, even in his last moments, curled into a superior sneer, as if he were trying to convey to his murderer that he had been through worse than this.

I was mesmerized by the brutality and the blood. My gorge rose, but I wouldn’t turn away. My body shook, but I wouldn’t take a step. A voice in the back of my mind was screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” But I stayed in place, gawking at the paradigm of murder.

My breathing had become very shallow. I was almost panting, with very little oxygen getting to my brain. So I put my hands on my knees and squatted down like a sprinter after a hard-run race. It worked. I took in deeper breaths, and the paralysis began to lift.

But bending over, I put myself closer to the corpse.

His left hand held a broken pencil. He’d probably snapped it when he first felt the razor on his throat. There was blood on the pencil and all over both hands. You could see that he’d grabbed for the wound without releasing what he held. Then, as he died, the hands came back down to the note he’d been writing:

“Mr. LaTiara?” a frail voice called.

How I moved so swiftly behind the maroon drapes I cannot say. All I know is that one moment I was frozen in awe, reading the upside-down note, and the next I was behind the thick fabric. There was a tiny tear through which I could see the room beyond the dead man’s chair.

“Mr. LaTiara?”

And then, long moments later, a small and ancient white woman doddered in. She had the blue hair of an old woman and a face that would have fit on the smallest of animals.

“Oh, no,” she whispered, and I was convinced, absolutely, that she would fall down dead from fright.

But I was wrong. She moved closer to the desk than I had dared and stared deeply at the man. Her tiny face became steely and she turned away, walking from the room with more fortitude than she had coming in.

My enemy became that telephone in the foyer. If she stopped there to call the police, I was done for. Either she’d see me or they would come and find me.

I could sneak up on her, knock her senseless, and run — but no. She was too old and I was too close to my mother.

A minute passed and I heard nothing.

Another minute.

I moved out from behind the curtain and into the foyer. The woman was gone.

I went back into the foyer and through another door. This led to a kitchen, which had a back door that led to a yard. Then there was a fence, another yard, an alley, a street. I ran as fast as I could until I was in the driver’s seat of my jalopy again. As I turned the ignition, I heard the far-off whine of sirens.

My heart was beating like bongo drums; my soul was deep in the ecstasy of escape.