Fear of the Dark

Chapter 23

I drove directly from the scene of the murder to Santa Monica Beach.

Whenever I am frightened I head for water. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a good swimmer and I don’t know the first thing about boats. My uncle always used to say that the fish must have known it was me at the other end of that line because they never took my bait.

But despite all that, the water makes me feel secure. The Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico were my solace in Louisiana; now that I was a Californian, the great Pacific was my protector.

I went to a bench in a park that stood maybe a hundred feet above the ocean at the end of Olympic Boulevard. There I sat and tried to make sense out of a life that, if I were a white man, should have been as boring as a cardboard box.

The last time I had anything to do with Jessa I found her lover murdered on my floor. And now I had found her again and another man had been murdered, a man who was after my cousin Useless.

It almost made sense. Almost.

I couldn’t hear the waves but I could see them, cresting white and breaking rank at the sand.

Useless was being followed by Hector. Hector, for some unknown reason, had killed Tiny. Then Jessa, who knows why, had gone away with Hector. Now Hector was dead.

There were people I had never met who were involved with Useless. There was the white man Stringly and the men who were being blackmailed or extorted or whatever. There was Mad Anthony, whom I did know.

What I didn’t know was if any of this mattered to me.

At almost any other time I would have gone home and left the killing of Hector LaTiara to the LAPD. They wouldn’t care too much about a black man getting his throat cut. And if they decided to investigate, it would be about the criminal life he lived and not about some Negro bookseller from South L.A. But I had already tried to ignore a crime that had come to me via my cousin. Tiny’s corpse was stalking me still. Hector might do so too.

After this last thought my mind went blank. I couldn’t get any further into the problem. I was not the kind of man who made bold decisions about events that could harm or kill me. I moved behind drapes, sought out shadows. But there I was in the light of day between the rock (Three Hearts) and the hard place (her son).

“Bail Bonds,” Loretta Kuroko answered on the first ring.

“Loretta.”

“Hi, Paris,” she said happily. “Hold on.”

“Hello?” Fearless said.

“Hey, man.”

“You sound like the house burnt down and the dog died,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I got to see you, Fearless, and this really ain’t the kinda talk you can have on the phone.”

“Okay, man. Fine. Milo off wit’ Whisper, so I could take some time. I don’t have a car, though.”

“I’m out at the beach,” I said. “Santa Monica.”

First-time lovers and real friends don’t need much language. Fearless knew my predilection for the sea when I was frightened. He knew I would find it hard to come to him.

“You at the place you usually go?” he asked.

“No. But I can get there.”

“See ya in forty-five minutes, Paris. Hold on, brother.”

My usual place was a patch of sand about a hundred feet south of the Santa Monica Pier, midway between the ocean and the boardwalk. I climbed down the long stairway from the park to the beach and then trudged along the shoreline to that place.

Along the way I didn’t think about anything bad or threatening. I had come to the dead end of my abilities and that had led to a blank wall. There was nothing else I could do. I was actually too afraid to consider doing anything more. The blood down Hector’s chest made me blind and deaf. I wasn’t built for that kind of confrontation.

I made it to my place in the sand and sat down with no blanket or bottle of beer. It was just me sitting on hot silicon under a brutal sun. The heat moved around me, that and the cacophonous music of the waves.

I didn’t even have a hat; nor did I desire one. I wanted the sun to beat down on me; I wanted the waves to crash senselessly. I was an innocent man, but no one would believe it. The only solace I had was the pulse of an ocean that had been there before there was even a fish to befoul it.

A cloud covered the sun for a moment, and my head felt a momentary coolness.

“Hey, Paris,” the cloud said.

Fearless sat down next to me on the hot bed of sand.

“Hey, man,” I replied. “How’d you get here?”

“Amos taxi.”

“I’ll pay you for the fare.”

“Your mother ain’t sick, is she?” he asked.

I shook my head no.

“You ain’t bleedin’, broken, or dyin’ as far as I can see. So don’t be too sad.”

I laughed and threw a play punch at him. He blocked me out of reflex, and I almost began to cry.

“Tell me what happened,” Fearless said, and I unburdened myself about the dead man and the white girl and my feelings of helplessness.

“Damn,” Fearless said at the end of my tale. “Somebody sneaked up on him and cut his th’oat like that? That’s serious bidness there. That’s a assassin doin’ his job right. An’ what was the white girl doin’ wit’ ’im?”

“Hector musta killed Tiny,” I said. “That’s all I can think. And then, and then... And then either he grabbed Jessa or she ran with him.”

“Why she wanna run with the man kilt her man?” Fearless asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Tiny started takin’ it out on her when I got away. Maybe Hector came in and didn’t like seein’ a woman bein’ beat by a man. If that’s the way it came down, then she might’a run with him because he saved her. On the other hand, he might’a killed Tiny out of self-defense and then took the girl to keep her from talkin’. For that matter, Jessa might have snuck up on Hector an’ cut his throat to get away.

“I ain’t worried about any’a that. It’s Useless’s part in it that bothers me.”

“I don’t even see how Useless comes in,” Fearless agreed.

“I see how it might happen,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t know why.”

I realized that in the presence of Fearless Jones I had the courage to think again. It was a fleeting thought.

“How so?” Fearless said.

Two young white women wearing one-piece bathing suits walked near us. One of them looked at Fearless and smiled. He smiled and waved, and the two women scurried away laughing, throwing him sideways glances.

“Hector and Useless were in business getting money from white men over some kind of blackmail or threat,” I said. “Useless was cheating Hector — that goes without sayin’...” Fearless chuckled and I went on. “Hector’s after Useless and somehow Useless decides to use me for his shill. Either he gonna leave somethin’ with me or tell Hector, or somebody Hector knows, that he did. That way he have Hector comin’ after me while he gets away with his plans.”

“What plans?”

“He’s been movin’ money through Jerry Twist. Maybe he wants to go where the money is.”

“And Hector comes up on you but finds Tiny and the white girl,” Fearless said.

“Yeah. And then, when I’m down in the basement with the body, he comes back and searches for whatever it is Useless said he gave me.”

“And then he comes back again lookin’ for the dictionary,” Fearless said.

“Yeah.”

“But why didn’t he pull out a gun or somethin’ then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe enough time had passed that he knew where whatever he was looking for was.”

“But then why come to you at all?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you bettah know sumpin’ soon, man. Old Three Hearts not gonna wait forever. I dropped by Nadine’s house just to see how your auntie was doin’, and Nadine told me that Hearts was out day and night tryin’ to get a line on her son. You know that’s gonna be trouble for somebody.”

“Shit,” I said. “Damn.” And with those two epithets my paralysis was completely over. “We need to look into these white businesses Useless was fleecin’,” I said. “We need to get in someplace and find out what he was up to.”

“Yeah, Paris. Yeah, man. Let’s do it.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “maybe I could sell my bookstore and take my savings and move to China. They speak English in Hong Kong. I could sell books there.”

“One night with Mum don’t make you a Chin’ee, man,” Fearless said.

“How you know about her?”

“I saw her lookin’ at you,” he said. “I know that look.”