Fear of the Dark

Chapter 35

We left Motley to pack his toothbrush and wine bottles. I had no doubt that he’d return to a previous life of white poverty in central California. There he’d live out his days, drinking rotgut and jumping at bumps in the night.

Friar had us drive him to a phone booth. There he called the Greenwood Golf Club and simply asked for the address and phone number of Lionel Charlemagne Sterling. The whole transaction took less than three minutes. They would never have let me in on those numbers. Then again, they wouldn’t have let me play golf there either. But a man like Friar, even though he was not a member, was well-known to them.

“Mr. Friar,” I said to our new friend, “you’ve been a good partner so far, but right now I believe that we need to go our separate ways.”

“I might be of help to you when you face Mr. Sterling.”

“Naw, man,” Fearless said. “These men serious about their bidness. They got guns an’ knives an’ they know how to use ’em too. I can cover one man, but two be a stretch.”

There was something in Fearless’s delivery. When he talked, any man halfway near sane listened.

“Will you keep me informed?” Friar asked me.

“When we get your money back, you’ll get it,” I said. “And we might need some’a your kinda help by that time.”

We drove Martin Friar back to his office and then made our way to Spalding Drive in that part of Beverly Hills that lay south of Wilshire Boulevard. North of Wilshire and beyond was where the truly wealthy people lived. The south was for their Passepartout-like aides. These men were senior vice presidents with no chance for promotion or small-business owners who didn’t have the vision, or the backing, to go large.

The house that fit the address Friar had given us was a small cottage with white plaster walls and a green thatch roof. Twenty blocks south and it would have cost less than five thousand dollars, but its location made it worth seven times that.

I rang the bell, and the door came open almost immediately. Maybe he was expecting someone. Maybe in this house he ignored the criminal circumstances of his life — I don’t know. All I can say is that the tall and handsome silver-haired white man was smiling when he opened the door. The smile faltered at first and then turned into a panicked grimace. He gasped and turned to run. Given no choice, Fearless lunged after the probable Mr. Sterling, grabbing him by the collar of his white dress shirt. One tug and he was on his back. I was inside the door by then, pulling it shut behind me.

“Please don’t kill me,” the white man whined. “Please.”

“Get his wallet,” I said to Fearless.

“Take it,” the terrified man said, almost throwing the wallet at me. “Take everything; just don’t kill me.”

I opened the billfold and pulled out his business card. It read: Lionel Charlemagne Sterling, Realtor.

“We got to talk, Lionel,” I said.

“Please, please,” he replied, staying down on his knees.

“Get up,” I said. I couldn’t stand to see a man kneeling and begging — not even a white man.

“Please.”

“Get up,” Fearless said in a voice he never used on me.

The sobbing extortionist rose to his feet, his head bowed and his shoulders sagging.

We were standing in an entranceway. To the right was a sunken living room. I thought he was going to lead us in there, but instead he leaned against a small waist-high table that stood against the wall. There was a telephone sitting there.

“I never meant to hurt anyone,” he said. “It was just too much.”

“Where’s Three Hearts and Angel?” I asked him.

“In Pasadena,” he said. “Thirteen twenty-nine Hugo.”

That was easy.

“Tell him that I would never turn him in,” Sterling said. “Tell him. Call him.”

“Why don’t you call him?” I said, wondering who it was that frightened Sterling so.

“Can I?” he sobbed. Mucus was running from his left nostril. Tears flowed from both eyes.

“Sure,” I said. “Calm down, Mr. Sterling. We’re not here to hurt you.”

My assurances seemed to frighten him even more. He began to tremble.

He turned to the telephone table, but instead of grabbing the receiver he pulled open the drawer. He turned quickly, but Fearless was even faster.

If I had been alone I would have died in that overpriced entranceway. But my friend, with his catlike instincts and reflexes, grabbed the gun and tore it from Sterling’s grip.

Sterling fell to his knees and screamed like a woman. He grabbed me by my thigh and yelled again, not so loudly this time. His eyes were popping out and the rictus of his smile was the epitome of terror.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed his face and leaned forward.

“It’s okay, man,” I said to him. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

His grin began to quiver, and his eyes fixed on a place that was far away from that room. The grip on my thigh loosened, and Mr. Lionel Charlemagne Sterling began to fade.

“No,” I said. “No, man. We’re not here to hurt you.”

The death grin was accompanied by a nod that did not comprehend my words.

He let go of my leg, but I grabbed his forearms in a hopeless attempt to keep him alive. But the blackmailer was dying, and nothing I could do would keep him from that fate.

When he’d fallen down on his back, Fearless touched his throat and put an ear against his mouth.

“Dead,” my friend said. Then he looked up at me. “Damn, Paris.”

“What? You think I knew somethin’ like this was gonna happen?”

“You the one brought us here, man,” he said.

“He killed himself,” I said. “He was scared because’a what he did.”

“Are we standin’ ovah a dead white man in Beverly Hills?” he asked me.

“He died of a heart attack or somethin’ like that. We didn’t kill him.”

Fearless just shook his head.

“Damn,” he said again.

There was over forty thousand dollars laid out on a bed in one of the house’s smaller bedrooms. I looked at it, counted it, placed it in a pillowcase, and put it down.

There was no other indication of Sterling’s criminal activity in the house. We left him where he had fallen in the foyer. If we were lucky, a housecleaner or relative would find him and that would be it — Death due to heart attack, the coroner’s report would read.

“Should we take the money?” I asked my friend.

“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” he said. “Maybe we could find somebody he robbed an’ pay ’em back.”

We watched the street until no one was out and no car was coming and then made our escape.

While driving toward Pasadena we had the following conversation:

“You really blame me for this?” I asked.

“I don’t think you knew what was gonna happen,” he said. “I don’t think you wanted him to die. But it’s just the way you go about things, man. You too much. You too hard.”

“Hard? Me? Man, I couldn’t beat up two outta three high school kids.”

“Not hard fists, Paris. It’s your mind. You treat people like they was books, man. You just open ’em up and start goin’. But really you should come up slow an’ check it out first.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had the feeling that he was telling me the truth, that I was at least partly the cause of Sterling’s death. But what could I do about it? He was the criminal. Wasn’t he?