Fear of the Dark

Chapter 40

Finally i drove home. I wasn’t worried about losing business; people were used to my being closed at odd hours now and then. And it wasn’t like there was any other bookshop in the neighborhood. The customers I had would come back when my problems were over — that is, if I lived that long.

I carried Useless’s leather suitcase upstairs to my desk, thinking about the trouble he’d caused. I hadn’t even let him in the front door and still my fat was in the fire. It was so pathetic that I had to chuckle. Useless was more deadly than an outbreak of smallpox in a tuberculosis ward.

I put the suitcase on the far side of my big desk.

Sun was streaming down from the window behind me. There was the scent of Mum’s floral perfume rising from my shirt. A sheath of sweat was forming at the back of my neck, and I felt unsure about opening Useless’s bag.

Instead I tried to think my way back along the path I had taken. It was what I did whenever I got lost on the road; I’d pull my car to the side and sit there remembering all the turns I had taken and directions in which I had gone. Whenever I did that, the right way would come to me.

I thought about Useless at my front door and Jessa after him. I remembered running down Central and being saved by Sir and Sasha. There was Ha Tsu, Jerry Twist, Auntie Three Hearts, and an Angel with horns. I thought about Tiny Bobchek with the hole in his temple. Hector had killed him. But who had killed Hector? Lionel Sterling? No. Jessa?

Mad Anthony had been murdered too. Useless had admitted to that killing. He claimed self-defense and I believed him. Mad Anthony was a killing machine. Shooting him from the back with a tommy gun was self-defense in my book.

I made a turn at Mad Anthony. He was the leg breaker. That made sense. I went from him to Hector. Hector was deep into all of this mess. He was after Useless because my cousin was going to take the money and run. Angel and Useless had found out about the counterplot and bolted. It was all falling together. There was reason in the mayhem. I was somewhere near home when I ran into Sterling. He wasn’t afraid of some unknown assassin. His fear was of someone he knew and worked with.

A dead end. As if I thought that murder would ever be as neat as a road map.

I eyed the worn leather of Useless’s suitcase, wondering idly who had owned that luggage before my cousin. It looked old enough to belong to Useless’s great-grandfather: the general who had either loved or raped, as some versions of the story went, Three Hearts’s husband’s father’s mother. The name was given as a kind of oral history that would pass down from father to son, memorializing both the greatness and base nature of our beginnings.

Who had owned that suitcase? There was a leather tag holder strapped to the handle. I flipped it open, but the name, written in purple ink, had gotten wet and was nothing more than a blur.

I had spent half an hour trying to work out that name when I realized that I had gotten lost again.

From the bottom drawer of my desk I took a pair of thin cotton gloves that I kept for just such a purpose.

I undid the straps and flipped the latch of the suitcase. Inside, there was a large accordionlike folder made from durable brown paper. The folder had eighteen separate sections. Fifteen of these were in use. Fourteen of them contained an accounting sheet, between three and six black-and-white photographs, letters of love, and a little bag of receipts from hotels, restaurants, and upscale luxury stores that sold expensive clothing and jewelry.

The photographs were of the men in question gambling and in compromising positions with Angel. Some of the pictures were quite explicit, making me wonder if Useless was the photographer. The accounting sheet listed every transfer of funds from the mark to the blackmailers, also the probable dates on which the monies had been embezzled.

The letters were the most embarrassing. It surprised me that every man had written to Angel. My mother had told me a long time ago never to sign my name to anything unless I was compelled to by law or the possibility of profit. She hadn’t used those words exactly, but that’s what she meant.

Some of the letters were romantic, talking about forbidden love and freedom. Others were down in the gutter. I supposed that Angel had written to them first and they replied, hoping for something that they didn’t even understand.

The fifteenth section of the folder contained a file with all the pertinent information on each mark. Full names, addresses, phone numbers, names of wives, ex-wives, children, past lovers, and immediate supervisors. A few of the men had confessed to crimes they had committed at different points in their lives.

I imagined them in the heat of their passion, whispering, whimpering, confessing at Angel’s altar. There was no contempt in my mind’s eye. I could see getting down on my knees for the absolution granted by her beauty. If I were an older gentleman I might have been happy to sacrifice the life I’d built for her. I mean, after all, what good is a lifetime of accrued wealth when all it gets you are body aches and boiled meat for supper?

None of the men had committed murder or any other violent crime as far as the notes went. They seemed to be well-chosen docile and bureaucratic sorts. Even Martin Friar was only brave in his mind. He’d given up his organization’s money to assure his place in Angel’s heart and to protect himself from exposure.

The more I read, the less I believed in the possibility that one of the businessmen was responsible for the deaths I’d encountered. This left me with the most probable cause: Useless.

My cousin messed up anything he got involved in. And if you were there with him, the worst would come to you. Useless had stolen the accordion folder from someone. I knew this because the folder was too neat, too well planned out for a sloppy mind like his. The man, or woman, who had designed this extortion scheme had it all worked out to a science. It was like an investment folder or a detailed business plan.

This meant that Useless was intimate with the mastermind of the operation. He was running from that someone and knew a name.

I didn’t like my conclusion. I didn’t want to talk to Useless again. My fear might have been irrational, but the idea of being in the same room with my cousin made my neck hairs rise.

Luckily I had other things to do first.

I took my car down the street to Central Avenue and drove four blocks to Eugenia’s Stationery Store. There I purchased a box of manila envelopes, a ream of white paper, two black markers, and a roll of postage stamps.

For the next hour I put all the blackmailers’ information into thirteen envelopes, then stamped and addressed each one to the men being blackmailed. I typed thirteen short notes that read,

I wrote PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL on the front and back of each envelope, then I licked the adhesive and sealed the envelopes. After that I taped each one shut.

The only information I skipped was Brian Motley’s. His life had already been destroyed.

After that I drove to a post office I knew in Westwood and deposited the envelopes in the box outside.

In my car coming home I had what I came later to know as an anxiety attack. My tongue went dry and my stomach roiled. A cold sweat broke out across my brow. My hands clenched into fists around the steering wheel, and I barely had the muscle control to pull up to the curb. Sitting there, holding on tightly with my head against the wheel, I began to shiver. I think the thing that got to me was sending off those envelopes filled with so much threat and turmoil. My chest began hurting again. I wanted to cry but could not. So instead I took long deep breaths with my eyes closed. After a few minutes I was able to release the wheel. A few moments more and I relaxed into sobs.

When the episode had passed, I was able to drive but unwilling to go home.

Maybe the killer would be there waiting for me. Maybe. But I learned something about myself that afternoon. I learned that fear was so pervasive in my life that it had no real sway over me.

After all, I was afraid of everything. A cold might be pneumonia. A cut warned of lockjaw. Any man I met might be the boyfriend of a woman who had neglected to inform me about her situation.

“Scared if I do,” I said, “and scared if I don’t.”

This made me laugh very hard. Anyone passing would have thought that I’d gone insane there behind the wheel.