Fear of the Dark

Chapter 44

The phone began ringing about ten minutes after Fearless had driven off with my windfall retirement fund.

I could have taken that money and moved to Paris, my namesake city, lived on the Champs-Élysée, and listened to American jazz in the bistros and nightclubs. I could have learned Latin and French and married an African princess.

The phone kept on ringing.

I was almost as leery of the phone as I was of people at my front door. Anybody could have been calling me: the police, Three Hearts, the killer pretending to be somebody else.

Why should I answer?

What I needed to do was to find an out-of-the-way motel where I could sleep and read until there was no more trouble roiling around me.

The phone stopped ringing.

I always forgot that it was Fearless’s moral side that did me in in the end. No matter how much money passed through our hands, he always wanted to do the right thing. Here we had money that nobody expected to see again. I had sent the victims the blackmailers’ evidence — wasn’t that good enough?

The phone started ringing again. That worried me. Somebody wanted to get through. If I didn’t answer they might come by.

“Hello?”

“Paris,” the voice intoned.

“Yeah,” I said resignedly.

“I don’t give information over the phone.”

“Come on by, then,” I said.

“Be there in five.”

More trouble. Whisper could find his way into any problem. He was a real private eye. I couldn’t shake the notion that it was him who had me walking in front of those armed men. It was him who was saved by my diversion.

But even in my self-centered despair, I knew that I had asked Mr. Natly for help. He wouldn’t have been calling me if I hadn’t called on him first.

Above my telephone I had a big round wall clock with a sweeping second hand.

Exactly three hundred seconds after I hung up there was a knock at the door. I just opened it. If it was some armed killer, then so be it.

Whisper smiled and stuck out a hand for me to shake.

I had met the detective a dozen times in my life. He had never before, to my recollection, offered to shake hands. His fleeting smile came and went. I offered him tea and he accepted.

We went into my kitchen and sat down like friends.

He used three sugars in his English Breakfast. That surprised me.

“That was a good thing you did the other night, Paris,” Whisper said.

“I was so scared I couldn’t even run,” I replied.

“Scared is the detective’s best friend,” he said. “Scared makes you look harder and think longer. Scared keeps your hand on the wheel and your eye on the rearview mirror.”

“Sounds like a heart attack waitin’ to happen,” I said.

“Naw, man. You get used to it. Find yourself sitting in your chair thinkin’ ’bout things nobody else will get to for days. After a while you take actions before the fear moves you. Not so many people could be a detective, but you could, Paris.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, you do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be askin’ after Mannheim and the Handsome boys.”

He had me there.

“You find ’em?” I asked.

“Bobo,” he said with a nod. “I decided to concentrate on him. I’m guessin’ you wouldn’t want to see ’em all together.”

“Where?” I asked, cutting to the chase.

Whisper smiled again. He took out a slip of paper with a list of four places scrawled on it. These places, I knew, were the leg breaker’s hangouts.

I took the list and looked it over. They were joints I wouldn’t have felt comfortable going in for any reason. The names were often heard along with reports of fights, knifings, arrests, and murder.

“You want some company, Paris?” Whisper offered.

“Damn right.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Allegra’s dance hall was no more than the frame of a barn behind an ironworks factory on Hooper. Back there you could lose your life in a second. It was early and no one was dancing. There were a couple of potheads smoking in the yard, but Bobo was nowhere in evidence.

“Should we ask about him?” I asked the professional.

“Not unless you want him to disappear on ya.”

The next place was a Texas barbecue stand on Santa Barbara. It was rumored that Bobo ate there at least four times a week. He wasn’t hungry right then.

Harry’s barbershop had been closed temporarily by the police. There had been a murder over a poker game in the back room, so Harry took off a week or so, until the police got tired of checking their seal.

Thad’s bar was last on our list.

The physical bar at Thad’s was small, but there was a big room for clientele once they had something to drink. There were four bartenders, serving cheap beer, mostly. Whisper had kept Thad’s for last because he’d been told that Bobo had an ex-girlfriend that worked there. He didn’t expect that Bobo would be hanging around an ex, but he was wrong.

Ora, Bobo’s girlfriend, was working serving drinks.

When Whisper asked her about Bobo, she just shrugged and gestured toward a corner with her jaw.

At the corner table sat a big man, a very big man. His shoulders sagged, and all you could see was the top of his uncombed head. The quart pitcher looked like a mug in his large hand.

Whisper and I went to his table. I tried to keep abreast of my new friend, but when we got to within six feet of Bobo, my legs just stopped moving.

Seeing our shadows in his beer, Bobo looked up. His brutal face seemed damaged somehow.

“What?” he whined.

“Bobo Handsome?” Whisper asked.

“Yeah? What you want?”

“Like to buy you a drink,” Whisper said.

I liked the style. I had to remember to use it the next time I wanted to grill somebody.

“Sure,” Bobo said, waving his hand at us.

Whisper ordered a fifth of whiskey and three glasses. Ora, Bobo’s ex-girlfriend, frowned when she received the order, but she kept quiet.

Whisper introduced himself and so did I. We traded shots for a while and discussed baseball. I don’t know a thing about baseball. I knew about the Negro Leagues, but if you asked me what they actually did on the field, I wouldn’t have been able to answer.

But Whisper knew. He seemed to know a little something about everything. Bobo got drunker, and angry, but he wasn’t mad at us.

“You evah have a friend that you really love?” Bobo asked me at one point.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“You talkin’ ’bout Tremont?” Whisper asked.

It was the first time I’d heard that name, but I knew from the context that he was the fat man that Three Hearts had killed.

“What you know ’bout Tremont?” Bobo asked, half rising from his chair.

“Nuthin’,” Whisper said innocently. “I just heard that the cops fount his body. Somebody had shot him in the gut.”

The violence in Bobo’s demeanor melted into grief. Tears sprouted from his eyes, and his hands grasped at nothing.

Ora, who was a small dark-skinned woman, came over and put her hands on his oxlike shoulders. Her face wasn’t beautiful, but the feeling she held for him was.

“Leave him alone,” she told us. “Cain’t you see he’s hurtin’?”

“You want us to leave, Bobo?” Whisper asked.

“No, man. Go on, Ora. These here my friends.”

“You don’t even know these niggahs,” she answered. “They buy you a drink an’ turn your ass ovah.”

“We don’t wanna hurt you, Bobo,” Whisper said, and I realized that in order to be a detective you had to be cruel while seeming to be kind.

“Go on, Ora,” Bobo said. “I ain’t no fool.”

“Fuck you, then,” Ora said to all of us.

She stormed away to be consoled by three or four other barmaids.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Whisper said.

What amazed me about Whisper was how simple and yet elegant his approach was at this point. If I were trying to get information out of Bobo I would have tried to fool him by making up a dozen lies. Whisper just told one lie and then soaked it in whiskey.

“I tell you one thing,” Bobo said. “Don’t evah put yo’ trust in no light-skin, light-eyed, high-yellah niggah. Mothahfuckah done made Tremont’s chirren orphans, an’ he won’t even let up on a dime. Wouldn’t shed a tear ovah his own.”

He said some other things, but I don’t remember what. I let him go on for a while and then I told Whisper that I had to go see my uncle. I explained to Bobo that my uncle had tuberculosis and needed help around his house.

Bobo told me to make sure that he drank a lot of milk. Milk was good for TB.

I thanked him and ordered another bottle of booze. I figured if he got drunk enough he wouldn’t be able to get in the way of my plans.