Fear of the Dark

Chapter 5

We took Milo’s dark red ’52 Cadillac. He drove while Fearless sat shotgun. I reclined in the backseat, thinking about my bookstore and that angry white man.

I wasn’t scared, because I was with Fearless and Fearless always inspired calm in me. In his company I had my greatest acuity due to the peaceful security of his aura.

I wasn’t scared, but I was worried that maybe Tiny had burned down my store.

I was thinking about Loretta behind me and Jessa up ahead, wondering why it was that I could never make it work with women, why there was only a short time for love before something went wrong.

“What’s the matter with you, Paris?” Milo asked, as we turned onto Central.

“What you talkin’ ’bout, Miles?”

“You. Why a smart man like you spend half his life in trouble?”

“Me? What about you, needin’ Fearless and Whisper t’covah yo’ ass?” I asked in the street banter that was the glue of Negro life in every corner of our nation.

“That’s business,” Milo said flatly. “That’s money in my pocket. Man gotta do business or him an’ his starve. But you got people up on your ass an’ you don’t hardly have a pot to piss in. Here you worried ’bout that bookstore, an’ we both know that you be lucky to clear forty dollars in a month’s time.”

“Maybe so,” I allowed. “But you the one been up to his kneecaps in loan sharks every year since you been out on your own.”

Fearless let out a low chuckle on that one.

Milo gave his temporary bodyguard a sidelong glance and said, “Again, all you talkin’ ’bout is business. Businessman got to cover his debts, got to grow his capital. I own a business that’s worth somethin’, Paris. People, white people, have offered me big money to sell out to them. Big money. How much somebody gonna give you for that bookstore?”

Milo was ragging me because he was mad that Fearless had made him leave his office. I was arguing back to keep my mind off the troubles that lay ahead. But I tripped up on that last question. I didn’t want to sell my bookstore. I would have gotten an extra job in order to keep it running. I loved sitting there with those dusty books. I loved it.

Milo pulled up at the curb across the street and down a few houses from my place. Fearless turned sideways in the front seat and gave me his serious look.

“Okay, Paris,” he said. “Now tell me what you did to this white boy.”

“Nuthin’.”

“You sure?”

Fearless was a killer. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body, but somewhere along the evolutionary trail he had been endowed with a gift for violence. All through World War II, and in American cities from Houston to S.F. to L.A., he had dealt out terrible punishment. He never shied away from trouble, nor would he turn his back on a friend. But Fearless didn’t want to be tricked into hurting someone who didn’t deserve it, and so he asked me about Tiny.

“What I told you at Milo’s is all there is, man,” I said. “I should have sent her away, but you know...”

Fearless smiled and opened the car door.

“I’ll drive around the block a couple’a times,” Milo told us.

“It won’t take long,” Fearless replied.

The front door to my store was closed. That in itself wasn’t so strange. It was just that I remembered the splintering wood from the frame and the violence in Tiny’s voice. I found it hard to imagine such rage closing a door like that.

Fearless and I took the stairs together, side by side.

With the fingers of his left hand, Fearless tapped the door, and it swung open. This meant that someone had gone to the bother of reattaching the hinges.

Ten feet from the doorway Tiny lay, in the same spot where Jessa and I had rutted like alley cats. He was on his back, his left arm under him and his right flung awkwardly over his stomach. His green eyes were open wide, and there was a small dark cavity in his right temple.

I moved closer to the body, not really realizing what I was seeing. It made no sense. In my fear I had wished this man dead, but wishes couldn’t happen. I tried to come up with an explanation as to how the killing might have occurred, but there was no thought that could take hold. I didn’t believe that I was seeing what was in front of me. I expected Tiny to sit up any minute and say, “April fool.”

“Paris,” Fearless said. I had the feeling he’d said it more than once.

“What?”

I turned to see that he had closed the door.

“What the hell is this, man?” he asked. Fearless rarely cursed.

“I swear, Fearless. I don’t know. I ran out over the eave of the back porch. He might have falled or somethin’...”

“Fall my ass. This dude been shot.”

“I don’t know how.”

“What about that girl? Maybe he went after her and she shot him.”

“She didn’t have no purse,” I said. “Damn, man, she wasn’t even wearin’ underpants.”

“What about your piece?” he asked.

“I don’t have a gun.”

“No?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Maybe,” Fearless said, straining his mental faculties, “maybe he had a gun and she took it from him.”

“Fearless, what the fuck I’m’a do about this?”

That started him chewing on his bottom lip. He shook his head, staring at the body.

“Call the cops?” he asked.

“Come on, man,” I said. “What the hell can I say to the cops? That I was fuckin’ his white girlfriend on the floor when he busted in? They hang me for that right there.”

“You right,” Fearless agreed. “Even if the girl did it, she’s probably long gone by now, and if they catch her all she got to do is cry rape and say you shot the guy.”

“Maybe we should bring Milo in,” I suggested.

“Uh-uh. Unless Milo see dollar signs he won’t do nuthin’. Anyway he’s not gonna put himself in trouble for us.”

Us. That’s why I could never turn my back on Fearless Jones. Who else would walk into my house, find a dead body, and stay to share my trouble?

“So what do we do?”

“How come you standin’ funny, Paris?” Fearless asked me.

“What the fuck that got to do with anything?”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what. You lift his feet and I’ll get his shoulders.”

I knelt and grabbed Tiny’s ankles. When I tried to lift them, a spasm went through my right shoulder that sent me to the floor.

“Now you wanna tell me ’bout how you standin’?” Fearless asked.

“Okay, yeah, I fell an’ hurt my side. So what?”

“So if we don’t tell the cops and we don’t tell Milo, then the only thing we can do is get rid’a yo’ friend here. But he too big for me alone. And you don’t have the strength to help, not with that hurt back.”

I wanted to scream. How could a bookworm like me get into so much trouble over a meat loaf dinner?

Fearless smiled.

“You get too upset, Paris. Don’t let it bother you. We just need some help.”

I couldn’t even talk.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s put our friend here down in your cellar. I’ll drive Milo around until he goes to sleep at his hideout and then I’ll get somebody we can trust to help.”

Under the rightmost bookcase in my store was a blue carpet covering a trapdoor. This door led to a small brick-lined cellar that had come with the building. I don’t know what the previous owners did down there. It didn’t have a hot-water heater or even an electric outlet. It wasn’t big enough for a pool table. I’d always thought that the original owners might have been crooked in some way and they installed the underground room as a hideout in times of trouble.

I had had Fearless run a wire through the wall so that I could have light down there, but other than that I hadn’t changed a thing.

Fearless moved the bookcase and I kicked the carpet away. I also pulled up the trapdoor. Fearless dragged the heavy corpse to the hole and dropped him in.

“Hey,” he said in a moment of sudden inspiration. “We could just bury him down there.”

“Naw, man. Naw.”

“Why not?”

“Jessa’s not here but she’s somewhere. Sooner or later she’s likely to talk to somebody and then they will talk to somebody else. One day somebody’s gonna talk to a cop, and he’s gonna come here with a hard-on and a search warrant. Naw. We got to get rid of Tiny.”

“Okay,” Fearless said. “Throw that carpet back down there.”

I did as he said, but before he could move the shelves I stopped him.

“Maybe I should go down there with him,” I said.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know who killed this man. Maybe he gonna come back. Maybe Jessa already talked to the cops. I can’t go with you ’cause Milo’d get suspicious. But if I’m down there, nobody gonna find me.”

So i climbed down the short ladder into the ten-by-ten-foot brick-lined hole. Tiny had fallen on his head and broken his back in the fall. His torso was bent in a most unnatural pose. I clicked on the reading lamp I had down there, and Fearless closed the hatch. I heard him moving the bookcase and sat myself on the floor in the corner — as far away from Death as I could manage.