Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

Angel gasped at every other syllable. She fell onto a chair that sat next the sofa. Three Hearts was glaring at me for being so cruel to her new best friend — the woman she had wanted to murder less than half an hour ago. But I didn’t feel the effect of my auntie’s evil eye. I realized then that alcohol was proof against her spells.

“How did it work, Angel?” I asked.

“You know my name,” she replied, “but I don’t know either of yours.”

“Jones,” my friend said first. “Fearless Jones.”

“Oh,” Angel crooned. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re famous.”

Fearless smiled. Even he could be flattered by an angel.

“Paris,” I said. “Paris Minton.”

“Oh, yes. You’re Ullie’s cousin. He felt really bad about that time the police arrested you. He didn’t know that they’d come to your house.”

“Who was the man you left with when you ran out on Ulysses?” I asked.

“It’s not like it seems, Mrs. Grant,” she said. “I left, but it was because Ulysses wanted me to. He said that LaTiara was after him and he didn’t want me to get hurt.”

I laughed then.

I don’t get drunk all that often. And I don’t believe that inebriation is any panacea to a poor man’s problems. But now and then a good buzz will help you through when the ground is trembling and the mountains are coming down.

“Angel,” I said slowly and deliberately, “Hector is dead, had his throat cut.”

“Whaaat?” Three Hearts sang.

“I have reason to believe that Hector killed somebody else tryin’ t’find my cousin. So I really wish you’d stop bein’ all beautiful an’ perfect for just a minute and answer some simple fuckin’ questions.”

“Paris,” Fearless said.

“You could leave any time you want, Fearless. This girl here got us up to our necks in crocodiles, and I cain’t help what comes outta my mouth.”

“Excuse him, ma’am,” Fearless said. “He’s been under some strain. He needs to know who it is killin’ who out here. He needs to know it or he won’t be able to sleep in his bed.”

“I, I didn’t know about Hector,” Angel said then. Maybe she didn’t.

“What were Hector and Ulysses doin’?” I asked.

Angel looked to be full of information, but she didn’t say a word.

“I got to know, girl,” I said, the whiskey awash in my brain.

“I don’t know you, Paris,” she said. “The kind of trouble Ullie is in could put him... and me in jail.”

“I bet Hector would take jail over what he got,” I opined.

“Hector was a friend of Ullie’s,” she said. “Not so much a friend but an acquaintance. Hector knew a white man named Sterling. Sterling knew about men,” she said tentatively.

“What kind of men?” I asked.

“Men like Katz and Reverend Drummund.”

“Rich men?”

“Not rich but in charge of great wealth.”

“Oh, Lord,” Three Hearts moaned.

“What was the hook?” I asked.

“Me,” Angel said softly but without any deep sense of shame that I could tell.

“How so?”

“I’d go to them with a purse full of money. Five thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds and the promise that I had ten times that. I’d say that I wanted to invest the money in their companies or, in the case of the church, that I wanted to use it for the greater good. When they’d wonder how I made the money, I told them about a system I used in betting in poker games. Hector would set up a fake game and I’d go there with the reverend or V.P. and show them how I’d win. The game was always fixed. After a few nights they’d be hooked and get into a big game where I’d lose ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars of their institution’s money. After that Hector would blackmail them, threatening to tell their employers that they’d put the company’s money on the line.”

At the last words, she shed a tear and swallowed a sob. I believed that they were cheating those men but not that poor Angel was an innocent who regretted her part in the scheme. She regretted Ulysses running away with her money. She regretted some killer hungering after her soft throat. But she didn’t give a damn about the men whose lives she’d ruined.

I didn’t care about them either, but I wasn’t the one who brought them down.

“You poor child,” Three Hearts said.

“You have any idea where my cousin is?” I asked.

“There’s a cabin in the Angeles National Forest. Sterling owns it. Ullie liked to go up there.”

I had unlocked the doors of my Studebaker for the women to climb in back. I was about to get in the driver’s seat when Fearless said, “Uh, Paris?”

“Yeah?”

“You bettah let me drive, man.”

“Why?”

“’Cause you drunk.”

I looked at him and took in a deep breath.

“I am not.”

Fearless put one finger against my chest and shoved with barely any force. I would have been on the ground if the car wasn’t behind me.

How many whiskies had I downed? I couldn’t remember.

I fell into the driver’s seat and crawled to the other side. Fearless got in and put his hand out for the key.

While I was giving it to him, Three Hearts said, “You really should watch your liquor, Paris.”

“Watch my liquor? Watch my liquor? What I should do is watch my front do’.”

“Paris,” Fearless warned.

“That’s right. If I watched the do’, then Useless wouldn’t come up and hide stolen property in my toilet. You wouldn’t come up gettin’ me so deep in trouble that I cain’t even think about nuthin’ else. I’m drinkin’ so I don’t have to run down the street yellin’ like a madman done lost his mind.”

I stared at Three Hearts in the backseat. She looked away in disgust. Her disdain made me so angry that I was about to rant some more, but Fearless put his foot on the accelerator, and somehow the gravity pushing me against the seat displaced the anger too. I felt a wave of pleasant intoxication and leaned back against the door.

For a long time I stared at Angel’s profile. It certainly was perfect. Daughter, wife, lover, mother — she could have been everything and anything to man, woman, or child. There was haughtiness and a waiting smile, knowledge that you could never have, and simple conversation. She was the woman who was the power behind the king and the widow that survived him.

I hated Angel Allmont, but it wasn’t because of my cousin. I didn’t care about Useless. He could die and never be found. Three Hearts could light a candle every night for him until the candleholder overflowed with wax and her wood shanty burned to the ground — I didn’t care about them. No. I hated Angel Allmont because looking at her made me feel small.

“So what else?” I said in a voice that was too loud for the small space of the car.

“Excuse me?” Angel said. She wasn’t even looking at me, but she knew what I was asking and to whom my question was addressed.

“You know,” I said. “What else did Sterling know about those white men?”

For a long moment I thought that Angel was not going to look at me. But then she turned and gave me the full treatment.

“I support my mother, Mr. Minton,” she said. “Her and her sister, my five-year-old son, and a man who once saved me from a rapist.”

Three Hearts put a hand on Angel’s shoulder.

“That ain’t what I asked you,” I said, wondering at the man that lay inside me.

“They were men who... enjoyed black women,” she said at last. “They hungered for dark flesh.”

“Your flesh?”

“Paris,” Fearless said again.

“Yes, Mr. Minton, my flesh.”

“Did you use to go with them up to this here cabin?”