Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

“She’s a beautiful animal,” Fearless said. “Too skinny and knocked around more than she deserves. If she was to jump I’d have to grab her by the jaw an’ snap her neck like a chicken. An’ then, Bubba Lateman, I would have to teach you a lesson that you’d carry down into the coffin wit’ you.”

Bulfinch’s Mythology came to me then. It seemed to me that this tableau belonged in those pages. Fearless was the hero, I was the hero’s companion, Useless was the mischievous trickster, and Bubba was the ogre or giant. We were playing out roles in a history that went back before anyone could remember. The river Styx might have lain to our left, and this was just a step in our journey.

I couldn’t help it: I laughed.

Bubba grinned then too. Bree turned her head toward him with a look of canine surprise on her vicious face.

“Take the car, man,” Bubba said. “And lemme tell ya, if Bree here jumped at ya, you’d never have a chance.”

I drove my car while Fearless manned the Caddy with Useless at his side. We took Useless back to Nadine’s house. Out front he was unwilling to see us go.

“Why you want Hector’s car?” he asked us.

“I like pink,” Fearless said. “It’s my favorite color.”

“Come on,” he said. “What you want it for?”

“Useless,” I said.

“Why you have to call me that?” he asked. He almost sounded insulted.

“What? Useless?”

“That’s hurtful. I don’t call you Dog Shit, now, do I?”

“You bettah not.”

“Well, I might.”

“And I might go to the cops an’ say about Martin Friar and Brian Motley, not to mention Mad Anthony. I might tell ’em that you was in business with Lionel Sterling and Hector LaTiara. That’s all I got to say, Useless. Because you know I never call you. I never drop by your house askin’ for ice water. I don’t need you, not at all. To me you truly are Useless. So get your ass back up in the house with your cockeyed mama and wait for us to call you again.”

If I didn’t know better I would have thought that Useless’s feelings were actually hurt. He pouted and stared at the ground.

“Go on, Useless,” I insisted.

He turned and walked away slowly.

For my part, I stood there refusing to feel guilty.

“What you think, Paris?” Fearless asked me when we were in my kitchen smoking cigarettes and drinking schnapps.

“I don’t know.”

There was a duffel bag on the floor between us. Above that was a table piled high with twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills. I had stopped counting at sixty thousand dollars. Adding that to the money we had found at Sterling’s, we had over one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand. In 1956 that was enough to retire on.

“We got to give it back, Paris,” Fearless said. “We got to.”

“Why, man? They already stole it. We might get caught tryin’ to put it back.”

Fearless shook his head and started shoving the money in its bag.

“I got the addresses,” I said. “Why don’t you just let me send it?”

“First we need to make sure the cutthroat ain’t a problem,” Fearless said.

“What you gonna do with the money and Hector’s car?”

“I’ll just leave Hector’s car on the street to get towed and then I’ll borrah Mickey Dean’s white Caddy, put the money in the trunk, an’ bring it ovah to Bubba.”

“You sure you wanna mess wit’ that man again?” I asked seriously. “I think he wanna test you.”

“Naw,” Fearless assured me. “I mean yeah, he wonders, but Bubba’s business. The minute I’m a payin’ client, thatta put fightin’ right out his mind.”

Fearless hefted the bag of money over his shoulder and carried it out to the Caddy.

I accompanied him out to the street and watched as he drove away.

A hundred thousand dollars in free money, and my potential partner in crime was the most honest man in L.A.

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.”