Walter Mosley - Fear of the Dark

I only meant it as a show of gratitude, but I could see that my words touched Mona. She put her hand on my elbow, leaned forward, and gave me the softest kiss on the lips.

“Fearless waitin’ on you,” she whispered.

I put on my shirt but carried my socks and shoes across the lawns to my friend’s place. Mona had shaken me up with that kiss. It wasn’t a passionate thing, but there was something to it, something I didn’t want to know about when my best friend had just spent the night with her.

Fearless was already dressed in a loose silvery shirt and gray slacks. His brown shoes looked new they were so shiny, and he had a fancy gold watch on his wrist.

“Watch?” I asked.

“Mona gimme it,” he said. “I don’t want her to think I don’t appreciate it.”

Reese roundtree owned a café a few blocks from Fearless’s court. Fearless bought me fried eggs and bacon there. He had pancakes with pecan-flavored syrup.

“I thought Mona wasn’t your girlfriend,” I said at one point, thinking about that soft kiss.

“She ain’t.”

“Sounded like she was last night.”

“We friends, Paris,” Fearless said. “It was just a night together.”

“So that was just like shakin’ hands?”

Reese only had two tables inside his place, but it was early enough that his only customers were people on the way to work.

“No,” Fearless said.

“She looked like a chicken sittin’ on a ostrich egg when I seen her this mornin’,” I said.

“What you sayin’, Paris?”

“I’m sayin’ that Mona wasn’t just bein’ friendly up in there.”

Fearless took in every word and nuance, making them into convictions and feelings that held more truth than most men were capable of. He might never have understood what I was saying, but after hearing my words he would do the right thing, which was better than most men could ever do.

After twenty seconds of serious consideration, Fearless smiled.

“What’s wrong, Paris?”

“What you mean?”

“I mean why you pesterin’ me? Ain’t you got a problem to solve?”

“Thomas Benton Hoag,” I said.

“Who?”

I explained about Angel’s old boyfriend, the high-yellow real estate man.

“He hired the Handsome brothers to grab Three Hearts and Angel.”

“But he was Angel’s boyfriend,” Fearless said.

“Was.”

Fearless squeezed the slender bone between his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “How does he get in this?”

“Real estate,” I said. “His company is a white company, and Sterling was in real estate too. Maybe Sterling knew some white dude, a potential client, who liked black girls and he came to Tommy askin’ ’bout a girl who could show him a good time. That brings us to Angel. One thing leads to another, and an opportunity for blackmail emerges. After a while Tommy’s in the catbird seat, targeting white men who have their hands on money but don’t have no money themselves.”

“So Angel was in on it from the beginning?”

“Maybe her. Maybe there was other girls. I don’t know. Angel don’t mattah. It’s Tommy the one.”

Fearless let the words wash over him. You could see him imagining not so much the details of the crime but the qualities of the man.

“So he like a pimp?” Fearless said at last.

“Yeah,” I said. “Not to mention a kidnapper, a killer, and a blackmailer.”

Fearless nodded and asked, “So what next?”

“There’s one problem,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“That suitcase.”

“Where is it?”

“I burned it.”

“Then it ain’t a problem,” Fearless reasoned.

“Where it came from is the problem,” I said.

“Ulysses said he took it from Hector’s house.”

“But we know he didn’t,” I said. “How’s he gonna be so lucky to get there after the killer kills Hector and before the deaf neighbor calls the cops?”

“So what you think?”

“I think Angel had the bag.”

“An’ where’d she get it from?” Fearless asked. He was getting nervous, tapping the toes of his left foot on the wood floor.

“Either from Hector after she killed him or from Thomas after he did.”

“You think she in it wit’ him?”

“I know they were in it together at the beginning,” I said. “At least that’s what makes the most sense.”

Fearless frowned and began tapping the toes of both his feet.

“Naw,” he said. “That girl loves Ulysses. You know he’s the apple’a her eye.”

“How come you say that about Angel but you don’t see it in Mona?” I asked.

“Mona don’t love me, man,” Fearless said with certainty. And before I could ask another question, he said, “She wants me. I’m everything she wants, but I ain’t what she need. I ain’t the man she gonna love, not really.”

“But Angel loves Useless?”

“Down to the jam between his toes,” Fearless said, accenting his words with a vigorous nod.

I took a deep breath and then another. I watched the line of workingmen and women waiting for their coffees and pastries, then looked back at Fearless in his silver and gray.

We were at the end of the road. The journey had started with Useless at my doorstep, plying his star-crossed fate. Now there was just one thing to do.

“We go to Schuyler Real Estate and deal with Thomas,” I said.

Fearless nodded, put the last corner of hotcake into his mouth, and stood up straight.

Fate tried to save us. She brought us to the real estate office, but Thomas Benton Hoag wasn’t there.

The white man who was sitting at his desk wanted to speak to us because he was so angry.

“Do you know where Thomas is?” he demanded.

“We came here lookin’ for him,” I explained. “We thought he was here.”

“Three days ago he stopped coming,” the white man (I never got his name) said. “Just stopped coming. He has clients who have lost faith in this office. He has records that I can’t read. What the hell kinda business is that?”

“Maybe he’s dead,” Fearless said.

That caught the white man up short.

“What?”

“If you had a friend,” Fearless reasoned, “and all of a sudden he wasn’t at work, didn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t you be worried that somethin’ bad happened to him?”

“We went to his house,” the white man, who was fat and wore a blue-and-white pinstriped suit, said. “He wasn’t there.”

“Maybe he’s in a ditch,” Fearless suggested. “Have you called the police?”

“I, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You just thought that he was tryin’ to mess wit’ you. You thought that he was gonna give up his commission to get drunk or take a vacation for a few days.”

The fact that Thomas’s boss didn’t have an answer went way past racism. There was something wrong with the man. There he was working with someone who had committed all kinds of crimes and all he could think about was that he hadn’t come in to work. He was a fool in baseball stripes, nameless in my mind but as American as the hot dog.

“Where to?” Fearless asked when we were on the street again.

“Nadine’s,” I said on a sigh.

Fearless grinned and we were off.

On the ride I asked, “What can we do about this dude if we get him?”

“He probably run,” Fearless said. “I mean, that’s what a smart man’d do. All them dead men and his suitcase gone.”

“But what if he ain’t? What if he after Useless still?”

“Then we gots to stop him.”

I remembered Cleave’s hard words in the car on the way to Tiny’s burial. I knew what Fearless meant and I wasn’t sure that I could manage it. Killing was a hard business — not like selling books or finding money in a dead man’s car.