Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

“Don’t you know?”

“I never met him before.” She took in a large gulp of air and made a strangled sound.

“Take us to him,” Fearless said. It was an order and not a request.

Leora led us into the big building and up to the sixth floor. The door to 6R was unlocked.

When I got into the room I closed the door quickly. Mainly because of the breaking and entering and because the man lying on the floor was at a most uncomfortable angle.

Leora Hartman cried on Fearless’s shoulder.

I went to the man. He was definitely dead. He’d been dead for a while, probably as long as the Wexlers.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Leora was saying.

“Is it him?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Fearless said. “Damn.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Leora said as if we were cops.

His face was brutalized, his left arm likely broken.

“No,” I said. “Not unless you Superman under that dress and you like livin’ with the dead for a few days.”

Leora began to cry harder. Fearless embraced her as a father would his child. From around the corner of his shoulder she stared at the Watermelon Man’s corpse. There was terror in her eyes.

“What were you doing here?” I asked.

She couldn’t tear her eyes away from Death.

I put my head between her and eternity and asked my question again.

“Oscar told me he was here.”

“How did he know?”

“There’s a woman on the first floor who has a cousin that works for Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply. Oscar had sent out the word to all the people work for us to look for Kit Mitchell. The employee, her name’s Bell Britton, asked her cousin if she knew Kit, and she finally got the word today.”

“And why did Oscar tell you?”

“So I could come by and talk to him.” Leora’s eyes widened and she began to cry again.

“Why would he —”

“Paris,” Fearless said. “Let her get it out first, will ya?”

“I came here,” she continued, “the door was unlocked.”

“What were you looking for?”

“I, I . . .”

“Leave her alone, Paris.”

“Shut up, Fearless.”

It was one of the few times I told Fearless to be quiet. He knew enough to listen.

“Talk to me, Leora.”

“He kidnapped my son.”

“Son is with Esau. You already knew that. What did Kit have that you wanted?”

Leora started gasping and then panting. She was at some early stage of shock. I knew that Fearless wouldn’t let me continue, so I said, “Damn!”

“We better get outta here, Paris,” Fearless said. The worry in his voice was for Leora.

“In a minute,” I said.

I launched into a quick search of the apartment. I went through drawers, closets, bedclothes, cereal boxes, the refrigerator and icebox, and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

Following my lead, Fearless searched the dead man.

“Here it is,” he said.

Next to the Watermelon Man’s right ankle, under the sock, was the emerald pendant. Kit must have hidden it before answering the door for the last time.

“I’ll put it with the money,” Fearless said.

I wondered if I’d be toting that bag on my journey down into hell.

WE MADE IT OUT of the building without too many people marking our passage. But every eye turned my way felt like a gun sight following me across an open field.

“I can drive myself,” Leora said when we tried to guide her to Fearless’s ride.

“I’ll drive her,” I said.

“No, Paris. You have her jumpin’ out the window with all your questions and shit.” With that Fearless handed me the keys to Ambrosia’s car.

“Okay,” I said. “You right. But where do we meet? Your mother’s?”

“Naw. I don’t wanna be talkin’ ’bout no murders in my mama’s house. No. You know where Milo leave his key, right?”

“Yeah, in a hole in the wall behind his mailbox. But what about Timmerman?”

“I ain’t worried about him. He ain’t got no pants, no shoes, no money, no car keys. Anyway, he admitted himself to the hospital.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. Remember when I made that call from Esau’s?”

“You called the hospital?”

“Yeah, man. I knew he’d probably come after you so I wanted to make sure his butt was in the sling.”

“Why come after me?” I asked. “You the one that hurt him.”

“Yeah,” Fearless said, nodding. “That’s why he gonna leave me alone.”

ON THE RIDE BACK TOWARD MILO’S OFFICE I tried to make sense out of death. Anybody I’d come across could have killed Kit or the Wexlers. Even Timmerman had been in the mix long enough. And what was Leora after? I didn’t doubt that she was innocent of Kit’s murder, but why come after him if she already had her son?

And why wouldn’t the man who killed Kit have searched him? Because he was looking for something particular, something that could not be hidden in a sock.

34

LORETTA KUROKO’S OFFICE had more room than Milo’s. She also had a small canvas cot in a closet behind her desk—kept there for any client who had to make an early-morning court date. Leora Hartman was reclining on the cot by the time I made it to Milo’s place.

She and Fearless were talking when I got there. That was good, because Fearless had a way of making people trust him, even those who thought that he was dumb.

“How you feelin’, Miss Hartman?” I asked when I came in.

“Fine.”

“Is that what I call you? Miss? Or is it Missus?”

“Missus. But my last name isn’t Hartman—it’s Brown.”

I knew a dozen people who went by that name. You met a new one every day or two. It was as common as Smith or Jones—more so among colored people. But still . . .

“Your husband’s not a chess player, is he?”

“He is. How would you know that?”

“And he’s from Illinois but he was born in Mississippi?”

“Where is he, Mr. Minton?” Leora sat up, her sorrow dissipating by the moment.

“No, uh-uh,” I said. “You tell us what’s goin’ on first.”

“Brown is my husband,” Leora said, “but you already know that.”

“You call your husband by his last name?” That was Fearless.

“Everybody does,” I said before Leora could get it out.

“Have you seen him, Mr. Minton?”

“I thought you and he were havin’ problems?”

“Yes, but not like you think,” she said. “He was a gardener at Hampton College when I went there. Nobody liked Brown very much but I loved him and we were married after I graduated. We had Son and moved back to Illinois. But Brown had a, a . . . he had a medical condition but we didn’t know it, not then. At first I just thought that he was just getting used to being married and a father. But . . . He was offensive and rough at times, but then he’d be wonderful. Finally, one day he turned on Son. We decided to put him in a hospital where I could be with him. I sent Son to stay with my mother —”

“Rose,” I said.

“You’ve met her, so you know that she isn’t able to give the twenty-four-hour care that a young child needs.”

“But Aunt Winnie could,” I said.

“Paris, will you let the lady finish?” Fearless chided.

“Yeah. Go on.”

“Well, you know most of it. I mean, you may have heard about Brown but you don’t know him. He’s the most amazing man I’ve ever met. He’s funny and smarter than anybody I ever knew at Hampton, even among the professors. He’s great with his hands. . . . He was in the asylum for a year and a half. I worked full-time to pay the expenses. I only got to see Son once a month or so, I was working so much. Finally we heard about a juju woman down in Louisiana. We were told by a white doctor that he had seen great improvement in a Negro patient who went down to her.