Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

“We went and she treated him with herbs and the like, and there was enough of a change that we could start our life over again. I went to Aunt Winifred then, but she refused to give Son back. She said that Brown was crazy and violent and that she wouldn’t put her nephew into harm’s way like that. Here he’s my son and she had the nerve to question me bringing him to harm.”

“Why didn’t you and Brown just go get him?” Fearless asked.

“I told Brown to stay back in Illinois,” Leora said. “He’s better . . . but even a sane man might come to violence if someone tried to keep him from his son. I thought he was still back home until you just said —”

“So Winifred refused to let Son go back to you,” I said. “Then what?”

“She said that she was going to raise him. I tried to reason with her and she went to a lawyer, Lewis Martini. He’s the one that put my mother’s wealth into Winifred’s hands.”

“Winnie got the power of attorney on Rose?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Damn. She got you comin’ and goin’. Use your own family’s money to keep everybody in line.”

“She thinks that she knows best so there’s no arguing about it.”

“In steps Bartholomew Perry, son of the dear departed Ethel Fine Perry,” I said.

“Yes. Esau had my cousin BB working at the car lot and he didn’t like the work. So he told me that he’d take Son out of there for ten thousand dollars. Once I got him I could go back to Illinois, and Winnie would have a lot of trouble trying to take a child from his mother and father across state lines.”

“I thought you were broke?” I asked.

“He said that I could pay over time,” she said. There was a slight catch in her throat, though. The lie couldn’t make it out of her mouth unscathed.

“I bet he did. So then BB hires Kit to get in there as a gardener,” I said. “Kit takes Son and brings him to BB. How does Maestro Wexler get in with it?”

“You know about that?”

“When Paris digs his claws into a problem he find out everything,” Fearless said. “I told you that.”

“BB was going out with Minna at the time. He told her about what he was doing, because he didn’t realize that she had any interest in his aunt.”

“So it’s just coincidence that she’s in his bed when he plans a kidnapping from the woman her father wants to get the reins on?”

“Yes,” Leora said, and I’m sure she believed it. Why would she think that she was the perfect pawn for the machinations of the white siblings?

“And how does Kit know BB?”

“BB sold some trucks to Kit.”

“So Kit knew BB from the used car business?” I asked.

“BB moved stolen cars,” Leora said. “That’s how he made money on the side.”

“But not no ten thousand dollars,” I said. “And surely not no fifty grand.”

Fearless spread a blanket out over the distraught woman.

“Maybe we should let her sleep,” he suggested.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “But lemme ask you just two more questions.”

“Yes?”

“Did Kit bring Son to you after he took him out from your aunt’s house?”

“No, it was like you said before. Kit brought Son to BB and BB turned him over to me. I was so happy to see him. All he wanted was to go see his father.”

“Then why you wanna go and ask Fearless to look for Kit? You already had what you wanted. You had your son. And why would somebody wanna kill the Wexlers?”

Leora turned on her back and stared at the ceiling. Maybe she had hoped that the question wouldn’t come, that we’d overlook the obvious. I wanted to press Leora but I didn’t think that Fearless would stand for it. He was a gentleman and would never allow a lady to be tormented except in the most extreme circumstances.

“Son wasn’t all Kit took out of Aunt Winnie’s house.”

“No? What else he take?” I knew she was going to mention the pendant, and I was ready to argue about the worth of the stone and the fact that Winnie didn’t seem that worried about it.

“A book,” she said, and a whole section of my logic and my mind collapsed.

“What book?”

“A handmade book,” she said. “Bound in leather with sheets of goatskin instead of paper. Handwritten and dating from the early part of the eighteenth century.”

My heart was beating fast enough to burst. I glanced at Fearless. He didn’t seem to have any reaction at all. Maybe he didn’t connect my prize with Winifred’s loss.

“Why would he take that? Was it valuable?”

“It’s a treasure,” Leora assured me. “More valuable than all the other riches of my family put together.”

I really didn’t want to hear any more. I stood up and went to the door. I pushed it open and looked outside as if maybe I had heard something. I was looking for cool air to clear my head but the night was still hot.

“. . . IT’S A FAMILY HEIRLOOM,” Leora was saying to Fearless when I turned back into the room.

My mind was racing for an answer while she spoke. I didn’t want to give up the book. I wouldn’t give up the book. It was mine. I found it.

“. . . for more than two centuries,” Leora said. “The first woman to write in it was Gheeza Manli, the first woman of the Fine family born here in America. From her time until now our family has kept a diary of our American experience.”

“You say it was started in about seventeen hundred?” I asked.

“No, she said eighteen hundred,” Fearless said.

“Eighteenth century,” Leora corrected.

Fearless didn’t know what she meant so he sat back and let us talk.

“So you sayin’ that you got a goatskin book that couldn’t have more than a hundred fifty, two hundred pages that’s got two hundred fifty years of family entries?”

“Three hundred pages,” she said. “And there are four books. They’ve been in our family for generations. The book that was stolen was the first one, the one that Gheeza Manli wrote in. Winifred’s the current keeper. She was going to teach Son to do it.”

“Why not you?”

“I didn’t want to live at home, and Aunt Winnie wouldn’t let the books out of the house. Anyway, she detested Brown because he always stood up to her.”

“And that’s what Kit stoled?” Fearless asked.

“Yes. BB told him about it. When we were kids Aunt Winnie would take us to her secret library and tell us about our family history. BB was never very interested but he knew where it was.”

“Did the Wexlers know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What about Oscar?”

“What about him?”

“Where does he come into the story?”

“He’s the one who told me about the book being missing.”

“Does Winnie know about it?”

“Not yet. The only reason Oscar knows is that it just happened to be time for him to clean out that little room. Aunt Winnie calls it a shrine.”

My respect for Bartholomew Perry’s intelligence rose then. He sent in a thief to grab his family’s most precious treasure, and if the thief got caught he could say that he was there trying to get a mother back together with her son. If he was lucky Winifred would be so distracted by the loss of Son that she wouldn’t know about the real theft until Maestro Wexler called.

Just about smart enough to get himself hung, my mother always says.

35

FEARLESS ELECTED TO TAKE LEORA to Esau’s. I stayed behind in Milo’s office. It was my time to shine. I knew almost everything, even what people didn’t know. The one piece that was missing was the identity of the man who had killed the Wexlers and Kit. I would have liked to know that man’s face and name for my own security and peace of mind.

But the biggest problem was Winifred Fine’s family journal. That was what everyone was after. That’s why people were getting killed. And I wanted that book for myself. The only thing I had ever wanted more was the ability to read. When I was a child I fantasized about a book like that, a book written by intelligent Negro minds that told the truth about some shred of our history. I didn’t care so much about slavery or racism. I didn’t want to know about abuses as much as I wanted to know what people were thinking, my people. Everybody else had it: the English, Irish, French, and Russians; the Chinese, Indians, Tibetans, and Jews; even the Mayans and Egyptians had hieroglyphics, and the Australian Aborigines had paintings that went back before all of them. The stolen book was all of that and more for me.