Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

“Not why your boy Timmerman killed the Wexler kids,” I said. “Did you tell him to do that?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then why?”

“Do you have the book, Mr. Minton?”

“I don’t say a thing until you explain these murders to me,” I replied.

“Why? Why do you need to know?”

“There’s a legal term, Brad. It’s called accessory after the fact. If I try and make money from a crime I know has happened, then they can put me in jail for that crime.”

Our eyes met then. Two men, one white and one black, one an Australian and the other almost an American. Both of us aging a day for every minute that passed.

“I asked Timmerman to search Mr. Mitchell’s apartment for the book. He did not find it. Then we had the meeting here on this bench. He told me that he had been searching for Bartholomew Perry. I told him that Mr. Perry probably had the book or at least he had knowledge of where the book could be found. . . .” Bradford’s words trailed off there. He had taken me up to the door and now he was afraid to go through.

“So you sent Timmerman after Lance and Minna to try and get through to BB. You thought that maybe they were going to go to Winifred directly.” It was all supposition by then. I just needed to keep him talking.

“I didn’t know that he was going to kill them. I didn’t know what kind of man he was,” Bradford said, practicing for the trial. “I just told him to get in touch with them, to offer to help and see what they said.”

“Instead he tortured them to find out what the book was worth and then killed ’em to cut down on the number of potential partners in the crime.” I was flying by then.

“Now you know what I do,” Bradford said. “Can you help get the book?”

“I believe I can, my man. I believe I can.”

“How?”

“I’m pretty sure that Timmerman got the book somewhere on the way. When Fearless knocked him down I got his address and the key to his door. Fearless is there right now, lookin’ for the book. When he gets it I might consider sellin’ it to you.”

“Why?” Craighton asked suspiciously. “You could go to Maestro or Miss Fine yourself.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I could tie the noose for the hangman too. No, no, brother. You find twenty-five thousand dollars and I’ll let you decide how to make money on the book.”

The light of hope was shining in Bradford Craighton’s eyes.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“I bet you could pick it up in that pantry you paid me from,” I said. “Sell the book to whoever pays the most, return the loan, and fly off to gay Paree.”

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told Mitchell,” the private secretary said. “I can raise seventy-five hundred dollars. That’s all I can lay my hands on.”

“I’ll meet you halfway and take twelve thousand five hundred.”

“Mr. Minton,” Bradford said with great reserve. “I have what I said. Take it and you will be safe and quite a bit richer. . . . Or take your chances with Mr. Wexler and his thugs.”

I stayed silent for a long moment to make him think that I was considering the options he presented. I wanted him to believe I might leave him hanging.

“Okay,” I said. “All right. I’ll take the seventy-five hundred, but you got to promise to keep my name out of it.”

“You have my word.”

Words: from the Emancipation Proclamation to the names on the ballots every election day, they had a life of their own and precious little to do with the truth.

43

IT’S FUNNY HOW YOU START OUT trying to help somebody else and end up in business for yourself. Fearless had come to me to find out why the cops were after him and what was going on with Leora and Son. That was all behind us, but there I was, still hanging in there, trying to make money out of thin air.

Bradford Craighton had gone into business for himself. Minna and Lance had come to him, the trusted family employee, and asked him to help make Maestro pay them for their crime. Bradford saw his chance. All those years working for the big man made him hungry for the real thing.

Paris is even more beautiful when you don’t have to walk to work every morning of your life.

But Kit took the book and called asking for more money than the down-at-heel secretary could raise. When Kit said that he’d go directly to the Fine family, Craighton thought that he’d lost his one chance. Then came Teddy Timmerman. But Timmerman also betrayed him. He killed the kids, killed Kit, and now Bradford was out on a limb. But there was the slight hope that he could still get the book.

The last two threats to my security were Maestro Wexler and the weasel Bradford. The master wanted to find the killer of his children and he looked to me as a guide. Of course I couldn’t very well turn over his secretary, because then I could be implicated in the secretary’s crime. And Bradford would need me out of the way sooner or later because I knew about his crimes.

I called the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct from a phone booth on Central Avenue.

“Police department,” a white woman answered.

“Sergeant Rawlway, please.”

“One moment.”

I waited through a series of clicks and buzzes. Finally there came another ring.

“Sergeant Rawlway speaking.”

“Good morning, sergeant. This is Paris Minton.”

“Oh. Hello, Mr. Minton. You’re a little late if you wanted to turn in your friend. We already found him.”

“It’s not that, sir. I know you talked to Fearless because he told me about it. He said that you were looking for a man named Kit Mitchell.”

“Mr. Jones really shouldn’t be discussing police business.”

“Maybe not, sir, but do you think it’s a coincidence that another man showed up at my door just yesterday asking me if I knew the whereabouts of Fearless or Kit?”

“What man?”

“A guy named Theodore Timmerman. At least that’s what he said his name was. He gave me a card with a number on it. Do you think that’s important?”

FEARLESS WAS AT MY HOUSE when I got there, shuffling a deck of cards. He was stretched out on the front room sofa—playing solitaire in a room full of books.

“Hey, Fearless —”

“I got bad news, Paris,” he said. “Somebody stole our money, man.”

“What money?”

“That we had in the trunk’a her car.”

“What about the book?”

“Book? Who cares about a book when we lost almost three thousand dollars and that emerald necklace?”

“Did they leave the book?”

“It was in the same bag as the money, man,” Fearless said. “They took it all.”

I sat down. If there hadn’t been a chair behind me I would have fallen to the floor.

“No,” was all I said.

“I know, Paris,” Fearless said. “I know.”

“Who would have known to take the money?”

“Ambrosia took the car to Tito’s Car Wash. I had driven it up into the Santa Monica mountains and it got kinda streaked. She was just gettin’ it clean if I wanted to drive around some more. You know at Tito’s they do the whole car. The trunk was wide open the whole time. They got at least twenty people workin’ there. And there’s a big sign sayin’ not to leave no valuables in the trunk.”

Up to that moment the loss of the Fine family chronicle was the worst defeat in my life. I forgot about the man who died at my hands and even the danger still posed by Maestro and his scheming secretary. I forgot about the police and their constant threat to my liberty. All that was left was the loss of more money than most Negro families made in an entire life of labor.

“Paris?”

“I’m goin’ to bed, Fearless,” I said.

He said something but I didn’t hear it. I scaled the stairs to my illegal loft. I don’t even remember getting into the bed. And I didn’t have one dream that I can remember. It was just as if I had died. That’s how far I’d fallen.