Fear of the Dark

by Walter Mosley

  Sometimes I wouldn’t answer Fearless’s calls. Sometimes I would refuse him bail money.

  But now here I was, in trouble deep, and I didn’t question whether or not Fearless would be there the moment I needed him. I can’t say that I felt guilty about my infidelity, but I did see the truth of it. If Fearless wasn’t in my life, I’d already be in jail over Tiny Bobchek’s murder. And if not for my friend, knowing anything about Hector LaTiara wouldn’t have done me one lick of good.

  IT WAS ABOUT ELEVEN when I drove down the 1600 block of Hauser, then left onto Saturn. It was a narrow street there below Pico. The dwellings were single-family houses and two- and three-unit apartment buildings. Most everybody was at work. The yards were empty. The birds were cheeping.

  There was no car at the address given for Mr. LaTiara. The apartment building was red and cream stucco, tall for L.A., three floors. I sat there patiently, remembering Mum’s kisses, fearing the iron bars of California justice.

  At twelve fifteen Jessa stumbled out of the arched entrance to Hector’s building. She was wearing a pale green dress that didn’t seem done up right. She looked confused standing there on the concrete path to the first-floor entrance of the building.

  Another problem I have is that I don’t have enough respect for women. I’m not saying that I don’t try to be civil by opening doors and keeping my eyes in check. The problem is that I don’t fear women enough.

  Seeing Jessa, I jumped out of my car and made it across the street before considering what her presence there might have meant. She was turning in a slow circle, looking up as if the sun had robbed her of her senses.

  “Jessa, what are you doing here?” I asked, coming up to her.

  At first she didn’t respond. Then she looked me in the eye. After a moment, I think she recognized me. I thought she was going to tell me something, but then she screamed and socked me in the jaw.

  Then next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the lawn.

  I sat up, befuddled. Jessa was screaming again but she was also running. I watched her go down the street at a good clip and wondered what I should do.

  I decided that going back to my car would be a mistake. If anyone saw me, they might get the license plate, and then the police would have my name and Jessa’s face at least. I couldn’t walk down the street—I just couldn’t. And so I decided that going into the red building was my best choice.

  It might not have been a good decision, but I was a little shaken by Jessa’s sucker punch.

  Once inside the entrance of the building, I was presented with two choices. To the left was a circular stairway that led to the apartments above, and straight ahead was the doorway to the first-floor abode.

  Another easy choice. The door to the first-floor apartment was open.

  I walked in gingerly. If there was someone there, I didn’t want to scare them.

  The foyer was a small room in its own right. Salmon pink walls and a dark wood chair with an ivory white cushion in the seat. The carpet was a yellow background supporting dozens of woven red roses. There was a telephone on the floor, marking a place where a stand should have been, I imagined. And there was a portrait of a white woman on a horse. The woman and horse were on a path in front of a white fence. In the distance was an apple orchard, beyond that a mountain range.

  I remember much more about that foyer. I remember the baseboard around the floor and the yellow-and-red light fixture on the ceiling. I could spend a great deal of time on the dimensions of the room and the odd shape of it . . . but that’s because of what happened in the next room, the room I should never have entered.

  It was a den of some sort: half office, half study. It was dark. There was a desk behind which were closed drapes. There was a high-backed office chair, and sitting on it was Hector LaTiara, the man who had come to me looking for a French dictionary, the man Useless was so frightened of.

  He was wearing a vanilla-colored jacket and a white shirt, both of which were bad choices because of his throat being slashed open. Thick, gelatinous blood had flowed, lavalike, down the fair material. An arc of blood had sprayed across the papers on his desk.

  One of his eyes was wide with fright, the other half closed. His lips, even in his last moments, curled into a superior sneer, as if he were trying to convey to his murderer that he had been through worse than this.

  I was mesmerized by the brutality and the blood. My gorge rose, but I wouldn’t turn away. My body shook, but I wouldn’t take a step. A voice in the back of my mind was screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” But I stayed in place, gawking at the paradigm of murder.

  My breathing had become very shallow. I was almost panting, with very little oxygen getting to my brain. So I put my hands on my knees and squatted down like a sprinter after a hard-run race. It worked. I took in deeper breaths, and the paralysis began to lift.

  But bending over, I put myself closer to the corpse.

  His left hand held a broken pencil. He’d probably snapped it when he first felt the razor on his throat. There was blood on the pencil and all over both hands. You could see that he’d grabbed for the wound without releasing what he held. Then, as he died, the hands came back down to the note he’d been writing:

  Martin Friar, UEC, 2750.00

  “Mr. LaTiara?” a frail voice called.

  How I moved so swiftly behind the maroon drapes I cannot say. All I know is that one moment I was frozen in awe, reading the upside-down note, and the next I was behind the thick fabric. There was a tiny tear through which I could see the room beyond the dead man’s chair.

  “Mr. LaTiara?”

  And then, long moments later, a small and ancient white woman doddered in. She had the blue hair of an old woman and a face that would have fit on the smallest of animals.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered, and I was convinced, absolutely, that she would fall down dead from fright.

  But I was wrong. She moved closer to the desk than I had dared and stared deeply at the man. Her tiny face became steely and she turned away, walking from the room with more fortitude than she had coming in.

  My enemy became that telephone in the foyer. If she stopped there to call the police, I was done for. Either she’d see me or they would come and find me.

  I could sneak up on her, knock her senseless, and run—but no. She was too old and I was too close to my mother.

  A minute passed and I heard nothing.

  Another minute.

  I moved out from behind the curtain and into the foyer. The woman was gone.

  I went back into the foyer and through another door. This led to a kitchen, which had a back door that led to a yard. Then there was a fence, another yard, an alley, a street. I ran as fast as I could until I was in the driver’s seat of my jalopy again. As I turned the ignition, I heard the far-off whine of sirens.

  My heart was beating like bongo drums; my soul was deep in the ecstasy of escape.

  23

  I DROVE DIRECTLY FROM the scene of the murder to Santa Monica Beach.

  Whenever I am frightened I head for water. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a good swimmer and I don’t know the first thing about boats. My uncle always used to say that the fish must have known it was me at the other end of that line because they never took my bait.

  But despite all that, the water makes me feel secure. The Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico were my solace in Louisiana; now that I was a Californian, the great Pacific was my protector.

  I went to a bench in a park that stood maybe a hundred feet above the ocean at the end of Olympic Boulevard. There I sat and tried to make sense out of a life that, if I were a white man, should have been as boring as a cardboard box.

  The last time I had anything to do with Jessa I found her lover murdered on my floor. And now I had found her again and another man had been murdered, a man who was after my cousin Useless.

  It almost made sense. Almost.

  I couldn’t hear the waves but I could see them, cresting white and breaking rank at the
sand.

  Useless was being followed by Hector. Hector, for some unknown reason, had killed Tiny. Then Jessa, who knows why, had gone away with Hector. Now Hector was dead.

  There were people I had never met who were involved with Useless. There was the white man Stringly and the men who were being blackmailed or extorted or whatever. There was Mad Anthony, whom I did know.

  What I didn’t know was if any of this mattered to me.

  At almost any other time I would have gone home and left the killing of Hector LaTiara to the LAPD. They wouldn’t care too much about a black man getting his throat cut. And if they decided to investigate, it would be about the criminal life he lived and not about some Negro bookseller from South L.A. But I had already tried to ignore a crime that had come to me via my cousin. Tiny’s corpse was stalking me still. Hector might do so too.

  After this last thought my mind went blank. I couldn’t get any further into the problem. I was not the kind of man who made bold decisions about events that could harm or kill me. I moved behind drapes, sought out shadows. But there I was in the light of day between the rock (Three Hearts) and the hard place (her son).

  “BAIL BONDS,” Loretta Kuroko answered on the first ring.

  “Loretta.”

  “Hi, Paris,” she said happily. “Hold on.”

  “Hello?” Fearless said.

  “Hey, man.”

  “You sound like the house burnt down and the dog died,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I got to see you, Fearless, and this really ain’t the kinda talk you can have on the phone.”

  “Okay, man. Fine. Milo off wit’ Whisper, so I could take some time. I don’t have a car, though.”

  “I’m out at the beach,” I said. “Santa Monica.”

  First-time lovers and real friends don’t need much language. Fearless knew my predilection for the sea when I was frightened. He knew I would find it hard to come to him.

  “You at the place you usually go?” he asked.

  “No. But I can get there.”

  “See ya in forty-five minutes, Paris. Hold on, brother.”

  MY USUAL PLACE WAS A PATCH of sand about a hundred feet south of the Santa Monica Pier, midway between the ocean and the boardwalk. I climbed down the long stairway from the park to the beach and then trudged along the shoreline to that place.

  Along the way I didn’t think about anything bad or threatening. I had come to the dead end of my abilities and that had led to a blank wall. There was nothing else I could do. I was actually too afraid to consider doing anything more. The blood down Hector’s chest made me blind and deaf. I wasn’t built for that kind of confrontation.

  I made it to my place in the sand and sat down with no blanket or bottle of beer. It was just me sitting on hot silicon under a brutal sun. The heat moved around me, that and the cacophonous music of the waves.

  I didn’t even have a hat; nor did I desire one. I wanted the sun to beat down on me; I wanted the waves to crash senselessly. I was an innocent man, but no one would believe it. The only solace I had was the pulse of an ocean that had been there before there was even a fish to befoul it.

  A CLOUD COVERED THE SUN for a moment, and my head felt a momentary coolness.

  “Hey, Paris,” the cloud said.

  Fearless sat down next to me on the hot bed of sand.

  “Hey, man,” I replied. “How’d you get here?”

  “Amos taxi.”

  “I’ll pay you for the fare.”

  “Your mother ain’t sick, is she?” he asked.

  I shook my head no.

  “You ain’t bleedin’, broken, or dyin’ as far as I can see. So don’t be too sad.”

  I laughed and threw a play punch at him. He blocked me out of reflex, and I almost began to cry.

  “Tell me what happened,” Fearless said, and I unburdened myself about the dead man and the white girl and my feelings of helplessness.

  “Damn,” Fearless said at the end of my tale. “Somebody sneaked up on him and cut his th’oat like that? That’s serious bidness there. That’s a assassin doin’ his job right. An’ what was the white girl doin’ wit’ ’im?”

  “Hector musta killed Tiny,” I said. “That’s all I can think. And then, and then . . . And then either he grabbed Jessa or she ran with him.”

  “Why she wanna run with the man kilt her man?” Fearless asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Tiny started takin’ it out on her when I got away. Maybe Hector came in and didn’t like seein’ a woman bein’ beat by a man. If that’s the way it came down, then she might’a run with him because he saved her. On the other hand, he might’a killed Tiny out of self-defense and then took the girl to keep her from talkin’. For that matter, Jessa might have snuck up on Hector an’ cut his throat to get away.

  “I ain’t worried about any’a that. It’s Useless’s part in it that bothers me.”

  “I don’t even see how Useless comes in,” Fearless agreed.

  “I see how it might happen,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t know why.”

  I realized that in the presence of Fearless Jones I had the courage to think again. It was a fleeting thought.

  “How so?” Fearless said.

  Two young white women wearing one-piece bathing suits walked near us. One of them looked at Fearless and smiled. He smiled and waved, and the two women scurried away laughing, throwing him sideways glances.

  “Hector and Useless were in business getting money from white men over some kind of blackmail or threat,” I said. “Useless was cheating Hector—that goes without sayin’. . . .” Fearless chuckled and I went on. “Hector’s after Useless and somehow Useless decides to use me for his shill. Either he gonna leave somethin’ with me or tell Hector, or somebody Hector knows, that he did. That way he have Hector comin’ after me while he gets away with his plans.”

  “What plans?”

  “He’s been movin’ money through Jerry Twist. Maybe he wants to go where the money is.”

  “And Hector comes up on you but finds Tiny and the white girl,” Fearless said.

  “Yeah. And then, when I’m down in the basement with the body, he comes back and searches for whatever it is Useless said he gave me.”

  “And then he comes back again lookin’ for the dictionary,” Fearless said.

  “Yeah.”

  “But why didn’t he pull out a gun or somethin’ then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe enough time had passed that he knew where whatever he was looking for was.”

  “But then why come to you at all?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you bettah know sumpin’ soon, man. Old Three Hearts not gonna wait forever. I dropped by Nadine’s house just to see how your auntie was doin’, and Nadine told me that Hearts was out day and night tryin’ to get a line on her son. You know that’s gonna be trouble for somebody.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Damn.” And with those two epithets my paralysis was completely over. “We need to look into these white businesses Useless was fleecin’,” I said. “We need to get in someplace and find out what he was up to.”

  “Yeah, Paris. Yeah, man. Let’s do it.”

  “Or maybe,” I said, “maybe I could sell my bookstore and take my savings and move to China. They speak English in Hong Kong. I could sell books there.”

  “One night with Mum don’t make you a Chin’ee, man,” Fearless said.

  “How you know about her?”

  “I saw her lookin’ at you,” he said. “I know that look.”

  24

  WHENEVER FEARLESS CAME to the beach he wanted fish and chips at Briny’s down in Venice. Briny was an older white gentleman who had lost his left leg below the knee and his right eye during his years at sea. The one eye he had left was gray; so was his hair and the pallor under his tanned white skin.

  The first time we ate at the dive, Briny was being harassed by an angry white guy. The guy, his name
was Lux, had a torso that was as big as half a keg of beer. He looked as strong as any man I ever met. Lux had decided, for some unknown reason, to make Briny the object of all his hatred.

  When we got to the restaurant that first time, Briny had seated us and served us without any strange looks or hesitance. Negroes at that time appreciated fair service of that type in white establishments. But his acceptance went further than that. When he’d been whole he was a merchant marine and had spent some time down in New Orleans. We swapped stories about that city, even knew a name or two in common.

  Fearless and Briny were getting pretty friendly when Lux came in.

  “Hey you, Riley,” the big white man shouted. “Come over here and make me some whitefish and eggs. I’m hungry and I’m horny as a toad. I got some pussy waitin’ down the street. It’s old pussy, so I need eggs t’get it up and fish to cut the smell.”

  No one could read Fearless like I could. His face darkened almost imperceptibly. His eyes shifted a thousandth of an inch. Fearless didn’t abide rudeness, and there was no room in his heart for a man bad-mouthing a woman, whether she was there or not. Add that to the fact that he’d become fond of Briny in the hour we’d been in the dingy restaurant and you had a recipe for trouble.

  Neither one of us liked it when Briny cowered and scuttled over to Lux saying, “Yes, sir, Mr. Lux.”

  But still, Fearless would have probably let it ride. Then Lux had to go and throw his plate on the floor when he didn’t like his eggs. He slapped our host and unleashed a string of curses and threats that one usually only heard in prison.

  Lux was in the middle of a complex description of Briny’s mother when Fearless tapped the big man’s shoulder.

  There were seven other customers in Briny’s that late afternoon. They were all witnesses to the spectacle.

  Lux turned his head slowly to regard my friend. Fearless is tall, but Lux was too. The white demon had at least twenty more pounds of muscle than did my friend. And Lux was fifty pounds heavier. All of those other customers must have thought that the foolish Negro was about to get his head torn off.