“Here, baby,” the boundless beauty said. “Take some water. Drink it down. Let it cool you.”
Then Angel put her hand to Three Hearts’s forehead as if she were the older woman’s mother feeling for fever.
And my auntie accepted the attention. Here I would have told you that Three Hearts would have bitten that hand if it got too close. Instead she let her head loll back and her eyes close, allowing the Jezebel to minister to her.
Fearless found a bottle of whiskey and some ice and poured us both a draft. That liquor was just what I needed.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Grant,” Angel said just as soon as Three Hearts settled down. “I know how much pain you must be in. Ulysses got in a whole mess of trouble, and I didn’t know what to do.”
As I have said, Three Hearts is my blood. I have known that woman since I could speak my own name. Never in all the time before that moment had I witnessed her allow man, woman, or child to lay blame at her son’s feet.
“What did he do to you, child?” Three Hearts asked Angel. “I see it stitched in your face. What did he do?”
“It wasn’t him,” Angel said. “He couldn’t help it. He got mixed up with those men and before he knew it we were in too deep.”
“He tries so hard,” Three Hearts sobbed.
The women hugged over their love. It was almost as if they were competing over who could love the little rat more.
I drained my glass. Fearless refilled it. I drained it again and Fearless was right on the job.
Half the way through my third glass of bourbon I looked around me. There I was, a mortal man flanked by Venus, Mars, and Juno. I wondered if Fate was standing outside the door, if he would allow me to stand up and walk away, just walk away from all that craziness. Maybe if I asked her right, Mum would take me in. We could discuss Spinoza and Karl Marx over dumplings and white rice.
That was a beautiful thought. I allowed myself fifteen seconds to wallow in it. I’d go to college and teach English at a boarding school in Jamaica.
“Excuse me,” I said when the daydream was done.
Angel and Three Hearts turned to me.
Fearless refilled my glass for the fourth time.
“What is it, Paris?” my auntie asked. She didn’t like her grief being interrupted.
“I know you ladies can read each other’s minds and all,” I said. “You seein’ invisible scars and like that. But for the menfolk here who don’t have your powers, could somebody please tell me where Ulysses has gone to?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Angel said. She rose up from her knees as if there were no gravity at her feet.
I felt some consternation because when I looked at her the rest of the room got fuzzy. At first I told myself that it was the whiskey, but then I looked at Fearless—the world around him was clear.
So I tried not to look directly into Angel’s eyes. That way I could converse with her without falling into some kind of crazy enchantment.
“But you an’ him was in business,” I said, all business myself.
“No,” she replied.
“What about Mr. Katz and Reverend Drummund?” I said. “Mad Anthony and Hector LaTiara?”
“You know about them?” Angel asked, seeking but not finding my eyes.
“I know about thirteen churches, banks, insurance companies, and investment firms,” I said. “I know about at least seventy thousand dollars that you and Use . . . Ulysses had in your apartment at Man’s Barn.”
Angel gasped at every other syllable. She fell onto a chair that sat next the sofa. Three Hearts was glaring at me for being so cruel to her new best friend—the woman she had wanted to murder less than half an hour ago. But I didn’t feel the effect of my auntie’s evil eye. I realized then that alcohol was proof against her spells.
“How did it work, Angel?” I asked.
“You know my name,” she replied, “but I don’t know either of yours.”
“Jones,” my friend said first. “Fearless Jones.”
“Oh,” Angel crooned. “I’ve heard all about you. You’re famous.”
Fearless smiled. Even he could be flattered by an angel.
“Paris,” I said. “Paris Minton.”
“Oh, yes. You’re Ullie’s cousin. He felt really bad about that time the police arrested you. He didn’t know that they’d come to your house.”
“Who was the man you left with when you ran out on Ulysses?” I asked.
“It’s not like it seems, Mrs. Grant,” she said. “I left, but it was because Ulysses wanted me to. He said that LaTiara was after him and he didn’t want me to get hurt.”
I laughed then.
I don’t get drunk all that often. And I don’t believe that inebriation is any panacea to a poor man’s problems. But now and then a good buzz will help you through when the ground is trembling and the mountains are coming down.
“Angel,” I said slowly and deliberately, “Hector is dead, had his throat cut.”
“Whaaat?” Three Hearts sang.
“I have reason to believe that Hector killed somebody else tryin’ t’find my cousin. So I really wish you’d stop bein’ all beautiful an’ perfect for just a minute and answer some simple fuckin’ questions.”
“Paris,” Fearless said.
“You could leave any time you want, Fearless. This girl here got us up to our necks in crocodiles, and I cain’t help what comes outta my mouth.”
“Excuse him, ma’am,” Fearless said. “He’s been under some strain. He needs to know who it is killin’ who out here. He needs to know it or he won’t be able to sleep in his bed.”
“I, I didn’t know about Hector,” Angel said then. Maybe she didn’t.
“What were Hector and Ulysses doin’?” I asked.
Angel looked to be full of information, but she didn’t say a word.
“I got to know, girl,” I said, the whiskey awash in my brain.
“I don’t know you, Paris,” she said. “The kind of trouble Ullie is in could put him . . . and me in jail.”
“I bet Hector would take jail over what he got,” I opined.
“Hector was a friend of Ullie’s,” she said. “Not so much a friend but an acquaintance. Hector knew a white man named Sterling. Sterling knew about men,” she said tentatively.
“What kind of men?” I asked.
“Men like Katz and Reverend Drummund.”
“Rich men?”
“Not rich but in charge of great wealth.”
“Oh, Lord,” Three Hearts moaned.
“What was the hook?” I asked.
“Me,” Angel said softly but without any deep sense of shame that I could tell.
“How so?”
“I’d go to them with a purse full of money. Five thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds and the promise that I had ten times that. I’d say that I wanted to invest the money in their companies or, in the case of the church, that I wanted to use it for the greater good. When they’d wonder how I made the money, I told them about a system I used in betting in poker games. Hector would set up a fake game and I’d go there with the reverend or V.P. and show them how I’d win. The game was always fixed. After a few nights they’d be hooked and get into a big game where I’d lose ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars of their institution’s money. After that Hector would blackmail them, threatening to tell their employers that they’d put the company’s money on the line.”
At the last words, she shed a tear and swallowed a sob. I believed that they were cheating those men but not that poor Angel was an innocent who regretted her part in the scheme. She regretted Ulysses running away with her money. She regretted some killer hungering after her soft throat. But she didn’t give a damn about the men whose lives she’d ruined.
I didn’t care about them either, but I wasn’t the one who brought them down.
“You poor child,” Three Hearts said.
“You have any idea where my cousin is?” I asked.
“There’s a cabin in the Angeles National Fo
rest. Sterling owns it. Ullie liked to go up there.”
27
I HAD UNLOCKED the doors of my Studebaker for the women to climb in back. I was about to get in the driver’s seat when Fearless said, “Uh, Paris?”
“Yeah?”
“You bettah let me drive, man.”
“Why?”
“’Cause you drunk.”
I looked at him and took in a deep breath.
“I am not.”
Fearless put one finger against my chest and shoved with barely any force. I would have been on the ground if the car wasn’t behind me.
How many whiskies had I downed? I couldn’t remember.
I fell into the driver’s seat and crawled to the other side. Fearless got in and put his hand out for the key.
While I was giving it to him, Three Hearts said, “You really should watch your liquor, Paris.”
“Watch my liquor? Watch my liquor? What I should do is watch my front do’.”
“Paris,” Fearless warned.
“That’s right. If I watched the do’, then Useless wouldn’t come up and hide stolen property in my toilet. You wouldn’t come up gettin’ me so deep in trouble that I cain’t even think about nuthin’ else. I’m drinkin’ so I don’t have to run down the street yellin’ like a madman done lost his mind.”
I stared at Three Hearts in the backseat. She looked away in disgust. Her disdain made me so angry that I was about to rant some more, but Fearless put his foot on the accelerator, and somehow the gravity pushing me against the seat displaced the anger too. I felt a wave of pleasant intoxication and leaned back against the door.
For a long time I stared at Angel’s profile. It certainly was perfect. Daughter, wife, lover, mother—she could have been everything and anything to man, woman, or child. There was haughtiness and a waiting smile, knowledge that you could never have, and simple conversation. She was the woman who was the power behind the king and the widow that survived him.
I hated Angel Allmont, but it wasn’t because of my cousin. I didn’t care about Useless. He could die and never be found. Three Hearts could light a candle every night for him until the candleholder overflowed with wax and her wood shanty burned to the ground—I didn’t care about them. No. I hated Angel Allmont because looking at her made me feel small.
“So what else?” I said in a voice that was too loud for the small space of the car.
“Excuse me?” Angel said. She wasn’t even looking at me, but she knew what I was asking and to whom my question was addressed.
“You know,” I said. “What else did Sterling know about those white men?”
For a long moment I thought that Angel was not going to look at me. But then she turned and gave me the full treatment.
“I support my mother, Mr. Minton,” she said. “Her and her sister, my five-year-old son, and a man who once saved me from a rapist.”
Three Hearts put a hand on Angel’s shoulder.
“That ain’t what I asked you,” I said, wondering at the man that lay inside me.
“They were men who . . . enjoyed black women,” she said at last. “They hungered for dark flesh.”
“Your flesh?”
“Paris,” Fearless said again.
“Yes, Mr. Minton, my flesh.”
“Did you use to go with them up to this here cabin?”
“There. Hotel rooms, beach houses, rectory couches, and back-alley slums.” There was distaste on her lips but not shame, not humiliation.
“So you seduced them?” I asked, as if my tongue were a scalpel and her dignity a malignant tumor that had to be excised.
“If you had been there you would see it differently,” Angel said in an even voice. “Their blood was boiling from the minute they saw me. Ullie told me that this was how we could save my family. I would have done a lot worse for them.”
She’d beaten me. Three Hearts was now holding the girl’s hands. Fearless sat there, his posture in the stoic demeanor of respect.
I turned my back against the door. I was falling into a stupor. Soon sleep would come and take me, just as one day Death would come knocking on my door.
“PARIS,” FEARLESS SAID, and I opened my eyes.
“What?”
“Cops.”
I turned and looked out the back window. The flashing blue and red lights caused a chemical reaction in my brain. I don’t know the names of the particular ingredients, but three seconds after I was awakened I was also as sober as a judge.
“I’m pullin’ ovah,” Fearless said. “Get ready.”
My sobriety turned into a microscopic lens then. Fearless saying to get ready meant that he was prepared to go to war.
“Fearless,” I said as he pulled to the curb.
“What?”
“We don’t need to fight here.”
“We got to get to Ulysses, man. These cops in the way.”
The squad car pulled up behind us. They shone a bright white light from their car into ours.
“There’s no reason to hurt anybody, Fearless. We’ll get out of this.”
A young white man was coming up to the driver’s window. He was wearing a policeman’s uniform and trained to enforce a certain kind of law; he was arrogant and sure of himself, but he didn’t know that if I didn’t talk just right he was about to be killed.
“I got it, Fearless. I got it, man.”
The tension went out of my friend.
The police hadn’t made it to the door yet. Fearless was rolling down his window in expectation. But my mind was back down the road we had just traveled. Three Hearts had thought she knew Angel from the first moment she laid eyes on her. She could see something in her the way I saw things in Fearless. Maybe, I thought, maybe Hearts knew something I did not; maybe Angel was not misnamed; maybe I was just blind to her, as many and most were to my friend.
“Step out of the car,” a voice said. There was no “please” at the end of his request.
UNDER THE HIGH BEAMS of their car we stood with our hands on the roof of mine. The women were on one side, while Fearless and I faced them.
“Paris Minton?” one white cop asked my friend.
“I’m Minton,” I said.
While the other cop frisked Fearless, my inquisitor patted me down with one hand.
“We’re going to have to bring you down to the station,” the cop was telling me.
“Gun,” the cop searching Fearless said.
“Paris,” Fearless said to me.
“You shut up,” his cop complained.
“Don’t worry, Fearless,” I said. “We’ll pull out of this.”
“Okay,” he said, as my cop snapped the first manacle of the handcuffs on me.
Three Hearts had left her gun-laden purse in the car and was holding her wallet in her hand. The police checked out the ladies’ IDs and told them that they had to bring Fearless and me down to the station for questioning.
“What for?” Three Hearts asked.
“I don’t know, ma’am,” one of them said. “We had his license plate number and name in our hot file. We’re just following orders.”
THEY PRESSED FEARLESS AND ME into the backseat of their prowl car. I remember, as our captors pulled from the curb, seeing Three Hearts in the front passenger’s seat and Angel behind the wheel of my junk heap. I wondered, as we drove off one way and the women headed in another, if I would see both of them alive again.
28
SOMETIMES JAIL ISN’T such a bad thing. I mean, you’re locked down and treated as a threat and a danger, but if you don’t have anywhere to go and freedom contains threats that incarceration does not, then a free meal, a locked metal door, and a hard cot will do.
Fearless and I were searched and thrown into a big cell that had a maximum capacity of twelve. There were fifteen men already in there when we arrived.
Some guy, I don’t even remember who, said something he thought was dangerous when we walked in.
With a smile Fearless told the man, “Come
on ovah here an’ let’s get this ovah wit’.” The man could hear the threat in Fearless’s bored tone. He stayed where he was, and from then on nobody bothered us. Two men even vacated their bunks so that we would have a place to rest our weary bones.
Fearless was a paradox in my life. In that cell he was my savior. Just hearing his few words and seeing the steel in his bearing, men stepped back from him and anyone with him.
But when we were back on the streets, Fearless would drag me into danger no matter which way he went.
That’s why I was happy to be locked up. The bars protected me. The lack of windows meant that nobody could spy on me. I wanted to stay there for a week, maybe two, until Useless and Angel and Three Hearts were far away and forgotten. But I knew that Fearless was too responsible for that. He used his one phone call to reach Milo. All he got was the answering service. I wasn’t even going to use my call, but Fearless convinced me to phone Mona and tell her to keep on Milo.
“You need a lawyer,” I said to my friend.
“Why?”
“Carrying a concealed weapon,” I suggested.
“I got a license,” he replied.
“Since when?”
“Since I been bodyguardin’ Milo. He got it for me.”
“Well,” I said, “we might as well get some sleep.”
“You sleep, Paris,” my friend said. “I’ll just sit up top an’ get the lay of the land.”
I WAS SO FAR INTO that mess with Three Hearts that I was even dreaming about Useless.
“What the hell you want?” I asked my iniquitous cousin. We were sitting at a picnic table in a small park near Watts.
“Listen to me, Paris,” he whined. “I cain’t he’p it, brother. I love her.”
“So? Love her, then. That don’t have nuthin’ to do wit’ me.”
“You got to find her, man. You got to bring her back.”
Useless was crying. I tried to remember him ever crying before.
“Paris.”
. . . Had he ever cried before? Had he shed tears?
“Wake up, man.”
I knew there was a commotion going on before I opened my eyes.
A large black man was saying something in a voice that rasped like a big handsaw on hard wood.
Fear of the Dark Page 14
