THAD’S BAR WAS LAST on our list.
The physical bar at Thad’s was small, but there was a big room for clientele once they had something to drink. There were four bartenders, serving cheap beer, mostly. Whisper had kept Thad’s for last because he’d been told that Bobo had an ex-girlfriend that worked there. He didn’t expect that Bobo would be hanging around an ex, but he was wrong.
Ora, Bobo’s girlfriend, was working serving drinks.
When Whisper asked her about Bobo, she just shrugged and gestured toward a corner with her jaw.
At the corner table sat a big man, a very big man. His shoulders sagged, and all you could see was the top of his uncombed head. The quart pitcher looked like a mug in his large hand.
Whisper and I went to his table. I tried to keep abreast of my new friend, but when we got to within six feet of Bobo, my legs just stopped moving.
Seeing our shadows in his beer, Bobo looked up. His brutal face seemed damaged somehow.
“What?” he whined.
“Bobo Handsome?” Whisper asked.
“Yeah? What you want?”
“Like to buy you a drink,” Whisper said.
I liked the style. I had to remember to use it the next time I wanted to grill somebody.
“Sure,” Bobo said, waving his hand at us.
Whisper ordered a fifth of whiskey and three glasses. Ora, Bobo’s ex-girlfriend, frowned when she received the order, but she kept quiet.
Whisper introduced himself and so did I. We traded shots for a while and discussed baseball. I don’t know a thing about baseball. I knew about the Negro Leagues, but if you asked me what they actually did on the field, I wouldn’t have been able to answer.
But Whisper knew. He seemed to know a little something about everything. Bobo got drunker, and angry, but he wasn’t mad at us.
“You evah have a friend that you really love?” Bobo asked me at one point.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“You talkin’ ’bout Tremont?” Whisper asked.
It was the first time I’d heard that name, but I knew from the context that he was the fat man that Three Hearts had killed.
“What you know ’bout Tremont?” Bobo asked, half rising from his chair.
“Nuthin’,” Whisper said innocently. “I just heard that the cops fount his body. Somebody had shot him in the gut.”
The violence in Bobo’s demeanor melted into grief. Tears sprouted from his eyes, and his hands grasped at nothing.
Ora, who was a small dark-skinned woman, came over and put her hands on his oxlike shoulders. Her face wasn’t beautiful, but the feeling she held for him was.
“Leave him alone,” she told us. “Cain’t you see he’s hurtin’?”
“You want us to leave, Bobo?” Whisper asked.
“No, man. Go on, Ora. These here my friends.”
“You don’t even know these niggahs,” she answered. “They buy you a drink an’ turn your ass ovah.”
“We don’t wanna hurt you, Bobo,” Whisper said, and I realized that in order to be a detective you had to be cruel while seeming to be kind.
“Go on, Ora,” Bobo said. “I ain’t no fool.”
“Fuck you, then,” Ora said to all of us.
She stormed away to be consoled by three or four other barmaids.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Whisper said.
What amazed me about Whisper was how simple and yet elegant his approach was at this point. If I were trying to get information out of Bobo I would have tried to fool him by making up a dozen lies. Whisper just told one lie and then soaked it in whiskey.
“I tell you one thing,” Bobo said. “Don’t evah put yo’ trust in no light-skin, light-eyed, high-yellah niggah. Mothahfuckah done made Tremont’s chirren orphans, an’ he won’t even let up on a dime. Wouldn’t shed a tear ovah his own.”
He said some other things, but I don’t remember what. I let him go on for a while and then I told Whisper that I had to go see my uncle. I explained to Bobo that my uncle had tuberculosis and needed help around his house.
Bobo told me to make sure that he drank a lot of milk. Milk was good for TB.
I thanked him and ordered another bottle of booze. I figured if he got drunk enough he wouldn’t be able to get in the way of my plans.
45
WHISPER DROPPED ME OFF at my bookstore. I hadn’t told him a thing about what I’d learned.
He shook my hand and smiled at me again.
“You got all the right instincts,” he told me. “You don’t tell nobody nuthin’ they don’t need to know and you keep your cool.”
I smiled, thinking that Whisper didn’t know how scared I really was.
“When you want a real job, call me,” Whisper said. “I could always use a partner.”
I DROVE STRAIGHT FROM the sidewalk to Fearless’s bungalow. When I got to the door, I heard Mona crying, “That’s it. That’s it. Oh yeah, baby, you got it.”
At any other time I would have turned away. But I had to knock. Had to.
The protestations of love stopped. Two hard footsteps crossed the floor.
“Who is it?” Fearless asked, not nearly as angry as I would have been.
“Paris.”
The door came open, and Fearless stuck his head out.
“Yeah?”
“I know the whole thing. All of it.”
“We got to do sumpin’ right now?” he asked me.
“No. But I need a place to stay an’ I ain’t got no cash.”
The head went away. A few words were traded in the room, and he returned holding out a key ring with two keys on it.
“Go stay at Mona’s, man. She gonna be here tonight. Stay ovah there an’ I get ya in the mornin’.”
I took the keys and walked across two dewy lawns to Mona’s place.
Her tiny house was well appointed, as I have said, but the best thing about it was her bed. It was high and soft, with ever so lightly scented sheets and blankets. There were half a dozen pillows and an azure night-light plugged into the socket to the right.
I fell instantly to sleep. And I didn’t have even one bad dream.
I woke up once in the night wondering why Fearless didn’t marry Mona. She was the perfect woman from where I lay. I glanced over at the sky-colored night-light and thought about blue tomorrows.
I’m sure that there was something psychological about my emotions, but I didn’t want to know. It was rare that I came upon a night of bliss. I wasn’t about to question it.
I WAS SOUND ASLEEP when someone came knocking on the door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Mona, Paris.”
I put on my pants and went to the door.
The look on her face told me that she’d had a pleasant night too.
“You know I almost got mad at you,” she said.
She was wearing a white terry cloth robe and Fearless’s big brown slippers.
“Sorry, babe. I just wanted a couple’a bucks to get a room someplace. But I tell ya this much—stayin’ here made me feel like I was at the Waldorf in the presidential suite. That was the best night’s sleep I ever had since I was a child in my mother’s arms.”
I only meant it as a show of gratitude, but I could see that my words touched Mona. She put her hand on my elbow, leaned forward, and gave me the softest kiss on the lips.
“Fearless waitin’ on you,” she whispered.
I put on my shirt but carried my socks and shoes across the lawns to my friend’s place. Mona had shaken me up with that kiss. It wasn’t a passionate thing, but there was something to it, something I didn’t want to know about when my best friend had just spent the night with her.
Fearless was already dressed in a loose silvery shirt and gray slacks. His brown shoes looked new they were so shiny, and he had a fancy gold watch on his wrist.
“Watch?” I asked.
“Mona gimme it,” he said. “I don’t want her to think I don’t appreciate it.”
“I thought Mona wasn’t your girlfriend,” I said at one point, thinking about that soft kiss.
“She ain’t.”
“Sounded like she was last night.”
“We friends, Paris,” Fearless said. “It was just a night together.”
“So that was just like shakin’ hands?”
Reese only had two tables inside his place, but it was early enough that his only customers were people on the way to work.
“No,” Fearless said.
“She looked like a chicken sittin’ on a ostrich egg when I seen her this mornin’,” I said.
“What you sayin’, Paris?”
“I’m sayin’ that Mona wasn’t just bein’ friendly up in there.”
Fearless took in every word and nuance, making them into convictions and feelings that held more truth than most men were capable of. He might never have understood what I was saying, but after hearing my words he would do the right thing, which was better than most men could ever do.
After twenty seconds of serious consideration, Fearless smiled.
“What’s wrong, Paris?”
“What you mean?”
“I mean why you pesterin’ me? Ain’t you got a problem to solve?”
“Thomas Benton Hoag,” I said.
“Who?”
I explained about Angel’s old boyfriend, the high-yellow real estate man.
“He hired the Handsome brothers to grab Three Hearts and Angel.”
“But he was Angel’s boyfriend,” Fearless said.
“Was.”
Fearless squeezed the slender bone between his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “How does he get in this?”
“Real estate,” I said. “His company is a white company, and Sterling was in real estate too. Maybe Sterling knew some white dude, a potential client, who liked black girls and he came to Tommy askin’ ’bout a girl who could show him a good time. That brings us to Angel. One thing leads to another, and an opportunity for blackmail emerges. After a while Tommy’s in the catbird seat, targeting white men who have their hands on money but don’t have no money themselves.”
“So Angel was in on it from the beginning?”
“Maybe her. Maybe there was other girls. I don’t know. Angel don’t mattah. It’s Tommy the one.”
Fearless let the words wash over him. You could see him imagining not so much the details of the crime but the qualities of the man.
“So he like a pimp?” Fearless said at last.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not to mention a kidnapper, a killer, and a blackmailer.”
Fearless nodded and asked, “So what next?”
“There’s one problem,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That suitcase.”
“Where is it?”
“I burned it.”
“Then it ain’t a problem,” Fearless reasoned.
“Where it came from is the problem,” I said.
“Ulysses said he took it from Hector’s house.”
“But we know he didn’t,” I said. “How’s he gonna be so lucky to get there after the killer kills Hector and before the deaf neighbor calls the cops?”
“So what you think?”
“I think Angel had the bag.”
“An’ where’d she get it from?” Fearless asked. He was getting nervous, tapping the toes of his left foot on the wood floor.
“Either from Hector after she killed him or from Thomas after he did.”
“You think she in it wit’ him?”
“I know they were in it together at the beginning,” I said. “At least that’s what makes the most sense.”
Fearless frowned and began tapping the toes of both his feet.
“Naw,” he said. “That girl loves Ulysses. You know he’s the apple’a her eye.”
“How come you say that about Angel but you don’t see it in Mona?” I asked.
“Mona don’t love me, man,” Fearless said with certainty. And before I could ask another question, he said, “She wants me. I’m everything she wants, but I ain’t what she need. I ain’t the man she gonna love, not really.”
“But Angel loves Useless?”
“Down to the jam between his toes,” Fearless said, accenting his words with a vigorous nod.
I took a deep breath and then another. I watched the line of workingmen and -women waiting for their coffees and pastries, then looked back at Fearless in his silver and gray.
We were at the end of the road. The journey had started with Useless at my doorstep, plying his star-crossed fate. Now there was just one thing to do.
“We go to Schuyler Real Estate and deal with Thomas,” I said.
Fearless nodded, put the last corner of hotcake into his mouth, and stood up straight.
46
FATE TRIED TO save us. She brought us to the real estate office, but Thomas Benton Hoag wasn’t there.
The white man who was sitting at his desk wanted to speak to us because he was so angry.
“Do you know where Thomas is?” he demanded.
“We came here lookin’ for him,” I explained. “We thought he was here.”
“Three days ago he stopped coming,” the white man (I never got his name) said. “Just stopped coming. He has clients who have lost faith in this office. He has records that I can’t read. What the hell kinda business is that?”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Fearless said.
That caught the white man up short.
“What?”
“If you had a friend,” Fearless reasoned, “and all of a sudden he wasn’t at work, didn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t you be worried that somethin’ bad happened to him?”
“We went to his house,” the white man, who was fat and wore a blue-and-white pinstriped suit, said. “He wasn’t there.”
“Maybe he’s in a ditch,” Fearless suggested. “Have you called the police?”
“I, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You just thought that he was tryin’ to mess wit’ you. You thought that he was gonna give up his commission to get drunk or take a vacation for a few days.”
The fact that Thomas’s boss didn’t have an answer went way past racism. There was something wrong with the man. There he was working with someone who had committed all kinds of crimes and all he could think about was that he hadn’t come in to work. He was a fool in baseball stripes, nameless in my mind but as American as the hot dog.
“WHERE TO?” Fearless asked when we were on the street again.
“Nadine’s,” I said on a sigh.
Fearless grinned and we were off.
On the ride I asked, “What can we do about this dude if we get him?”
“He probably run,” Fearless said. “I mean, that’s what a smart man’d do. All them dead men and his suitcase gone.”
“But what if he ain’t? What if he after Useless still?”
“Then we gots to stop him.”
I remembered Cleave’s hard words in the car on the way to Tiny’s burial. I knew what Fearless meant and I wasn’t sure that I could manage it. Killing was a hard business—not like selling books or finding money in a dead man’s car.
This last thought made me chuckle, but there was little humor in the sound.
“Try not to worry about it, Paris,” Fearless said. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
“But I got to be ready,” I said.
“Ain’t nobody evah ready, man. You could be layin’ up in some hospital bed dyin’, an’ somewhere yo’ boss fires you for not callin’ in. How you gonna be ready for that?”
NADINE GRANT WAS HUSTLING OUT her front door when we got there.
“I don’t have any more time to waste on you people, Paris,” she said, trying to move around us at the front gate. “I have to get to work.”
“Three Hea
rts in there?” I asked her.
“They moved,” she said with a voice that somehow reminded me of a hammer at work.
“Where to?”
“Four houses down,” she said. “The red place with the blue fence. It come open for rent and all of a sudden Hearts realized that she had three hundred dollars in her bag. Here she haven’t even paid me for a banana and now she payin’ rent for Useless and that nasty girl.”
Nadine hurried off to her car, talking to herself about my aunt and how she did her wrong.
I wanted to leave then. I had a deep conviction that Nadine was right, that my family was something to avoid.
“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. “Let’s get this ovah wit’.”
We walked down the street and up to the front door of the dark red house. There was a jack-in-the-box and a broomstick with a horse’s head in the yard. There were boxes with the name Georgia Arnold written on them on the small walled-in porch.
I knocked on the door, and after maybe a minute, Three Hearts answered.
“Hi, Paris, Fearless,” she said.
I should have known by the way she said my name first that something was wrong. As it was, I wondered why she was no longer angry with me for calling her boy Useless.
She led us through a kind of utility room into a larger space. I could see Angel sitting on a straight-back chair, and Three Hearts gasped as someone dragged her to the side.
Fearless and I came in to see Thomas Benton Hoag holding a small-caliber pistol to my auntie’s head. Next to him was Cousin Useless tied down in a chair.
“I’ll kill her and you too,” Hoag said. “Just gimme a reason.”
It seemed odd to me that his dialect had changed to street. But then I guessed that he was under pressure and the way he spoke now was his true self.
“What’s up, brothah?” Fearless asked.
“You don’t scare me, Fearless Jones,” Hoag said. “I want my mothahfuckin’ money an’ I want it now. I know you got Hector’s car outta the yard. I know what he had in the trunk.”
I glanced at Fearless. He was biding his time. I was sure that if Fearless could get to Hoag then there was nothing to fear. But there were eight long feet between my friend and that pistol. The time it would take to cross it was all the time you needed to die.
Fear of the Dark Page 23
