Fear of the Dark Read online

  “I don’t know what kind funny stuff this is,” the cook said to me, waving the Jackson note. “But I will take your money.”

  I remember thinking that there was a great deal more truth to what he said than he meant.

  The blonde moved to my booth, and the rest of the patrons returned to eating.

  “Jessa,” she said, introducing herself. She held out her hand and I shook it. “Thanks.”

  “It was a good scam,” I said. “Three out of four places would have just thrown you out and said not to come back. But you should at least have the two bucks so that the one hardnose won’t send you to jail.”

  Jessa was wearing an orange sundress that had little white buttons all the way down the front. The collar had a little dirt on it. Her red purse was scuffed.

  “If I had two dollars I would have gotten a burger someplace,” she said, smiling at me. “My boyfriend took off with our money, two weeks behind on the rent.”

  She didn’t have to ask where she was going to sleep that night. I might be a coward, but that doesn’t prevent me from being a fool. Watching that girl masticate her meat loaf had wiped any caution from my mind.

  I had seen Jessa every third day after paying for her meal. I even went into my sacrosanct bank account and came out with money for her weekly rate on a room down on Grand.

  That woman knew how to talk to a man.

  But eight days before Useless came knocking, I had gotten information from a guy who worked at the front desk of Jessa’s downtown rooming house.

  “Mr. Minton,” Gregory Wallace, the night manager, said, speaking to me as if we were equals. He was a white guy from Idaho. He’d never understood racism. There are many white people like that, even in the South.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know your friend Jessa had another boyfriend before you,” the skinny young man said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This big mean guy called Tiny.”

  Greg had my attention then.

  “What about Tiny?” I asked.

  “He’s been comin’ around on days that you’re not here. And last night he asked me what the name was of the guy paying her rent.”

  Gregory had a pale, crooked face, with permanently bloodshot eyes, but he looked to me like a savior right then.

  “Thanks, man.”

  I hadn’t gone back to the rooming house for a week. That meant it was time for the rent to be paid and so Jessa would be looking for me. My phone had been off the hook for three days. I’d taken sixty-five dollars from my savings account to give to Jessa if she came by, but I intended to tell her that she needed to leave me alone.

  So, Three Hearts notwithstanding, I had to turn Useless away. Because if he was there when Jessa was, I would most certainly come to grief. Useless was like monosodium glutamate for problems; he brought out the evil essence and magnified it.

  I HAD JUST FINISHED rehearsing my speech to Jessa for the thirteenth time when her gentle knock came on my door.

  I pulled the drape back to be sure she was alone, took a deep breath, and then opened up.

  She was wearing a tan dress that hugged her slim figure and somehow wrapped around her calves.

  “Hi,” she said, letting her head loll to the side.

  “Hey.”

  “Can I come in?”

  No died on my lips as I backed away from the door. She swayed twice and crossed the threshold. She pushed the door closed, and I shivered.

  Jessa Brown reached out as if she was about hold my hand, but instead she unzipped my pants and reached down into my shorts with quick and deft fingers.

  “That’s what I need,” she said, looking into my eyes. “You know a girl can’t give up a treasure like that.”

  I took half a breath and held it.

  I am what the genteel folks call well-endowed. Some women like that. It gives them a de facto sense of power, I believe.

  I’m small and weak and scared of my own shadow, and so my sexual prowess is one of the only things I have to be proud of in a masculine way. So when a woman looks me in the eye like that and tells me she needs me, I can’t say no.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Huh?”

  “Let’s do it right here on the floor, with your pants down around your ankles and me riding that monster.”

  3

  THERE WE WERE, lying on the wood floor, naked where it counted. Jessa’s feathery touch was keeping me excited, and her kisses on my shoulder and cheek delivered me from fear.

  I would be thirty years old later that year, but in my heart I was still a kid. When a woman laid her hands on me, there was nothing I could do. That’s why I hadn’t as of yet entertained the idea of marriage. My auntie Three Hearts had always told me, “A man shouldn’t say I do until he can say I don’t.”

  I was a long way from no in the presence of a woman like Jessa.

  She was a good seven years younger than me, not pretty but fetching. White women were another taboo that I liked breaking now and again. But there were other qualities about that girl.

  The first thing was that she didn’t feel compelled to talk and didn’t mind listening. She liked masculine company and so never complained about toilet seats, dirty dishes, or the errant eructation. And when she did talk, she knew how to speak to a man.

  “How come you haven’t been by to see me, lover?” she said with her head on my chest and her left thigh over both of mine.

  “Tiny.”

  “Him? Why you worried about him?”

  “Because he’s big and the jealous type.”

  “Big? He’s not even half of you.”

  “Maybe not in the bed. But I’m not talkin’ about love, J. I’m talkin’ about gettin’ my ass kicked—hard.”

  Jessa sat up to look down on me. “I’m not gonna tell Tiny about you. I don’t tell him nuthin’. He just came back because he thought I’d take him in. But you know I’m easin’ him out. By next week he’ll be gone and forgotten.”

  “I don’t know if we should be seeing each other,” I said. I might have been more convincing if my voice hadn’t gone up an octave.

  “Come on, lover,” she said, looking deep into my eyes. “You want this.”

  I did. I really did. Even though I knew better, I saw no use in that knowledge. The only reason I learned things was to be in a situation like I was there: lying on the floor in the entranceway of my bookstore, all tangled up with a girl that made my blood boil.

  She kissed me.

  “I can’t let you go, Paris,” she whispered.

  Jessa Brown was from a whole slate of southern states. Her mother had moved around quite a lot. Her family was from the Midwest somewhere, but she never saw them because they called her and her mama trash. She could barely read, but she sang beautifully and had come to Los Angeles with a man named Theodore who had promised to get her an audition.

  I didn’t know that much about her, but it was enough to know that she was trouble.

  But there I was on that floor, floating in a dream and not even thinking about waking up.

  That’s when the front door slammed open, breaking the lock and splintering part of the frame.

  Jessa was on her feet in no more than a second. I was on my back, moving backward on all fours, under the shadow of one of the largest white men I had ever seen.

  “Tiny!” Jessa shouted, and I remembered, quite clearly, why I stayed away from women like her.

  “Kill you, bastard!” came from Tiny’s lips. He had a movie star’s voice, loud and strong.

  It was his threatening tone that got me to my feet.

  It was my youth and sexual prominence that saved my life.

  Tiny was mad but not blind. He did a double take when he saw my diminishing erection. That one moment of hesitation was enough for Jessa. She grabbed a hardwood bookend from one of my shelves and threw herself at the behemoth. I didn’t wait to see how it went.

  With my pants in one hand and
my drawers in the other, I made it up the staircase in triple time. At the top of the stairs I kept a large oak bookcase that only had towels and sheets on it. This light load was by design. I tipped the bookcase over so that it blocked entrée to the second floor. Then I scooted out the window and onto the tar paper roof.

  I plan for calamity. The roof I was on covered the back porch of my house. There were three beams along it that could bear the weight of a man. I knew the route of those beams and went quickly along the center timber and into the apple tree in the yard.

  A great bellow came from the house as I stepped onto the top pole of the wire fence that separated my backyard from the alley behind Florence. The volume of that shout made me lose my footing. My bare foot got tangled up in the top mesh, and I fell to the asphalt below.

  The fence was only six feet high, but I landed on my right shoulder blade and it hurt like hell. For a moment I lay there feeling as though I could never get up. But then I saw my maple desk chair crashing through the window I had just gone through.

  I dropped my underpants and jumped into my jeans as I ran.

  I came out on Central in a matter of moments. I couldn’t hear Tiny, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t after me.

  There I was in the twilight, wearing only my jeans with no shoes or socks. The pain from the fall was returning. Somewhere on the run I had cut my right foot, so I was limping now and trailing blood behind me on the white sidewalk.

  I looked like a hobo. And not only that, I looked like trouble and so I had to figure what establishment I could duck into that wouldn’t eject me into Tiny’s murderous embrace.

  “Paris!” a voice called. I nearly fainted.

  “Paris, what’s wrong?”

  The voice was coming from the street, not the alley. There was a yellowy green Studebaker, maybe ten years old, right there in the left lane. Sir Bradley was sitting behind the wheel.

  I heard a shout. It might have been anybody, but I couldn’t take that chance.

  “They tryin’ to get me, Sir,” I cried.

  “Jump on in, boy. Let’s move.”

  I opened his car door and hopped into the backseat. Before the door was closed, Sir hit the gas and we were off across the intersection. I heard a loud thump, turned, and saw Tiny running only a foot or so behind us. Cars were honking in the intersection, and Sir swerved to avoid a collision. Tiny swung his fist and struck the trunk of the Studebaker again.

  “Oh, shit!” Sir screamed.

  The tires squealed loudly, and we were off down Central, leaving Tiny to swing his fists in the crossroads.

  “Wow,” my savior said. “That suckah’s big. What he after you for, Paris?”

  “His girlfriend forgot to tell him about me.”

  “White girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman sitting next to him gave a disapproving grunt.

  “Hm. That’s what you get runnin’ ’round with them white women,” she said.

  “Paris, meet Sasha,” Sir said.

  “Pleased to meet ya,” I said while glancing out the back window and putting pressure on the cut on my foot. Now that I was safe from immediate harm, I began to worry about what Tiny would do to my store.

  Turning my attention to the front seat, I saw that the woman with Sir was a deep chocolate color, with big eyes and high cheekbones. She was a beauty by any standard—except for the sour twist of her lips.

  Sasha was born to be a queen and Sir was just a pawn. He was medium brown, middlebrow, and five eight in street shoes. His forehead was low, but he had a long skull from front to back. His eyes were crafty and his smile ever present. He was a union man from the first day he got a job at the Long Beach docks and he voted Democrat without even a glance at the candidate’s name.

  Mrs. Bradley, Sir’s mother, had christened him so that no white person could insult him by refusing to call him Mister. He might have been a peasant by breeding, but there was a natural genuflection in just the mention of his name.

  Maybe that’s why the sour-faced beauty had hooked up with him: because saying his name did her honor.

  “That boy was out for blood,” Sir said.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed.

  Crossing the cut foot over my knee, I began teasing out the splinter of glass.

  “You wanna call the cops?” Sir asked.

  “A white cop?” Sasha said. “And tell him what? That he been sleepin’ with a white man’s girl and the white man wanna kick him? The police probably hold him down.”

  She was more than half right.

  “Naw. I don’t wanna go to no cops,” I said. “Take me over to Slauson.”

  “Where?” Sir asked.

  “Milo Sweet’s new office. Fearless is there playin’ bodyguard for a little while.”

  “Fearless Jones?” Sasha asked.

  I recognized the longing in her voice. Fearless was coveted by women all over South L.A. and beyond. They liked his power to begin with and then his heart once they got to know him.

  “Hear that, Paris?” Sir said. “I’ll let you off on the corner. Either that or I’ll be sleepin’ alone tonight.”

  4

  SIR LENT ME A BEAT-UP yellow sweater so that I wasn’t bare chested walking down Slauson. When he and Sasha let me out on the darkening corner, I was almost shaking. I was feeling the exhilaration of survival and mortal fear at my close call. I was proud of myself for my letter-perfect escape, knowing all the while that I was a fool to be in a situation that could bring me so close to pain.

  MILO SWEET’S BAIL BOND office was upstairs from the haberdashers Kleinsman and Lowe. They specialized in old-world hats that they exported throughout Europe and the Orient. At one time they had used the third floor for the managing office, but when they decided to move the nerve center of their operation downtown, they let the space to Milo Sweet and his jack-of-all-trades assistant, Loretta Kuroko.

  I climbed the outside staircase to the third floor and knocked.

  After a few moments Loretta opened the door and smiled for me.

  That day she was wearing a green ensemble. The jacket was silk and so was her skirt. The black blouse might have been cotton, and the hand-carved jade rose that hung from her neck was exquisite.

  Loretta was ten years my senior but looked younger than me. She was beautiful and smarter than her boss. But Loretta revered Milo Sweet, and I do believe that she was the only person in the world he would have laid down his life for.

  She had long dark hair rolled up into a bun at the back of her head and eyes that looked at you from some other epoch, when there were no cars or jitterbugs, no white people at all, and when men, once they made up their mind to fight, would not give up until they had bled their last drop.

  “Hello, Paris,” she said.

  I felt something then. It was the feeling I’d had as a child when I returned home after a long day away. My mother would be there waiting for me, and I felt a joy that I had not expected to feel. Loretta’s greeting was a delight. And I think that she saw my reaction.

  She smiled and nodded by moving her head in an elegant semicircle.

  “Are you here to see Milo?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Her lips pursed. “Fearless?”

  “Have I ever told you how happy I am to see you whenever I come to this office?” I asked.

  “Come on in, Paris,” she said.

  I followed her up the three steps to the circular room that she and Milo shared.

  When Milo told Loretta that they were moving offices again, the thirteenth time in nine years, she informed him that she would only go if he let her find the place and design and furnish it. What came of it was a thing of beauty.

  The room wasn’t actually round. It had eight walls of equal size. Every other wall had a large window with a roll-up bamboo shade. The floor was the most wonderful part. It was a perfect circle, twenty feet in diameter, raised half a foot above the original floor and made from cherrywood. Fearless had constructed it. He
had also built the oak file cabinets that sat against the windowless walls and on the floor outside the circle.

  Loretta’s desk was a simple plank of ebony wood on white ash legs. She had no drawers or doodads to obstruct the elegant lines.

  On the other side of the circle, Milo had his hideous drab green desk made from sheet metal. His chairs didn’t match, and he was perpetually swaddled in a thin blanket of cigar smoke. When you looked at the room you got the feeling that it represented a planet, one side of which was in permanent midnight and the other washed in eternal noon.

  No one would have expected this particular meeting of East and West in a third-floor office in black Los Angeles. It might be that no one, outside of Milo’s clients and friends, ever knew it was there. People from the style section at magazines went to see how John Wayne and Clark Gable lived. They wanted to see foreign queens’ palaces when they should have been looking at that bail bondsman’s office on Slauson.

  WHEN I TOOK A STEP and faltered, Loretta noticed my bare feet. A moment after that she saw that I was bleeding on her cherry floor.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s kinda hard to explain,” I said. “But it’s not all that bad.”

  “Come sit down.”

  Milo had a favorite guest chair. It was a spindly light brown creature that most resembled a half-starved dog. The legs didn’t look as though they could bear the weight of a big cat, but there Fearless sat with his feet on Milo’s desk, leaning back on the two quivering hind legs of that chair.

  Fearless wore a charcoal shirt and blue jeans. He was drinking a glass of water.

  “Paris,” he said with a true friend’s smile.

  “The prodigal son,” Milo rumbled. If they ever put him in a choir, he’d have to be placed somewhere behind the bass section.

  “Gentlemen,” I hailed, allowing Loretta to help me to a red stool that Milo had also refused to give up. Behind him there was an open window with a fan blowing out; another demand of Loretta’s.

  “What happened to you, Paris?” Milo asked.

  Looking at Milo you would have thought he was once tall but somewhere along the way he’d gotten jammed up in a compactor that had made a shorter, broader specimen.