Fear of the Dark Page 3

  He had the big hands of a heavyweight and the shoulders of a bull. For all that, Milo was not a physical man. Nine times out of ten when I saw him he was sitting, and the only sport he excelled in was darts. He was most often the darkest man in the room, that is unless he was in the room with Fearless.

  “Cut myself runnin’ barefoot through an alley,” I said. I didn’t need to say any more.

  Loretta came up with a glass of water and a first aid kit. She knelt down in front of me and started ministering to my wound.

  “I come to borrow my friend,” I said, wincing from a dab of iodine.

  “This is prime time right here, Paris,” Milo said, shaking his big head at me. “And Fearless is on the clock.”

  “What you need, Paris?” Fearless asked, as if Milo had not said a word.

  I told them the story. It didn’t bother me that Loretta was there listening. Milo’s assistant never passed judgment on someone for being the victim of his instincts.

  “Unless the man come to your house is Albert Rive, Fearless ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Milo said when I finished my tale.

  Fearless had grinned now and then while I spoke, and Loretta had let out with an “Oh, no” here and there. But Milo was all business.

  There was a thug in Los Angeles named Albert Rive. He was an armed robber who got caught, tried, and sentenced to fifteen years in the California penal system. But before he could be sent away, his lawyer, Philip Reed, a friend of Milo’s, got the conviction set aside on a technicality. Rive came to Milo for bail with his mother’s mortgage in hand. Then he went somewhere down South and disappeared.

  Milo was out fifteen thousand dollars when Rive jumped bail. And though he hated to do it, he had to foreclose on Mrs. Alberta Rive’s home. She lived there with her daughter, granddaughter, and four great-grandchildren. Milo was about to put them all out in the street.

  Somehow a message came to Milo that he had better lay off Mrs. Rive or Albert would make a surprise stop at his doorstep.

  Milo was a thinking man, but he was also almost as brave as my friend Fearless. He had hired Mr. Jones to be his bodyguard until the Rive property was liquidated and hoped that Albert would make a move so he would get caught and Alberta could remain in her home.

  Toward this end, Milo had hired the only official black private detective in Watts, a man known as Whisper Natly.

  Whisper was a man with no distinguishing characteristics. You never saw him even when he was right there in front of you. He wore a short-brimmed brown hat that was a shade darker than his skin. He had a gray hatband but no feather. His shoes were dark, maybe brown, and his clothes were neither new nor old, natty nor disheveled. He spoke in a low voice, not a whisper, and no one I knew had ever seen where he lived.

  Whisper was the kind of man who could get information out of a deaf-mute. He moved quietly, always paid his bills, and never bad-mouthed anyone.

  If Albert Rive was anywhere near Watts, Whisper was sure to sniff him out.

  “Get your hat, man,” Fearless said to Milo. “We gonna take a ride with Paris.”

  My friend rose from his leaning position effortlessly, like some being more graceful than a human. When he squared his shoulders, I spied Loretta appreciating him.

  “I’m the one payin’ you, Fearless,” Milo reminded him. He stayed in his chair.

  “If I was wit’ Paris here doin’ sumpin’ for him,” Fearless said, “an’ you come to me an’ say your house was on fire, I’d tell Paris to get his hat. Now, if you want me to leave you a gun, I’ll be happy to do it.”

  Fearless wasn’t the smartest man I ever met. I sometimes wondered if he could do long division. But whatever he said was usually the last word in any argument. That’s because Fearless thought with a pure heart.

  Milo got up.

  “Come on, Loretta,” he said. “Get your bag and go on home.”

  “But what if someone needs bail?” she asked.

  “Have the answering service call you at home. I don’t wanna leave you here with that killer runnin’ free out there.”

  “Wait a second,” she said, jumping up from her knees.

  She’d done a good job cleaning and bandaging my foot. She went behind Milo’s desk and came out with a beat-up pair of light brown slippers.

  “Put these on,” she told me, tossing the house shoes to the floor.

  I glanced at Milo, but he just shrugged resignedly. He knew better than to argue with Miss Kuroko.

  WHEN WE GOT TO THE STREET, I told Loretta that I’d walk her to her car. She was driving a tan Volkswagen Bug. At the door she reached out and touched my upper lip.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Mustache.”

  “It looks good.”

  We stood there for a moment longer than was necessary.

  “Call me,” she said.

  I breathed in and forgot about expiration. Loretta gave a little laugh. It was as if I had never heard her laugh. It was wonderful.

  5

  WE TOOK MILO’S dark red ’52 Cadillac. He drove while Fearless sat shotgun. I reclined in the backseat, thinking about my bookstore and that angry white man.

  I wasn’t scared, because I was with Fearless and Fearless always inspired calm in me. In his company I had my greatest acuity due to the peaceful security of his aura.

  I wasn’t scared, but I was worried that maybe Tiny had burned down my store.

  I was thinking about Loretta behind me and Jessa up ahead, wondering why it was that I could never make it work with women, why there was only a short time for love before something went wrong.

  “What’s the matter with you, Paris?” Milo asked, as we turned onto Central.

  “What you talkin’ ’bout, Miles?”

  “You. Why a smart man like you spend half his life in trouble?”

  “Me? What about you, needin’ Fearless and Whisper t’covah yo’ ass?” I asked in the street banter that was the glue of Negro life in every corner of our nation.

  “That’s business,” Milo said flatly. “That’s money in my pocket. Man gotta do business or him an’ his starve. But you got people up on your ass an’ you don’t hardly have a pot to piss in. Here you worried ’bout that bookstore, an’ we both know that you be lucky to clear forty dollars in a month’s time.”

  “Maybe so,” I allowed. “But you the one been up to his kneecaps in loan sharks every year since you been out on your own.”

  Fearless let out a low chuckle on that one.

  Milo gave his temporary bodyguard a sidelong glance and said, “Again, all you talkin’ ’bout is business. Businessman got to cover his debts, got to grow his capital. I own a business that’s worth somethin’, Paris. People, white people, have offered me big money to sell out to them. Big money. How much somebody gonna give you for that bookstore?”

  Milo was ragging me because he was mad that Fearless had made him leave his office. I was arguing back to keep my mind off the troubles that lay ahead. But I tripped up on that last question. I didn’t want to sell my bookstore. I would have gotten an extra job in order to keep it running. I loved sitting there with those dusty books. I loved it.

  MILO PULLED UP AT THE CURB across the street and down a few houses from my place. Fearless turned sideways in the front seat and gave me his serious look.

  “Okay, Paris,” he said. “Now tell me what you did to this white boy.”

  “Nuthin’.”

  “You sure?”

  Fearless was a killer. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body, but somewhere along the evolutionary trail he had been endowed with a gift for violence. All through World War II, and in American cities from Houston to S.F. to L.A., he had dealt out terrible punishment. He never shied away from trouble, nor would he turn his back on a friend. But Fearless didn’t want to be tricked into hurting someone who didn’t deserve it, and so he asked me about Tiny.

  “What I told you at Milo’s is all there is, man,” I said. “I should have sent her away, but you kn
ow . . .”

  Fearless smiled and opened the car door.

  “I’ll drive around the block a couple’a times,” Milo told us.

  “It won’t take long,” Fearless replied.

  THE FRONT DOOR TO MY STORE was closed. That in itself wasn’t so strange. It was just that I remembered the splintering wood from the frame and the violence in Tiny’s voice. I found it hard to imagine such rage closing a door like that.

  Fearless and I took the stairs together, side by side.

  With the fingers of his left hand, Fearless tapped the door, and it swung open. This meant that someone had gone to the bother of reattaching the hinges.

  Ten feet from the doorway Tiny lay, in the same spot where Jessa and I had rutted like alley cats. He was on his back, his left arm under him and his right flung awkwardly over his stomach. His green eyes were open wide, and there was a small dark cavity in his right temple.

  I moved closer to the body, not really realizing what I was seeing. It made no sense. In my fear I had wished this man dead, but wishes couldn’t happen. I tried to come up with an explanation as to how the killing might have occurred, but there was no thought that could take hold. I didn’t believe that I was seeing what was in front of me. I expected Tiny to sit up any minute and say, “April fool.”

  “Paris,” Fearless said. I had the feeling he’d said it more than once.

  “What?”

  I turned to see that he had closed the door.

  “What the hell is this, man?” he asked. Fearless rarely cursed.

  “I swear, Fearless. I don’t know. I ran out over the eave of the back porch. He might have falled or somethin’. . . .”

  “Fall my ass. This dude been shot.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “What about that girl? Maybe he went after her and she shot him.”

  “She didn’t have no purse,” I said. “Damn, man, she wasn’t even wearin’ underpants.”

  “What about your piece?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a gun.”

  “No?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Maybe,” Fearless said, straining his mental faculties, “maybe he had a gun and she took it from him.”

  “Fearless, what the fuck I’m’a do about this?”

  That started him chewing on his bottom lip. He shook his head, staring at the body.

  “Call the cops?” he asked.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “What the hell can I say to the cops? That I was fuckin’ his white girlfriend on the floor when he busted in? They hang me for that right there.”

  “You right,” Fearless agreed. “Even if the girl did it, she’s probably long gone by now, and if they catch her all she got to do is cry rape and say you shot the guy.”

  “Maybe we should bring Milo in,” I suggested.

  “Uh-uh. Unless Milo see dollar signs he won’t do nuthin’. Anyway he’s not gonna put himself in trouble for us.”

  Us. That’s why I could never turn my back on Fearless Jones. Who else would walk into my house, find a dead body, and stay to share my trouble?

  “So what do we do?”

  “How come you standin’ funny, Paris?” Fearless asked me.

  “What the fuck that got to do with anything?”

  “Okay. I’ll tell you what. You lift his feet and I’ll get his shoulders.”

  I knelt and grabbed Tiny’s ankles. When I tried to lift them, a spasm went through my right shoulder that sent me to the floor.

  “Now you wanna tell me ’bout how you standin’?” Fearless asked.

  “Okay, yeah, I fell an’ hurt my side. So what?”

  “So if we don’t tell the cops and we don’t tell Milo, then the only thing we can do is get rid’a yo’ friend here. But he too big for me alone. And you don’t have the strength to help, not with that hurt back.”

  I wanted to scream. How could a bookworm like me get into so much trouble over a meat loaf dinner?

  Fearless smiled.

  “You get too upset, Paris. Don’t let it bother you. We just need some help.”

  I couldn’t even talk.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Let’s put our friend here down in your cellar. I’ll drive Milo around until he goes to sleep at his hideout and then I’ll get somebody we can trust to help.”

  Under the rightmost bookcase in my store was a blue carpet covering a trapdoor. This door led to a small brick-lined cellar that had come with the building. I don’t know what the previous owners did down there. It didn’t have a hot-water heater or even an electric outlet. It wasn’t big enough for a pool table. I’d always thought that the original owners might have been crooked in some way and they installed the underground room as a hideout in times of trouble.

  I had had Fearless run a wire through the wall so that I could have light down there, but other than that I hadn’t changed a thing.

  Fearless moved the bookcase and I kicked the carpet away. I also pulled up the trapdoor. Fearless dragged the heavy corpse to the hole and dropped him in.

  “Hey,” he said in a moment of sudden inspiration. “We could just bury him down there.”

  “Naw, man. Naw.”

  “Why not?”

  “Jessa’s not here but she’s somewhere. Sooner or later she’s likely to talk to somebody and then they will talk to somebody else. One day somebody’s gonna talk to a cop, and he’s gonna come here with a hard-on and a search warrant. Naw. We got to get rid of Tiny.”

  “Okay,” Fearless said. “Throw that carpet back down there.”

  I did as he said, but before he could move the shelves I stopped him.

  “Maybe I should go down there with him,” I said.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know who killed this man. Maybe he gonna come back. Maybe Jessa already talked to the cops. I can’t go with you ’cause Milo’d get suspicious. But if I’m down there, nobody gonna find me.”

  SO I CLIMBED DOWN the short ladder into the ten-by-ten-foot brick-lined hole. Tiny had fallen on his head and broken his back in the fall. His torso was bent in a most unnatural pose. I clicked on the reading lamp I had down there, and Fearless closed the hatch. I heard him moving the bookcase and sat myself on the floor in the corner—as far away from Death as I could manage.

  6

  BEFORE HE LEFT, Fearless called down through the floorboards, “Paris, you still got that trunk with the padlock on it in the back?”

  “Yeah,” I said in a deep tone.

  “Where’s the key?”

  “In my tool drawer. Why?”

  “I’m’a put the lock on the front do’ so nobody come in here.”

  I heard him walking around for a while after that. He went back and forth a couple of times, and then the house was silent.

  The first thing I realized after Fearless was gone was that I didn’t have a book to read. At the best of times that would have been bad news. Reading is how I made it through life. While other children were out getting into trouble, I was in the schoolroom or at the back of the church reading Treasure Island or Huckleberry Finn. Books were my radio and my daily drug. I could live without almost anyone or anything as long as I had a book to read. A long queue became a luxury if Anna Karenina was there to engage me. The doctor’s waiting room became my private den if he kept up with his magazine subscriptions.

  Sitting there next to a heap of flesh and bone that once made up a man, with no book and no way out, made me jittery, pressed me to the edge of panic.

  I tried to go over how I had come to that place. Should I have left Jessa alone? Probably. But she said her boyfriend had left her. Should I never have believed what people told me?

  Within five minutes of Fearless’s departure a peculiar pinging sound began emanating from the corpse. It had a nautical ring to it. His body juices settling, no doubt, I thought.

  I turned off the lamp and closed my eyes, determined to sleep until Fearless returned with his helper. No more t
han a minute later came another greatly extended bodily note. I turned on the light and wondered if I could push the trapdoor open.

  Tiny’s head was on the floor and his middle was bent backward so that his feet were next to his head. I decided that it was this uncomfortable position that made him so musical. Maybe if I straightened him out he might calm down.

  With great difficulty because of my hurt back, I pulled on the big man’s legs until he was lying flat on his stomach with one hand underneath him and one behind his neck. I would have straightened him out more, but he had soiled himself and was beginning to smell pretty bad. For a moment I worried that the odor might overwhelm me. I panicked and climbed the ladder, but when I made a tentative shove against the trapdoor I realized that I’d never be able to push my way out.

  I kept a tarp down there that I used sometimes when I had to do work around the house. I used this to cover the body and to contain the odors it was emitting.

  Then I turned out the light again. The next sound that came from Tiny was like that of a giant toad being pressed underneath him.

  I turned on the light.

  I was caught between my fear of the dark and the terror that light brought.

  “You gonna be fine, Paris,” I told myself. “It’s gonna be okay. You didn’t kill this boy. You didn’t ask him to come over here after you, actin’ a fool.”

  For a while there I blamed Useless for my problems. Just the fact of him dragging his unlucky hide to my doorstep, I reasoned, had brought this misfortune down on my head.

  But I couldn’t blame Useless. He hadn’t even come in my house. Anyway, if my cousin had caused the problem it would have been me stretched out on the floor instead of Tiny.

  For some reason that thought made me laugh. The laugh, in turn, made me smile; as long as I had a sense of humor I was on the way to recovery.

  That’s when Tiny twitched under his canvas blanket.

  It wasn’t a violent motion, more like a twist and a shudder. But when the man you’re sitting with is supposed to be dead, you don’t want to see any movement whatsoever.