“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 28
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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 knee-caps 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.
M i l o p u l l e d u p a t t h e c u r b 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, 29
Walter Mosley
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 know . . .”
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.
Th e f r o n t d o o r t o m y s t o r e 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 30
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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
