With that, Three Hearts Grant stood up and marched toward the door. I followed her, wondering if her evil eye was powerful enough to protect me from the people that worked for the companies on Useless’s list.
67
M a n D o r n wa s o n his blue porch, puffing at a short cigar and sitting in the center of a mesh 11 hammock as if it were a chair.
“You movin’ in?” he asked me.
“Ms. Grant’s the tenant,” I told him. “But you can tell me somethin’ if you don’t mind.”
“What’s that?” the no-neck landlord offered.
“Who was Angel and Ulysses hangin’ out with before he went away?”
“Mad Anthony,” Man said with no hesitation.
“That’s it?”
“The only one I knew. People come in and outta there all the time, but I didn’t know their names. Angel didn’t have many girlfriends, and the men who visited Useless wore suits half the time.”
“Ulysses,” Three Hearts corrected.
“Any white men come to see Ulysses?”
“No,” Man said, shaking his head, “never.”
“You know where I can find Anthony?” I asked, all other options being closed.
“He stay at a white door in the alley between Ninety-first and Ninety-second, right off Central to the east side.”
68
FEAR OF THE DARK
I walked Three Hearts back to my car with the detritus of seventy-two thousand dollars in my pocket and the address of a brutal thug echoing in my ear.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Three Hearts said as we left the curb.
“No,” I said. “No police on this.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Three Hearts turn to regard me. She watched my profile for a moment and then looked away. She knew that I had gleaned some information that might have put her son in jail. She knew it and decided that she didn’t want to know the details.
That was fine by me. I was afraid even to speak the thoughts I was having.
I didn’t like anything about the road we were on: Useless with his rotten luck, his mother and her evil eye. And a woman named Angel in that community didn’t bode well either. All of that was just superstition, though. I could have gone to a good John Wayne movie and put those thoughts out of my mind.
But those money wrappers and that list were no wild fancy.
That was blackmail and extortion — maybe worse.
Th e a l l e y b e t w e e n N i n e t y - f i r s t and Ninety-second was a rut-ridden dirt path with tiny islets of asphalt here and there to remind you that it had once been an honest road, paved and straight. But now that alley was a place to buy and sell those things that were not legal. It was a place where a teenage boy could lose his virginity for ten dollars and where the woman who helped him could forget her sins for half that in white powder held by a cellophane fold.
The alley was a place where criminals congregated and 69
Walter Mosley
plotted doomed liquor store robberies and pie-in-the-sky counterfeiting schemes.
I parked on Ninety-first because any car left in the alley was asking to be stolen.
Three Hearts and I walked timidly at midday down the dark path to Mad Anthony. I wasn’t as afraid as I might have been because I did believe in Three Hearts’s power. But even the thought of standing face-to-face with one of Watts’s gen-uine gangsters made me quiver.
I had never actually been in the company of Anthony Jarman. I had seen him in side glances at glitzy Watts night spots and coming out of big fancy cars. Once I had seen him sitting in a booth in a gumbo restaurant on Florence. But I knew enough not to stare at a man like that. I wouldn’t have met his gaze any more than I would look a wild animal in the eye.
Fearless knew Anthony, actually referred to him as Tony.
But Fearless was almost as much of a legend as Killer Cleave in our neighborhoods. Most people knew that Fearless had been a behind-the-lines assassin in Europe during the big war. No one who crossed him stayed on his feet.
But I had no intention of invoking my friend’s name. Saying that I was there under the protection of Fearless Jones would have been like taking out a pistol and placing it on a table. Everyone knows that once the gun comes out, it’s bound to go off sooner or later.
I laughed when we got to the door, set in a decrepit brick wall at the very center of the block. It was as if Man Dorn had told me a joke when he called that portal white.
It might have once been white. But now it was lined with cracked paint. The cracks were filled with black dirt and soot.
The little white that was left had dried gray and green lichen 70
FEAR OF THE DARK
on it like delicate tile work. The doorknob was so rusted that you would have cut your palm trying to turn it.
