“No, no, miss,” the burly, all-white cook was saying. “This is the dinner menu. The meat loaf is two ninety-nine, not one fifty.”
“It says right here that meat loaf is a dollar fifty cent,” the young woman said, pointing.
“It says lunch from noon to four right here,” the cook, who had a kindly face, insisted.
“You shouldn’t have the lunches on the same menu with the dinners,” the girl said. “I wouldn’t have even eaten here if I thought I had to pay all that.”
“I’m sorry,” the big man said.
The woman took out a small red purse and reached in.
“Oh, no,” she said.
“What now?” the waitress, who was almost as large as the cook, said.
“I must have left my wallet at home.”
“I do not trust you,” the cook said, and I wondered what his native language might have been.
“I’ll just go home and bring it right back,” the woman went on as if she had not heard his words.
10
FEAR OF THE DARK
“No,” said the man. “You will be staying here and Diane will be calling the police.”
The woman attempted to rise, but the man with the kindly face held up a warning hand.
Diane turned to go toward the counter.
People all over the diner were craning their necks to see what was happening.
“Rita?” I said. I was standing next to the cook with a restraining hand on the waitress’s elbow.
The dirty blonde looked up at me, trying not to seem confused.
“Hey, Rita. It’s me . . . Paris. Don’t tell me you lost your wallet again. I told you you got to remember to put it in your purse before you leave the house.”
“You know her?” the cook asked.
Instead of answering, I handed him a twenty-dollar bill, the first twenty I’d had a hold of in a few weeks. That’s the reason I had come to the diner, because I was flush and didn’t have to eat pinto beans and rice for once.
“Rita Pigeon,” I said, lying easily. “We work at the Lido Theater. I take tickets in the afternoon, and she’s the nighttime usherette.”
“Bullshit,” Diane, the obese waitress, said.
“Watch you language,” the cook said. “Don’t speak like that around customers.”
“What customers?” Diane spat.
“Come on over and sit with me, Rita,” I said to the blonde.
“And could you bring us some coffee with milk?” I asked the waitress.
Diane was going to tell me where I could go, but one gesture from the cook and she was on her way.
11
Walter Mosley
“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 12
FEAR OF THE DARK
Idaho. He’d never understood racism. There are many white people like that, even in the South.
