But I was wrong. She moved closer to the desk than I had dared and stared deeply at the man. Her tiny face became steely and she turned away, walking from the room with more fortitude than she had coming in.
My enemy became that telephone in the foyer. If she 146
FEAR OF THE DARK
stopped there to call the police, I was done for. Either she’d see me or they would come and find me.
I could sneak up on her, knock her senseless, and run —
but no. She was too old and I was too close to my mother.
A minute passed and I heard nothing.
Another minute.
I moved out from behind the curtain and into the foyer.
The woman was gone.
I went back into the foyer and through another door. This led to a kitchen, which had a back door that led to a yard. Then there was a fence, another yard, an alley, a street. I ran as fast as I could until I was in the driver’s seat of my jalopy again. As I turned the ignition, I heard the far-off whine of sirens.
My heart was beating like bongo drums; my soul was deep in the ecstasy of escape.
147
I d r o v e d i r e c t l y f r o m the scene of the murder to Santa Monica Beach.
23 Whenever I am frightened I head for water.
Don’t ask me why. I’m not a good swimmer and I don’t know the first thing about boats. My uncle always used to say that the fish must have known it was me at the other end of that line because they never took my bait.
But despite all that, the water makes me feel secure. The Mis-sissippi and the Gulf of Mexico were my solace in Louisiana; now that I was a Californian, the great Pacific was my pro-tector.
I went to a bench in a park that stood maybe a hundred feet above the ocean at the end of Olympic Boulevard. There I sat and tried to make sense out of a life that, if I were a white man, should have been as boring as a cardboard box.
The last time I had anything to do with Jessa I found her lover murdered on my floor. And now I had found her again and another man had been murdered, a man who was after my cousin Useless.
It almost made sense. Almost.
I couldn’t hear the waves but I could see them, cresting white and breaking rank at the sand.
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FEAR OF THE DARK
Useless was being followed by Hector. Hector, for some unknown reason, had killed Tiny. Then Jessa, who knows why, had gone away with Hector. Now Hector was dead.
There were people I had never met who were involved with Useless. There was the white man Stringly and the men who were being blackmailed or extorted or whatever. There was Mad Anthony, whom I did know.
What I didn’t know was if any of this mattered to me.
At almost any other time I would have gone home and left the killing of Hector LaTiara to the LAPD. They wouldn’t care too much about a black man getting his throat cut. And if they decided to investigate, it would be about the criminal life he lived and not about some Negro bookseller from South L.A. But I had already tried to ignore a crime that had come to me via my cousin. Tiny’s corpse was stalking me still. Hector might do so too.
After this last thought my mind went blank. I couldn’t get any further into the problem. I was not the kind of man who made bold decisions about events that could harm or kill me. I moved behind drapes, sought out shadows. But there I was in the light of day between the rock (Three Hearts) and the hard place (her son).
“ B a i l b o n d s , ” Loretta Kuroko answered on the first ring.
“Loretta.”
“Hi, Paris,” she said happily. “Hold on.”
“Hello?” Fearless said.
“Hey, man.”
“You sound like the house burnt down and the dog died,”
he said. “What’s wrong?”
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Walter Mosley
“I got to see you, Fearless, and this really ain’t the kinda talk you can have on the phone.”
“Okay, man. Fine. Milo off wit’ Whisper, so I could take some time. I don’t have a car, though.”
“I’m out at the beach,” I said. “Santa Monica.”
First-time lovers and real friends don’t need much language. Fearless knew my predilection for the sea when I was frightened. He knew I would find it hard to come to him.
“You at the place you usually go?” he asked.
“No. But I can get there.”
“See ya in forty-five minutes, Paris. Hold on, brother.”
M y
