“I have reason to believe that Hector killed somebody else tryin’ t’find my cousin. So I really wish you’d stop bein’ all beautiful an’ perfect for just a minute and answer some simple fuckin’ questions.”
“Paris,” Fearless said.
“You could leave any time you want, Fearless. This girl here got us up to our necks in crocodiles, and I cain’t help what comes outta my mouth.”
“Excuse him, ma’am,” Fearless said. “He’s been under some strain. He needs to know who it is killin’ who out here.
He needs to know it or he won’t be able to sleep in his bed.”
“I, I didn’t know about Hector,” Angel said then. Maybe she didn’t.
“What were Hector and Ulysses doin’?” I asked.
Angel looked to be full of information, but she didn’t say a word.
172
FEAR OF THE DARK
“I got to know, girl,” I said, the whiskey awash in my brain.
“I don’t know you, Paris,” she said. “The kind of trouble Ullie is in could put him . . . and me in jail.”
“I bet Hector would take jail over what he got,” I opined.
“Hector was a friend of Ullie’s,” she said. “Not so much a friend but an acquaintance. Hector knew a white man named Sterling. Sterling knew about men,” she said tentatively.
“What kind of men?” I asked.
“Men like Katz and Reverend Drummund.”
“Rich men?”
“Not rich but in charge of great wealth.”
“Oh, Lord,” Three Hearts moaned.
“What was the hook?” I asked.
“Me,” Angel said softly but without any deep sense of shame that I could tell.
“How so?”
“I’d go to them with a purse full of money. Five thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds and the promise that I had ten times that. I’d say that I wanted to invest the money in their companies or, in the case of the church, that I wanted to use it for the greater good. When they’d wonder how I made the money, I told them about a system I used in betting in poker games. Hector would set up a fake game and I’d go there with the reverend or V.P. and show them how I’d win. The game was always fixed. After a few nights they’d be hooked and get into a big game where I’d lose ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars of their institution’s money. After that Hector would blackmail them, threatening to tell their employers that they’d put the company’s money on the line.”
At the last words, she shed a tear and swallowed a sob. I believed that they were cheating those men but not that poor 173
Walter Mosley
Angel was an innocent who regretted her part in the scheme.
She regretted Ulysses running away with her money. She regretted some killer hungering after her soft throat. But she didn’t give a damn about the men whose lives she’d ruined.
I didn’t care about them either, but I wasn’t the one who brought them down.
“You poor child,” Three Hearts said.
“You have any idea where my cousin is?” I asked.
“There’s a cabin in the Angeles National Forest. Sterling owns it. Ullie liked to go up there.”
174
I h a d u n l o c k e d the doors of my Studebaker for the women to climb in back. I was 27 about to get in the driver’s seat when Fearless said, “Uh, Paris?”
“Yeah?”
“You bettah let me drive, man.”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause you drunk.”
I looked at him and took in a deep breath.
“I am not.”
Fearless put one finger against my chest and shoved with barely any force. I would have been on the ground if the car wasn’t behind me.
How many whiskies had I downed? I couldn’t remember.
I fell into the driver’s seat and crawled to the other side.
Fearless got in and put his hand out for the key.
While I was giving it to him, Three Hearts said, “You really should watch your liquor, Paris.”
“Watch my liquor? Watch my liquor? What I should do is watch my front do’.”
“Paris,” Fearless warned.
