If I had been alone I would have died in that overpriced entranceway. But my friend, with his catlike instincts and reflexes, grabbed the gun and tore it from Sterling’s grip.
Sterling fell to his knees and screamed like a woman. He grabbed me by my thigh and yelled again, not so loudly this time. His eyes were popping out and the rictus of his smile was the epitome of terror.
Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed his face and leaned forward.
“It’s okay, man,” I said to him. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
His grin began to quiver, and his eyes fixed on a place that was far away from that room. The grip on my thigh loosened, and Mr. Lionel Charlemagne Sterling began to fade.
“No,” I said. “No, man. We’re not here to hurt you.”
The death grin was accompanied by a nod that did not comprehend my words.
He let go of my leg, but I grabbed his forearms in a hopeless attempt to keep him alive. But the blackmailer was dying, and nothing I could do would keep him from that fate.
When he’d fallen down on his back, Fearless touched his throat and put an ear against his mouth.
“Dead,” my friend said. Then he looked up at me. “Damn, Paris.”
“What? You think I knew somethin’ like this was gonna happen?”
“You the one brought us here, man,” he said.
“He killed himself,” I said. “He was scared because’a what he did.”
229
Walter Mosley
“Are we standin’ ovah a dead white man in Beverly Hills?”
he asked me.
“He died of a heart attack or somethin’ like that. We didn’t kill him.”
Fearless just shook his head.
“Damn,” he said again.
Th e r e wa s o v e r forty thousand dollars laid out on a bed in one of the house’s smaller bedrooms. I looked at it, counted it, placed it in a pillowcase, and put it down.
There was no other indication of Sterling’s criminal activity in the house. We left him where he had fallen in the foyer. If we were lucky, a housecleaner or relative would find him and that would be it —
“Should we take the money?” I asked my friend.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” he said. “Maybe we could find somebody he robbed an’ pay ’em back.”
We wa t c h e d t h e s t r e e t until no one was out and no car was coming and then made our escape.
While driving toward Pasadena we had the following conversation:
“You really blame me for this?” I asked.
“I don’t think you knew what was gonna happen,” he said.
“I don’t think you wanted him to die. But it’s just the way you go about things, man. You too much. You too hard.”
“Hard? Me? Man, I couldn’t beat up two outta three high school kids.”
230
FEAR OF THE DARK
“Not hard fists, Paris. It’s your mind. You treat people like they was books, man. You just open ’em up and start goin’. But really you should come up slow an’ check it out first.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I had the feeling that he was telling me the truth, that I was at least partly the cause of Sterling’s death. But what could I do about it? He was the criminal. Wasn’t he?
231
I t wa s e v e n i n g b e f o r e we arrived at 1329 Hugo Place. The address sounded as if it 36 belonged on a small house like Sterling’s cottage. But this was a mansion. There was an eight- foot salmon pink adobe wall around the property and wrought-iron gates blocking pedestrian and vehicular passage.
There was a button for a buzzer to the right of the gateway.
“Okay, Fearless,” I said. “What do you say? Do we knock or not?”
“They got your people in there, man,” Fearless said. Then he tried the pedestrian gate — it wasn’t locked.
A hundred feet from the entrance stood the house.
It was a big house, three floors in places. There were no lights on, no cars in the driveway.
My heart was pounding like John Henry’s hammer, and I worried about a heart attack. Maybe I’d die like Sterling had, from fear. Even Fearless couldn’t protect me from my own heart.
The moon was bright enough to light our way and expose us to invisible assassins. Every footstep we took on the gravel path was like a giant maraca announcing us to our enemies.
232
FEAR OF THE DARK
