he?”
“I don’t know,” Useless said, shaking his head and looking pitiful.
“How did you know to call Twist to get us out of jail?”
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Walter Mosley
A liar’s desperation spread across Useless’s face, and I knew that I had him.
But I was wrong.
“I got a call from a guy who wanted us to get back into business. He told me that he had my mama and if I wanted her to be all right I’d have to give him what I got in this here suitcase.”
“What guy?”
“Paris,” he replied, “you don’t wanna get too deep in this, Cousin. These men is dangerous.”
Now I was sure that he was lying.
“Who was it, Ulysses?”
“A white man named Lionel Sterling. He the one called me.”
“He had your number?”
“He called Jerry Twist and told him that if he talked to me to tell me to call. He said that I’d like to hear what he had to say.”
Useless might have been the best liar I’d ever met.
“Sterling’s dead,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Three Hearts proclaimed. “Not another one dead.”
“He wasn’t dead when he called me,” Useless said, approximating a man telling the truth.
“How did you know we were in jail?”
“Sterling told me. He had his men question Three Hearts about the men she’d been wit’ —”
“That’s right,” my auntie said. “They asked and we told them that you had been arrested.”
“Why would they ask you that?” I asked Three Hearts.
“I don’t know.”
My frustration was rising. Something was a lie here. Something wasn’t true. And Useless knew what it was.
“When Fearless and I went to see Sterling,” I said to Use-242
FEAR OF THE DARK
less, “he was scared the minute he saw that we were black.
That’s what frightened him. Now, if he’s afraid of black people so much, how he gonna get three black men to kidnap your mama an’ girlfriend?”
“Maybe he wasn’t scared,” Useless speculated. “Maybe he only pretended to be afraid so you wouldn’t suspect him.”
I wanted to ask: That’s why he had a heart attack an’ died in my arms?
“People out here dyin’ because’a you, Cousin,” I did say.
“Leave him alone,” my aunt countered. “You’re the one gettin’ people in trouble. You’re the one see somebody and then he turns up dead.”
That was the last straw for me. I said, “You come to my house, drag me out in the street where I get my butt kicked, thrown in jail, surrounded by murderers, blackmailers, pimps, and thieves . . .”
“Paris,” Fearless said in a low warning tone.
“. . . You shoot a man with your own gun, kill him dead, don’t even cross your heart for a blessin’ when you talk about it, and still you gonna sit there next to that liar you call a son and blame me for killin’ the man Useless here just said ordered your kidnappin’.”
“His name is Ulysses,” was her reply.
“Maybe to you,” I said. I realized that I was hovering over my relatives. “Maybe to you he’s some Greek hero, some descendant of a poor slave woman got in the way of a war. But to me he’s useless, hopeless, inadequate, futile, a waste of time.”
Three Hearts stood up.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“Get out, then,” I said, not myself at all. “Get the hell out.”
“Come on, Ulysses,” was her reply.
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Walter Mosley
Useless stood. So did Angel.
“But you ain’t takin’ that suitcase.”
Fearless hopped down from the counter.
