“Sure. You know I didn’t do nuthin’ except for trip ovah my own big feet.”
“You might’a saved Fearless and you shoutin’ took that rifleman’s aim on you.”
Even the thought of such an action put fear in me.
“What happened in there?” I asked.
“Fearless had knocked out both Al Rive and Rex Hathaway before I got inside. Then we went up the stairs. I started shootin’. It was an office buildin’ so I didn’t have to worry about people gettin’ hurt. Steven Borell was shootin’ down the stairs at me while Fearless went out a window and then back in through a side stairway. He jumped Borell and knocked him 258
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ovah. Nobody got killed an’ the cops had their bail jumper, so they didn’t question how we got it done.”
Those were the most words I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.
“Thank you,” he said again.
“You the ones did the work,” I said.
“I’ll find the Handsome brothers and Mannheim for you, Paris,” he said. “Gimme a day, two at most, an’ I’ll have what you want.”
“I can pay you,” I said.
“No, brother. You already have.”
259
F i n a l l y I d r o v e h o m e . I wasn’t worried about losing business; people were used to 40 my being closed at odd hours now and then.
And it wasn’t like there was any other bookshop in the neighborhood. The customers I had would come back when my problems were over — that is, if I lived that long.
I carried Useless’s leather suitcase upstairs to my desk, thinking about the trouble he’d caused. I hadn’t even let him in the front door and still my fat was in the fire. It was so pathetic that I had to chuckle. Useless was more deadly than an out-break of smallpox in a tuberculosis ward.
I put the suitcase on the far side of my big desk.
Sun was streaming down from the window behind me.
There was the scent of Mum’s floral perfume rising from my shirt. A sheath of sweat was forming at the back of my neck, and I felt unsure about opening Useless’s bag.
Instead I tried to think my way back along the path I had taken. It was what I did whenever I got lost on the road; I’d pull my car to the side and sit there remembering all the turns I had taken and directions in which I had gone. Whenever I did that, the right way would come to me.
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I thought about Useless at my front door and Jessa after him. I remembered running down Central and being saved by Sir and Sasha. There was Ha Tsu, Jerry Twist, Auntie Three Hearts, and an Angel with horns. I thought about Tiny Bobchek with the hole in his temple. Hector had killed him. But who had killed Hector? Lionel Sterling? No. Jessa?
Mad Anthony had been murdered too. Useless had admitted to that killing. He claimed self-defense and I believed him.
Mad Anthony was a killing machine. Shooting him from the back with a tommy gun was self-defense in my book.
I made a turn at Mad Anthony. He was the leg breaker.
That made sense. I went from him to Hector. Hector was deep into all of this mess. He was after Useless because my cousin was going to take the money and run. Angel and Useless had found out about the counterplot and bolted. It was all falling together. There was reason in the mayhem. I was somewhere near home when I ran into Sterling. He wasn’t afraid of some unknown assassin. His fear was of someone he knew and worked with.
A dead end. As if I thought that murder would ever be as neat as a road map.
I eyed the worn leather of Useless’s suitcase, wondering idly who had owned that luggage before my cousin. It looked old enough to belong to Useless’s great-grandfather: the general who had either loved or raped, as some versions of the story went, Three Hearts’s husband’s father’s mother. The name was given as a kind of oral history that would pass down from father to son, memorializing both the greatness and base nature of our beginnings.
Who had owned that suitcase? There was a leather tag 261
Walter Mosley
holder strapped to the handle. I flipped it open, but the name, written in purple ink, had gotten wet and was nothing more than a blur.
I had spent half an hour trying to work out that name when I realized that I had gotten lost again.
From the bottom drawer of my desk I took a pair of thin cotton gloves that I kept for just such a purpose.
I undid the straps and flipped the latch of the suitcase. Inside, there was a large accordionlike folder made from durable brown paper. The folder had eighteen separate sections. Fifteen of these were in use. Fourteen of them contained an accounting sheet, between three and six black-and-white photographs, letters of love, and a little bag of receipts from hotels, restaurants, and upscale luxury stores that sold expensive clothing and jewelry.
The photographs were of the men in question gambling and in compromising positions with Angel. Some of the pictures were quite explicit, making me wonder if Useless was the photographer. The accounting sheet listed every transfer of funds from the mark to the blackmailers, also the probable dates on which the monies had been embezzled.
The letters were the most embarrassing. It surprised me that every man had written to Angel. My mother had told me a long time ago never to sign my name to anything unless I was compelled to by law or the possibility of profit. She hadn’t used those words exactly, but that’s what she meant.
