“I know they were in it together at the beginning,” I said.
“At least that’s what makes the most sense.”
Fearless frowned and began tapping the toes of both his feet.
“Naw,” he said. “That girl loves Ulysses. You know he’s the apple’a her eye.”
“How come you say that about Angel but you don’t see it in Mona?” I asked.
“Mona don’t love me, man,” Fearless said with certainty.
And before I could ask another question, he said, “She wants me. I’m everything she wants, but I ain’t what she need. I ain’t the man she gonna love, not really.”
“But Angel loves Useless?”
“Down to the jam between his toes,” Fearless said, accent-ing his words with a vigorous nod.
I took a deep breath and then another. I watched the line of workingmen and -women waiting for their coffees and pas-tries, then looked back at Fearless in his silver and gray.
We were at the end of the road. The journey had started 298
FEAR OF THE DARK
with Useless at my doorstep, plying his star-crossed fate. Now there was just one thing to do.
“We go to Schuyler Real Estate and deal with Thomas,” I said.
Fearless nodded, put the last corner of hotcake into his mouth, and stood up straight.
299
Fa t e t r i e d t o save us. She brought us to the real estate office, but Thomas Benton Hoag 46 wasn’t there.
The white man who was sitting at his desk wanted to speak to us because he was so angry.
“Do you know where Thomas is?” he demanded.
“We came here lookin’ for him,” I explained. “We thought he was here.”
“Three days ago he stopped coming,” the white man (I never got his name) said. “Just stopped coming. He has clients who have lost faith in this office. He has records that I can’t read. What the hell kinda business is that?”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Fearless said.
That caught the white man up short.
“What?”
“If you had a friend,” Fearless reasoned, “and all of a sudden he wasn’t at work, didn’t answer his phone, wouldn’t you be worried that somethin’ bad happened to him?”
“We went to his house,” the white man, who was fat and wore a blue-and-white pinstriped suit, said. “He wasn’t there.”
“Maybe he’s in a ditch,” Fearless suggested. “Have you called the police?”
300
FEAR OF THE DARK
“I, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“You just thought that he was tryin’ to mess wit’ you. You thought that he was gonna give up his commission to get drunk or take a vacation for a few days.”
The fact that Thomas’s boss didn’t have an answer went way past racism. There was something wrong with the man.
There he was working with someone who had committed all kinds of crimes and all he could think about was that he hadn’t come in to work. He was a fool in baseball stripes, nameless in my mind but as American as the hot dog.
“ Wh e r e t o ? ” Fearless asked when we were on the street again.
“Nadine’s,” I said on a sigh.
Fearless grinned and we were off.
On the ride I asked, “What can we do about this dude if we get him?”
“He probably run,” Fearless said. “I mean, that’s what a smart man’d do. All them dead men and his suitcase gone.”
“But what if he ain’t? What if he after Useless still?”
“Then we gots to stop him.”
I remembered Cleave’s hard words in the car on the way to Tiny’s burial. I knew what Fearless meant and I wasn’t sure that I could manage it. Killing was a hard business — not like selling books or finding money in a dead man’s car.
This last thought made me chuckle, but there was little humor in the sound.
“Try not to worry about it, Paris,” Fearless said. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
“But I got to be ready,” I said.
301
Walter Mosley
