Walter Mosley - Fear Itself

Fearless unbuttoned Charlotta’s blouse and took it off. He scanned her flesh, prodding here and there. I supposed that he was looking for wounds or deep bruises. It was odd looking at the body I had spent so much time with. There was no allure left, only tight little bruises and slack muscles.

“She gonna be all right?” I asked Fearless.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Her head ain’t hurt except for some hard slaps, and these bruises ain’t deep. It’s just some arm punches. First she fainted, then she passed into sleep.”

Fearless pinched her cheek hard and Charlotta opened her eyes.

“What?” she said, and then she sat up.

She realized she was half-naked but that didn’t seem to bother her, at least not at first.

“Paris, what happened?”

“Brown said that you came in and said a white man beat you.”

She gasped with the memory. “Yeah. Yeah. Bastard beat me like a rug.”

“Who?”

“Some man left a message for me. I called him back and he said that he needed to talk about Kit.”

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“Uh-uh. He called Miss Moore and told her that he owned a restaurant that Kit had been in with his girlfriend and that he left somethin’ behind. He gave her his number and she give it to me. She was all mad, sayin’ that if I talked to Kit she wanted her twelve dollars.”

“And you called the man?”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about but I was, you know, curious.”

“And so he met you here?”

“Yeah.” Charlotta picked up her blouse and swaddled her breasts with it. “He met me out front at about ten. At first he was nice, but then when I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about he started beatin’ me.”

Charlotta began to cry.

“What did he want from you, baby?” I asked softly.

Brown came back with a blue pitcher and a drab green first aid kit.

Fearless went to work on the bruises of Charlotta’s lumpy face.

“He wanted to know if Kit had a old book and who was Kit workin’ with.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked for more than one reason.

“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no book or nobody he been workin’ with except for BB. I told him all that, and he beat me anyway and then threw me out the car. Ow!” This last was because Fearless was putting iodine on a cut above her left eye.

“Did he ask you where he could find Kit?”

“No.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“Like a white man,” she said as if that explained everything.

“Was he fat?”

“No. He was slender-like.”

“Ugly?”

“Plain.”

“What color hair?”

“It was nighttime, Paris. I didn’t see no color but white.”

“Was there anything strange about him?”

“He talked like a Mexican.”

“He had a Spanish accent?”

“Uh-huh. Yeah.”

“You gonna have two shiners by mornin’, girl,” Fearless told her.

“Oh Lord,” she said. “Why they always pickin’ on me?”

Fearless lifted her in his arms and then put her down on the bed. He took off her shoes and skirt, her stockings, and even took away the blouse she still had clutched to her chest. Then he covered her and ran his fingers over her head.

“You should take some’a this aspirin,” he said. “’Cause them bruises gonna hurt in the mornin’.”

Charlotta loved the attention she was getting. I think if they were alone she would have asked him to stay.

“Charlotta?” I said.

“Yeah, Paris?”

“Do you still have the number that man left?”

“No. It was in my bag. But I dropped that in his car.”

“What kinda car was it?”

“A red Ford.”

37

FEARLESS, BROWN, AND I WENT UP to my room for a powwow.

“We know about Son and Leora,” I said right off. “And that Oscar called you to come out here and help them with the book that white man was after.”

“You know everything then,” Brown replied. He was getting fidgety, tapping his left foot and looking around.

“No,” I said. “Not everything. Not where the book is or who killed the Wexlers and Kit.”

“Kit’s dead? Since when?”

“Probably the same time the white folks got it.”

Brown’s cheek jumped from an involuntary tic, but that seemed to come from the nervousness descending on him and not guilt.

“I need some water,” he said.

I poured a glass from my private sink and handed it to him. He took a wax paper packet from his pants pocket and poured a foul-looking powder into the glass. He drank it down in one big gulp, after which he grimaced and coughed.

“What’s that?” Fearless asked.

“Medicine,” Brown said.

“Doctor give you that? In wax paper?”

“No. Witch woman from down in Louisiana.”

“Not Mama Jo?” Fearless asked.

“Yeah. How you know that?”

“Jo’s famous, man. She got people comin’ all the way from South America to get her cures.”

In just the few moments it took them to speak Brown began to calm down.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got this nerves thing that fucks me up. Sometimes I get so crazy that I could put my fist through a brick wall, and then sometimes I might be so sad that all I can do is cry and sleep. Doctors couldn’t do a thing. But Mama Jo had me out there in her swamp house for three days, and when I left she give me these packets and says take one if I feel the lows comin’ on. I could still feel it for a while but it don’t get to me.”

“About the book,” I said.

“Yeah. Yeah. I found out that Kit was stayin’ here, so I moved in hopin’ to get a hint about where he put it.”

“Why’s he holdin’ on to it in the first place?”

“I don’t know for sure but the best bet’s money,” Brown said. “BB said too much about what that book was worth, so Kit decided that he didn’t need no partner.”

“And what about you?” Fearless asked.

“What about me?”

“Are you crazy or what? Are you workin’ with that white man worked over Charlotta and tryin’ to put it over on us too?”

Fearless was dumb as a post when it came to letters and other intellectual concerns. He couldn’t follow an eighth-grade fairy tale. But he knew people, at least most people. He understood the workings of the heart. But his greatest knowledge was at those moments when he was aware of what he didn’t know, when he looked into a darkness that even his bright soul could not illuminate. Brown was such an anomaly. He was a cipher, a man without even a proper name.

Brown grinned, then he chuckled. He was used to hiding when he was standing in plain sight. I felt then that I was seeing him for the first time.

“I’ve done some bad things, Fearless,” Brown said. “Things I’m not proud of and things could put me under the jailhouse. But since I been takin’ these herbs and whatnot I haven’t lost control for a moment. And you know I’d have to be crazy to be killin’ white people ain’t done nuthin’ to me.”

You could have spent a year interpreting Brown’s simple declaration. There was a Bedlam and an Alcatraz, maybe even a gallows, woven in between the lines. But all of that was unnecessary, because Fearless listened to him and then nodded as if to say, This man has got the job.

“So what do you know that we don’t?” I asked.

“What’s your business in this first?” Brown asked back.

“We have been offered a lot of money,” I said. “But mainly I just wanna know that I’m not gonna get squashed by some man thinks I’ve done him harm.”

“Well, that last part is okay,” Brown said. “But I don’t know about the money. What I plan to do is get the book and give it to Leora so that she can work out a deal to keep her aunt off our back.”

“We might could work that together,” I said. “We take a little less money and Miss Fine gets her prized possession.”

“I don’t know,” Brown said. “I don’t think I could go along with that. I mean, what if Miss Fine does business with you and then give us the shaft?”

“What if we find the book and you didn’t wanna work with us?” I replied. “This way we both got coverage. Me and Fearless get some money and peace’a mind and you get a happy family.”

“But how do we trust each other, man?”

“You can trust me,” Fearless said. “Whatever it is Paris says, I’ll make sure that it’s true.”

Brown’s smile made it to his eyes for the first time.

“Okay, Brother Fearless. All right. You give me your word and I’ll take it. But you know I don’t know a whole lot. Oscar called me a week ago and said that he needed my help. Leora was already out here to get Son back from Winifred. At first I was worried that somethin’ happened to her or Son, but then Oscar told me that Bartholomew had sent some man in to kidnap Son, that he knew about it because he was in it with Leora. But then the man took Son also stoled their family book. Now he was callin’ and sayin’ that he wanted fifty thousand dollars for it.”

“Kit?”

“Yeah. BB had been in it but Kit cut him out.”

“What about the Wexlers?”

“Kit told Oscar that he had a white man wanted to buy the book already. He was ready to spend almost fifty. He told Oscar that he had to have the money in three days or the white man was gonna get the book and Winifred would come down on everybody.”

“What’d he mean by that?”

“Oscar was in it with BB and Kit in the first place. He set it up so that Kit could take Son. But he didn’t know about the rest.”

“And you run down here from Chi?” Fearless asked.

“Yeah. I was waitin’ for Leora and Son. But she didn’t come because Oscar had called her too. I took the train and started lookin’ for Kit. I heard that he was at this rooming house, so I came here. They told me about him and Charlotta, so I kept my eye on her.”

“Don’t make no sense,” I said.

“What?”

“Why would Kit waste his time on Oscar if there was somebody wanted to buy the book already? I mean, the white man had to be Maestro Wexler or his son. They got almost fifty thousand dollars layin’ around in the closet. Why give Oscar time to raise the money?”

“Maybe because he killed the kids,” Fearless said.

“Kit’s been dead too long for that,” I said. “Same man killed him probably killed them too.”

“You right, Thad—I mean Paris,” Brown said. “Why would Kit waste time with Oscar? I mean, Winifred had already went to the police because’a the necklace.”

“She didn’t tell the cops about Son?” I asked our new ally.

“No. She was afraid that the cops would wanna know where his parents were.”

“I don’t get it,” Fearless said. “If this book is the big thing, why Kit wanna mess around with a hot necklace?”

It was a good question, reminding me that Fearless was a thinker too.

“Oscar let Kit take the necklace. That was what they agreed on to pay Kit for his taking Son.”

“So Kit had to take the choker in order to keep Oscar and Leora from suspecting about the book,” I said.

“Yeah. Oscar promised to pretend that the emerald got misplaced,” Brown added. “But once he realized about the book, he told Winifred that Kit stole the necklace.”

“Somethin’ must’a gone wrong on Kit’s side,” I said. “Somehow Lance was in trouble and Kit needed to get his money fast. He leaned on Oscar but instead Oscar put you and Leora on the case. Maybe he was thinkin’ that Leora could set him up and then he’d send you in to take him down.”