Fear Itself - Walter Mosley

I got up on one elbow, stayed there for what felt like a month, then I rocked up into a sitting position. I was moving fast by then. It took me no longer than five minutes to remember my legs and feet and the possibility of walking.

I stared at the phone for a long time, I have no idea how long, trying to remember Ambrosia’s number and how to dial it. I knew I had tucked it away on a slip of paper someplace but it was beyond me to think of where.

What I did think of was my little cousin Aster, a young girl, not yet five, who died in a flash flood when I was six. She was my best friend, and when my mother took me to her parents’ house to help with the preparations we found them washing the body before putting her in her Sunday dress. I asked could I wash her feet, and I remember her mother, a big West Indian woman, cried and wrapped me in her arms. My mother wouldn’t let me wash Asty’s feet, but that night I dreamt that I washed her soles and between her toes with a real sea sponge and perfumed soap.

Looking down at the phone, with Theodore’s corpse in the periphery, and thinking about dreaming about washing my dead playmate’s feet, I suddenly remembered Ambrosia’s number.

“Hello,” she said without the slightest shred of civility.

“Fearless there?” I asked in a voice that belonged to a dead man.

“Do you know what time it is, Paris Minton? It’s three in the mornin’. First Fearless don’t get in till two and I just fall asleep again, and then —”

“Get him for me, Ambrosia,” I said. “I don’t have time to play.”

Maybe she could hear the stress in my voice. Maybe Fearless had talked to her about me being his closest friend. Whatever it was, she stopped her complaints and a moment later Fearless was on the line.

“What’s up, Paris?”

“I just killed Theodore Timmerman.”

“I’ll be right there,” he said.

He hung up the phone in my ear, leaving me holding on to the receiver and thinking about how Aster would scream and giggle when I tickled her.

“HE’S SURE ENOUGH DEAD,” Fearless was saying. “No doubt about that at all.”

I had pulled up a chair next to the corpse while Fearless examined the body.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said.

I had been saying things like that since Fearless got there. I said I was sorry. I said I didn’t mean to kill him. I asked Fearless why did he have to try and hurt me like that.

“You didn’t kill him,” Fearless said.

“What you talkin’ ’bout, man. I hit and hit and hit and hit, and he fell dead.”

“If anybody killed him,” Fearless said, “I’m the one. I’m the one threw that stone. I’m the one threw him down and tied him up. But Paris, we took him to the hospital. We called to make sure he got a bed. What else could we do? And what was you supposed to do wit’ him stranglin’ you like that? I mean, if there was ever a case of self-defense in Los Angeles, it’s this right here.”

“Yeah I . . . Yeah I . . . guess.”

Fearless put his hand on my neck. I thought he was trying to console me, but then I felt a pinch on a muscle next to the big vertebra. A pain went down my back and up into my head that was beyond any physical hurt I had ever known. I cried out and tried to get away from the hold but Fearless would not let go. It seemed as if he had taken up Timmerman’s job and planned to kill me too.

Finally he released his grip and I fell to the floor writhing. Fearless picked me up and carried me to the bathroom in the back of the store. He turned on the shower I had installed over the bathtub and threw me in, clothes and all.

The water was freezing!

I tried to climb out but Fearless wouldn’t let me. He held on to my arms and legs until I was almost numb with the cold. After long minutes he pulled me out and said, “Dry off and then go upstairs and change, Paris. We got business to take care of here.”

“Man, what the fuck you do that to me for?” I shouted, sputtering with rage.

“You was slippin’, Paris,” he said, giving me a one-shoulder shrug. “Shock, man. You know I been on the front lines. I seen boys experience death for the first time. And here you think you killed that man. We ain’t got time for no sanitarium, so I just put you through the crash course.”

I was so cold that I was shivering. The quavering in my chest and Fearless’s offhanded manner made me laugh. I did that a bit and then stopped for fear that my friend might throw me back in the shower.

It was at that moment that I accepted myself as a killer.

40

I CHANGED CLOTHES QUICKLY, not thinking about the dead white man downstairs at all. Fearless had been busy too. He’d found two old blankets and some rope and trussed the body up so that now it looked like an oversized, unfinished doll.

“Here, Paris, let me take care of that finger.”

While he bandaged up my torn nail he kept talking. “I emptied his pockets. It’s all on the table in your kitchen. Now I’m gonna take him out somewhere and get rid of him.”

“Don’t you think we should call the cops?” I asked.

Fearless just shook his head.

“I, I’ll go with you, though,” I offered.

“No, Paris. I don’t need you and it’a be bad enough if one of us is found wit’ a dead man in the trunk. I know what I’m doin’, brother. You just do what you do with his things.”

I watched as Fearless carried the man-doll down to the street and dumped him in the trunk. I didn’t worry about the money or even my book in there. I was a new man, at least for the moment, concentrated on the task at hand.

ALL THEODORE TIMMERMAN LEFT in the world was a package of mint gum, a roll of nickels, one of his own fake insurance cards with Craighton at pull lay 10:30 scrawled on it, and a ring of three keys. The keys were probably to his apartment, but the address would have been in the wallet that Fearless had confiscated before taking him to the hospital. We’d tossed the man’s pants, wallet, and shoes in a bin downtown. There was no finding his address.

And why would I still be chasing him down anyway? He tried to kill me three times already. There was no reason for me to put us into further jeopardy. The one real threat to me was dead. I had killed him with my own two hands.

The memory of the fight flooded my mind. For my entire life I had imagined what it would be like if I would fight to the death against some tough and come out victorious. But the reality was empty. I still felt guilty, even though he was a bully and white and had intentions of killing me. I felt I owed something to the world because I was a murderer and Fearless Jones was out covering my tracks.

I GOT TO MILO’S OFFICE at about four in the morning. The streets were empty of traffic. It didn’t take me long to locate Milo’s operatives file. The problem was that it was in one of the cabinets that Timmerman had overturned when he went after Milo to find out Winifred Fine’s identity.

Hindered by my sore finger, I took a while to flip the metal cabinet, but I finally got it.

Timmerman had his checks mailed to an address on Ogden Drive just north of Venice Boulevard.

IT WAS A HOUSE, not an apartment, on a street that was empty of any potential witnesses. The first key I tried in the lock fit. The numbness of my near-death experience kept me from fear or common sense. I went inside without even knocking. What if he had a girlfriend or a roommate? But those thoughts didn’t cross my mind until weeks later. At that moment I was a fool on a mission. And all the bricks of the road to hell were falling right into place at my feet.

The house was dark and so I ran my hand along the wall until I found the switch.

Mr. Timmerman hadn’t cleaned up once since the day he had moved in. The sink and tables were full of crusty dishes. The garbage stank and he had forgotten to flush the toilet before leaving his house to hunt down Bartholomew Perry, Kit Mitchell, and me. There was a rug in the bathtub, I never did figure out why. His bed was littered with half-filled potato chip bags and magazines with pictures of nude Negro women on every page. The floor was his hamper and every shade and curtain in the house was drawn.

Sherlock Holmes would have been at sea in that grubby hole. The skip tracer’s papers were in among the dishes and newspapers and scattered with coffee grounds.

Some mothers think they’re showing love by cleaning up after their sons, but in the long run they make them into feral things, growing bacteria in their bedrooms and filling the air with fungus and dust.

I looked around aimlessly for a while and then concentrated my search. I figured that even a slob like Timmerman would have a special place for important papers and projects. I was looking for a trunk or a briefcase, a filing cabinet, or maybe just a corner of a closet that didn’t have the clutter of the rest of his house.

Over an hour later I hadn’t found a thing.

The back door of his kitchen led to a small walkway in a yard overgrown with weeds and the branches of an untrimmed oak. Through the leaves and boughs I found another door. This one opened into his garage.

I knew from the moment I flipped the light switch that Theodore Timmerman was insane. The garage was neat as a pin. The floor was tiled with black and white squares that had been perfectly laid. He had three different desks, a telephone, one white upright filing cabinet, and over four thousand watts of light to illuminate every corner.

The life of his mind was in the garage, whereas his house was a trough where he ate and masturbated. Looking over his files I could see that he was a man of many faces. He used jobs like Milo’s to worm his way into more lucrative, if less legal, activities. He had files on dozens of men and women he had chased down, and scams that he ran through the mail on a regular basis. There was one whole file of photographs. Most of these were of the incriminating variety: people in places they shouldn’t have been, men and women making love, grinning so wide that you just knew they weren’t married—at least not to each other. But then there were other pictures that were more disturbing: men in sexual situations with young boys, over two dozen photographs of corpses, with detailed notes about the circumstances of their deaths. One photograph was of a young woman who I had first read about in the L.A. Times. Minna Wexler was stripped to the waist. One of her large breasts had been marred, maybe burned. Lance Wexler looked just as he had when I came across him in his apartment. Kit Mitchell was also pretty much the same as I had found him.

Timmerman had killed them all.

Theodore Timmerman was a pornographer, murderer, extortionist, and blackmailer. And Milo had been working with him for years. I didn’t think that Milo knew what this man was up to, but just the fact that he didn’t suspect him put the bail bondsman in a whole new light for me. I would never again trust his estimation of people or situations. And there was another thing . . .

At the back of the top drawer of his center desk I found a tiny leather notebook like the one Sergeant Rawlway took notes in. The notebook had page after page of handwriting that covered every detail of the cases that Timmerman was covering. His descriptions were cruel and humiliating, but they also served the purpose of obscuring the identities of the people he stalked. Toward the end of the little book there began the entries about Bartholomew Perry. The most important segment read:

. . . Watermelon Man must have had a weak heart . . . he had a telephone number that Craighton answered . . . Craighton made Mr. Sweet’s salary look like chump change . . . Craighton sent me after Titty mama and Strong boy but they didn’t know shit . . . it was the nigger who knew but he died before he could even tell me where the car salesman lived . . . but I got some leads . . . pretty soon Mr. Sweet will have to get me into that rich woman’s house . . .

I read everything he had to say about Bartholomew and Kit and Milo. It seemed that somewhere along the way he became aware of the book. It was probably the man Craighton who told him. But there was no information about who this Craighton might be. It was clear that the mystery man was the mastermind behind Timmerman and that he was willing to pay big money for Winifred Fine’s book.

There was no more information on Craighton. A new player with no face or even a race. He had to be rich, that’s all I knew for sure.

Later entries were about Fearless and me. I ripped out those pages and returned the book to its place in the drawer.

I spent another hour searching the garage-office. Under a loose tile I found a rusty metal toolbox that had stacks of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills in it. It was a lot of money but I didn’t have my usual sticky-fingered reaction. When I looked at that money all I could think of was those pictures of perverts and corpses. Blood money was one thing but Ted Timmerman’s money was drenched in filth. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.

I left the house of evil at about eight forty-five.

41

WHEN I GOT BACK HOME Icleaned my place from top to bottom. I washed the floors and windows and walls. I dusted and scrubbed until the whole place smelled of cleaning fluid. By four that afternoon I was exhausted.

It might seem that I had wasted the day on trivial matters, but that’s not true. While I mopped and swept I was thinking and plotting. The murder of the Wexler kids was ordered by an enemy of Maestro Wexler, of that much I was sure. This faceless foe, named only Craighton, had hired Timmerman to take out the kids and steal the book. With the book this new player—also a millionaire, I surmised—would shake down Winifred and get control of the prime property in Compton.

All I had to do was figure out who it was that stood to gain from the loss of both Wexler and Fine. That might have been an impossible task, but I had one advantage: Bradford, the personal secretary and self-styled mother hen of the Wexler clan.

I had to wait until nine that evening to use the number the personal secretary had given me, but that was fine. I spent a couple of hours rereading the poem “Little Gidding” from the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. The language swept me away until six, when the phone rang.

“Hello,” I said, with a fair certainty that it would be Fearless on the other end of the line.

“Paris?” she asked. “Have you heard from Fearless?”

“Hey, Ambrosia. No, I ain’t seen ’im since early this morning.”

“What you call him for anyway? You know he ain’t been back here since then.”

“He said that he had some business with a man he wanted me to introduce him to. Probably they got down to some work.” I was pleased being obscure with the taciturn Ambrosia.

“I’m worried about him, Paris. He said that we were gonna go to Big Mama’s Bar-B-Q Pit tonight.”