“Real estate,” I said. “His company is a white company, and Sterling was in real estate too. Maybe Sterling knew some white dude, a potential client, who liked black girls and he came to Tommy askin’ ’bout a girl who could show him a good time. That brings us to Angel. One thing leads to another, and an opportunity for blackmail emerges. After a while Tommy’s in the catbird seat, targeting white men who have their hands on money but don’t have no money themselves.”
“So Angel was in on it from the beginning?”
“Maybe her. Maybe there was other girls. I don’t know. Angel don’t mattah. It’s Tommy the one.”
Fearless let the words wash over him. You could see him imagining not so much the details of the crime but the qualities of the man.
“So he like a pimp?” Fearless said at last.
“Yeah,” I said. “Not to mention a kidnapper, a killer, and a blackmailer.”
Fearless nodded and asked, “So what next?”
“There’s one problem,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“That suitcase.”
“Where is it?”
“I burned it.”
“Then it ain’t a problem,” Fearless reasoned.
“Where it came from is the problem,” I said.
“Ulysses said he took it from Hector’s house.”
“But we know he didn’t,” I said. “How’s he gonna be so lucky to get there after the killer kills Hector and before the deaf neighbor calls the cops?”
“So what you think?”
“I think Angel had the bag.”
“An’ where’d she get it from?” Fearless asked. He was getting nervous, tapping the toes of his left foot on the wood floor.
“Either from Hector after she killed him or from Thomas after he did.”
“You think she in it wit’ him?”
“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, accenting 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 pastries, then looked back at Fearless in his silver and gray.
We were at the end of the road. The journey had started 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.
Chapter 46
Fate tried to save us. She brought us to the real estate office, but Thomas Benton Hoag 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?”
“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.
“Where to?” 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.
“Ain’t nobody evah ready, man. You could be layin’ up in some hospital bed dyin’, an’ somewhere yo’ boss fires you for not callin’ in. How you gonna be ready for that?”
Nadine Grant was hustling out her front door when we got there.
“I don’t have any more time to waste on you people, Paris,” she said, trying to move around us at the front gate. “I have to get to work.”
“Three Hearts in there?” I asked her.
“They moved,” she said with a voice that somehow reminded me of a hammer at work.
“Where to?”
“Four houses down,” she said. “The red place with the blue fence. It come open for rent and all of a sudden Hearts realized that she had three hundred dollars in her bag. Here she haven’t even paid me for a banana and now she payin’ rent for Useless and that nasty girl.”
Nadine hurried off to her car, talking to herself about my aunt and how she did her wrong.
I wanted to leave then. I had a deep conviction that Nadine was right, that my family was something to avoid.
“Come on, Paris,” Fearless said. “Let’s get this ovah wit’.”
We walked down the street and up to the front door of the dark red house. There was a jack-in-the-box and a broomstick with a horse’s head in the yard. There were boxes with the name Georgia Arnold written on them on the small walled-in porch.
I knocked on the door, and after maybe a minute, Three Hearts answered.
“Hi, Paris, Fearless,” she said.
I should have known by the way she said my name first that something was wrong. As it was, I wondered why she was no longer angry with me for calling her boy Useless.
She led us through a kind of utility room into a larger space. I could see Angel sitting on a straight-back chair, and Three Hearts gasped as someone dragged her to the side.
Fearless and I came in to see Thomas Benton Hoag holding a small-caliber pistol to my auntie’s head. Next to him was Cousin Useless tied down in a chair.
“I’ll kill her and you too,” Hoag said. “Just gimme a reason.”
It seemed odd to me that his dialect had changed to street. But then I guessed that he was under pressure and the way he spoke now was his true self.