“Where’s Loretta?” Fearless asked.
“I thought it was best if she took a few days off,” Milo said, his voice suggesting more.
“I’ll bite,” I said.
“I went to see Lawson and Widlow,” Milo admitted. “I took a business card that said my name was Brown. I told them that I had a client named Love who had found a bearer bond worth a few thousand dollars to the owner.”
I could see that Milo intended to earn his thirty-three percent.
“And what did they say?” I asked.
The bailbondsman sat forward. “At first they acted like they weren’t too concerned. But when I suggested shopping the bond around, they said that that wouldn’t be such a good idea. They let it drop that I could get in trouble if the wrong people found out about the bond. I said maybe I should go to the police. They offered me a finder’s fee right then and there.”
“How much?” Fearless asked.
“Five thousand dollars.”
“What then, Milo?” I wanted to know.
“I said some names then. Leon Douglas. Fanny and Sol Tannenbaum. I said that that wasn’t all, and I wanted some real money for my client or they was gonna be up to their elbows in J. Edgar.”
“So where’d you leave it?”
“I got a answerin’ service under the name’a Brown at a switchboard downtown. I gave Widlow the number and told him to call me inside of a day.”
“Have they called yet?”
“I was waitin’ for you’n Fearless to come ’fore I checked.” With that he picked up the receiver and dialed. He waited no more than the span of a ring and said, “Brown, sixteen-sixty-four.”
Milo looked up and started snapping his fingers at me. He made the motion of writing and pointed at Loretta’s desk. I ran over, finding a yellow pencil and an unused envelope. I brought these back to Milo’s desk.
“Hold on, hold on,” Milo was saying into the receiver. “I got to get a pencil. All right, go on. Yeah. Three-
Milo frowned at the words he had written down, then he smiled and said, “They wanna meet us at their office tonight at eight-fifteen. They said that the security guard’ll meet us at the side door in the alley and let us upstairs. What do you think about that?”
“We ain’t got the bond,” I said.
“A sheer technicality, my boy,” Milo responded cheerfully. “If Lawson and Widlow are still looking, it means that your girlfriend hasn’t brought it to them yet.”
“The bond’s worthless,” I said. “Well, not worthless, but only worth the face value.”
“How would you know that?”
I related the improbable tale of two American Negroes and the Israeli secret service.
Milo wasn’t phased. “Well,” he said. “Lawson and Widlow don’t know that. We just jack up the price to ten or fifteen thousand and let them find out on their own.”
“Yeah,” Fearless added. “But we tell ’em that it ain’t no deal unless we sit down with Zimmerman.”
“Why complicate matters, Mr. Jones?” Milo asked. “Get the money and get out, that’s what I say.”
“Money ain’t everything, Milo.”
Milo tried to argue, but Fearless wouldn’t budge.
MILO GAVE Fearless a small .32-caliber pistol that he had taken as a payment from a man charged with distributing counterfeit bills. It was not the kind of weapon Fearless commonly used.
“I usually like somethin’ wit’ more bite,” he said. “But in a sitchiation like this, somethin’ small is even better.”
“Situation like what?” I asked. We were driving toward downtown. Fearless was testing different places to conceal his weapon. He tried his belt, the sleeve of his windbreaker, even in the elastic of his sock.
“Whenever a man tell ya he gonna meet you at the side door, you know he got somethin’ t’hide,” Fearless said. “An’ if he’s hidin’ one thing, then he might be hidin’ somethin’ else. An’ then you got to worry. Me, I don’t like to worry, so I just hide somethin’ myself.” With that he shoved the pistol in his pocket and shrugged.
“Well, you just keep that thing in your pocket, Mr. Jones,” Milo said from the backseat. “This here is just business. Plain
