“Yes I do.” And then, “Paris, where are you?”
35
MILO CALLED FEARLESS and told him where I was. Fearless picked me up, in a brand-new Ford Crown Victoria, at the city library three hours after I called.
We had already said our hellos, and I explained the dumb charges that held me in jail.
“Why Milo take my call?” I asked Fearless. “I mean he never takes a collect call unless it’s from one’a them bounty hunters.”
“Open the glove compartment,” was Fearless’s reply.
There was a fat envelope there with my name on it. I was loathe to touch it.
“Go on,” Fearless encouraged me.
It held a thick wad of cash.
“Thirteen thousand,” Fearless said. “Plus the eight hundred from poor Wally and the five hundred I owed you for my fine.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a present from Gella Greenspan.”
“What?”
“After I got to Dorthea’s I called Gella to see how she was and to tell her somethin’,” Fearless said. “But she was arrested just like you. They wanted to charge her with the murder of her husband or her auntie or both, but they couldn’t figure out how to make the charge stick and they had to let her go.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Fearless said, grinning. He was never much on sarcasm. “And then I told her what Sol said.”
“When did Sol say somethin’?”
“Oh yeah. Sol wasn’t dead when I got to the hospital. He told me about the money he stoled before he passed.”
“He told you?”
“You see, he put the money in a bank in Montreal — that’s in Canada — under Gella’s name, but he didn’t tell nobody. The account number and everything was in a picture he framed and gave her. It was a picture of Fanny laughing and wearing a green dress.”
“But, but what about the bond that Elana Love had?” I asked. “What did that have to do with it?”
“Oh yeah,” Fearless said. “Sol said that that bond was just practice.”
“Practice?”
“Yeah. He wanted to see how to convert dollars to another country’s money. That was all it had to do with the millions.”
“I don’t get this, man. Why he wanna tell you?”
“He liked me ’cause I came with Fanny. And he wanted to make sure that Gella got the finder’s fee. So I went to her and she wanted to give the money to Israel like Sol wanted, so we went to Manly. Only they had already kicked him and his boys outta the country.”
“Say what?”
“They were over here pretendin’ to be architects or sumpin’. A rich Jewish guy friendly with the Jewish government signed their papers. He the one own that hotel they was in. Anyway the cops looked into Latham’s death and came up with Manly and his boys. But then Gella decided to go over there on her own.”
“She left the country?”
“But she give us one-half of one percent. Forty thousand dollars.”
Fearless drove along, chatting happily. He had bought his mother and sister houses, and he owned the Ford he was driving. I did the math on one-half of one percent. The solution made me sweat.
THAT WAS some months ago. The police drop by my new bookstore on Florence now and then and ask me about the old landlord and that fire. Antonio took a ninety-nine-year lease on the lot and put up a new Superette. That burned down too, under suspicious circumstances. All the suspicion was cast on me, but no one could prove it.
I still see Charlotte, and sometimes Fearless and I get together for drinks. He’s broke and needs a loan now and then, but I don’t mind.
