“Tea?” Fearless asked me.
“Since when do you drink tea?”
“My auntie Leigh Lenore used to drink tea with lemon every mornin’.”
“What’s that got to do with you?” I asked.
“In that jail cell I used to think how much I missed Leigh. I really loved her, and that made me think about tea. You want some?”
I took the tea but turned down the lemon.
“I bought milk,” Fearless said.
“What did Latham say?” I asked.
“I think it was Man. Jam. Manjam,” Fearless said. “Jamman. It was the name of somebody or something, I’m pretty sure.”
“You really think so? All it sounded like was a cough to me.”
“I listened to a lotta dyin’ men, Paris. The trick is you got to keep your heart open. You got to listen wit’ your heart. That’s the trick.”
The tea, from the cracked pottery crock that Fearless had found on some shelf, was hot and made me feel good. I let my eyes close for a moment, which was a mistake because William Grove’s death stare came up in my mind.
I sat up quickly and said, “Let’s get over to Milo’s.”
“SO WHAT YOU THINK we got here, Paris?” Milo Sweet asked me.
We were sitting in his office, listening to the gentle clucking of hens through the heating vents. Loretta was there and so was Fearless, but the discussion was between me and Milo.
“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I mean really — I don’t know.”
“One always knows something,” the bailbondsman replied. “It’s just that we don’t know it all. What is it that we
I got his meaning and so tried to think. Sometimes I find thinking out loud is the best way to solve a problem. Of course, I’ve also found that thinking out loud is the best way to get yourself into trouble too.
“Well,” I said. “We know that there are people, white people, looking for a bond that Sol Tannenbaum gave to Leon through Fanny and Elana for protection in the joint.”
Milo nodded. Fearless sat back and laced his fingers behind his neck. Loretta let her eyes run up and down his long, strong body.
“We know there’s a real bond because we saw it.”
Again Milo nodded.
“We know that Leon was after Elana, but then they were together, that there was a white man at the Pine Grove Hotel who met with Latham and Elana probably about the bond. Maybe he even has the bond now. Maybe he’s the one with the money. If that’s true, then Elana’s long gone. There’s another white man, John Manly, he said, who knew that Sol wasn’t home. He wanted to talk to Fanny in the worst way, but he was probably just a real-estate agent who heard about Sol somehow and thought he might find someone who needed to sell off their house for hospital bills. And then there’s the little old white man named Zev Minor, who came to their house and opened the front door without ringing the bell. Latham is dead. William Grove is dead. Fanny Tannenbaum is dead. My bookstore done burned, and Sol is in the hospital — and it’s him probably that stole the money in the first place. And, oh yeah, whatever money there is, it’s between ten thousand francs and ten million dollars.”
“Shouldn’t you just drop it?” Loretta Kuroko said.
“What’s that, Loretta?” Milo asked. He didn’t sound angry or brusque at his secretary for interrupting our talk. He was sincerely interested in her opinion.
“A policeman is dead, Mr. Sweet. A cop. They can come and take you away over that, take you away for good.”
Fearless sat up. I began drumming my fingers on Milo’s desk.
“But he was a crooked cop,” Milo said. “The newspaper didn’t even identify him as an officer. You know somebody’s hidin’ somethin’ behind that. And this is real money too.”
“Anyway,” Fearless added. “We didn’t shoot him.”
“Why would any’a these people burn down your store, Paris?” Milo asked. He blew out a thick cloud of cigar smoke.
“Man as mean as Leon Douglas, he might burn the muthahfuckah down just outta spite,” I said.
