“Simon.”
“What?”
“Where does Lily live?”
“I don’t know.” He was near tears. “I’m sorry.”
Then came the hard part. I wanted to get out of there without getting killed. The blond bully was six two at least, and he did hard labor for a living. I was five eight, a bookseller by trade, and a bookworm by nature. I didn’t think that I could swing the piece of iron in my hand hard enough to stun the mechanic. And I had to believe that he had a gun somewhere in his little apartment. If I just walked away, he’d get to that gun before I could drive off. I was pretty sure that I could nail the guy point blank, but at six paces away I might as well have been packing a cap gun.
Killing him was the best option, that was my first thought. But there was Gella sitting in the car. I couldn’t expect her to be quiet about murder. So then I thought about wounding him, shooting him in the thigh, after that maybe hitting him in the head.
Then I came to my senses. I brought up my left hand to steady my aim. Tears sprouted from Simon Jonas’s eyes, and the high-pitched sound of a small animal came out of his throat.
“Get down on your belly, boy,” I said.
The little animal screeched from under his tongue.
“Get down.”
Simon did a belly flop right there in his doorway. The moment he was down I turned tail and ran for the car. I jumped into the driver’s seat, slipped the key into the ignition, and turned over the engine in record speed. I had taken four sharp turns before Gella could sit up in the backseat.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Get down!”
She obliged and asked again, “What happened?”
“He doesn’t know where Morris is, but he saw him.”
“When?” she sat up again.
“At lunchtime.”
“Was he all right?”
“I guess not if he left you all alone. But Simon seemed to think that he was just fine.”
“Where did he go?”
“Don’t know.”
“Did you ask?”
“Why you think I was there?”
“Why were you running?”
“Because Jonas is a big white boy not too pleased with a black man ringin’ his bell in the middle’a the night.”
“You’re scared?” she said. “But you have the gun.”
“And so you think I can just go up and down the street shooting anybody I want?”
“I just think that you don’t need to be scared.”
“Jonas didn’t know where Morris was,” I said, not wanting to discuss my lack of bravery, “but I’d like to look around the office he has with Minor. Do you have a key somewhere?”
“There’s a duplicate key in the big plant outside the front door,” she said. “Mo leaves it there because he forgets to bring his sometimes.”
IT WAS a four-story office building made from brick; not tenement or factory brick, but solid, English-manor-house blocks. They were red, even in the night, and flawless. There was no fancy entranceway, but the door was flanked by five- foot pine trees set in gigantic terra-cotta pots. There were three windows stacked above the front door, each looking into the hallway of that floor. There was a dim light shining somewhere on three.
“What floor does Morris work on?” I asked Gella. We were parked across the street from the building, on Melrose. There was nobody out at that time of night.
“Two,” she said.
“So the key is in that pot on the right?”
