“Kit Mitchell.”
“What about him?”
“Do you know him?”
“He did some mechanical work for us a while back, two or three months ago, I think. Bartholomew had suggested him.”
“You seemed to be upset when I mentioned his name.”
“He wasn’t a very good worker,” she replied coolly. “I should have known better than to take a recommendation from Bartholomew.”
I didn’t believe a word of what she said, but Winifred L. Fine wasn’t the kind of woman you called a liar. Her breeding prohibited any such intimacy.
“Does Bartholomew’s problem have anything to do with Kit?”
“No,” she said with all the finality of Creation. “Go now, Mr. Minton. Come back when you have knowledge of my nephew.”
“Can I get a phone number?”
She pointed with her baby finger to a small stack of cards on the lower left corner of the desk. The card had two lines. The first one read W.L.F. and the second one had her number.
“You can show yourself out,” she said.
“What about Oscar?”
“What about him?”
“Isn’t he going to bring your malted?”
“I’m allergic to milk products,” she said. Then she turned her back on me and stared out upon the stone image of her younger, more vulnerable self.
11
“WHO IS THIS?”
“It’s Paris, Ambrosia. Fearless there?”
“He’s sleep.”
It was two in the afternoon.
“Wake him up for me, will ya? We got to be movin’ soon.”
“Who do you think you are, tellin’ me what to do, Paris Minton?”
“Listen, honey. I know you thought that you’d have him longer than this but playtime is over for a while. Fearless needs me to help out with a problem he’s got. It’s a big problem, and you would not want him thinkin’ that you kept him from me at an important point like the one we at right now.”
Love might be light in someone’s eyes, but hatred is silent and dark. Ambrosia didn’t say a word for a full thirty seconds, and then she put the phone down—hard. She yelled a few well-chosen curses, and then Fearless picked up an extension somewhere in the house.
“Paris?”
“. . . and tell that skinny-ass mothahfuckah that he bettah not show up at my door to get ya, neither!” Ambrosia yelled on her line. Then she slammed down the receiver in both our ears.
“Yeah, Fearless. It’s me.”
“You find Kit?”
“Meet me at the Emerald Lounge.”
“Why’ont you pick me up?”
“Because Ambrosia said she don’t want me there.”
“You scared of a woman, Paris?”
“No,” I said. “It’s just that I’m respecting her wishes.”
“I won’t let her hurt you.”
“Just get over to the bar soon as you can. All right?”
Fearless laughed and hung up the phone.
I leaned forward over my butcher-block table and recounted the five-dollar bills that had been stuffed in the envelope Winifred L. Fine gave me. There were 186 notes. Nine hundred and thirty dollars. Not the millions Milo was talking about, but a pretty big payday for a man who had never earned over two dollars an hour on a regular job.
The name Wexler was still nagging at me. It was as if I had heard it before calling the Bernard Arms. The newspaper was in the trash, the column heading WOMAN FOUND DEAD in plain sight. I remembered that when I thought about the name Wexler it was as though I had read it before. . . . And there it was—Minna Wexler. The
