“Sound like a setup,” Fearless speculated.
“No, man,” Milo said. “This is Miss Winifred L. Fine, the richest Negro lady in the forty-eight states. She’s not no thug or gangster. There ain’t even no way that you could tell what she’s thinkin’ about. You know people like that different than you and me.”
“I don’t know, Milo,” Fearless said. “I once had a girlfriend was a millionaire. White girl name of Bell, Solla Bell. She told me that her father had had two men killed that she knew of. She said it so that I would keep my head down when we were around where he had eyes lookin’ out. You don’t have to be a poor man to wanna kill somebody.”
“I don’t know about no rich white girls or their fathers, Fearless. All I know is that Miss Fine has pedigree and social standing,” Milo said, holding up his right hand as if he were swearing under oath. “She ain’t got nuthin’ to do with no lowlife element like we used to bein’ around.”
“Like Teddy,” I suggested.
“We got to move you, Mr. Sweet,” Fearless said. “Put you someplace that that white man cain’t kill you.”
“Yeah,” the bail bondsman agreed. “I’m beginning to think that Theodore Timmerman is a very dangerous man indeed. Where you think I could go?”
“My mama got a house I bought with the money we made last year. She wouldn’t mind you campin’ out a few days or so.”
19
FEARLESS CALLED HIS MOTHER and we dropped Milo off in front of the house.
From there I had a plan to gather information while keeping me out of harm’s way.
“What did you throw at that gunman?” I asked Fearless.
“Brick.”
“A brick?”
“Not a whole brick, but just a chunk, like a half like.”
“Where’d that come from?”
“I don’t know. It was there in the gutter, so I grabbed it. You know I used to like to play ball. I could’a played on the Pumas, but they spend half their lives in a dusty bus and I’d rather stay in one place.”
“But how did you know that brick was there?” I asked. “I mean, you reached down and grabbed that stone like it was put there just in case somebody started shootin’ at us.”
“It’s my army trainin’, Paris. That’s all. Wherever I am I look around me. I see things. I don’t think about ’em or nuthin’. I just see ’em, and then they’re there for me when I need ’em.”
“So when you got out the car you saw that little chunk’a brick on the ground?”
“I didn’t know I saw it but I did, and when that man started firin’ I knew it was there and I grabbed it. That’s all.”
“And what’s all this shit about a millionaire white girlfriend?”
“What about her?”
“You ain’t never said nuthin’ ’bout that to me before.”
“I don’t tell you everything, Paris. You know I’m a gentleman anyway.”
“No, baby,” I said. “There’s more to it than that.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I don’t wanna talk about it. Where we goin’ anyway?” he asked, trying to change the subject.
“I wanna go over to that rooming house that Kit had been stayin’ at,” I said. “Where was it?”
“Over on Denker.”
“Let’s go there.”
Fearless made a right turn and then another one.
After five or six blocks I worked my way back to the question about the millionaire white girlfriend.
“I never told you because it’s the kinda thing you always said that you didn’t wanna hear,” Fearless said.
I knew what that meant. I had always told Fearless that I didn’t need to hear about anything illegal because I never wanted to be in the position of being blamed for letting the cat out of the bag to the authorities or, worse, to some gangster who wanted revenge. Had that been a regular day with me at my bookshop and Fearless dropping by to shoot the breeze, I would have held up my hand and said,
“How long ago did you and this girl break up?” I asked.
“More’n six years.”
“Let’s hear it, then.”
“Okay. You heard of a man named Thetford Bell?”
