payday.”
I returned to my wooden chair. Fearless slumped back on the couch.
“How would he pick up the money for the day’s sales?” I asked.
“He’d go to each truck at the end of the day, count the melons, and take what they supposed to have.”
“How’d he know how many melons they supposed to have if he didn’t ask you?”
“I give a count sheet to Maynard and he give it to Kit. But Kit was gone since Monday last. The drivers just kept what they collected.”
“Why didn’t Kit stay at the farm?” I asked.
“He had spent months growin’ them melons. He said he was goin’ stir crazy and that he was afraid his girlfriend was runnin’ around.”
“He was afraid his girlfriend was runnin’ around but he didn’t say nuthin’ about his wife?”
“You gonna let me talk, Paris?”
“Go on.”
“Anyway, Leora told me where she lived and I said that I’d get a line on Kit. I asked around until I found out where Maynard was, and then I went over to see him.”
Fearless sprawled out on the couch. Upset as he was, he made himself comfortable as a plains lion. I was hunched over and at the edge of my seat. That was the difference between Fearless and me. He was relaxed in the face of trouble, where I was afraid of a bump in the night.
“Maynard didn’t know too much,” Fearless continued. “He said that he used to pick Kit up at a bus stop on Western at four A.M. I asked him if he ever said about anyplace he might hang out. At first Maynard didn’t remember, but then he thought about Mauritia’s country store on Divine.”
Mauritia’s was a hole in the wall that sold clothes and beauty products for Negro women. They carried hair irons and skin lighteners, fake fingernails and different brands of makeup designed for various hues of dark skin. I had only been in there once. I remembered that it smelled of coconut and rubbing alcohol.
“So you went to Mauritia’s?” I asked, trying to urge him on.
“Maynard said that early one morning a week before, Kit had three boxes and that he had Maynard help him drop them off at Mauritia’s front door. So I went over there to see maybe if he worked for them part-time or somethin’ like that.”
Fearless sat up, took his coffee cup from the floor, and brought it to his lips. He made a loud smacking sound and grunted his approval.
“It’s after three, Fearless. What did they say at Mauritia’s?”
“They said that they remembered a man looked like Kit come over to their place a couple’a times but that’s all they knew. He was just droppin’ off for the man usually bring ’em their Madame Ethel’s supplies. A guy name of Henry T. Orkan.”
My eyes were sore. I had been up until midnight reading
“Orkan lives out past Compton at the end of a lane that didn’t have no other houses on it. I called up a cabbie I knew and had him drive me out over there for a favor yesterday.”
“You mean Sunday,” I said.
“Yeah. Orkan is a crazy old guy. He come outta his house with a shotgun cradled in his arm, askin’ me what I wanted on his property. It was nutty, Paris, like he was some kinda moonshiner in the back country instead of a man livin’ in the middle of a big city.”
I knew that Fearless hadn’t been afraid of that man sporting a shotgun. Fearless had never been afraid of anything.
“Did he tell you where Kit was?”
“At first he was all cagey, but when we got to talkin’ he warmed up. He told me that Kit just showed up one day with a receipt for the boxes of beauty supplies. He dropped by after that pretty regular for two weeks, and then he didn’t come anymore. But he had got a number for Kit, though.”
“So this Orkan is a beauty product distributor?” I asked.
“I guess he is. That place’a his looked like a shanty down at the Galveston shore. No paint on it and all lopsided and messy.” Fearless shrugged. “I called the number Orkan gave me. A woman name of Moore answered. I asked her about Kit and she said that she wouldn’t talk on the phone but that I could come by if I wanted to.”
“Why didn’t she want to talk on the phone?”
“Superstitious I guess. You know country people’s scared’a all these machines they got today.”
“So you went there?”
“It was a big old ramblin’ house. Must’a had a dozen tenants or more. They told me that Kit had taken a room on the top floor, but that he hadn’t been back there since the first day he didn’t come in to work.”
“Wait a minute, Fearless,” I said. “If Kit got a room on the top floor of a rooming house, then how could he walk out on his wife and child?”
“That’s what I went to know from Leora,” he said. “I went over to her apartment and asked why didn’t she know that Kit had another place. But she said all she knew was that Kit had been away at his watermelon farm. So I told her where he had been stayin’.” Fearless hesitated again.
“What?” I asked.
