“Perry?”
“That’s him. You know him?”
“Him and father—Esau. Bad relations is what I calls ’em. Definitely the colored side of the family.”
“You don’t like ’em?”
“They family so I have to put up with ’em on Christmas and Easter, but other than them days I wouldn’t let them into my outhouse.”
I liked her candor even if she was mad.
“What about a young woman named Leora Hartman?”
“Leora,” Rose said. She grinned, showing us that she’d lost more teeth than she’d kept. “She’s a feather bed in God’s sanctuary.”
“You know her?”
“Know her? She’s my little girl. My baby.”
“Your daughter?” I asked, surprised and a little confounded.
If Leora belonged to Rose, then the connection to the house was even stronger than it had seemed. Maybe I should have spent a little more time talking to the demure colored woman.
Rose didn’t have many teeth but her hearing was better than mine. She made an unpleasant sound in her throat and darted back down the hall she’d come from. Two seconds after that the scuffed lime door came open.
“Miss Fine will see you both,” Oscar informed us.
“Lead on, my man.”
THE CURTAINS WERE already open when we entered Winifred Lucia Fine’s study. Her nude image in the fountain was still attempting the impossible. My heart still skipped at the beauty.
It struck me that Maestro Wexler’s home was much more opulent but somehow the beauty had gotten lost in all the majesty of his residence.
“Fearless Jones,” my friend said, approaching the matriarch and holding out his hand.
I could see that she didn’t want to shake, but the pressure of his friendliness got to her and she gave up a weak squeeze.
“Winifred Fine,” she said.
“I had a aunt named Winfred,” Fearless said. “She lived in Mississippi in a little cabin off’a the Tickle River. Whenever anybody in my family got in trouble they’d go and hide at Aunt Winfred’s. The house was built on a overhang and you could stay up under there catchin’ and fryin’ catfish until the law gave up and you could move on. She’d still be there except for a flood in ’forty-eight. Now she’s up around St. Louis. She still gotta basement to hide in, the fishin’s not too good though.”
“My name is Winifred, not Winfred,” Miss Fine said.
“She’s a good woman,” Fearless agreed.
“I need to ask you some questions, Miss Fine,” I interjected.
“About what?”
“Me and Fearless found your nephew.”
“Where is he?”
“You got to answer my questions first.”
“Did I not pay you, sir?” she asked, using elocution that she probably learned at the same black college that her niece, Leora, attended.
“Question is, did you pay me to walk down the stairs or jump out the window?”
“What is all this?” she asked, waving both hands at the sides of her head. “River hideouts. Jumping out of windows.”
“Fearless here is a rough customer, Miss Fine,” I said. “He’s a nice guy and fair but he’s known around Watts as one of the two or three most dangerous men in the entire city.”
“Are you trying to threaten me?”
“No ma’am. And it wouldn’t matter even if I was, because Fearless would not hurt a woman no matter what I said. But when we broke in on your nephew, Fearless told him that he better act right or he might get hurt. BB was scared.”
“I can imagine,” Winifred said.
“That’s right, ma’am. He was afraid of Fearless, but then, when we mentioned your name, he threw down and swung on Fearless like he was Sugar Ray Robinson up against a tomato can. Fearless had to knock your nephew out. Not only that. When he came to he begged us not to turn him over to you.”
“I’ve already paid you.”
“Not to bring a man to the slaughter.”
“That’s ridiculous. I would not harm my nephew.”
“Somebody’s been out there harmin’ people,” Fearless said. “Harmin’ up a storm.”
