Mutual Life of Cincinnati
Claims and Investigations
The phone number was local, however. The ink on the bottom line was slightly smeared.
“Is there a finder’s fee if I can get this to Fearless?”
“Yes,” he said. But I could see that the idea was novel to him. “Sure. Two and a half percent.”
“That don’t sound like much.”
“Out of fifty thousand that’s over twelve hundred dollars.”
“Oh,” I said. “Damn. Well, let me ask around and see if I can come up with something.”
Timmerman grinned again. “Can I use your toilet, Mr. Minton?”
“Sorry, but I got a girlfriend in the nude back there. Well, she’s not exactly a girlfriend. I mean, we just met each other last night. There’s not too much privacy and I don’t wanna get her all upset with some big man walkin’ in. You see what I mean.”
We were both liars. Almost everything we’d said to each other was a lie.
He nodded, looked up over my head again. I got the feeling that he wanted to catch a glimpse of a naked black girl.
“Well,” he said, still hesitating, still looking for a way in. “You have my number.”
The big man in the poorly chosen clothes walked away, taking the six wooden stairs of my front porch in two strides.
“Mr. Timmerman.”
“Yes, Mr. Minton.”
“Fearless got a lotta friends. How come you came to me?”
The white man looked at me a moment. He was trying to figure out where I stood in his business.
“Sweet,” he said at last. “Milo Sweet was listed as a contact for Mr. Jones. When I went to him he gave me your name.”
It was time for me to think. Was the bail bondsman holding paper on Fearless? Was that why Fearless was on the run?
No. Fearless wouldn’t lie to me. Not unless it was to protect me, or maybe he was protecting someone else. No. The story was too complex for his style of lying. Fearless’s lies were no longer than a few sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two.
“Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”
He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.
“Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.
I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.
“I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”
“Me?”
I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.
“Did you jump bail, Fearless?”
“No.”
“Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”
Fearless shook his head.
“He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”
Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.
“He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”
The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”
“Probably not.”
“Why you say that, Paris?”
“He called you Fearless, not Tristan. Seems to me that anybody care enough about you to leave you fifty thousand dollars would at least know your legal name.”
“Fifty thousand. Damn. I hope you wrong, Paris. You know I been lookin’ for fifty thousand dollars my whole life.”
That made me laugh. Fearless joined in. I pulled a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf on the wall and some
