“And so he met you here?”
“Yeah.” Charlotta picked up her blouse and swaddled her breasts with it. “He met me out front at about ten. At first he was nice, but then when I didn’t know what he was talkin’ about he started beatin’ me.”
Charlotta began to cry.
“What did he want from you, baby?” I asked softly.
Brown came back with a blue pitcher and a drab green first aid kit.
Fearless went to work on the bruises of Charlotta’s lumpy face.
“He wanted to know if Kit had a old book and who was Kit workin’ with.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked for more than one reason.
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no book or nobody he been workin’ with except for BB. I told him all that, and he beat me anyway and then threw me out the car. Ow!” This last was because Fearless was putting iodine on a cut above her left eye.
“Did he ask you where he could find Kit?”
“No.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Like a white man,” she said as if that explained everything.
“Was he fat?”
“No. He was slender-like.”
“Ugly?”
“Plain.”
“What color hair?”
“It was nighttime, Paris. I didn’t see no color but white.”
“Was there anything strange about him?”
“He talked like a Mexican.”
“He had a Spanish accent?”
“Uh-huh. Yeah.”
“You gonna have two shiners by mornin’, girl,” Fearless told her.
“Oh Lord,” she said. “Why they always pickin’ on me?”
Fearless lifted her in his arms and then put her down on the bed. He took off her shoes and skirt, her stockings, and even took away the blouse she still had clutched to her chest. Then he covered her and ran his fingers over her head.
“You should take some’a this aspirin,” he said. “’Cause them bruises gonna hurt in the mornin’.”
Charlotta loved the attention she was getting. I think if they were alone she would have asked him to stay.
“Charlotta?” I said.
“Yeah, Paris?”
“Do you still have the number that man left?”
“No. It was in my bag. But I dropped that in his car.”
“What kinda car was it?”
“A red Ford.”
37
FEARLESS, BROWN, AND I WENT UP to my room for a powwow.
“We know about Son and Leora,” I said right off. “And that Oscar called you to come out here and help them with the book that white man was after.”
“You know everything then,” Brown replied. He was getting fidgety, tapping his left foot and looking around.
“No,” I said. “Not everything. Not where the book is or who killed the Wexlers and Kit.”
“Kit’s dead? Since when?”
“Probably the same time the white folks got it.”
Brown’s cheek jumped from an involuntary tic, but that seemed to come from the nervousness descending on him and not guilt.
“I need some water,” he said.
