I stayed silent for a long moment to make him think that I was considering the options he presented. I wanted him to believe I might leave him hanging.
“Okay,” I said. “All right. I’ll take the seventy-five hundred, but you got to promise to keep my name out of it.”
“You have my word.”
Words: from the Emancipation Proclamation to the names on the ballots every election day, they had a life of their own and precious little to do with the truth.
43
IT’S FUNNY HOW YOU START OUT trying to help somebody else and end up in business for yourself. Fearless had come to me to find out why the cops were after him and what was going on with Leora and Son. That was all behind us, but there I was, still hanging in there, trying to make money out of thin air.
Bradford Craighton had gone into business for himself. Minna and Lance had come to him, the trusted family employee, and asked him to help make Maestro pay them for their crime. Bradford saw his chance. All those years working for the big man made him hungry for the real thing.
Paris is even more beautiful when you don’t have to walk to work every morning of your life.
But Kit took the book and called asking for more money than the down-at-heel secretary could raise. When Kit said that he’d go directly to the Fine family, Craighton thought that he’d lost his one chance. Then came Teddy Timmerman. But Timmerman also betrayed him. He killed the kids, killed Kit, and now Bradford was out on a limb. But there was the slight hope that he could still get the book.
The last two threats to my security were Maestro Wexler and the weasel Bradford. The master wanted to find the killer of his children and he looked to me as a guide. Of course I couldn’t very well turn over his secretary, because then I could be implicated in the secretary’s crime. And Bradford would need me out of the way sooner or later because I knew about his crimes.
I called the Seventy-seventh Street Precinct from a phone booth on Central Avenue.
“Police department,” a white woman answered.
“Sergeant Rawlway, please.”
“One moment.”
I waited through a series of clicks and buzzes. Finally there came another ring.
“Sergeant Rawlway speaking.”
“Good morning, sergeant. This is Paris Minton.”
“Oh. Hello, Mr. Minton. You’re a little late if you wanted to turn in your friend. We already found him.”
“It’s not that, sir. I know you talked to Fearless because he told me about it. He said that you were looking for a man named Kit Mitchell.”
“Mr. Jones really shouldn’t be discussing police business.”
“Maybe not, sir, but do you think it’s a coincidence that another man showed up at my door just yesterday asking me if I knew the whereabouts of Fearless or Kit?”
“What man?”
“A guy named Theodore Timmerman. At least that’s what he said his name was. He gave me a card with a number on it. Do you think that’s important?”
FEARLESS WAS AT MY HOUSE when I got there, shuffling a deck of cards. He was stretched out on the front room sofa—playing solitaire in a room full of books.
“Hey, Fearless —”
“I got bad news, Paris,” he said. “Somebody stole our money, man.”
“What money?”
“That we had in the trunk’a her car.”
“What about the book?”
“Book? Who cares about a book when we lost almost three thousand dollars and that emerald necklace?”
“Did they leave the book?”
“It was in the same bag as the money, man,” Fearless said. “They took it all.”
I sat down. If there hadn’t been a chair behind me I would have fallen to the floor.
“No,” was all I said.
“I know, Paris,” Fearless said. “I know.”
“Who would have known to take the money?”
“Ambrosia took the car to Tito’s Car Wash. I had driven it up into the Santa Monica mountains and it got kinda streaked. She was just gettin’ it clean if I wanted to drive around some more. You know at Tito’s they do the whole car. The trunk was wide open the whole time. They got at least twenty people workin’ there. And there’s a big sign sayin’ not to leave no valuables in the trunk.”
Up to that moment the loss of the Fine family chronicle was the worst defeat in my life. I forgot about the man
