The moment I laid eyes on her she turned, smiled, stood, and walked in my direction.
“Mr. King Oliver.”
“Why don’t we go back to your bench, Ms. Prim?”
“It’s kinda public,” she worried.
“Yeah, but no one will wonder what we’re talking about. They’ll know it’s either art or love or both.”
So we sauntered back to the bench and sat, both of us looking up at the Temple of Dendur with mild awe.
“I am always stunned by this exhibit,” she said. “You’d expect something like this to be nestled away on some billionaire’s estate, behind barbed wire and silent alarms.”
“Where you from, Mattie?”
She smiled at my familiarity, even showing her teeth.
“A town called Peanut,” she said.
“In Kentucky?”
“How’d you know that?”
“There’s a chemical factory there, I think.”
“You are a good detective,” she said.
“How long ago did you leave there?”
“Long time.”
“Your whole family?”
“No.” There was a dark tone to that one word.
“Something happen?”
“You could say that. There were only two legal businesses in Peanut at the time — coal mining and the syngas factory.”
“Syngas?”
“Synthetic natural gas. It comes from coal. Peanut was a big coal-mining town. Back then you either sold meth, hootch, ass, or your soul to coal.”
“Back then but not anymore?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions about your husband?”
“No.” But she wasn’t happy about it either.
“Everything I’ve read paints him as racist and more. An enemy of Black people, of women, of any kind of thinking that didn’t originate in Europe.”
“I don’t know him like that,” she said simply.
“And exactly how is it that you know him?”
Mathilda Prim was exquisite: her face, her elocution, her gait... Her gaze told me to drop the line of inquiry, but I was stubborn.
“I got into trouble back home,” she said. “As a consequence people looked down on me and my parents. That’s why they wanted me in the gas factory. They were even happier to see me gone from town. For them it was like I never existed. Alfie has a similar life history, but his path was harder than mine. Much harder.”
“But he saw a fellow soul in you.”
“Among other things.”
My heart grabbed right then. It wasn’t love or lust or anything like that. It was a connection she’d made in her life that resonated with my own.
I took a deep breath and asked, “Was there something you wanted to tell me?”
“Have you heard the name George Laurel in your investigation?”
“No. Who is he?”
“That’s what you need to find out.”
15
Bestial. That’s the word that comes to mind when I remember walking through the vast entry hall of the museum with Mathilda Prim. I wasn’t breathing any harder but was aware of every breath. I was walking normally but it felt as if I was hunching with each step, turning my head from side to side looking for threats — or rivals.
When we reached the crowded curb in front of the museum she took a cell phone from her sapphire clutch and entered a number.
“Can I ask you something, Ms. Prim?”
“What’s that, Mr. King Oliver?” There was a smile in her voice.
“Those white men around your house.”
“Yes, what about them?”
“Are they working for you?”
“No,” she intoned. This time her mouth formed the shadow of a smile, but there was no humor behind it.
A black town car slid up to the curb, the door swinging open. Minta Kraft was driving. My museum date lowered into the passenger’s seat and closed the door, and Minta drove off, a dark samurai fish joining the school of brightly colored koi.
It’s never a good idea for lawyers or detectives to have real feelings. It’s okay to shout or frown. It’s fine to channel old spirits into threats or even violence. But once you feel connected to any part of the job, you end up like Amethyst Banks — giving away everything for a roll in the hay.
These thoughts in mind, I turned in my Mini Cooper and took a train to Yonkers. There I went to a small hotel I sometimes use, the Nurya Inn on Second. I liked it because the slender Black man who always manned the front desk preferred cash and hardly ever made eye contact.
I was unarmed and feeling a fool, Mathilda Prim’s fool. That woman got under my skin.
Nurya’s rooms were like small dens off a main living room in a big house. The chamber I liked was 304. There was a rolltop desk, a sofa that folded out into a bed, and an old-time stand-up lamp that had three forty-watt bulbs that gave off soft but certain light. The one window looked out on a small side street that shone under the yellowy streetlamps. It had started to rain. Everything outside glistened and pedestrian traffic was nearly nil.
I stayed at the window for a long time, savoring the moments of anonymity, safety, and, most of all, quiet.
After a while I pulled away from the window and made a few reservations via iPad. Then I called two men, asking them to help me. I got two yeses.
At 6:45 the next morning I was at Delta Gate 22 sitting very near the boarding gate. Across the way from my row of chairs sat Cousin Rags. He was leaning back in his chair studying a fishing magazine with great interest. I wondered if he really was a fisherman. We were blood but never really all that close.
Four seats down from me sat a thirty-something Black woman dressed for upper-echelon office work with good posture and a pink carry-on bag. I noticed her because now and then she would glance at my cousin.
I had a novel taken from my storage space library. It was Joe Hill, a biographical novel written by Wallace Stegner. Stegner was a good writer and a political activist of sorts. The man he wrote about, Joe Hill, was a martyr of the IWW back in the late nineteenth / early twentieth centuries. Ever since seeing Forthright and dealing again with Roger Ferris, I wanted to feel that I was about something meaningful. I mean, I realize that I was just another gumshoe working for a few dollars, prone to looking the other way if the client or the job was less than savory. But still it’s good to read about flawed heroes attempting to do something good on a field of bad intent.
I’d gotten through the foreword when I looked up to see that the Black woman with the pink carry-on had moved next to Rags.
They were chatting away about something — fish or fishing, boarding flights, or maybe how crazy the news is getting.
I imagined that Rags had a whole story about why he was going to Atlanta. He was dressed like a day laborer, so he wouldn’t pretend to be commuting for work. He didn’t have a southern accent so probably wouldn’t say he was going home. Maybe that’s why he had the fishing journal. Maybe, in his mind, he was going fishing in some stream or lake.
And her? I imagined she was a little nervous about flying and he reminded her of some family member who calmed her down. Rags was a good listener and so she could put her worry into words about a job or boyfriend, sister or some specific task that she had to perform on one Peachtree Street or other.
I sat toward the front of the regular passenger section of the plane. Rags passed me at some point, but the woman with the pink carry-on did not. She sat in business class in the second row.
I was in the aisle seat. A white woman and her nine-year-old daughter sat next to me.
The woman’s name was Ida Denton and her daughter was Florence. They were moving down to Savannah to live with her new husband, Clark Rowel.