“No sir. I’ve been hired by your ex-sister-in-law, Miss Winifred L. Fine, to locate your son, and I was wondering why she didn’t ask you.” I decided on the direct approach partly because I didn’t trust anyone I was dealing with and partly because I liked the way Esau looked.
He had shiny black skin and tight eyes. His hands were thick but he was a lightweight. At sixty he probably could wear the same pants he put on when he was a twenty-year-old. He wore a gray pair of coveralls that had an emblem for the defunct Oklahoma Star Oil Company over the left breast. He was the kind of man who lived in my New Iberia neighborhood in Louisiana; the kind of man who could make a living with just two sticks and a cupful of spit.
“She hired you to find him, huh?” Esau said. “She tell you why?”
“No sir, she didn’t. And so I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t some bad blood between the two families that I was gettin’ mixed up with.”
“Well,” Esau said. “Winnie never liked me too much. When her sister and me got married she refused to come to the wedding. Then, after Honey left me and went back to Winnie, they didn’t even tell me she was sick until after she died.”
“Your wife died and they didn’t even tell you about it?” Fearless asked.
“By that time we was already divorced. Honey had moved back with Winnie and I kept BB.”
“Why would Miss Fine want to see Bartholomew now?”
“She always liked the boy. More because he was blood than anything he did, I think. Every now and then they’d get together at her place out in the desert. She got what she call a cabin outside of A Thousand Palms.”
“But you’ve never seen her?” I asked.
“She used to invite me and BB for a Thanksgivin’ dinner. I’d go when BB was a boy, for family, you know. But now he’s grown I stay home.” Esau shrugged and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of a T-shirt under his coveralls. “Want one?”
Fearless shook his head but I accepted the cigarette, and the light that came after.
“But you’re not bothered that she hired me to look for him?”
“Naw. She wanna find him, that’s okay by me.”
“Why didn’t she just call you?”
“She did. At least that Oscar did.”
“When?”
“Week ago. ’Bout that. Maybe eight days.”
“And what you tell him?”
“That I don’t know where BB is. He met some girl a few months ago. They go off together all the time. The two of ’em.”
“White girl?” I asked.
“I see you know my Bartholomew.”
“You know her name?”
“Me an’ BB didn’t talk all that much about his personal life. I didn’t ask an’ he didn’t say.”
“You know somebody who might know?” I asked.
“Them peoples down at Hoochie’s might could know,” Esau speculated.
“That place on Hoover?” I asked, just to be sure. “The dance club?”
Esau nodded.
“Did he ever say anything about a man named Kit Mitchell?”
“No,” Esau said, a little too fast and a little too sure.
“You got any cars for fifty bucks, Mr. Perry?” Fearless asked.
“Couple’a Fords like your friend’s the cheapest I got. Lowest price is two twenty-five, though.”
“Lemme think about that for a while.” Fearless put his hand on my shoulder then and I nodded.
“Guess it’s time to go.”
“Mr. Minton,” Esau said.
“Yes sir?”
“Tell BB I’d like to talk to him before he sees Winifred. Tell him, well, just tell him that I’d like to talk.”
14
“WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT MR. PERRY?” I asked Fearless.
We were a few blocks away at a small park that was like an island at the intersection of Slater Avenue and 127th Street. There was a picnic table with the benches attached under a shady oak tree. The grass was dead. One lone sparrow eyed us sidewise from the nearest bough. He was waiting for a crumb to drop and so was I.
“He’s lyin’ about Kit.”
“You sure’a that?”
“No question there.”
Fearless Jones could have been Buck Rogers’s lie detector. He could tell if someone was lying even if he didn’t understand the language they spoke.
“What about the rest?” I asked.
“Cain’t tell. But I’m sure that he wants to talk to BB. He wants to talk to him bad.”
I could read Esau for myself. Still it was good to have Fearless confirm my conclusions. But what difference did it make? I could go out looking for BB, but there was no promise that I would find him. And even if I did find him, it was a dangerous game turning a man over to somebody with the police breathing down your neck. If I confronted him, Milo would lie, and so would the white man he sent to my house to find Fearless.
I shared these pessimistic thoughts with my friend.
He took it all in and nodded.
“Then maybe I better go down to them cops questioned you,” he said.
“Turn yourself in?”
“Why not? They gonna get me sooner or later—that is, unless I skip town. And you know that little taste of Ambrosia reminded me of just how sweet she is.”
“You don’t know why they after you, Fearless. They might could put you in jail for months.”
“I didn’t do nuthin’ except sit out with those gourds in Oxnard for weeks. They mad, but what they gonna charge me wit’? Why shouldn’t I go?”
“Because we don’t know what they want.”
“And we ain’t gonna know unless I turn myself in.” Fearless grinned at me. I knew that grin. It said, Sometimes you have to be a fool if you want to make it in this world.
I knew that I couldn’t talk Fearless out of his decision, so I asked, “What should I do?”
“Go on home and wait for my one phone call,” he said. “It may not come for a while, but you be there and I’ll get what we need.”
***
WE SEPARATED THERE. Me going back to my bookshop and Fearless following his name.
My store was hot from the brutal summer sun beating down on it. I opened the front door to let a breeze bring the temperature down into the eighties. I was too jumpy even to read, so I picked up a folio of photographs taken by the New York photographer Weegee. I took this to the front room and sat there perusing the strange and revealing images of a New York that few tourists ever saw, even though it was right there under their toes and noses. Weegee treated the whole city as if it were his backyard. I imagined that he knew ten thousand people by name and that they were so familiar with him that they never had their guard up against his lenses. He roamed from Park Avenue to Harlem with his camera, mostly at night, getting behind all of the lies we tell and showing just how ugly people can be when no one else is around.
“Hello?”
If I could have jumped out of my skin I would have. As it was, I leapt out of the chair and threw out my hands, letting the book fly somewhere back into the store.
“What!” I shouted.
It took a few seconds for me to focus on the young woman framed inside the gray rectangle of the screen door.
If she had a gun you’d be dead right now. If she had a gun you’d be dead right now. Those words repeated themselves over and over in my mind. My heart was thumping. I was rubbing both thumbs against my fingertips, trying to look normal.
The Negro woman smiled.
“I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that,” she said. “I thought that you must have heard me coming up the stairs.”
“No.” It was the only syllable I could manage without stumbling over my tongue.
“Can I come in?”
“Come on.” I was getting better.
She tried the screen door, but it was latched. Did I think that I could keep someone from getting at me with a slender latch and a paper-thin screen?