“Paris,” Milo shouted. It was his normal voice, but even Milo’s whisper was loud. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you, Milo,” I said.
He was sitting behind a maple desk, in a red leather recliner, under a naked hundred-watt bulb dangling from bare black cord. The chair in front of the desk looked like some sort of starved four-legged animal. I was afraid that even my few pounds would be the last straw.
But I sat anyway. The legs strained but held.
“What can I do for you?” Milo asked.
Milo’s skin color wasn’t as dark as Fearless’s, but it was close. He was a couple of inches taller than I and a few inches shorter than Fearless. His feet and hands belonged on someone who was much larger, and his body was naturally powerful. But Milo wasn’t a physical man. He was a thinker, a reader, a man who understood power but who was forever blocked from holding its reins.
Milo could quote passages from a thousand poems, do problems in calculus and trigonometry, but if you waved a stack of hundred-dollar bills under his nose he would forget his own name.
“Kit Mitchell,” I said.
The delay between hearing the name and his next breath was enough to let me know that Ted Timmerman had something to do with the Watermelon Man.
“Who?”
“Don’t fuck with me, Miles,” I said. “You know as well as I do that you done sent Fearless down a dangerous road. You know it.”
Milo pulled out a cigar.
If I didn’t know that I was in trouble before, that stogie was the final proof. Milo smoked to hide his nervousness—and he never got nervous until the walls were caving in.
“Talk to me, Milo.”
“What do you know, Paris?”
“Enough to put you in prison.”
The bail bondsman’s eyes widened. I liked that for two reasons. One was that I had gotten to him, raised the stakes. And also I liked to see bright white eyes against black skin—it made me feel like home.
“I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no prisons,” Milo said. “I know money and I know power, that’s all.”
“So which one did you send Ted Timmerman out after?”
“You met Mr. Timmerman, then?”
“Milo, do I have to go get Fearless? I mean, do you want to do this song and dance with him?”
“I’m not afraid. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
I snorted.
Milo blew out a cloud of smoke.
It was hot in that room. I was sweating even though all I had on was green gardener trousers and a white T-shirt. Milo wore a three-piece suit with a red tie knotted up to his throat, but he was still dry as a bone.
“What’s goin’ on, Milo?”
“Money, son,” the dark-skinned ex-lawyer proclaimed. “Only money, and nuthin’ else.”
“I got twenty-three dollars seventy-five cents in my pocket,” I said. “And compared to Fearless I’m a millionaire.”
“I know you got money in the bank,” Milo said. “Money in the bank and papers on that bookstore. You ain’t broke.”
Milo had been an equal third partner when Fearless and I got our thirteen thousand dollars and almost killed. His money was gone too. But Milo had squandered his cash on foolish investments. He wanted to be rich so bad that he never had a dime.
“Winifred Fine come to see me four, no five, five days ago,” he said.
“And?”
“That’s Winifred L. Fine.” Milo pronounced the name as if he expected me to faint dead away.
“Yeah. I know her. The one own that fruit market down on Avalon.”
“And three gas stations, two hardware stores, and Nathan’s Bakery,” Milo added.
“She own Nathan’s too?”
“She also make Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply line.”
“Never heard of it,” I lied.
“Black women all over Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Alabama use Madame Ethel’s.”
“When did you get to be such an expert on women’s beauty products?”
“I’m an expert on money,” Milo said. “Money, boy. Big money. And when Miss Fine come to me five days ago and says that she needed to locate her nephew, I knew that big money was on the rise.”
“What nephew?”
“Bartholomew Perry.”
“BB’s her blood?”
“You know him?”
“Seen ’im around. He come down Watts all the time, thinkin’ he’s slummin’ just ’cause his daddy owns that used car lot.” An alarm went off in my head but I didn’t let it show.
“So you know where he hangs out?”
“Naw. I just seen him. At Baptiste’s mainly. That’s all.”
“What was he doin’ when you seen ’im?”
“Stuffin’ his fat face,” I said. “He’d bring his high-yellow and white girlfriends down there.”
“All right now,” Milo complained. “Ain’t no use tryin’ to run a man down like that. I’m sure he got black girls too.”
“Not that I ever saw.”
“But you don’t know everything. You don’t know shit.”
“Whatever you say, Miles.”
“How would you like to have a real bookstore?” he asked me. “New books on finished oak shelves with a real cash register, not just some cigar box with the lid ripped off?”
“Sure.” My pulse quickened in spite of common sense.
“Winifred L. Fine can do that for you. She can take a hole in the wall like you got and make it into a co-orporation.”
“What you sayin’, Milo?”
“Like I said—Miss Fine asked me to find Bartholomew.”
“He jump bail or sumpin’?”
“No.”
“Then how did Miss Fine get to your door?”
“You might not know it, but I got a reputation for finding people, Paris. Most the times it’s bail jumpers, but I do other kinds of searches too. I can be discreet.”
“Discreet about what?”
“Miss Fine needs to have a private talk with her nephew. I didn’t ask her why.”
“So you agreed to find a man for somebody and you don’t even know what for?”
“She wants to talk to him. That’s all I need to know.”
“And what’s she gonna pay you for that?” I asked.
“This ain’t about no fee,” Milo said. He shrugged just as if he had already made it rich. “This is gettin’ in good with the richest black woman in Los Angeles, maybe even the whole country. A man could become a millionaire behind a woman like that.”
“Listen, Milo. A missin’ nephew ain’t no million dollars unless there’s somethin’ serious goin’ on.”
“There isn’t,” he said.
I sat back in my spindly chair. The joints creaked and the backrest sagged, but I started to get the feeling that that little chair would hold up under a man Milo’s size, or bigger.
What I had to figure was how much to tell Milo. How much could I trust him?
We were friends—after a fashion. I had done some work for his bail bonds business when men awaiting trial went on the run. Usually I’d just find out where they were hiding and tell Milo. Nothing dangerous.
We played chess now and then and had political and philosophical debates. But we didn’t share the life-and-death kind of friendship that Fearless and I had.
“What does BB have to do with Kit Mitchell?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Milo said. “I hired Timmerman to find BB and he came up with Kit and BB hangin’ out together a few months ago. I think they were doin’ some kinda business.”
“What kind of business?”
Milo pursed his lips and rubbed his thumbs and forefingers together.
“BB might’a crossed the line a li’l bit, but that don’t have nuthin’ to do with Miss Fine and why she wants to talk to him,” the bail bondsman said.
“What kind of business?” I asked again.
“Kit needed some trucks for his melon business and BB knew how to get ’em on the cheap.”
“Hot?”
“There ain’t no proof of that one way or t’other,” the lawyer turned skip chaser said.
“Is that why the police are lookin’ for Kit?” I asked.
Milo shrugged. “Kit’s a businessman and black. You know all businessmen cross the line now and then. But when a black one do it the cops on him like white on rice.”