“What?” Fearless complained. “Naw, man. I ain’t interested in that crooked-nosed girl.”
“You could’a fooled me and about half the neighborhood too.”
“She needed a kiss, Paris. That’s all. A kiss and a kind word. She just lost her family, man. That big bum of a husband don’t care. I just kissed her and told her that I was there. That’s all.”
“And if she still felt bad,” I taunted, “you’d take her up in the bed but still that wouldn’t be nuthin’?”
“Maybe. Sometimes you got to give, Paris. Sometimes a man or a woman needs the opposite sex to say, hey it’s okay. But she don’t mean nuthin’ t’me. Neither do that dumb husband. If he was holdin’ her, then she wouldn’t’a needed me to do it.”
I shifted into first and drove off.
Fearless had a smart heart. He had a brave heart too. When he talked to me like he did about Gella, I never understood, not really, a word.
WE MADE IT to the Charles Diner by nine-fifteen. The place was alive. The girls couldn’t help but move their butts, even if it was just in their chairs, when Big Joe Turner was playing on the jukebox, and the men couldn’t help but watch. At the Charles men dressed as differently as the women did. From T-shirts to tuxedos the fashions ranged. The women sat in groups at the small tables in the great round room while solitary men smelling anywhere from Classic Gent to hard-earned sweat came up and made their offers for a little wiggle on the dance floor in back.
“At the table over next to the plastic palm tree,” the bartender told Fearless when he asked if anyone was looking for Tyrell Lockwood.
A woman was sitting next to him, leaning toward him like a sailboat under a squall.
“Reverend Grove?” I said in greeting. There was only a faint light of recognition in his eyes for me, but I knew him. The minister was the cock of the walk down around Central and 101 when the Messenger had its doors open.
“Get yourself another fizz and park it at the bar, babe. I’ll be there in a minute,” the reverend told the girl.
He handed her a two-dollar bill. She kissed his fingers before taking the money with her teeth. I think she was a pretty girl. She might have been a knockout. But I couldn’t tell. My mind was going over and over the lies and questions I had for the holy man.
His suit was three-button, maroon, and silk. He was a hair shorter than Fearless and more substantial but not portly or fat. He had a full face that was medium brown and diabolical in a mild way. Everything turned up: the almond eyes, the slightly receding hairline, the corners of his smile; all like small horns on a masquerade devil or, more likely, a minister who had studied sin for too long and who was finally overwhelmed by its beauty. The left side of his jaw was a little larger than the right, and that eye was bloodshot, and not from lack of sleep.
“Tyrell Lockwood?” the devil inquired of either of us.
“Me,” I said. “This is my friend.”
Grove motioned for us to join him. A waitress wearing a black T-shirt and a tight white skirt came up. There was a nasty-looking scar that came from the bottom of her chin to the middle of her generous lower lip. On that lip the scar took a left turn and went all the way to the corner of her mouth. It made her look vulnerable, so I looked away.
“Drinks?” the waitress asked in a husky voice.
Fearless looked to Grove, who shook his head slightly. Fearless showed two fingers and said, “Beers.” The waitress went off.
“Where is she?” Grove asked.
“Didn’t Vincent tell you what I said?”
“He said some nonsense about her paying you to find me.”
“Well I found you now, didn’t I?”
The waitress came back. She tried to look me in the eye while serving the drinks, but I looked away again. Fearless gave her something and then tapped the table for her to bring more when the time came. She said thanks, so I supposed he had tipped her nicely.
When the waitress had gone Grove lowered his voice and said, “Don’t try and fool with me, niggah.”
“Don’t fool yourself,” Fearless interjected, his cool certainty bringing doubt to the reverend’s eye.
He gazed over toward the door. Maybe he thought it was foolish to come alone to meet two strangers in that dangerous business. Maybe he recognized that his arrogance didn’t carry any weight outside of his red-draped storefront church.
“You lookin’ for Elana. Elana lookin’ for you. Why?” I asked.
Grove didn’t respond. He was trying to figure out what to do. He spent as much time looking at the door as he did at us. Louis Armstrong was singing duets with Billie Holiday on the box. Fearless stretched out on his chair like a cat. I think he was just enjoying being free.
“She promised me five hundred dollars,” I told Grove. “I already put in my time.”
“I don’t believe you,” the Holy Roller replied.
Fearless straightened up in his chair.
“Leon Douglas.” I spoke Elana’s ex-con boyfriend’s name as if it were a complete sentence. “And a bearer bond. How about that?”
“Do you know where she is?” Grove asked, no longer looking for a way out.
“I might know how to find her,” I said. “But I wanna know what I’m gettin’ into before I take another step.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“No, uh-uh. I put my money on the table, man,” I said. “Now it’s your turn. If you got somethin’ I could use, then maybe we could do somethin’ together.”
“The bond,” he said, his voice changing this time to a breath of air. “It’s worth a lot more than she said.”
“She lied?”
“Sister Love was made to lie. Prob’ly half’a everything she told you was a lie,” Grove said. “But she didn’t lie about the bond. She just don’t know. It’s worth ten times what she thinks.”
Using gangster logic I figured he meant a hundred times what she said.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“That’s for me to know.”
“Well how’s this?” I added. “Elana told me that you were the one had the bond. She said that she left it with you, but that —”
“It’s all a lie,” the preacher said. There was the musical note of a sermon in his voice.
“There ain’t no bond?”
“Oh yeah. There’s a bond all right. Damn sure enough. But I don’t have it. I did have it but not no more.”
“All you’re sayin’ is what isn’t and what’s lies and what didn’t happen. What me and my friend here need to know is what is.” I felt confident when Fearless was at my back, smart too.
Grove took me in for a moment or two.
“I remember you now,” he said. “At the bookstore. Vincent told me you worked there, but I didn’t remember the name.”
I nodded and waited.
“Leon,” he said, “sent Elana a letter askin’ her to come see him in prison. She was stayin’ with me at that time but still had her own place.”
“And you didn’t mind her gettin’ mail from an old boyfriend?”
“I saw my fortieth birthday two years ago, son. I know that women go to the bathroom and everything. I wasn’t her first man. I wasn’t her best man. Leon mentioned a thousand dollars in the letter, and so she took a day trip. Three days later we had the note.”
“Tell me about the note,” I said.
“What about it?”
“What country it come from? What’s the face value?”
“Ten thousand Swiss francs,” he said.
I was happy because at least one thing Elana said might be true.
“And she give it to you?” Fearless asked.