“Mr. Timmerman.”

“Yes, Mr. Minton.”

“Fearless got a lotta friends. How come you came to me?”

The white man looked at me a moment. He was trying to figure out where I stood in his business.

“Sweet,” he said at last. “Milo Sweet was listed as a contact for Mr. Jones. When I went to him he gave me your name.”

It was time for me to think. Was the bail bondsman holding paper on Fearless? Was that why Fearless was on the run?

No. Fearless wouldn’t lie to me. Not unless it was to protect me, or maybe he was protecting someone else. No. The story was too complex for his style of lying. Fearless’s lies were no longer than a few sentences, sometimes no more than a word or two.

“Good-bye, Mr. Minton,” the man who said he was in insurance said. “Call me the minute you hear from Mr. Jones. Time is money, you know.”

He crossed the street, climbed into a brand-new, maroon-colored Pontiac, and drove off.

“Who was he?” Fearless asked at my back.

I hadn’t heard him come up behind me but that was no surprise. Fearless’s job in World War II was to get behind German lines at night and “neutralize” any military man or operation that he came across.

“I don’t know,” I said. I closed the door and walked back toward the porch. “But he said that Milo gave him my name so that he could ask me about you.”

“Me?”

I went back to the kitchen to fix breakfast, but when I got there I realized that my appetite had gone with Theodore T. Timmerman.

“Did you jump bail, Fearless?”

“No.”

“Does Milo have any reason to be after you?”

Fearless shook his head.

“He said his name was Timmerman, Theodore. You ever heard of him?”

Fearless could exhibit the blankest stare imaginable.

“He said that you inherited some money,” I said. “You got any rich relatives or friends that care for you like that?”

The ex-assassin hunched his shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe.”