6

MY EYES WERE WATERING and I couldn’t stop yawning by the time Fearless and I got to Ambrosia Childress’s house. We went to the front door together because I needed her phone number to stay in touch with my friend.

She answered in a bathrobe that was open just enough to snap me out of my lethargy. She had deep chocolate skin, dark red lips, and bright brown eyes. When she looked at Fearless her lips parted.

“Hi,” she said.

I might just as well have been a tree.

“Hey, Ambrosia. I’m sorry to drop in on you like this but I need a place to stay for a day or two.”

“Okay,” she said. No question why. No coy hesitation. I do believe that her nostrils widened and her chest swelled.

“Thank you, honey,” Fearless said.

He was swallowed up whole by her doorway and I was left at the threshold with a scrap of paper in my hand.

We’d decided that it would be dangerous for Fearless to travel the streets with so many people looking for him. I could make the rounds asking questions while he suffered the four walls of Ambrosia’s protective custody.

“GOOD AFTERNOON. BERNARD ARMS,” a friendly young woman said in my ear.

I was down the street from the residence hotel, closeted in a sidewalk phone booth.

“Brian Letterman,” I said in a tone completely drained of my Louisiana upbringing. “Pasternak Deliveries. With whom am I speaking?”

“Susan Seaborne. Yes, Mr. Letterman. What can I do for you?”

“I got a new guy at the front desk here, Sue. You know how it goes. Some guy in a hundred-dollar suit came in and dropped off a parcel without leaving the proper information. Lenny didn’t know. And now I have a problem.”

“Oh,” Susan Seaborne said. “I see.”