Son. She told me that his father had left her and that her and Son was in the street on account’a he done taken all her savings with ’im.”

“She picked you outta the blue?”

“She said that Son’s father is a man named Kit Mitchell. Kit’s a farmer from Wayne, Texas. I been workin’ for him the last month or so.”

“The Watermelon Man?”

“That’s him.”

Fearless and I received thirteen thousand dollars apiece after we were involved in the shootout that maimed his baby finger. With my money I bought and refurbished a building that had been a barber’s shop. When I was through I had a new used book store. I also bought a used Ford sedan and put a few hundred dollars in the bank with a solid two percent interest rate.

Fearless got houses for his sister and mother at thirty-five hundred dollars a go, bought a fancy car, and spent the rest on a good time that lasted about three months. After that he sold his car to pay the rent and took on a job for a man selling counterfeit Texas watermelons. Counterfeit, inasmuch as they came from the seeds of the green-and-white-striped Texas variety of melon but they were grown in Oxnard on the leased farm of a man I only knew by the title of the Watermelon Man.

The Watermelon Man hired Fearless to harvest his melons and put them on trucks that he had fitted with Texas license plates. Then he would send his fleet of six trucks into Watts, where they would sell the giant fruit on street corners, telling everybody that they were getting genuine Texas melons. Texans believe that the best food in the world is from down home, and so they spent the extra nickel for this prime commodity.

“So the woman was the Watermelon Man’s wife?” I asked.

“That’s what she said. She was his wife and the boy was his son. The whole time we talked, Son was cryin’ that he wanted his daddy. You know he cried so hard that it almost broke my heart.”

“When did you meet her?” I asked.

“I just told you—the other day.”

“You never saw her with this Kit?”

“Uh-uh. I didn’t even know that he was married.”

“So then how’d you know that she really was his wife?” I asked, wondering at the endless gullibility of the deadliest man in L.A.

“Why she wanna lie to me?” Fearless replied. “I didn’t even know the lady.”

“Maybe because she wanted to find Kit for some other reason,” I suggested. “Maybe he owed somebody some money, maybe he’s in a jam.”

“Yeah.” Fearless ducked his head. “Yeah, you right, Paris. Maybe so. But when I saw her and heard that boy cryin’, I was just so sure that she was the one in trouble.”

“And she wanted you to bring her man back?” I asked, worrying about what my deadly friend might have done.

“No,” Fearless said. “All she wanted was to know if I knew where to find him.”

“And did you?”

“No. That’s why I believed her story.”

That was when I should have stood up and shown Fearless the door. I should have said, No more, brother. I have to get back to sleep. That’s because I knew whatever it was he saw in her story was going to bite me on the backside before we were through.

“Why?” I asked beyond all reason.

“Because Kit hadn’t shown up to work at the gardens on Monday. He wasn’t there Tuesday neither. His drivers all came but he never showed. I wasn’t surprised. The last couple’a days out there he kept talkin’ about some big deal he had and how he was gonna make a whole room full’a money.”

“Doing what?”

Fearless shook his head.

“Did anybody call him after he didn’t show up?” I asked.

“Nobody knew his number. And we really didn’t need him. You know I was the one loaded the trucks anyway. And I never liked the fact that he was pawnin’ off those melons like they was real Texas. When he didn’t come in on Wednesday I called it quits.”

“And when did Leora come to you?”

“Day before yesterday.”

It was Monday morning, so I asked, “Saturday?”

“No . . . I mean yeah.”

“You want some coffee, Fearless?”

He smiled then, because coffee was the signal that meant I was going to hear him out.

2

MY KITCHEN WAS AN UNFINISHED BACK porch furnished with a butcher-block table and a twelve-foot counter that held three hot plates, a flat pan toaster, and an electric rotisserie oven. I boiled water and filtered it through a cheesecloth