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“Well, come on in I guess,” the voice said.
The electric fence, made from simple wire gating, rolled half the way across the entrance and then seemed to get stuck. It was still trying to roll but something, somewhere, was an impediment. I got out of my Ford and helped the gate move along its track. Then I got back in and drove the S-shaped driveway up to Winifred L. Fine’s front door.
The house was four stories with an extra turret on top of that. It would have been impressive if the owner had it painted and did something about the front yard.
Really, I guess you would call it the grounds. The lawn in front of the fading house was at least five acres. The grass was overgrown but I could see why. There was a refrigerator, a stove, various canisters, and less identifiable refuse in among the long blades of grass. A gardener would have gone crazy trying to mow. And even if he managed, the lawn would have looked worse because all the trash would have been more visible.
There weren’t only discards in the yard, however. There were trees too. Fruit trees mainly. Two apples—which is one of the only fruit bearers that don’t do well in the southern California clime—a dying peach, a dead pomegranate, and a date palm that had only one living leaf.
I saw no place set aside for parking, so I just pulled as far to the right side of the road as possible and stopped the car.
The front door was green with a picture of Mary and baby Jesus laminated to its center. I wondered if knocking on Mary’s forehead was considered a sin.
A middle-aged black woman opened the door. She was quite short and wore a full-length formal black gown that had shiny black buttons from the throat down to the hem. The sleeves went all the way to her wrists. The head of an unblinking red fox peeked at me from her right shoulder.
“Miss Fine?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes didn’t waver, they hardly blinked. It was almost as if I were staring into the face of two dead animals, the fox and the woman.
The foyer behind her was as much in disarray as the grounds. There was a large ceramic pot in one corner filled with peacock feathers that were coated in dust. Above this was a large painting of a white woman astride a white stallion galloping away from a squat stone castle.
“May I speak with you, ma’am?”
“Certainly, young man,” she said.
With that she led me to the left, down a long and wide corridor made narrower by stacks of cartons labeled Madame Ethel’s Beauty Supply along the walls. There were also piles of documents, newspapers, ledgers, and manuals of all kinds. We came to a room that had a barber’s chair and a park bench for furniture. By then I was pretty sure that I was in a madhouse, or at least in a house that was in the process of going mad.
“Sit down, sit down,” the woman said, waving at the park bench.
She struggled with the barber’s chair. The long skirts and stiffness in her joints made the necessary movements difficult, but she finally managed to seat herself upon the cracked grandeur of the golden leather cushion.
“Miss Fine . . . ,” I said.
She held up her hand to stop me and then shook the same hand. A tinkling accompanied the motion. I saw then that there was a tiny silver bell attached to her wrist. The old woman then stared at a bookcase to her left with great concentration.
The room was quite odd. First of all, it wasn’t so much a room but the dead end of the cluttered hall. There was nothing that seemed normal in there. Besides the park bench and barber’s chair there was an unfinished sawhorse and a high table on which stood three miner’s lanterns. The bookcases were crowded with handmade papier-mâché figurines. There were statuettes of black men and women shopping, kneeling in prayer, two men fighting with knives, and dozens of other tableaus.
“Miss Fine,” I said again.
“Shh!”
A man came out from behind the bookcase then. He wore black slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt that was one size too big. His coloring was equal parts brown and drab green, and his eyebrows were thicker than some men’s beards.
“Yes?” he asked with undisguised disdain.
“Oscar, this is my guest,” she said.
He glanced at me with similar condescension.
“Yes, I know. Mr. Minton, who, I am told, was sent by Mr. Milo Sweet.”
“What do we have to offer my guest?” she asked.
“What does he want?”
“Why I . . . ,” she said. “What do you want?” she then asked me, as if some request I had made was the cause of her embarrassment.
“Nothing. Thank you, ma’am.”
“You have to have something,” she said. “You don’t just walk into somebody’s house without accepting their hospitality.”
Miss Fine was staring at me. Oscar was staring at me.
“Tea?” I said.
“Hot tea or ice?” Oscar asked.
“Ice.”
“Milk or lemon?”
Miss Fine giggled and bounced a little in her chair.
“Milk,” I said.
“Sugar?”
“Okay.”
“How many teaspoons?”
“Half of one.”
Oscar’s immense eyebrows rose like two bales of black hay giving way to a great subterranean upheaval.
“Don’t have much of a sweet tooth,” I apologized.
Oscar gave a slight shrug.
“And you?” he asked Miss Fine.
“The usual.”
“It’s rather early, don’t you think?”
“The usual,” she repeated.
Oscar shrugged again, turned, and went back behind the bookcase. For all I knew there was a closet back there where he lived with a maid, a chauffeur, and a cook.
“Now, Miss Fine,” I said.
“He’s not a very good servant, is he?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Never had a butler and never been one.”
“Are you here on business?”
“I’m working for Milo Sweet, like Oscar said.”
“Oh, Mr. Sweet. You know I like that name. Sweet. I love sweets, and so I liked his name right away.”
“You asked Mr. Sweet to look for Bartholomew Perry.”
“Bartholomew? I did?”
“That’s what he told me.”
“He did? Well then he must be right.”
By that time I was completely lost. Either Winifred Fine was senile or so wily that there was no way for me to understand her motives.
“Why do you think you might have wanted him to find BB?” I asked.
“What did Mr. Sweet say I wanted?”
“He said that you wanted to have a secret talk with Bartholomew.”
Miss Fine grinned and ducked her head as if we were exchanging confidences.
“Your tea,” Oscar said.
He had come in from behind the bookcase with a silver tray supported by his left hand. The tray held a slender tumbler of milky ice tea and a squat glass filled with amber liquid. I took my glass. Oscar then proffered the tray to his mistress. She took the liquor with eagerness.
“Miss Fine will see you now,” Oscar said to me.
“What?” I said.
“She’s waiting for you in her sitting room.”
“Isn’t this Miss Fine?”
“Rose Fine,” Oscar said. “Miss Winifred is waiting for you in her sitting room.”
“But he’s my guest,” Rose Fine whined. “I’m all dressed up.”
“I’ll be back in just a little bit,” I said.
I took the old woman’s hand and kissed it.
She gasped and yanked the hand away.
10
“I AM WINIFRED FINE,” the woman standing in the doorway said.
She was almost my height (which is five foot eight) and slender, the color of twilight after a storm. She had been beautiful as a young woman. She was handsome today.
“Paris Minton,” I said.
I extended my hand and she turned her back on me, gliding into the large sitting room that Oscar had led me to.
This room was immaculate. The custard-colored walls, edged in dark wood, were twenty feet high. From the ceiling there hung a crystal-and-amber chandelier the like of which I’d never seen before or since. The light through the different crystals was both brilliant and warm. It seemed like a fireplace blazing from the ceiling.
“Have a seat, Mr. Minton.”
Along the walls there were several framed landscape paintings, hung all in a line. At the end of the room were full-length purple curtains. There was a large desk before them and then four red-and-blue-striped sofas that formed a square. I took a seat at the corner of one of the sofas. At the edge of the couch opposite me was a toy gyroscope, the kind that had a slender pump at the top with a bright red handle made from wood.
“A child?” I asked the lady.
“Yes,” she said with a happy smile that bordered on being a grin. “My grandson had been staying with me for a while. He’s away for a few nights with some friends on holiday.”
I wondered what kind of friends millionaire black women had.
Oscar took up a post at my side. I got the feeling that if I made any quick movements he would shoot me before I could be of any threat to the lady.
Winifred did not sit.
“Why are you here, Mr. Minton?”
“To get information.”
“But I thought you worked for Mr. Sweet? Certainly he told you all you need to know.”
“I like to do my own investigations,” I said.
“I don’t understand.” She inclined her head.
Winifred Fine was wearing a two-piece suit that was deep blue in color. When I had first seen her I thought that she was in her late forties. But seeing her figure under that thin material I figured that she was closer to sixty.
“I got questions,” I said.
“What questions?” Oscar asked me.
“Like for instance. Do you know a friend of BB’s called Hercules Wexler?”
The lady seemed unperturbed but Oscar straightened up a bit. His boss noticed this too.
“Who is he?” Oscar asked.
“Big white dude that BB’s been doin’ business with.” I figured they might have worked together, seeing that they were both in the used car business.
“Why do you bring this information to me?” Winifred asked. “Why not tell the man who employed you?”
“Milo is the excitable type, Miss Fine. When things get rough he goes all to pieces. He asked me to look for BB because I’m a little more levelheaded.”
“What do you mean, ‘when things get rough’?”
“Why are you looking for Bartholomew?”
“That is none of your business.”
“You’re right about that, ma’am. But I was sleepin’ in my bed this morning and suddenly I found myself all involved in your business. People started knockin’ on my door and talkin’ to me about your troubles. Some of them lied, others were just confused. One man even said that someone could get killed if he looked too deep into the whereabouts of BB or his friends. Two men have already disappeared.”
“What men?” Winifred asked.
“Kit Mitchell, for instance.”
That got the spinster’s attention.
“What about him?”
“That’s what I wanted to know from you. Seems like Kit and BB’s two peas in a pod.”
“What have you found out, Mr. Minton?” Winifred asked.
“I already told you just about everything I know,” I said. “Now it’s your turn.”
Winifred stole a glance at Oscar and then strode toward the great curtains. She went to a corner and pulled on a braided golden rope. The rope must have been connected to a weighted pulley, because the heavy drapes opened effortlessly. The twenty-foot windows revealed a sun-soaked garden I would never have suspected after seeing the desolate front yard.
Great pines and eucalyptus trees made the walls of Winifred’s private Eden, protecting pomegranate and loquat trees that bore fruit in the midst of golden and scarlet flowers. Birds flitted from bough to bough as a huge tiger-striped cat watched motionlessly from the base of a marble fountain. The fountain gave off a continual spray upon the nude figure carved from an onyxlike stone. The sculpture was of an obviously Negro woman. She had small breasts and a largish butt. With one hand she attempted to maintain her modesty and with the other she was reaching for some unknown goal far above.
I could feel myself become sexually aroused, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of the woman depicted or the wealth the garden represented.
“You like my garden, Mr. Minton?” Winifred asked me.
I realized that I had gotten to my feet and approached the window. Oscar was standing at my elbow.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“That woman was me,” she said proudly.
I could see it, mainly in the shape of the face.
“It’s surprising,” I said.
“That I was once young and beautiful?”
“That the front yard is in such a mess but back here is like a paradise.”
“The front of the house is my sister’s responsibility,” Winifred Fine said, rather petulantly for a woman of such power.
“About BB Perry,” I prodded.
“I saw you looking at the paintings along my walls,” she said instead of answering. “They are all by Edward Mitchell Bannister. Do you know his work?”
“I’m not really up on my painting,” I said. “I mean, I’ve seen a lot of them in art books but I don’t know the artists’ names as a rule, except the Postimpressionists. They’re so wild it’s easy to tell the difference in styles.”
“Bannister was a great landscape artist of the nineteenth century. He was a black man. The first truly great landscape artist that this country ever had.”
I’m a well-read individual. It’s unusual that I meet a man or woman who has gone through more books than I have. I’ve met English teachers who didn’t know as much about literature. But for all my stores of knowledge I’d never heard of Bannister before that day.
Winifred Fine saw that knowledge and wealth impressed me.
“Bartholomew is my nephew by blood,” she said. “His father, Esau, was my sister’s husband.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Esau is a fool, and his son takes after him.”
“So why do you want to talk to him?”
“I think he’s in trouble.”
“Why?”
Oscar cleared his throat. Winifred turned her gaze to him.
“Make me a chocolate malted, Oscar.” It was the last thing in the world I expected to hear from her.
“Yes ma’am.”
The butler, or whatever he was, turned and left.
When he had gone from the study Winifred said, “Oscar is very protective of me.”
“That’s a good quality in an employee.”
Winifred smiled and said, “He doesn’t like you.”
“He tell you that?”
“I can see it in his eyes.”
“You were going to tell me something while he was gone,” I suggested.
“Esau Perry is a fool. He’s a gifted mechanic. Anything made from moving parts he can fix. He knows watches and steam engines, cotton gins and hydraulic lifts. But put a deck of cards in his hand, a woman on his lap, or a bottle anywhere within reach and he loses his mind.”
I was enjoying the way the tall old maid put together sentences. You could tell by her grasp of the language that she was formidable and in control.
“So what?” I asked.
Winifred’s stormy eyes washed over me. Then for a moment the squall subsided.
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