the Wind, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah, just like that. Now, I have to be in court in thirty minutes. Will you help Lucy or not?”
“I’ll see what I can do. But you know the two likeliest scenarios as well as I do. First, Thomas has skipped town for a while. He’s in Chicago or Detroit and he’ll be back for Christmas. Second, his crack buddies have killed him. If so, his body will show up any day and the case will be solved, no thanks to me.”
“Maybe you can find out if he left town. That would ease Lucy’s mind,” Amanda said.
“Everyone I talk to about Thomas will be about as forthcoming as Lucy. Besides, if he’s alive, he’d have gotten in touch with her.”
“Well, he hasn’t.”
“Which means…”
“Not necessarily,” Amanda said.
“99% is not enough?” I asked.
“John, I’ve given you a lot of good business over the years. You owe me this,” Amanda said with a look that was both exasperated and pleading.
“Amanda,” I said, “you know I’ll do it. I just hate to see us both waste our time.”
She gave me a relieved look, and murmured a quiet thank you.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “So tell me what you know about Thomas.”
“I don’t really know much,” she said. “Lucy had him when she was fifteen, which would make him about twenty-seven, since she and I are the same age. Her mother quit working for us right after Thomas was born, and we didn’t stay in touch. I was a freshman in high school, and I remember feeling that Lucy was much older.”
“When did you see her next?” I asked.
“Not till I was in college. My mother heard that her mother had died, and she asked Lucy if she wanted to work for us. I was home one summer while she was our maid, and she brought Thomas over now and then. He was a cute little boy. But by the time I came back for Christmas break, Lucy was gone. Mom said the silver and booze kept disappearing, so she finally let Lucy go. Lucy ended up the way you saw her today.”
“I bet I hadn’t thought of Lucy in ten years,” she continued, “when she called me one day after I had started practicing law. She said she had heard I was a lawyer, and asked me if I would help her in a dispute with her landlord. Since then she’ll call me every two or three years with some problem.”
“Did you get her off the assault charge she mentioned?” I asked.
“No, that’s the first time I heard about that one, but it doesn’t surprise me. She’s always had a temper.”
“What did Lucy tell you about Thomas?”
“Not much. I know he graduated from high school, she was real proud of that. The last time I saw her she just said he was a businessman, and doing real well.”
“What’s going on with the Jones estate?” I asked, changing the subject. “Do you see any problems?”
“No, but it won’t happen any time soon. What does that have to do with Lucy?”
“I don’t expect to get paid on Jones till you get paid, but I’ll make you a deal. You pay me for Tuggle, and then when Jones comes in you deduct the Tuggle fee and pay me from that.”
“I’ll pay you for Lucy anyway,” she said. “I’m not asking you to work for free.”
“I know you’re not, but this is the way I want to do it. Maybe the PI society will give me the do-gooder award.”
“You’re not the one feeling guilty about Jones now, are you? Is this atonement?” she asked.
“That’s just the way I want to do it, okay?” I said.
“Okay, would you like an advance?”
“An advance is always nice.”
“How about a thousand?” she said.
“A thousand is always nice.”
She pulled a checkbook out of her drawer and wrote a check. She handed it to me along with a legal sized envelope and said, “Now I have to go to court. You find Thomas, Jack. I’m counting on you.”
4 _____________________
I went to the bank and deposited my check, and then sat down outside on a bench and opened Amanda’s envelope. Inside was a Polaroid of Lucy standing in front of a Christmas tree with one arm around a slender young black man with a light complexion. Lucy was dressed about the way she had been at Amanda’s office, but Thomas had on a smart blue blazer with gold buttons, a striped button-down shirt, and gray slacks.
Thomas’s address and phone number was on a separate piece of paper. I knew from working a previous case that the address was on a street in a neighborhood of affluent African-American professionals and business people. I strolled over to the public library and checked the city directory to see if it listed a business address for Thomas, but all it had was his home, the same as Lucy had given me.
I picked up a sandwich at the Front Street Deli and returned to my office. I ate lunch while I returned phone calls and went through the mail. In one envelope was a check for $800 from a client that I had decided was never going to pay. This was looking like one of those days that it did pay to get out of bed.
About two thirty, I headed down to the Ajax Bail Bond Company. It was located across the street from the Criminal Justice Center, on the north edge of downtown, at 201 Poplar Avenue, the main thoroughfare from the river out to the affluent suburbs of Germantown and Collierville. The Justice Center is an imposing gray stone building built in the early 1980s to relieve prisoner crowding. It was nicknamed the Glamour Slammer because of the supposed amenities it would offer prisoners. Ask any local businessman who has spent his 48 hours there for a first-time DUI and he’ll tell you how glamorous it is.
Ajax had a blinking blue neon sign that operated even in the afternoon. It was in a one-story brick building separated from its neighbors only by firewalls. A liquor store occupied the space on the west, and a pawnshop was on the east. It was a complete urban strip mall, offering liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the means for financing both.
Black men, young and old, loitered on the sidewalk in front of the three businesses. Almost all smoked cigarettes, and some sucked liquor or wine from bottles hidden in paper sacks. Women strolled back and forth across Poplar to and from the jail, some carrying babies or holding children’s hands, obstructing traffic and not seeming to notice. Visiting day.
Cars waited more or less patiently for a gap in the pedestrians. Memphians don’t blow horns unless someone is about to run into them.
I walked in through the propped open door of Ajax Bond and stopped to let my eyes adjust to the dimness. When I could focus, I saw I was in a square room divided by a waist high wooden counter. There were rows of file cabinets covering the back wall behind the counter, and two metal desks with rolling chairs. On my side of the counter there were cheap vinyl-covered chairs and stacks of magazines on end tables. A strong odor of disinfectant filled the air. In one of the chairs a
