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“Have you been asleep all day?”

“What time is it?”

“A little after four.”

I sat up, keeping the blanket wrapped around me.

Aja was wearing a light brown dress that came down to almost the knee, and though it revealed her figure it didn’t cling.

Looking at this mature attire I realized that she was even more alluring and looked old enough to do something about it. I chuckled to myself, realizing that I couldn’t keep my chick in the egg.

“What you lookin’ at, Daddy?”

“Fate.”

“Are you okay?”

I thought about her question and finally said, “Sit down.”

She perched at the edge of the bed and cocked her head the way she had as a child.

“What?” she asked.

“I wanted to say that watching you grow into a woman is really the best thing I’ve ever done.”

“I talked to Mama,” she said.

“Oh?”

“She told me what she did. She tried to say that it wasn’t all that bad, but I said that she couldn’t have no idea what might happen if she outed you like that. I think she understood.”

“Go on downstairs,” I said then. “Let me get dressed.”

16.

Even with waking up that late in the day, the afternoon was almost normal. Aja made phone calls and filled out checks for me to sign after she was gone. I looked down on Montague Street, thinking about Effy pretending that she was a hooker in order to give me what I needed and Mel flying out of hell in the guise of a scarlet bird to be my guardian angel.

I intended to use Willa’s money to pay for a full investigation into Stuart Braun’s case on A Free Man. But first I had to make a little headway on the frame certain elements in the NYPD had hung around my neck.

“Angles and Dangles,” a woman with a deep and raspy voice answered on the fourth ring. It was six thirty and Aja was packing up to go.

“Let me talk to Marty Moreland,” I said.

“Who?”

“My friend Marty said he’d be at the bar and I could call…at six sharp.”

“To begin with,” the woman said, peeved, “it’s six thirty. And even if whoever you said was here, you got to call the pay phone you want to talk to a customer.”

She hung up and I smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

Aja was standing there looking at me from the doorway.

“I like my job,” I said.

“You working on that thing for Miss Portman?”