Free When the Thrill Is Gone by Walter Mosley

it exactly you need with me?” Tally asked, giving in, for the moment, to my superior, moneyed position.
    “Shawna wanted me to get you out of jail,” I began.
    “How she even know I was there? I haven’t seen her in days.”
    “How many days?”
    “Four . . . maybe five.”
    “What did you guys talk about?”
    Theodore Chambers clearly remembered the conversation.
    “I don’t remember,” he said. “Just shootin’ the shit is all.”
    The kid was going to be a puzzle. That was fine by me.
    “When she couldn’t find Chrystal, Shawna went looking for you,” I said. “When you were nowhere to be found, she came to me. I did a citywide systems search and found that you’d been arrested. I told her and she said to get you sprung.”
    “Why didn’t she come herself?”
    “With both brother and sister missing she went into hiding,” I said. “ I don’t even know where she is. She calls me to get her updates.”
    While Tally wondered at my story I got a closer look at him. The whites of his eyes were darkening and encroached upon by blood vessels. There was an odor coming off him that was mildly organic and not at all healthy.
    Seemingly to underscore my perceptions he emitted a midlung cough.
    “So what do you want, man?” he asked when the hacking subsided.
    “Shawna wants to help you,” I said. “She told me to get you out of jail and then question you about your sister. If you cooperate, I’m supposed to supply a lawyer to get you outta this jam and give you twenty-five hundred dollars.”
    “Show me the money,” he said, suddenly all ears and bloodshot eyes.
    I took three fresh new hundred-dollar bills from my pocket and handed them over.
    “This only three hundred,” he said.
    “Down payment on the talk we have.”
    Theodore “Tally” Chambers was twenty-nine years old. I knew that from Mardi’s research. His state of health made him look older, while his state of mind was reminiscent of a much younger man. I had him on my hook, but this didn’t offer me any comfort. Usually, when things went too easily something was bound to go wrong.
    “I got to get to my house, man,” he told me and then he coughed some more.
    “In Vinegar Hill?” Mardi’s research had been thorough.
    “Yeah,” he said behind big reddish-brown eyes.
    I hailed a cab and we piled in. Tally gave the driver his address after we both closed our doors.
    “I don’t go to Brooklyn,” the foreign white man told us.
    I smiled, thinking that this trouble was just the speed bump I needed.
    “We’re not getting out of this car until you stop in front of the address my friend gave you.”
    “I don’t know how to get there,” the middle-aged driver said.
    “You take the Brooklyn Bridge—” Tally started saying.
    “I’m not going!”
    “Oh yes you are, my friend,” I said calmly. “Because if you don’t we’re gonna sit back here all day long.”
    The man turned around in his seat, showing us a white wood baton that was about two feet long. Tally reached for the door but I laid a hand on his forearm and smiled for our mustachioed driver.
    “Listen to me, brother,” I said in a modulated but still threatening voice. “I have been in the ring my whole fuckin’ life. Hit me with that stick and I will beat you until your own brother will not know your face.”
    I meant what I said, the driver could tell. He turned around and shifted the car into drive.
    “Which way?” he asked.
     
     
    ON THE WAY over the bridge I began the interrogation.
    “Have you ever heard that Cyril was violent or threatening toward Chrystal?” I asked.
    “Naw, man. But, you know, I never had much to do with him. Only time we evah really spoke was at the weddin’, an’ even then it was like he wasn’t even talkin’ to me.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “It was just a whole bunch’a words. He talked but didn’t listen, then moved on like I didn’t make no difference at all.”
    “So you didn’t like him?”
    “I’m not