“This man I’m talking about could do more good than them,” she contended. “If that big bright Cadillac is anywhere in Harlem, he is more likely to find it than anybody I know of.”

“If all these mens you know—” he began, but she wouldn’t let him finish.

“What mens?”

“This bald-headed pappy passing himself off as a fortune teller—”

Her lips curled. “You ain’t jealous of him, I hope.”

“Well, he damn sure wasn’t no woman.”

“This man ain’t a bit like him.”

“If you think that makes me happy—”

“It ain’t like that,” she said. “I hardly know him. He’s just a business acquaintance.”

“What kind of business?”

But she ignored that. “We can ask him to look around and see what he might find,” she said. “And also we can stay in his house whilst he’s looking. You ain’t got nowhere to stay.”

“I was depending on staying with you the time I wasn’t staying in my car. Is you got some man staying in your room?”

“You make me sick,” she said. “You know can’t no man stay in my room, as respectable as those people is I room with.”

“Well, how is us going to pay this man for staying in his house and searching for our car?” he wanted to know. “I gave Mister Baron my last dollar.”

“We can sell him the tires off this car,” she said, “He’s in the used-tire business.”

“I get it,” he said. “I ain’t as dumb as you think. He’s tire thief.”

“Well, what if he is,” she said. “He’s got to know where cars is at in order to steal their tires. And that’s just who you need, somebody who knows something.”

“Well, all right then, let’s go give him the tires off this car and get started looking. Where is he at?”

“He lives in the Alley. He’s got a big place of his own.”

He started the car and drove down to 112th Street and turned back toward Lexington. Just back of the buildings facing on Third Avenue was a narrow passageway that turned at a right angle and ran between the crosstown streets.

It was a tight squeeze for a big car—there wasn’t space on either side to open the door and get out—and he had to back up three times to turn the corner.

“I’d hate to get caught in here,” he said. “Ain’t no way to go but up.”

The Alley was flanked by rows of two-story brick buildings, in varying degrees of decay, that had once been carriage-houses for the residents of 112th and 111th Streets. Now families lived on the second floors that had been servants quarters, and the carriage stalls were filled with long-forgotten junk, in which rats bred and children played and little girls lost their maidenheads.

“It’s here,” she said, indicating a rotten wooden carriage-house door spotted with patches of rusty tin. “Let me see if he’s in.”

The door was fastened by iron bars bolted to the rotten wood and a brass lock the size of a hitching block.