“That’s one of the things I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“Why he’d come back to the neighborhood. He didn’t need to.”
“His ego.”
“How so?”
“He wasn’t an especially strong man, you know? Growing up, he’d had to take a lot of pushing around by other kids in the neighborhood. I don’t think he ever got over the thrill of coming back here and kind of rubbing their faces in it.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “Time’s up. I told you I wouldn’t be much help.”
“You see him much?”
“Not much.”
“He pay you child support?”
“Not much.”
“With all his money?”
“With all his money.”
“He see the kids much?”
“When it suited him.”
“He have a lot of enemies?”
She looked at me as if I were hopelessly naive. “You know much about dealing drugs? All you got is enemies.”
“The white woman — you think she killed him because of drugs?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“And you don’t care?”
“I quit caring about him a long time ago.”
“You give me the names of the other witnesses?”
Again, she hesitated. “I guess you could find out anyway.”
She gave me the names. I wrote them down in my little notebook.
“What’re you lookin’ for, mister?” she said.
I sighed. “I wish I knew, Charlene. I wish I knew.”
3
Two blocks after leaving the restaurant, I was joined by a jaunty little black man in a coat of blue vinyl that tried with great and sad difficulty to be leather. It would probably have even settled for being leatherette.
He was my age and he walked with a slight limp and he knew nothing whatsoever about tailing anybody. It had not taken Charlene long to get to the phone.
I thought about this as I reached the neighborhood proper, five square blocks where rats crouched in living room corners and where there wasn’t enough water pressure to flush a toilet. The neighborhood seemed to huddle, as if for warmth and inspiration, around a ma and pa corner grocery store with rusting forty-year-old “PEPSI COLA... in the big bottle!” signs on either side of the door. People came and went bearing groceries bought with food stamps and the quick sad last of paychecks; shuffling shambling stumbling away if they were into hootch or cough syrup or street drugs; moving briskly and soberly if they had some sort of purpose, kids to feed, jobs to get to. In the cold drizzle, the dark faces staring at me held distrust and anger and curiosity; only a few smiled. I wouldn’t have smiled at me, either.
For a time, I stood out on the corner looking at the place, in front of the laundromat that also rented videos, where John Wade had been shot to death and where a woman who had looked not unlike Carla DiMonte had been seen fleeing.
The jaunty little man in the blue vinyl coat stood maybe thirty yards away, leaning into a doorway and hacking harshly around his cigarette. Twice we made eye contact. I doubted I’d be hiring him in the near future to do any leg work.
Inside, the grocery store smelled of spices, overripe fruit, and blooded meat.
A tiny bald black man in a proud white apron stood behind a counter dispatching people with all the efficiency and courtesy of a supply sergeant dispatching recruits. His plastic name badge read PHIL WARREN. He was one of the people I was looking for.
One woman was stupid enough to question a certain odor from the bundled hamburger she laid on the counter and the little black man said, “You want to talk about your bill now, Bertha?”
The woman dropped her gaze. He wrote up her ticket and jammed it into a large manilla envelope taped to the wall next to endless rows of cigarettes. In Magic Marker the envelope was labeled CREDIT.
When my turn came, I said, “I’d like to ask you some questions about John Wade.” I’d waited until the place was empty except for a chunky woman sweeping up in back. The only real noise in the place was the thrumming of cooler motors too old to work efficiently.
The little man, who looked to be about forty and who wore a snappy red bowtie across the collar of his white shirt, said, “I can tell you exactly two things about John Wade. One is that he’s dead; two is that he deserves to be dead.”
“I understand you were an eyewitness?”
“Yes, I happen to be.” He looked at me carefully. “You’re not the law, are you?”
“Not the official law.”
“You couldn’t be a friend of his because drug dealers don’t have friends.”
“I suspect that’s true.”
“So you’re trying to find out exactly what?”
“If you saw this woman kill him.”
“Oh, I saw it all right.”
I described the woman to him.
“That’s her, all right,” he said.
“And you actually saw her shoot him?”
“I actually saw her shoot him.”
“And then get into a Mercedes-Benz and leave?”
He nodded. “Umm-hmm. Why would you be interested now? He’s been dead for some time.”
“A client is interested.”
“Oh,” he said. “A client. Must be an interesting business you’re in.”
I smiled. “Sometimes.”
For the first time, he smiled, too. “This used to be a nice neighborhood. Oh, I don’t mean like your white neighborhoods. But nice. If you lived here, you were reasonably safe.” He shook his head. “And there were drugs. I mean, I can’t deny that. Why, I can remember after coming back from Korea, all the marijuana I suddenly saw here. But the past ten years, it’s different. They’ll kill you to get the drug money and the pushers are gods and that’s maybe the saddest thing of all. How the youngsters look up to the pushers.”
“So John Wade was—”
“—was just one less pusher to worry about.”
I was reaching over to take a book of matches from a small white plastic box that said FREE when I saw something familiar written on a notepad next to the black dial telephone.
“Charlene called you.”
“Pardon me?” he said, suddenly snappy as his bow tie.
“Your notepad there.”
He saw the problem and grabbed the notepad.
“You had my name written on it. So, unless you’re a psychic, Charlene called ahead about me and told you my name.”
He decided to give up the ruse. “You know how it is in a neighborhood. People take care of each other.”
Just then, from the back, a tall, good-looking woman of perhaps twenty-five came through curtains and walked up to the register. She had the kind of coffee-colored beauty that lends itself to genuine grace. She said to Phil Warren, “Here’s a list of everything I took, Phil. Just put it on the Friend House account.” She glanced at me dismissively and went out the door, toting a large square cardboard box heavy with groceries.
“Would that be Karen Dooley?”
“I suppose,” he said.
I nodded. “Thank you.” Then I went out the door quickly.
She was already halfway down the block by the time I reached her. She walked with her head down to avoid the stinging drizzle.
“I’d be happy to carry that for you,” I said.
“It’s fine just the way it is.”
“My name’s Parnell.”
“Hello, Mr. Parnell.”
“I take it Charlene called you about me.”
She surprised me by laughing. “Charlene is very fast on the phone. That’s why the machine always tries to recruit her at election time. She can call five people in the time it takes others to call two.”