“So no permanent solution but at least a temporary one?”
“Exactly.”
“How many guest rooms do you have?”
“With the four new ones in the basement, we’ve got fourteen. That’s nowhere near enough to help everybody in the neighborhood who’s hurting very badly but at least it’s something.”
“It must be pretty expensive, running a place like this. Does the city contribute?”
“Yes, the city.” She made a clucking noise and glanced down at the slender gold watch on her slender brown wrist. “Ooops, I’m sorry, Mr. Parnell. I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting upstairs. Have we helped you?”
I stood up. “As much as you could, I guess.”
She put out her hand and we shook.
“I hope you find whatever you’re looking for, Mr. Parnell,” she said.
In less than a minute, I was standing on the sidewalk again. The coffee cake kept me full and warm.
I decided to find out who was following me and why.
4
We went two blocks. A hard wind came and chafed my cheeks and nose, a mumbling drunken black man bounced off a building and nearly fell into me, a cop ticketed a rusted weary VW that looked as if it had not been moved in weeks, and the man tailing me got all worked up when I took two steps into an alley.
Pressed against the wall, I waited, making a fist of my gloved hand.
But he was in no shape to swing on me when he came trotting into the alley, a small man the color of hickory, his chest heaving from a long lifetime of cigarettes.
He ran right into me and I grabbed him.
I didn’t put him against the wall with any special force but even so he looked afraid. His nose was running in the cold and he hadn’t cleaned his eyes so well this morning.
“Make it easy on yourself,” I said. “Who put you on to me?”
“Tommy,” he said between gasps.
“Who?”
“Tommy, man.”
“I don’t know any Tommy.”
His brown eyes narrowed. “Her son. Charlene’s.”
I thought of last night, the late phone call, the young black voice. “Why’d he put you on to me?”
“Don’t know.”
“Bull.”
“Don’t, man. Honest. He’s jes’ a good kid so I tol’ him I’d help him.”
“Why didn’t he tail me himself?”
“Aw, I guess ’cause he believes some of m’ah stories. Been tellin’ them stories for years and years, ever since he was a little kid.”
“What stories?”
“You know, man, how I was an MP in Korea. That whole gig.”
“And you weren’t?”
He shrugged. “Had a buddy who was, I guess.”
“How did Tommy know about me?”
“He heard about you bein’ in the neighborhood yesterday, then he saw you with his ma this morning.”
“He isn’t in school?”
“Dropped out.”
“Where do I find him?”
He told me.
5
Steam rolled from the front end of the car wash like smoke from an angry dragon. Inside the smoke you could see a shiny new red Buick struggling like some metal monster to be born. As soon as the Buick reached the park area, the smoke evaporating now against the gray sky, four black boys descended on it with dirty white rags and dirtier white wiping mitts, shouting things to each other over the top of the car as rap music played above the roar of the cleaning and buffing machinery inside. One of the boys, I suspected, was Tommy.
Inside the office, the plump dark woman in the lime-green blastjacket put down her Kool filter-tip and said, “Tommy’s a good kid.”
All I’d asked was where I’d find him. Nothing else.
“Not all the kids who work here are good kids, if you know what I mean,” she went on. “But Tommy is. Most definitely.”
“I’m not going to hurt him.”
“He ain’t done nothin’, if that’s what you’re about.”
“I’d just like to ask him some questions.”
“He’s straight. In every sense. No fightin’, no drugs, nothin’. He’s the one I leave in charge when I got to go to the doctor or somethin’. You can trust him.”
Feeling eyes on me, I turned at an angle. Through the glass separating the wind tunnel of the wash itself from the shabby waiting area, I saw a tall, lean young man, gray in the shadows now, watching me.
I nodded in his direction. “Tommy?”
She saw him, too. “Yes.”
“Thanks.”
I went out the door and into the wind tunnel. The roar was deafening. Customers waved white tickets at the cleaning kids and then piled in their cars. It reminded me of working around fighter planes in WW II, the ceaseless and overwhelming noise that you got lost inside of.
For a moment, Tommy looked afraid, and I had the sense that he might run.
Then he surprised me by tossing his rag to another kid and coming toward me.
“I’m Tommy,” he shouted over the roar.
“Yes.”
“Let’s go in the back where we can have a cup of coffee.”
“Fine.”
I followed him down a narrow concrete path that paralleled the cleaning equipment. Sudsy spray flicked at us. It was freezing in here. The kids probably had head colds all winter long.
In a small room with two vending machines and a long, scarred table, Tommy got two cups of black coffee in paper cups and set them down on either side of the table.
He sat down and I did likewise.
“I figured you’d come looking for me,” he said.
“You were the one who called me last night, right?”
“Right.”
I watched him. He had a good, high, intelligent forehead and somber, intelligent eyes. Even dressed in a sweatshirt and a dirty blastjacket, he carried himself with poise and dignity. He had long but very masculine hands the undersides of which were tan in contrast to the dark uppers. He was one of those kids who would have been mature around age ten. He said, “I want you to find out who killed my father.”
“From the police and press reports, I gather it was an unidentified white woman.”
“No.”
“You know something they don’t?”
“I just know it wasn’t an ‘unidentified white woman.’ ”
“How do you know that?”
“Because of what Phil Warren did to me.”
“The guy who runs the grocery store?”
“Right.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Slapped me. Real hard.”
“For what?”
“For eavesdropping.”
“When?”
“The night my father was killed. I went looking for my mother — my little brother told me she was over at Warren’s — and I heard them in the back room there. Phil’s got a little room where some of the neighborhood people meet when something bad happens or when they want to get some neighborhood project going. At least, they used his little room till they got Friend House.”
“So what did you hear?”
“When I was eavesdropping?”
“Right.”
“Nothing. I was just there a minute or two, you know, kind of pressed up against the door, and I stumbled against something and Phil came out and—”
“Why didn’t you just go inside the room or knock? Why were you eavesdropping?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I heard voices and I didn’t want to interrupt. So I kind of started listening and—”