In the silence I could hear the distant roar of the car wash. It was like the distant sound of war.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“My father didn’t get much education. He did pretty well.”
“Yeah, he did pretty well all right, Tommy. Somebody shot him to death in the street.”
Tommy’s eyes dropped to his coffee. “Maybe I’ll go back sometime. You know, to school.”
“The longer you’re out, the harder it’ll be to go back.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“She seems like a decent woman.”
He didn’t say anything, which I found odd. Most boys agree with nice things said about their mothers.
I said, “Who do you think killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You want to try and look me in the eye and tell me that?”
He raised his gaze. “I don’t know.”
“C’mon, Tommy. There’s something you’re not saying.”
“Some white chick killed him.”
“You believe that, do you?”
“That’s what the papers said, right?'” He glanced down at a battered Timex on his right wrist. “Mr. Franklin don’t like us taking long breaks. I better get back.”
“You heard something, didn’t you? When you were eavesdropping.”
He took his soggy paper coffee cup and tossed it for three points into a wastebasket to our right. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. He stood up. “I better get back, man.”
When he reached the roar of the cleaning machines, he shouted a goodbye and disappeared into the chill rolling steam.
6
“When did Tommy drop out of school?” I said.
“I don’t know. A while back.”
“Right after his father was murdered, maybe?”
Charlene looked at me with growing impatience. “I already told you, Parnell, I’m busy.”
She wasn’t kidding about that. The restaurant was packed with suppertime customers. Grease and cigarette smoke were heavy.
“Tommy dropped out of school because he found out who really killed his father,” I said. “He figured being a good boy wasn’t worth it any more.”
“Is that right?” she said, reaching past me to take a green ticket from a customer.
She punched it up with her usual formidable efficiency.
“He also called me in my room last night so I’d be sure to do some investigating,” I said.
“Have a nice night,” she said to the customer, a man who looked at me with equal degrees of malice and pity, bothering the pretty woman as I was.
“He knows who killed his father but he won’t tell me,” I said.
This time it was a chunky woman bundled up inside a threadbare brown coat. She looked like a nearsighted bear.
“Don’t forget, your favorite show’s on TV tonight, Emma,” Charlene said, as she handed her back her change.
The old woman, nearsighted, tromped on my foot as she moved past the register.
“If your son knows who killed his father, that means you do, too,” I said.
Only at the last did I see the flick of her eyes, a preordained signal of some kind that brought a dusky fellow too young, too angry and too big for me to do anything about.
“He’s hassling me, Roland,” Charlene said.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
Down the block was an old-fashioned glass phone booth whose dim light was like a forlorn beacon in the gathering gloom. Though it was not yet four-thirty in the afternoon, night was here.
Inside, a drunken kid with a mean facial scar stood bounding on his feet as if he had to go to the bathroom very badly and trying to explain in a whining voice why he’d been unfaithful to the woman he was attempting to sweet-talk on the other end of the phone.
Finally — she must have known telepathically how cold I was getting waiting my turn — she hung up on him. For the next minute silver breath poured from his mouth as he shouted at the phone he’d just slammed.
Tearing open the door, he came out onto the sidewalk, seeing me for the first time.
“She’s a bitch,” he said, and vanished into the shadows.
There wasn’t, of course, anything left of the phone book except the black plastic covers. I had to call information for the general number and then I had to ask the operator who answered the general number to whom I might speak about funding for halfway houses.
In all, I talked to four people at some length before I got my answer.
By then, I was very cold and not just physically. Now, I understood why an otherwise all right kid like Tommy would drop out of school.
Down by the restaurant, I waited next to a tree, smoking cigarettes eight, nine and ten for the day, until Charlene came walking fast out of the restaurant.
7
“I’d like to talk with you,” I said, trying to match her quick steps.
Turning, seeing who I was, her pace only increased. “I’ve had enough of you, Parnell. Now, I want you to leave me alone.”
People appeared and disappeared in the darkness like phantoms. I caught up with her and took her arm and slowed her down.
“He knows,” I said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Parnell.”
“Your son. Tommy. He knows what happened.”
Only for a moment did her eyes allow the possibility that she was afraid. Then she tried to cover everything in anger again. “Leave me alone.”
“It isn’t too hard to figure out, when you think about it,” I said. “A drug dealer making a drop is going to have a lot of money on him. Did he have it in a suitcase?”
Ahead, in the faint streetlight, I could see the new, clean shape of Friend House, obviously her destination. Knowing what I knew now, that did not surprise me.
Silhouetted on the front steps, the open door pouring warm yellow light into the chill night, stood Phil Warren. He held his hand out to her, as if to a drowning victim.
She went up the steps two at a time, huddling next to him like a girl to her father when the neighborhood bully came ’round.
“You don’t have no call to be here, Mr. Parnell. Now you go on back to where you belong,” Warren said. In his cardigan sweater, white shirt and gray slacks, he looked relaxed and composed. Not even his voice betrayed the panic he must have been feeling. “Out of this neighborhood,” he said, in case I didn’t get the point.
“There wasn’t any white woman who shot John Wade, was there? She was somebody you made up and told the police about.”
“You heard me, Mr. Parnell. You get away from us and stay away.”
He took Charlene’s arm and turned to guide her inside.
“There’s a sixteen-year-old boy who wants to know why the five of you murdered his father,” I said, there in the glow of the porch light, my breath cold. Down the street a dog barked angrily at the quarter-moon.
Warren had the grace and good sense to let that one stop him. To Charlene, he said, “You go on inside. I’ll talk to him.”
She glanced down at me and said, “Maybe you don’t understand everything you think you do, Parnell.”
“Hand me my coat, would you, Charlene?” Warren asked, going back to the threshold and putting his hand out. He bundled up inside a dark topcoat and then came down the stairs.
We walked two blocks before saying anything. In the soft moonlight the ugliness of the neighborhood, the buildings half-toppled, the rusted, deserted automobiles, the brothers standing loud and boastful in the red-lit roaring mouths of bars — in the moonlight and shadows none of this looked so forlorn and menacing. There was even a lurid beauty about it, one only a tourist like myself could appreciate. The practiced eye of the resident would see far different things.