Sadler stopped in the street in front of a house painted purple with green trim. Four units. He remembered he had waited until Shortchops dashed through the rain and went in a door on the left. Hell, why not? The area was predominately black. He felt out of place as he passed four black kids playing on the sidewalk and moved up the concrete to the door, then around to the left to the next entrance. He knocked.
A black woman about forty-five opened the door a foot. She scowled. “What you’all want?”
“Looking for a friend. Shortchops Jackson used to live here.” She started to close the door, but his big Navy shoe wedged in and stopped it.
“Hey, I’m not the cops, I play jazz with the man every week. I want to help him.”
The woman frowned. “You got a name?” He told her. She turned and shouted something, then waited. After what seemed to Sadler to be five minutes, she slowly eased away from the door. It swung open, and Sadler stared at the man he had known as Shortchops Jackson. He looked twenty years older, ancient. He had a week’s growth of beard showing white on his black skin. His cheeks had sunk in and his eyes seemed to bulge.
“Be damned, the horn.” He stepped back and waved for Sadler to come in. Shortchops grabbed a chair at once and sat down. His knees gave way and he barely made it.
“What’n hell you doing here?” he asked.
“Looking for you. Hey, the cops are hunting you. They need some answers.”
“Can’t. They’ll throw me in jail and I’ll never get out.”
“Not if you had nothing to do with Joisette’s OD.”
Shortchops closed his eyes and tears seeped out around his lids and wound across wrinkles down his cheeks.
“Oh, yeah, my baby, my wonderful little adopted daughter. Tried to keep her off that shit. Did for a while. She went back. Said she was gonna be a porn queen soon as she got a wardrobe and met the right producer. She even went to Hollywood twice. Got stoned and called me.”
“Tell me what happened that night.”
“Yeah.” He sighed, and for a minute Sadler thought he had gone to sleep or died. He snorted and sat up straighter. “That night. Yeah. Showed her off to you guys, then we went back outside. She gave me a small hit, a quickie, so I could still play, then she wanted one herself. I saw her fill the damn syringe. Way too much. Way too much. I tried to stop her, but I was too late. Then she smiled and told me how great she felt, and almost at once she fell down. I found the syringe and picked it up with my handkerchief and put it in my pocket. The cops would never believe me.”
He opened his eyes and stared at Sadler. “I ain’t exactly been a church choirboy. Got me a record. Done good lately. Just too much shit for my own body. Got me a woman helps me. Gonna get some money if I ever kick this damn murder rap.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Nobody can help but Joisette or that hooker, Nancy. Who was so stoned she didn’t even know if it was day or night.”
“You still have that syringe wrapped in your handkerchief.”
“Oh, yeah. Didn’t want the cops to find it.”
“You have it now, here?”
Shortchops frowned. “Have it?”
“Do you still have the syringe that Joisette used to shoot up that night she died?”
“Oh, hell, yes. In my drawer.” He motioned to the woman, who had hovered in the background holding an iron frying pan. Sadler figured she wasn’t doing the dishes.
“Get the handkerchief and the syringe,” Shortchops said, sounding more straight than he had all night. The woman frowned, looked at Sadler.
“Sure you ain’t a cop?”
“I’m in the Navy, and I play horn with Shortchops.”
She nodded after staring hard at him, then went into another room. She came back a few moments later holding a white handkerchief. She started to hand it to Shortchops, but his hands shook so much she gave it to Sadler. He pushed back the edges of the white cloth to see the syringe. Carefully he folded the cloth over it again.
“Shortchops. I’m going to take this downtown to the police. If it has Joisette’s fingerprints on it, you’ll be in the clear. It will be a simple self-inflicted OD.”
“No,” he said. “No cops.”
The woman walked in front of him and slapped him gently on the cheek. He looked up in surprise.
“Yes. The police. This man can help. You can stop hiding. You can get your money and we can live in a respectable house.”
His eyes went wide, his head sagged, and the woman caught him before he fell off the chair. Sadler helped her carry him to the sofa and stretch him out.
“No more heroin for Shortchops,” he told her. “This should clear him. You get him dried out and we’ll be playing jazz again in two weeks.”
Sadler left the room and hurried down to his car. He had put the handkerchief in his civilian jacket pocket and reached for his keys. Three teenage boys sat on the hood of his car. He stopped and stared at them. Two stood and walked toward him.
“Your car, mister?” the one just over six feet asked.
“Yes.”
“You did shit by not paying us to protect it. Man, this is our turf. Don’t nobody park here without protection.” They moved up within three feet of him.
The third boy came up beside the other two. “I have protection,” Sadler said. “It’s right over there, that unmarked police car.” Two of the boys turned to look. He kicked viciously out with his right foot at the boy in the middle who didn’t look away. He felt his hard shoe skid off the youth’s thigh and land hard into his crotch, smashing penis and testicles upward against his pelvic bones and bringing a wail of agony. The kid slumped to the ground and rolled into a ball.
One of the kids looked back quickly. Sadler slammed a hard right fist into the boy’s jaw, and at the same time spun and caught the third boy with a back-kick in the kidney putting him on the ground. The only one standing backed up and lifted his fists, then thought better of it and turned and ran.
“See, I told you guys I had all the protection I need.” He walked around them, stepped into his car, and drove away.
Detective Petroff was not in the Central Station when Sadler arrived. The dispatcher put in a call to him, and a half hour later he came in the door and spotted Sadler.
“So, you remembered something?”
Sadler told him the story that Shortchops had told him. The detective held out his hand. “Give,” he said.
Sadler frowned. “Shortchops is a friend. I’d hate to see this evidence get lost and you continue to hound him. I’ll give you the syringe, but I go with it to your lab and see if they can find prints on it and then find out whose prints they are.”
Petroff nodded. “No problem. Right this way.”
It only took fifteen minutes. There were plenty of good prints. Detective Petroff had a copy of a full set of prints of the dead girl.
“Match a hundred percent,” the print technician said. “No doubt those prints on the syringe are those and only those of Joisette Brown.”
Senior Chief Sadler came into the Third Platoon’s office just as the SEALs marched back from the afternoon swim. He dropped into the chair beside Murdock’s desk and told him the whole story.
“So, Shortchops is free and clear. His woman promised me that she’ll dry him out and get the probate under way. There should be no problem with him collecting his three and a half million dollars or whatever it is.”
“And you and the other members of the band will each get your fifty thousand?”
“Who knows, Skipper? I’ll believe that much money when I see the check. Until then, what’s on the Bunsen for tomorrow?”