“I am. A private investigator. I just opened my own office over Uncle Vartan’s store.”
“You should have told me that when you came.”
“You must have guessed that I was an investigator when we met on the beach. Why else would you have lied?”
He didn’t answer.
“If Janice’s real parents are still poor,” I said, “fifty or a hundred thousand dollars should help to alleviate it.”
He nodded. “If the burglar has found the right buyer. It should certainly help to send her to a first-rate college. And now I’m getting tired. It’s time for my nap. I have leukemia, Pierre. My doctor has told me he doesn’t know how many days I have before I sleep the big sleep. I know what you are thinking, and it could be true. I’m sure you are honor bound to take what I have told you to the police. I promise I will bear you no malice if you do. But you had better hurry.”
“There is no need to hurry,” I said. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Pressville.”
“And thank you for your courtesy,” he said. “Give my regards to Vartan.”
I didn’t give his regards to Uncle Vartan. I didn’t even tell him I had talked with his former customer. I had some thinking to do.
For three days I thought and wondered when the police would call. They never came. Mrs. Bishop sent me a check for the balance of my investigation along with an acerbic note that informed me she would certainly tell her many friends how unsuccessful I had been in searching for both her rug and her daughter.
I had no need to continue thinking on the fourth day. Duane Pressville was found dead in his house on Adonis Court by a concerned neighbor. I burned the records of that maiden quest.
PART IV
MODERN CLASSICS
CRIMSON SHADOW
BY WALTER MOSLEY
Watts
(Originally published in 1995)
1
What you doin’ there, boy?”
It was six a.m. Socrates Fortlow had come out to the alley to see what was wrong with Billy. He hadn’t heard him crow that morning and was worried about his old friend.
The sun was just coming up. The alley was almost pretty with the trash and broken asphalt covered in half-light. Discarded wine bottles shone like murky emeralds in the sludge. In the dawn shadows Socrates didn’t even notice the boy until he moved. He was standing in front of a small cardboard box, across the alley—next to Billy’s wire fence.
“What bidness is it to you, old man?” the boy answered. He couldn’t have been more than twelve but he had that hard convict stare.
Socrates knew convicts, knew them inside and out.
“I asked you a question, boy. Ain’t yo’ momma told you t’be civil?”
“Shit!” The boy turned away, ready to leave. He wore baggy jeans with a blooming blue T-shirt over his bony arms and chest. His hair was cut close to the scalp.
The boy bent down to pick up the box.
“What they call you?” Socrates asked the skinny butt stuck up in the air.
“What’s it to you?”
Socrates pushed open the wooden fence and leapt. If the boy hadn’t had his back turned he would have been able to dodge the stiff lunge. As it was he heard something and moved quickly to the side.
Quickly. But not quickly enough.
Socrates grabbed the skinny arms with his big hands—the rock breakers, as Joe Benz used to call them.
“Ow! Shit!”
Socrates shook the boy until the serrated steak knife, which had appeared from nowhere, fell from his hand.
The old brown rooster was dead in the box. His head slashed so badly that half of the beak was gone.
“Let me loose, man.” The boy kicked, but Socrates held him at arm’s length.
“Don’t make me hurt you, boy,” he warned. He let go of one arm and said, “Pick up that box. Pick it up!” When the boy obeyed, Socrates pulled him by the arm—dragged him through the gate, past the tomato plants and string bean vines, into the two rooms where he’d stayed since they’d let him out of prison.
The kitchen was only big enough for a man and a half. The floor was pitted linoleum; maroon where it had kept its color, gray where it had worn through. There was a card table for dining and a fold-up plastic chair for a seat. There was a sink with a hot plate on the drainboard and shelves that were once cabinets—before the doors were torn off.
The light fixture above the sink had a sixty-watt bulb burning in it. The room smelled of coffee. A newspaper was spread across the table.
Socrates shoved the boy into the chair, not gently.
“Sit’own!”
There was a mass of webbing next to the weak lightbulb. A red spider picked its way slowly through the strands.
“What’s your name, boy?” Socrates asked again.
“Darryl.”
There was a photograph of a painting tacked underneath the light. It was the image of a black woman in the doorway of a house. She wore a red dress and a red hat to protect her eyes from the sun. She had her arms crossed under her breasts and looked angry. Darryl stared at the painting while the spider danced above.
“Why you kill my friend, asshole?”
“What?” Darryl asked. There was fear in his voice.
“You heard me.”
“I-I-I din’t kill nobody.” Darryl gulped and opened his eyes wider than seemed possible. “Who told you that?”
When Socrates didn’t say anything, Darryl jumped up to run, but the man socked him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, pushing him back down in the chair.
Socrates squatted down and scooped the rooster up out of the box. He held the limp old bird up in front of Darryl’s face.
“Why you kill Billy, boy?”
“That’s a bird.” Darryl pointed. There was relief mixed with panic in his eyes.
“That’s my friend.”
“You crazy, old man. That’s a bird. Bird cain’t be nobody’s friend.” Darryl’s words were still wild. Socrates knew the guilty look on his face.
He wondered at the boy and at the rooster that had gotten him out of his bed every day for the past eight years. A rage went through him and he crushed the rooster’s neck in his fist.
“You crazy,” Darryl said.
A large truck made its way down the alley just then. The heavy vibrations went through the small kitchen, making plates and tin-ware rattle loudly.
Socrates shoved the corpse into the boy’s lap. “Get ovah there to the sink an’ pluck it.”
“Shit!”
“You don’t have to do it …”
“You better believe I ain’t gonna …”
“… but I will kick holy shit outta you if you don’t.”
“Pluck what? What you mean, pluck it?”
“I mean go ovah t’that sink an’ pull out the feathers. What you kill it for if you ain’t gonna pluck it?”
“I’as gonna sell it.”
“Sell it?”
“Yeah,” Darryl said. “Sell it to some old lady wanna make some chicken.”
2
Darryl plucked the chicken bare. He wanted to stop halfway but Socrates kept pointing out where he had missed and pushed him back toward the sink. Darryl used a razor-sharp knife that Socrates gave him to cut off the feet and battered head. He slit open the old rooster’s belly and set aside the liver, heart, and gizzard.
“Rinse out all the blood. All of it,” Socrates told his captive. “Man could get sick on blood.”
While Darryl worked, under the older man’s supervision, Socrates made Minute rice and then green beans seasoned with lard and black pepper. He prepared them in succession, one after the other on the single hot plate. Then he sautéed the giblets, with green onions from the garden, in bacon fat that he kept in a can over the sink. He mixed the giblets in with the rice.