"Wha' yo' say?" The woman's eyes narrowed suspiciously.
"I thought I was speaking English. Tyrone's folks are working and they wanted me…"
"Ah hear you. Ah hear you. What kind of silly story be dat? What kind of people you tink we is, you come in and try to fool us like dat?"
"Fool you?" asked Remo.
"Nobody gots no folks what bofe be working. Why you heah tellin' dem lies?"
Remo sighed. "I don't know why I bother. All right. I'm Tyrone's parole officer. I think he's violated parole with a triple rape and six murders. I want to talk to Shockley before I send him to the electric chair."
"Dat better, you be tellin' de troof now. You sit down and you wait and Shockley be wif you when he gets chancet. He busy."
The woman nodded Remo toward a chair and went back to her desk and a copy of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty. She stared at the cover.
Remo found himself sitting next to a teenage boy who was staring hard at a coloring book on his lap. It was open to a cartoon of Porky Pig sniffing a flower in front of a barn.
The boy took a crayon from his shirt pocket, colored one of Porky's fat round hams pink, then replaced the crayon. He took out a green one and colored the roof of the barn. He replaced that crayon and took out the pink one again to do Porky's other rear leg.
Remo watched over the boy's shoulder.
"You're pretty good," he said.
"Yeah, I do de best in de art appreciation classes."
"I can see why. You almost stay inside all the lines."
"Sometime it be hard though when de lines close together and de point of de crayon don't fit 'tween dem."
"What do you do then?" asked Remo.
"Ah takes a crayon from somebody whats got a sharp one and ah use dat one to fit in 'tween de lines."
"And you give him your old crayon?"
The boy looked at Remo, a look of confusion on his face as if Remo were speaking a language he had never heard.
"Whuffo ah do that? Ah trows de old crayon away. You a social worker or somefin?"
"No, but sometimes I wish I were."
"Yo' talks funny. 'If ah were' you says."
"That's called English."
"Yeah. That. What your name?"
"Bwana Sahib," Remo said.
"You son of great Arab chief too?"
"I'm a direct descendant of that great Arabian chief, Pocahontas."
"Great Arab chiefs, dey be black," the boy sniffed. He knew a fool when he saw one.
"I was on his mother's side," Remo said. "Go back to coloring."
"It all right. Ah gots till tomorra to finish it."
Remo shook his head. At the desk, the black woman was still staring at the cover of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty.
Shockley's office door opened slightly and Remo heard a voice.
"Rat bastard," came a shriek. "You be discriminating. Dat not be fair."
The door opened fully and a woman stood in the opening, her back to Remo. She was shaking a fist at something inside the room. The woman had big thick hams that jiggled below the flowered belt of her cotton dress. Her hips looked like a hassock with a bite taken out of it. Her flailing arms set off wave movements in the oceans of fat that hung from her upper biceps. A voice inside the room said something softly.
"You still a rat bastard," she said. "If you didn't have dat, I show you a ting or two."
She turned and stepped toward Remo. If hate had been electricity, her eyes would have sparked. Her lips were pressed tight together and her nostrils flared.
For a moment, Remo considered running lest the mastodon get her hands on him. But she stopped next to the boy who was coloring.
"Come on, Shabazz, we going home."
The boy was trying to finish up the coloring of Porky Pig's right front leg. Remo could hear his teeth grind as he concentrated. The woman lingered only for a moment, then clubbed the boy alongside the head. Crayon went flying one way, the coloring book the other.
"Come on, ma, why you do dat?"
"We gettin' outta here. Dat rat bastard, he not gonna change his mind 'bout you graduating."
"You mean your son here is not going to be graduated?" Remo said. "He's going to be left back?" Maybe there was still some sanity in the world.
The woman looked at Remo as if he were a fried rib that had lain all night on a subway platform.
"What you talking? Shabazz here, he de salitate-atorian. He got honors."
"Then what's the problem?" Remo asked.
"De problem is Shabazz gots go away on May fifteempf. And dat no good Shockley, he won't change de graduation and make it no earlier so dat Shabazz get his diploma before he go to de jail. He do de five years for de robbery."
"That must be heartbreaking after Shabazz works so hard coloring inside the lines."
"Dat right," said the mother. "C'mon, Shabazz, we gets outta dis motherfuckin' place."
Shabazz shuffled to his feet. The sixteen-year-old was taller than Remo. Standing next to his mother, he looked like a pencil leaning against a pencil sharpener.
He followed the woman from the room, leaving his crayon and coloring book on the floor where she had knocked them. Remo picked them up and put them on the small end table that held a lamp, bolted to the table with long steel stove bolts.
Remo looked across the counter at the woman who was still staring at the cover of Essential Magazine, the Journal of Black Beauty, her big lips moving slowly as if she were trying to crush a very small guppy to death between them. She finally took a deep breath and turned the cover to the front page.
"Excuse, me," Remo said. "May I go in now?"
The woman slammed shut the cover of the magazine. "Sheeit," she said. "Always inneruptions. Now ah got to start all over 'gain."
"I won't bother you again," Remo said. "I'll be quiet."
"You do that, heah? Go 'head in, iffen you wants."
Doctor Shockley's office was really two offices. There was the part Remo stood in, just inside the door, a skeleton of a room with three chairs bolted to the vinyl-tiled floor and a lamp that was riveted to the floor and had a tamperproof wire screen around the bare bulb.
The other part of the office was where Shockley sat at a desk. Behind him were shelves filled with books, tape recorders, and statues of African artifacts that were made in a small town in Illinois. And between the two halves of the office was a screen, a tight steel mesh that ran from wall to floor, from floor to ceiling, effectively separating Shockley from anyone who might come into his office. Next to his desk, a gate was built into the screen. It was fastened on Shockley's side with a heavy bulletproof padlock.
Shockley was a trim black man with a modest Afro and darting eyes. He wore a pin-striped gray suit with a pink shirt and black figured tie. His fingernails were manicured, Remo noticed, and he wore a thin gold Omega watch on his narrow wrist.
His hands were open on his desk, palm side down. Next to his right hand was a .357 Magnum. Remo had to look twice before he believed it. The gun had notches on the carved wooden grip.
Shockley smiled at Remo as Remo approached the screen.
"Won't you sit down, please?" His voice was nasal, bored, and precise, the adenoidal Ivy League squeak that clips off words as if they are unworthy to remain in the speaker's mouth.
"Thank you," Remo said.
"What may I do for you?" Shockley asked.
"I'm a friend of the family. I've come to inquire about one of your students. A Tyrone Walker."
"Tyrone Walker? Tyrone Walker? Just a moment."
Shockley pressed a panel built into his desk and a television monitor popped up from inside the left edge of the desk. He pressed some buttons on a typewriter keyboard and Remo could see the reflection in his eyes as a flicker of light illuminated the screen.
"Oh yes. Tyrone Walker." Shockley looked toward Remo with a smile of love and beneficence. "You'll be happy to know, Mr… Mister?"