Three little girls were jumping rope when we parked. They were the only people in sight. We could hear them chanting something to the beat of the rope against the cracked sidewalk. The girl doing the jumping was about eleven. She jumped tirelessly and smiled at us as we watched and waited and the girls kept chanting something about babies.
Finally the girl jumped out of the twirling rope and looked at us.
“We’re looking for this man,” I said, showing the girl Dorsey’s photograph. “Know him?”
The other two girls moved in to take a look. None of them recognized him.
“He lives on this street,” I said.
“Only white people on this street live over there,” the jumping girl said, pointing to a house across the street. “Old white people.”
“You know their name?” I asked.
“Them’s the Clevelands,” answered another girl. “They never go out. But them’s the Clevelands.”
“He goes out sometimes,” one of the other girls said.
“Sometimes at night,” the jumping girl agreed. “Not much.”
I thanked them and Ames nodded.
Behind us, one of the little girls whispered, “They gonna see the witch.”
We crossed the street. The girls went back to their chanting and jumping.
The morning already promised a hot day.
The Cleveland house looked as if it couldn’t take another punch. The porch sagged and the paint flecked. The screen door had been patched so many times that it looked like modern art, and the dirt lawn, with only a barren little tree, had long given up.
I knocked at the peeling frame of the screen door. Nothing. I knocked again and heard a shuffle inside. It stopped. I knocked again and the shuffle moved toward the door and then the door opened, but just a crack.
“What?” came a man’s voice.
“Mr. Cleveland?” I asked.
“So?” he asked in return.
“My name is Fonesca. This is my partner Mr. McKinney. We’d like to talk to you for a minute or two.”
He hesitated and started to close the door.
“It’s about your wife,” I said.
The door stopped closing.
“My wife isn’t well,” he said.
“I’ve got a message for her,” I said.
“No,” the man said, closing the door.
“Mr. Dorsey,” I said, hoping to penetrate with the bullet of his real name, “I think you’re going to have to deal with us, either now or tomorrow or the next day. We can keep coming back and draw attention to you or you can let us in and get it over with.”
If he hadn’t opened the door, we would have left and I would have gone back to Sarasota and told Marvin where she was. But Dorsey didn’t call my bluff. The door opened and we went through the screen door into a darkened hall. I could see the thin outline of a man in front of me. He backed away and we followed. When we stepped into a small living room, there was enough light coming through the drawn shades to see that the man was dressed in a badly faded blue shirt and equally faded blue pants. His mouth was partly open and his teeth were bad but they were all there. In his right hand he held a Smith amp; Wesson. 38 with a six-inch barrel, a favorite with cops. Charles Dorsey used to be a cop.
The most striking thing about Charles Dorsey was that I knew he couldn’t be more than fifty, but he looked at least twenty years older, older than Ames. His hair was white, his shoulders bent, and his eyes a vacant, faded blue.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Fonesca, just the way I told you.”
There were chairs to sit in, even a sofa, but they were old with a washed-out, ghostly pattern and I was sure that dust would rise from them if we sat. Dorsey didn’t ask us to sit.
“He sent you, didn’t he?” Dorsey said, pistol moving between me and Ames.
“He?”
“Her brother,” he said.
“I just want to talk to your wife for a minute,” I said.
“No,” he said.
Something stirred in the doorway and I turned, to the sound of sagging wooden floors. My eyes met the deepest, darkest, and most melancholy eyes I had ever seen. The eyes were set in a soft balloon of a face resting on a huge, neckless, round body. Vera Lynn Uliaks Dorsey walked with a cane to support her mass. Her breathing was pained and labored.
“They’re from Marvin,” Dorsey said.
Her eyes opened wide in fear.
“He wants to talk to you,” I explained.
“Charlie,” Vera Lynn croaked.
“We’ve spent our lives hiding from him, Vera,” Dorsey said with almost a sob in his voice. “I’m beginning to think our lives aren’t worth that damned much anymore.”
With that he gave me his full attention.
“How much is he paying you to kill us?” he asked.
“Kill you? He doesn’t want to kill you. He wants to see his sister.”
“His sister is dead,” Vera Lynn said, sagging into a nearby chair that groaned under her weight.
“Dead?”
“Her name was Sarah. Sarah Taylor,” Vera Lynn said. “My parents adopted Marvin. The Taylors adopted Sarah when their mother went mad and killed herself. Arcadia’s not that big. We all knew each other.”
“Whole family, Marvin and Sarah’s mother and father, way back, were a little mad,” said Dorsey. “Sarah thought I was in love with her. She said I promised to marry her. She came to my office. Vera Lynn was there with me. We told Sarah that Vera Lynn and I were getting married, that she had to stop bothering me. And then…”
“She acted crazy, threatened,” said Vera Lynn, her eyes looking beyond me into the past. “I lost my temper… I said things… and she…”
“…jumped out the window?” I finished. “That’s…”
“Crazy,” Dorsey said. “Sarah had talked to Marvin, told him lies about me, and when Sarah died he blamed us for it.”
“And he was right,” Vera Lynn said.
“He wasn’t,” wailed Dorsey. “We didn’t know she was that crazy.”
“We should have been more gentle with her,” said Vera Lynn to no one.
“We’ve been over it and over it,” cried Dorsey. “You want to die now? You want these men to shoot you?”
“I’m past caring,” she said. “We ran from him when he came for us in Arcadia, and we ran from every other man he sent for us every place we moved. He found us.”
“We’re not here to kill anybody,” I said, but the Dorseys weren’t listening to me. They were off in a conversation they must have had a thousand times on a thousand mornings, afternoons, and nights.
“No more,” Vera Lynn said. “No more.”
Dorsey’s hand dropped slowly as he spoke and the gun pointed toward the floor. I wanted to tell them to forget the whole thing, that I would just go back to Sarasota and tell Marvin it was over. And that’s what I would have done if Dorsey had given me the chance to explain. What he did instead was lift his. 38 and take aim at me. I read the look in his eyes. It said something like: “Charles Dorsey is no longer in command of this vessel. Charles Dorsey has nothing to do with what’s going to happen next. He’s somewhere else. When it’s over, he’ll come back and won’t even know what he had done.”
“Best put that down,” Ames said, showing a gun about twice the size of Dorsey’s.
Dorsey looked at the gun in Ames’s hand and started to lower his weapon. It fired. Intentionally, unintentionally. I don’t know. And then the gun clattered to the floor. Then he started shuffling over to Vera Lynn, who was slumped forward, a rivulet of blood snaking down her once-white dress. Dorsey tried to stop the massive body of his wife from sliding onto the floor. He didn’t have a chance.
“She’s dying,” he wailed. “I shot her.”
“She’s dead, Mr. Dorsey,” I corrected, walking over to him as the body of Vera Lynn Uliaks Dorsey rolled onto the floor.
“I killed her?” Dorsey asked, looking at Ames.
“You did,” Ames said, putting his weapon back under his jacket.
“She’d be alive if you hadn’t come.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Ames said, picking up the. 38 Dorsey had dropped by the barrel.