“They just guys. We hang out sometimes.”
“PacMen,” Mike said. “Gangsta-wannabe assholes. What’d you do time for?”
Luther licked his lips.
“Let me guess. At least once for drugs. Then, two years? Armed robbery, I’m figuring. Botched job at best. Nobody got hurt, you weren’t the one carrying heat. You were too dumb to get away clean. Copped to the attempt and got a deuce up the river. Am I warm?”
“My lawyer made me take that plea.” Luther Audley rolled his head around and looked up at the ceiling.
“Always the damn suits that make you do things you don’t wanna do, isn’t it?” Mike asked. “Ms. Cooper here, she’s a mouthpiece too. She finds out you know something about this murder and she’ll have your parole revoked, then ship you right back up to the yard. She actually enjoys doing that.”
Luther’s head dropped and he fixed his vacant gaze on me. “What you keep talking about murder?”
“There was a body found on the steps of the church tonight,” I said, trying to edge Mike farther away from the young man. “A woman was killed and—”
“We didn’t kill nobody.”
“I’m going to start easy, back it up a few hours, and find out what brought you here,” I said, pulling my chair closer to the slow-to-anger interloper.
“Whoa, Ms. Cooper.” Wilbur Gaskin had appeared in the doorway. “How about Miranda? How about the right to—”
Mike interrupted him and rose to back him away from the room. “Nobody’s in custody, Mr. Gaskin. Let’s not put a plug in the works yet.”
“Not in custody? You’ve got the kid closeted in back here, while his God-fearing grandfather is going to pieces right outside,” Gaskin said. “You hear that, Luther? Get your tail out of this place.”
The young man’s mouth was open but he didn’t move fast.
“I’d sooner lock up Grandpa for aiding and abetting,” Mike said. “I’d get my answers damn fast, and they wouldn’t be full of lies and laced with crack.”
Luther lit up like he’d had a snake bite. He stood and shouted at Mike, his finger jabbing at the air. “You can’t be all gettin’ on Amos. You can’t be all—”
Mike was walking out the door and directing Gaskin to come with him as he looked back for a last comment. “You’d be surprised at the things I can do, Luther. Hold tight and tell Ms. Cooper what she wants to know. Who comes and goes is up to me.”
Luther Audley stared at me and laughed.
“Talk to her,” Mercer said.
Mike’s bluff had worked. If the kid was agitated about nothing else, he still wanted to protect his grandfather. He snarled at me but took his seat.
“Tell me why you’re here tonight,” I said.
“I’m here every night. My mother won’t let me be at her house. She got a boyfriend who don’t want me there.”
“And Amos?”
“He don’t have space for me. Him and my grandmother live in a studio. Ain’t no room.”
“How do you get in here?”
Luther fidgeted with the belt loops on his pants. “Amos. He the last one to leave every night, first one to come in the morning.”
“Your friends, he lets them crib here too?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. He don’t like most of them. Used to be you could sleep on the steps of almost any church. Even get food and all. Now every one got bars on them.”
The city’s religious institutions had long been havens for the homeless. That situation, neither safe nor sanitary, had ended with the gating of most of them when a homeless man who had lived outside a church on the Upper West Side for three years froze to death just feet from the entrance.
Luther described the habit that had developed because of his grandfather’s affection for him. Those nights that were too cold and raw, he called Amos and asked for shelter. His crew knew he would let them in later, when alone, and they’d leave at daybreak, before Amos arrived. In exchange for a warm place to crash, they would bring drugs to feed Luther’s habit.
“What time did you get here last night?” I asked.
“I don’t remember.”
“Don’t mess with her, Luther,” Mercer said. “She’s got more juice than I do.”
Luther closed one eye and studied me with the other.
“What time did your grandfather let you in?”
He didn’t like it when we brought Amos into the mix. “It was, like, midnight. A little earlier than that.”
There was no watch on either of his skinny wrists. “How do you know?”
“ ’ Cause of the bells. I was in here when they rang, when they done twelve times.”
“And the others?”
“I texted them when he left. Maybe fifteen minutes later.”
“Give me your cell phone,” Mercer said, holding out his hand.
Luther frowned.
“Give it up.”
The messages he sent to his friends, and their responses, would be captured in the memory of his phone. He drew the razor-thin machine out of his pocket and placed it in the large palm of Mercer’s hand.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nuthin’.” He was watching Mercer scroll through the messages.
“What did you do, Luther?” I asked again.
“Me and them, we always hang in the basement. They brung me some food, is all.”
“And crack?”
He blew me off. “I don’t do that shit.”
“Coke?”
“L’il bit.”
“So these guys you don’t know,” Mercer said, reading the name off the cell history, “which one is Shaquille?”
Luther bit his tongue.
“Shaquille, the one you texted.” Mercer leaned in closer. “He one of the dudes inside, or is he the one who skipped out on you?”
The answer was slow and deliberate. “Inside.”
“Which one deals?”
No answer this time.
“Must be Shaquille or you wouldn’t have been so anxious to invite him to join you.”
Luther had nowhere else in the room left to look but at Mercer.
“Go talk to him, Alex. I’ll get Luther here up to speed.” Mercer handed me the phone. “What else did you hear besides church bells last night?”
“She gonna ask Shaquille. I don’t know nuthin’ else.”
As I turned the corner into the sanctuary, I noticed another kid was gone. The remaining one was still cuffed to the end seat of a pew. His knee was bouncing up and down, nervously, at a furious pace, and when Mike stepped away from him, I could see that tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s—”
“Scotty took the tall one back down to the basement for a once-over.”
“What’d you do to make this guy cry?”
“He’s fifteen, Coop. Wants his mama, I think.”
“Which one’s Shaquille?” I asked.
The knee jerked and the kid shook his head.
I held up Luther’s cell and texted a few words. I could hear the noise of the vibrating phone in his pocket over the insistent tapping of his foot.
“I guess you’re Shaquille,” Mike said. “That solves that piece of the puzzle. Now, why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper what you saw last night? And remember, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
“I was waiting for Luther to call me.” The kid wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I was around the corner, on 114th.”
“You know what time it was?” Mike asked.
Shaquille shook his head.
I looked at Luther’s outgoing messages. “A little bit before twelve forty-five.”
“All three of you there?”
“Nope. I was alone.”
The bounce in his leg was like a lie detector. It sped up whenever the topic got more sensitive. He didn’t seem to care about the time of night, or his companions.