“About the girlfriend,” I said. “Had you heard anything about trouble between them?”
“No. She had a rep, you know. But all the guys seemed to think she’d quieted down since she look up with Lomax.”
“Who’d she been with before?”
“Don’t know.”
“Do you know anyone with a reason to kill Lomax, or the girl?”
He sighed. “Look,” he said. “These kids, they talk big, they look bad, but these are the ones who’re trying. Coe. Drum, even Lomax — still in school, still trying. Like something could work out for them.” He spread his hands wide, showing me the shabby office, the defeated building, the dead-end lives. “But me, all my life I’ve been a sucker. My job, the way I figure, is to do my damnedest to help, whenever it looks like something might. That’s your job too, Smith. You’re here because it makes Coe feel like a man, avenging his buddy. That helps. But you’re not going to find anything. There’s nothing to find.”
“Okay.” I stood. I was warm; the air felt stuffy, old. I wanted to be outside; where the air moved, even with a cold edge. I wanted to be where everything wasn’t already over. “Thanks. I’ll come back if I need anything else.”
“Sure,” he answered. “And come see Drum play Saturday.”
Seeing the family is always hard. People have a thousand different ways of responding to loss, of adjusting to their grief and the sudden new pattern of their lives. A prying stranger on a questionable mission is never welcome: there’s no reason he should be.
Charles Lomax’s family lived in a tan concrete project about half a mile from the high school. There were no corridors. The elevators went to outdoor walkways; the apartments opened off them. The door downstairs should have been locked, but the lock was broken, so I rode up to the third floor, picked my way through kids’ bikes and folding beach chairs to the apartment at the end.
The wind and the air were cold as I waited for someone to answer my ring, but the view was good, and the apartments’ front doors were painted cheerful colors. Here and there beyond the doors I could hear kids’ voices yelling and the thump of music.
“Yes, can I help you?” The woman who opened the door was thin, tired-looking. She wore no makeup, and her wrists and collarbone were knobby under her shapeless sweater. Her hair, pulled back into a knot, was streaked with gray. It wasn’t until I heard her clear soft voice that I realized she was probably younger than I was.
Electronic sirens came from the TV in the room behind her. She turned her head, raised her voice. “Darian, you turn that down.”
The noise dropped a notch. The woman’s eyes came back to me.
“Mrs. Lomax?” I said. “I’m Smith. Raymond Coe said you’d be expecting me.”
“Raymond.” She nodded slightly, “Come in.”
She closed the door behind me. Warm cooking smells replaced the cold wind as we moved into the living room, where a boy of maybe ten and a girl a few years older were flopped on the sofa in front of the TV. An open door to the left led into a darkened bedroom. On the wall I glimpsed a basketball poster, Magic Johnson calling the play.
Charles Lomax’s mother led me to a paper-strewn table in one corner of the living room, offered me a chair. “Claudine,” she called to the girl on the sofa, “come and get your homework. Don’t you leave your things around like that.” The girl pushed herself reluctantly off the pillows. She looked me over with the dispassionate curiosity of children; then, fanning herself with her papers, she flopped onto the floor in front of the TV.
Sitting, Mrs. Lomax turned to me and waited, with the tired patience of a woman who’s used to waiting.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I began. “But Raymond said you might answer some questions for me.”
“What kind of questions?”
I looked over at the children, trying to judge whether the TV was loud enough to keep this discussion private. “Raymond doesn’t think Charles killed himself, Mrs. Lomax.”
“I know,” she said simply. “He told me that. I think he just don’t want to think it.”
“Then you don’t agree with him?”
She also looked to the children before she answered. “Raymond knew my boy better than I did. If he says someone else had more reason to kill Charles than Charles had, might be he’s right. But I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly.
“Mrs. Lomax, did Charles have a gun?”
“I never saw one. I guess that don’t mean he didn’t have one.”
A sudden sense of being watched made me glance toward the sofa again. My eyes caught the boy’s; the girl was intent on the TV. The boy turned quickly back to the set, but not before Mrs. Lomax lifted her chin, straightened her shoulders. “Darian!” The boy didn’t respond. “Darian,” she said again, “you come over here.”
Darian sullenly slipped off the sofa, came over, eyes watching the floor. His sister remained intent on the car chase on TV.
“Darian,” his mother said, “Mr. Smith asked a question. Did you hear him?”
Hands in the pockets of his oversized jeans, the boy scowled and shrugged.
“He asked did your brother have a gun.”
The boy shrugged again.
“Darian, if you know something you ain’t saying, you’re about to be in some serious kind of trouble. Did you ever see your brother with a gun?”
Darian kicked at a stray pencil, sent it rolling across the floor. “Yeah, I seen him.”
I looked at Mrs. Lomax, then back to the boy. “Darian,” I said, “do you know where he kept it?”
Without looking at me. Darian shook his head.
“You sure?” said his mother sharply.
“’Course I’m sure.”
Mrs. Lomax looked closely at him. “Darian, you know anything else you ain’t saying?”
“No, ’course not,” Darian growled.
“If I find you do...” she warned. “Okay, you go back and sit down.”
Darian spun around, deposited himself on the sofa, arms hugging his knees.
I turned back to Mrs. Lomax. “Can I ask you about Ayisha?”
She shrugged.
“Did you like her?”
“Started out I did. She was smart to her friends, but she was polite to me. I remember her when she was small, too. Bright little thing... But after I found out what she did, no, I didn’t like her no more.”
“Do you mean getting pregnant?” I asked.
She frowned, as though I were speaking a foreign language she was having trouble following. “Not the baby,” she said. “The baby wasn’t the problem. Though she didn’t have no right to go and do that, after she knew. You got to see I blame her. She killed my son.”
“Mrs. Lomax, I don’t understand. According to the police, your son killed her, and himself.”
“Oh, well, he pulled the trigger. But they was both already dead. And that innocent baby, too.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Raymond didn’t tell you?” Her eyes, fixed on mine, hardened with sudden understanding, and the realization that she was going to have to tell me herself. “She gave him AIDS.”
Back on the winter street. I dropped a quarter in a pay phone, watched a newspaper skid down the walk, and waited for Raymond.
“Your buddy Charles was HIV positive,” I said when he came on. “Did you know that?”
A short pause, then Raymond’s voice, belligerent around the edges. “Yeah, I knew it.”