“And his girlfriend, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What difference do it make?”
“Sounds like a motive to me.”
“What you talking about?”
“Hopelessness,” I told him. “Fear. Not wanting to wait around to die. Not wanting to watch his son die.”
“Oh, man!” Raymond snorted a laugh. “C didn’t care. He say he never feel better. He tell me it gonna be years before he get sick. Not even gonna stop playing or nothing, even if it so piss Coach off. Just ’cause you got the virus don’t mean you sick, you know,” he pointed out with a touch of contempt. “You as ignorant as some of them ’round here.”
“What does that mean?”
“Some of the homies, they nervous round С when they find out he got the virus. Talking about he shouldn’t be coming ’round. Like Ash, don’t want to play if С stay on the squad. I had to talk to that brother. But С just laugh. Say, some people ignorant. Don’t pay them no mind, do what you be doing. Maybe someday I get sick, he say, but by then they have a cure.”
“Goddamn. Raymond,” I breathed. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth, lit it to keep from saying all the angry things I was thinking, things about youth, strength, arrogance not lasting, about consequences, about decisions closing doors behind you. I took a deep drag; it cleared my head. Not your business. Smith. Stick to what Raymond hired you for. “All right: Ayisha,” I said. “Who else was she with?”
“Ayisha? She been with a lot of guys.” Raymond paused. “You thinking some jealous dude gonna come after С and Ayisha ’cause they together?”
“It happens.”
“Oh, man! Ain’t no homie done this. Black man do it, it be straight up. Coming with this suicide bull, this some crazy white man. That why you here. See,” he said, unexpectedly patient, trying to explain something to me, “C and me and the crew, we tight. Like...” He paused, reaching for an analogy I’d understand. “Like, you on a squad, maybe you don’t like a brother, but you ain’t gonna trip him when he got the ball. You got something to say to him, you go up in his face. You do what you gotta do, and you take what you gotta take.”
Uh-huh. I thought. If life were like that.
“Okay, Raymond. I’ll call you.”
“Yeah, man. Later.”
I turned up the collar of my jacket; the wind was blowing harder now, off the river. You could smell the water here, the openness of it, the movement and the distance. To me there had always been an offer in that, and a promise: Elsewhere, things are different. Somewhere, not here, lives are better; and the water connects that place and this.
That offer, that promise, probably didn’t mean much to Raymond and his buddies. This was what they had, and, with a clear-eyed understanding I couldn’t argue with, they knew what it meant.
Except Tyrell Drum, of course. “Offer” meant something different to him, but maybe not all that different: a chance to start again, to climb out of this and be somewhere else.
I started back to my car. I was cold and hungry, and down. I’d been buying into Raymond’s theory. A conspiracy, the Power bringing down a black kid because they couldn’t get him legally and they knew they could get away with it. I’d bought into it because I’d wanted to. Wanted to what. Smith? Be the righteous white man, the one on their side? The part of the Power working for them? Offering them justice, this once, so the world wouldn’t look so bad to them? Or so it wouldn’t look so bad to you? So you could sleep at night, having done your bit for the oppressed. Terrific.
But now it was different. Lomax had a motive, and a good one, if you asked me. Teenage swagger can plunge into despair fast. One bad blood test, one scary story about how it feels to die of AIDS: Something like that could have been enough. Especially if he really loved Ayisha. Especially if he already loved his son.
Running footsteps on the pavement behind me made me spin around, ready. The electricity in my skin subsided when I saw who it was.
“Mister, wait.” The voice was small and breathless. Jacket open, pink backpack heavy over her arm. Claudine Lomax stopped on the sidewalk, caught her breath. She regarded me with suspicion.
“Zip your jacket.” I said. “You’ll freeze.”
She glanced down, then did as she was told, pulling up her hood and tucking in her braids. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Mister, you a cop?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”
“Why you come around asking questions like that?”
I thought for a moment. “Raymond asked me to. There were some things about Charles he wanted to know.”
She bit her lower lip. “You know Raymond?”
“I’m working for him.”
“Raymond was Charles’s friend.”
“I know.”
She nodded; that seemed to deride something for her, looking me in the eye, she said, “You was asking Mama about Charles’s gun.”
“That’s right. I was asking where he kept it. Do you know?”
“Yeah. And so do Darian. He gonna kill me when he find out it gone. But he just a kid. I been crazy worried about this ever since Charles...” She trailed off, looking away; then she lifted her head and straightened her shoulders, her mother’s gesture. Putting her backpack on the ground with exaggerated care, she pulled a paper bag from it, thrust it at me. “Here.”
“What’s this?” It was heavy and hard and before I looked inside I knew the answer.
“I don’t want it in the house. Mama don’t know nothing about it. I don’t want it where Darian can get it. He think he stepping like a man, gonna take care of business. Make me laugh, but he got this. Boys like that all the time, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Boys are like that all the time.”
“I thought Charles took it with him. Meeting some guy at night like that. But he must have — he must have had another one, huh?”
“Maybe,” I said carefully. “Claudine, what do you mean ‘meeting some guy at night’?”
“Charles don’t like to go do his business without his piece. But maybe it wasn’t business,” she said thoughtfully. “’Cause usually he tell Ayisha stay home when he taking care of business.”
I asked her, “What guy was Charles meeting? Do you know?”
“Uh-uh. He just say he gotta go meet some guy, and Ayisha say she want to come. So Charles say okay, she could keep him company. Then he tell me I better be in bed when he get back, ’cause I got a math test the next day and he gonna beat my butt if I don’t pass.” In a small voice she added, “I passed, too.”
I opened the bag, looked without taking the gun out. It was a long-barreled .32. “Claudine, how long had Charles had this?”
“About a year.”
“How did you know he had it?”
“I hear him and Tyrell hiking on each other when he got it. Tyrell say it a old-fashioned, dumb kind of piece, slow as shit. Oh.” She covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry. But that what Tyrell say.”
“It’s okay, Claudine. What did Charles say?”
“He laugh. He say, by the time Tyrell get his fancy piece working, he gonna find out some guy with a old-fashioned dumb piece already blowed his head off, every time.”
She stared at me under the yellow streetlights, a skinny twelve-year-old kid in a jacket not warm enough for a night like this.
“Claudine,” I said, “did Charles and Tyrell argue a lot?”
“I hear them trash-talking all the time,” she answered. “But I don’t think nothing of it. Boys do that, don’t they?”
“Yeah,” I said. “They do.”
Tyrell, then. Claudine told me where to go; I drove over. Tyrell Drum lived with his family in a run-down wood-frame house with a view of the river in the distance and the abandoned GM plant closer in. Towels were stuffed around the places where the warped windows wouldn’t shut. The peeling paint had faded to a dull gray.