"Deck-ah, even if I knew something I wouldn't tell you."
"What? This is African-American omerta, is it?"
"No, this is Jonah Jones thinking about his self-preservation. Whoever whacked a heavy-duty dude like Junior Abraham wouldn't have no compunction about swatting a mosquito like me. I'll tell you something, Deckah, even if I knew for sure who done this deed, which I don't, I wouldn't tell you who done it even if you rubbed my nuts with marrowbone and let two hungry Dobermans loose in the room."
Decker rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers, as if he were thinking seriously. "You know something, Jonah? There's an idea."
Decker crunched across the shattered glass into the restaurant, already crowded with scene-of-crime investigators and photographers and uniformed officers and bewildered looking witnesses. The interior was pungent with soul-food spices and fried chicken, and the walls were covered with sepia photographs of slave cabins and cotton fields and dozens of framed photographs of famous people of color, everybody from Maggie L. Walker, the first woman in America to found a bank, to Denzel Washington and Arthur Ashe Jr.
Cab and Hicks were talking to witnesses. Decker went to join them. Plastic grapevines hung down from the ceilings
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in such profusion that he had to push them away from his face. "Jesus," he said, "it's a jungle in here."
Cab said, "It sure is. Take a look at this."
Decker followed him to a booth at the very back of the restaurant, partly enclosed by a carved mahogany screen. In the corner hung a slanty-eyed African voodoo mask with an electric lightbulb shining through its eyes. Underneath the mask sat a skinny man in a shiny black satin shirt and shiny black satin pants, and black alligator moccasins with no socks. Above the man's collar, all that remained was his lower jaw, like a dental cast. The rest of his head was sprayed up the wall in an ever-widening fan shape of dark red blood and pink glistening lumps. Even as Decker was examining him, one of the lumps started to creep its way surreptitiously down the wallpaper like a garden slug.
"Heck—he was right in the middle of eating," Hicks said, in disgust. "If you look into his neck, you can still see chewed-up ham and potatoes. Didn't even have time to swallow them."
"I'll take your word for it, sport," Decker said. "What went down here, Cab? This doesn't look anything at all like the other two killings."
"It doesn't but it does. The story is that Junior Abraham comes here for lunch every Monday regular at one o'clock. Always sits at the same table and always orders the same thing, ham hocks and mixed greens, with candied sweet potatoes. He's sitting in the first booth right here with his brother Treasure and two of his heavies. A guy in a waiter's apron comes out of the kitchen door carrying a tray with four bowls of fish chowder."
Cab took out his handkerchief and slapped it open. "We got nine eyewitnesses, would you believe? They all say that the waiter guy goes up to the booth and throws the chowder
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into Junior's lap. Junior jumps up, hands clutching his crotch, natural reaction, and that's when the waiter guy pulls out a pump-action shotgun from under his apron and blows a respectable part of Junior's head off. There's another of Junior's heavies on the door but the waiter guy doesn't bother to exit via the door—he simply shoots out the window."
"Anybody recognize this waiter guy?"
"Nobody says they do. What do you expect? They all want to keep their heads intact."
"So it was a hit. What makes it anything like the other two killings?"
"The waiter guy was out here, right? In the restaurant. But—and this is the weird bit—he was never in the kitchen."
Decker blinked. "What do you mean he was never in the kitchen?"
Hicks said, "All the eyewitnesses in the restaurant say that he came out of the kitchen door, but the cooks insist that he was never in there. He just, like, appeared."
"Ah, come on. The cooks weren't concentrating, that's all. They were cooking, they were filling out orders, they were stacking plates. They weren't going to notice some guy in a waiter's apron."
"I'm telling you, Lieutenant. They all swear blind there was nobody there."
"Blind is probably the right word. Listen—I'll talk to the cooks in a minute, but I want to have a word with Treasure first. He still here?"
"There—over in the corner," Hicks said. "But I took a statement already . . . he doesn't know from squat."
Decker went over to a chunky young man with dreadlocks and a sweat-stained Michael Jordan T-shirt. He kept
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sniffing and blinking and jerking his head, as if he needed a snort of something.
"Hi, Treasure. Sorry about your brother."
"Yeah," Treasure said.
"Did you recognize the guy who did it?"
Treasure sniffed and blinked and shook his head. "Never saw him before."
"Want to tell me what he looked like?"
"I just told the other guy," Treasure said, jerking his head toward Tim.
"Well, do me a favor, and tell me, too."
"He was a brother."
"I see. How tall was he?"
"Kind of like normal height."
"I see. What about weight?"
"Not too skinny, not too fat."
Decker nodded. "Any distinguishing marks? Hair? Scars? Moustache? False nose?"
"Nothing. It all happened so quick. Sploosh with the soup, then bang."
"I see. Sploosh with the soup and then bang."
"Listen, man," Treasure said, with a thumping sniff. "If I knew who it was, I'd personally kill him myself."
Decker turned back to Cab. "Black, average build and height. That sure narrows it down."
"Yeah, we could hold an identity parade twenty-three miles long."
Decker pushed his way through the swing door to the kitchen, with Hicks right behind him. Standing by the stove were two anxious cooks and a dim-looking dishwasher with long red rubber gloves and his cap on sideways. The burners were crowded with huge simmering pots of corn chowder and crawfish stew and thick brown gravy going blibble-blobble like a swamp. The senior cook was even fatter
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than Cab, with a red bandana around his sweat-beaded forehead.
"I'm Lieutenant Martin," Decker said.
"Louis," the senior cook said, wiping his hand on a dishcloth and holding it out. "This here is Roy and this here is Toussaint."
"My partner tells me you didn't see anybody in the kitchen immediately prior to the shooting."
"That's perfectly correct, sir. There was only us and nobody else. Anyhow there's only two servers, Gina and May, and Gina and May is both women."
"Really? Gina and May? Women?" Decker circled the kitchen, picking up spoons and spatulas and frowning at them as if he thought they might be circumstantial evidence. "You didn't see the door open? I mean, nine people saw this guy come out of the kitchen door with a tray of soup. How did he get the soup out of the kitchen if he didn't open the door? Where'd he get the soup from?"
"I don't know, sir. I truly can't say. But I can testify to you on my mother's life there was no waiter in here."
The other two men nodded in furious agreement. Decker lifted the lid of one of the pots and sniffed the ham hocks that were nestling in it. "Smells pretty damn good." Then he looked up and said, "You're not saying this just to protect your ass, are you, Louis? Because this is a homicide inquiry, and anybody who obstructs such an inquiry by professing, for instance, that nobody was there when they were there—well, they're almost equally as guilty as whoever pulled the trigger. Junior Abraham's brains are spattered all over his hands, too."
Louis quickly looked down at his hands and gave them another wipe with his twisted cloth. "It's the truth, sir. The absolute truth. There was nobody here in this here kitchen but us."