Dark Whispers & Other Stories

I've written two long stories and one long novel about Jack Walsh. I suppose, in most respects, he’s really my father, albeit much happier than my father ever managed to be. Whoever he is, he’s not me — I’m Jack Dwyer, my other series character, lots of anger and rancor and occasional embarrassing bursts of violence in that puppy. But the relatively gentle Walsh stories are fun to do because I truly never know where they’re going to end up. When I started this story, for example, I had no idea where it was headed. It ended not as I wanted it to. It ended as Jack Walsh, whoever he is, wanted it to.

1

I saw a small child twisted with cerebral palsy. I saw an even smaller child stomach-bloated with malnutrition, flies walking his face. And a man who had mined his life with cocaine. And a forlorn, whispery woman dying of AIDS.

I almost couldn’t finish the late-night dinner I’d brought back to my motel room from a nearby McDonald’s.

I don’t mean to be sarcastic. I felt all the things those television commercials begged me to feel — guilt, sadness, rage at injustice, and utter helplessness. You know the commercials I mean and you know the time I mean — late night TV in between commercials for Boxcar Willie and Slim Whitman albums and forthcoming professional wrestling matches.

The trouble is, being a sixty-plus retired sheriffs deputy, I don’t exactly have a lot of money to contribute to charities, worthy or not, and even if I did have money, I’d be confused as to which one needed my funding most. How do you decide between a kid with cerebral palsy and a kid with Down’s syndrome?

Finishing my cheeseburger that was by now cold, finishing my Pepsi that was by now warm, I rolled up the grease-stained sack and hook-shotted it for two points into a tiny brown plastic wastebasket next to the bureau. The wastebasket was one of the few things not chained down in this small motel room right on the edge of a Chicago ghetto. I’d been here three days. It seemed more like sixty.

I was starting to think about Faith and Hoyt again — Faith being my thirty-one-year-old ladyfriend and Hoyt the child we inadvertently produced — when the phone rang.

I had hopes, of course, that it would be Faith herself, even though I’d given her all sorts of stern reasons not to phone me and run up the bill, reasons that seemed inane this lonely time of night.

I grabbed the phone.

“Mr. Parnell?”

The voice was young, black.

“We probably should talk,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“You was in the neighborhood today.”

“Yes.”

“Looking for somebody who knows somethin’ about a certain woman.”

“Right.”

“You still interested?”

“Very much.”

“You was lookin’ in the wrong places. Ask for Charlene.”

“Charlene?”

“She works at a restaurant called Charlie’s. She’s cashier there.”

“Okay. You mind if I ask who I’m speaking with?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I looked at my Bulova. “It’s nearly midnight. You wouldn’t be suspicious about a call like this?”

“I guess.”

“Plus, if this leads somewhere, there might be some money in it.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow night. If there’s some money in it, tell me then.”

“Maybe we could accomplish more if we could sit down and talk. Face to face.”

“No reason for that.”

“Up to you.”

“Charlene can tell you some things.”

“I appreciate the advice.”

“Tomorrow night, then.”

He hung up.

I replaced the receiver, stretched my legs and set them between the cigarette burns somebody had decorously put in the bedspread, and leaned back to watch an episode of Andy Griffith, the one where Gomer proves to be a better singer than Barney.

About halfway through the show, two men in the room next door came back from some sort of close and prolonged association with alcohol and turned on their TV to some kind of country-western hoe-down that lead them to stomp their feet and say every few minutes, “Lookit the pair on that babe, will ya?” and then giggle and giggle.

About the time Andy was figuring out a solution to Barney’s dilemma (if you watch the show often enough, you’ll see how Andy evolved over the years from a sly redneck into a genuinely wise and compassionate man) and about the time I was sneaking my fifth cigarette for the day (but sneaking from whom? I was alone), the phone rang.

I decided to be bold and not even say hello. “I’m sure glad you don’t do what old farts tell you to.”

Faith laughed. “I’m glad I don’t either. Otherwise I never would have called tonight.”

“How’s Hoyt’s cold?”

“A lot better.”

“How’re you?”

“Feeling wonderful. I took Hoyt to Immaculate Conception tonight. I’ve always liked Lenten services for some reason. Maybe it’s the bare altar and all the incense and the monks chanting.” A little more than a year ago, Faith had had a mastectomy. You sure wouldn’t know it now.

I laughed. “There were monks there tonight?”

“No, but when I was a girl they’d come up from New Mallory, the monks, and the Gregorian chant was beautiful. Really. You still depressed?”

“It’s just the weather. You know how November is. Rainy and damp.”

“Anything turn up on Carla DiMonte yet?”

“Maybe. Just had a phone call about twenty minutes ago.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you,” I said. I hesitated.

“You’re doing it, aren’t you?”

“What?” I said.

“Looking at your wristwatch.”

“Clairvoyance.”

“No; it’s just something I’ve picked up on since you’ve been in Chicago. How you start noting the minutes.”

“We’re coming up on three minutes.”

She laughed. “God, I wish you were here.”

“Kiss Hoyt for me.”

Ten minutes later, I lay in bed afraid I’d have to go and confront the guests next door. But there was a crash, leaden weight smashing into an end table it sounded like, and then a male voice laughing said, “Man, you’re really soused. You better lay down.” Then the TV went off and then later there was just the sound of the toilet flushing.

Then there was just the darkness of the room and the way the blood-red light of the neon outside climbed along the edge of the curtain like a luminous snake.

Always late at night, and particularly when I was alone, the fear came about Faith. Her health seemed to be all right. Seemed to be.

I fell asleep saying earnest grade school Hail Marys. I woke up twice, the second time to hear one of the men next door barfing on the other side of the wall.

2

I came to Chicago at the request of Sal Carlucci, a Brooklyn private investigator with whom I served in World War II. Sal had been hired by no less a mobster than Don DiMonte to check into the activities of Carla DiMonte, the mobster’s twenty-one-year-old daughter who had a penchant for trouble. At sixteen, for example, DiMonte had had to ease her out of a murder charge. A few weeks ago DiMonte had received a blackmail letter saying that his daughter had killed somebody else — and that if one million dollars wasn’t turned over to the letter writer, said letter writer would go to the police with evidence that would convict Carla.

As if Mr. DiMonte’s troubles weren’t already plentiful, there was yet one more problem. A private detective he’d hired showed him that over the past year Carla had traveled with a rock band, spending decent amounts of time in five major cities. The murder, if it had actually taken place, most likely occurred in one of these cities.

Now, as good a private investigator as Sal Carlucci is, there’s no way he could visit five cities in a week — the amount of time DiMonte figured he had to hold the blackmailer off. So Carlucci hired four other private investigators, including me, to help. Since I’m closest to Chicago, and since Carla spent time there, that’s where I headed.

I spent my first day in the new library on North Franklin, checking out all the local murders for the past twelve months. It was Carlucci’s idea that we first try to ascertain if the blackmailer really had something on Carla — was there an unsolved murder that sounded as if Carla might have been involved?

I found nothing that looked even promising until late in the day when I found an item about the slaying of a prominent drug dealer near a housing project Several witnesses said that he had been shot dead by a white woman who seemed to resemble very much the description I’d been given of Carla DiMonte.

I spent yesterday walking off the blocks around the development where the killing had taken place. I had interviewed a few dozen people but learned precisely nothing. Nobody, it seemed, had ever heard of John Wade, the drug dealer who’d been murdered, nor had anybody seen a well-dressed white woman down here. “She wouldn’t’a stayed white for long, man,” one man told me around a silver-toothed grin.

Around nine the next morning I walked into Charlie’s, the restaurant I’d been told about by my mysterious late-night caller.

Neither black nor white faces looked up at me as I came inside out of the raw gray cold and stood in the entranceway watching a chunky black cashier in a pink uniform stab out numbers on a cash register with deadly efficiency. Presumably, this was Charlene.

I stood there ten minutes. It took that long for the line to disperse. Then I went inside.

“Charlene,” I said over the Phil Collins record assaulting the smoke-hazed air.

She looked up at me from under aqua eyebrows that seemed to be the texture of lizard skin. “Yes?”

“My name’s Parnell.”

“So?”

“I just wondered if I could ask you some questions.”

“You law?”

“Indirectly. I’m a private investigator.”

“Then I don’t have to answer?”

“Right. You don’t have to answer.”

She shrugged meaty shoulders. “Then get lost.”

“You mind?” a white guy said to me. “Jesus.” He pushed into place at the cash register and handed over a green ticket. He only glared at me maybe three times while Charlene did her killer routine with his receipt. “You have a nice day, Charlene,” he said to her when she handed him back his change but he was staring at me. He was no more than thirty and obviously he could see that I was about twice his age. He had the energy of a pit bull. Energy wasn’t something I had in plentiful supply these days. He made sure to push against me as he went out the door.

Two more guys came up and handed her tickets. During her business, she glanced up at me twice and scowled.

When the guys were gone, I said, “Did you know a man named John Wade?”

Her eyes revealed nothing but her full, sensuous mouth gave an unpleasant little tug. She was maybe forty and twenty pounds overweight, but she was an appealing woman nonetheless, one of those women of fleshy charms men seem to appreciate the older they get, when the ideal of femininity has given way to simple need. You no longer worry about physical beauty so much; you want companionship in and out of bed. Charlene looked as if she’d be a pretty good companion. “You know what I do when I get off this ten-hour shift?”

“No. What?”

“I go home and take care of my two kids.”

“Hard work?”

“Real hard.”

“But I’m afraid I don’t get your point.”

A black guy came over. He was little and seemed nervous. He kept coughing as if an invisible doctor were giving him an invisible hernia checkup.

“You have a nice day, Benny,” Charlene said to the little man as he pushed out the door. She looked at me again. “What I’m saying is that I’m too busy for trouble. I work here and then I go home. I don’t have time to get involved in whatever it is you’re pushing.”

“You get a break?”

She sighed. “Nine forty-five Belinda comes out from the bookkeeping office and spells me for fifteen minutes.”

I nodded to the long row of red-covered seats that ran along the counter. But it was a booth I wanted. “I’ll go have some breakfast over there. By nine forty-five I should have gotten us a booth. All right?”

“I get anything for this?”

“Fifty dollars if you tell me anything useful.”

She shrugged again. It was the gesture of a weary woman who had long ago been beaten past pain into sullen submission. “Guess that’ll pay a few doctor bills.”

The food — bacon, two eggs over easy, a big piece of wheat toast spread with something that managed to taste neither like butter nor margarine — was better than I had expected.

Afterward, I read the Tribune, all about Richard Daley, Jr.’s new administration, and drank three cups of hot coffee and was naughty and smoked two cigarettes.

Charlene appeared right on time.

She had brought a big plastic purse the size of a shopping bag with her. She slipped into the other side of the booth and said, “He’s been dead several months. Why're you interested in him now?”

“You knew him?”

“You’re not going to answer my question?”

“Not now. But I need you to tell me about him.”

She tamped a cigarette from a black and white generic pack and said, “What’s to know? In this neighborhood, he was an important man.”

“A pusher.”

Anger filled her chocolate eyes. “Maybe, being a black man, that’s the only thing he knew how to do.”

“You really believe that?”

She cooled down, exhaled smoke, looked out the window. “No.” She looked back at me. “He was the father of my two boys.”

“Did you live with him?”

“A long time ago. Not since the youngest was born.” She smiled her full, erotic smile. “That’s the funny thing about some men. You have a kid for them and all of a sudden they start to treat you like you’re some kind of old lady. Right after Ornette was born, John started up with very young girls. Nineteen seemed to be the right age for him.”

“Was he pushing then?”

“Not so much. Actually, he still had his job at the A&P as an assistant manager. Then he started doing drugs himself and—” The shrug again. “It changed him. He’d always had a good mind, one of the best in the neighborhood. He decided to put it to use, I guess.”

“Pushing?”

“Uh-huh.”

“The newspaper accounts said that several eyewitnesses saw him being shot to death by a white woman. You know anything about that?”

She hesitated. “I was one of the eyewitnesses.”

“You saw him being shot?”

“Right.”

“He was getting out of his car—”

“He was getting out of his car when this other car pulled up and a white woman got out and said something to him and then shot him. She got back in the car and took off before any of us could do anything about it.”

“Would you describe the woman?”

The description she gave matched that in the newspaper. While it could Fit a lot of women, it could also fit Carla DiMonte.

“You’d never seen her before?” I asked.

“No.”

“So you wouldn’t have any idea why she shot him?”

“No.”

“How’d your boys deal with it?”

“I don’t want to talk about my boys.”

“They don’t know he was their father?”

“Why is that important?”

“Just curious, I guess.”

“My boys didn’t have nothing to do with this.”

“So John was a big man in the neighborhood?”

She looked relieved that I’d changed the subject. “Very big.”

“Feared or respected?”

“Both. In the ghetto, nobody respects you unless they fear you, too.”

I laughed. “I don’t think that applies to just the ghetto.”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“He had a big blue Mercedes and he had a reputation for having never been busted and he lived over near Lake Shore in this fabulous condo and when he’d come back to the neighborhood the kids would flock around like some rock star had shown up or something.”

“That’s one of the things I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?”

“Why he’d come back to the neighborhood. He didn’t need to.”

“His ego.”

“How so?”

“He wasn’t an especially strong man, you know? Growing up, he’d had to take a lot of pushing around by other kids in the neighborhood. I don’t think he ever got over the thrill of coming back here and kind of rubbing their faces in it.”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “Time’s up. I told you I wouldn’t be much help.”

“You see him much?”

“Not much.”

“He pay you child support?”

“Not much.”

“With all his money?”

“With all his money.”

“He see the kids much?”

“When it suited him.”

“He have a lot of enemies?”

She looked at me as if I were hopelessly naive. “You know much about dealing drugs? All you got is enemies.”

“The white woman — you think she killed him because of drugs?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“And you don’t care?”

“I quit caring about him a long time ago.”

“You give me the names of the other witnesses?”

Again, she hesitated. “I guess you could find out anyway.”

She gave me the names. I wrote them down in my little notebook.

“What’re you lookin’ for, mister?” she said.

I sighed. “I wish I knew, Charlene. I wish I knew.”

3

Two blocks after leaving the restaurant, I was joined by a jaunty little black man in a coat of blue vinyl that tried with great and sad difficulty to be leather. It would probably have even settled for being leatherette.

He was my age and he walked with a slight limp and he knew nothing whatsoever about tailing anybody. It had not taken Charlene long to get to the phone.

I thought about this as I reached the neighborhood proper, five square blocks where rats crouched in living room corners and where there wasn’t enough water pressure to flush a toilet. The neighborhood seemed to huddle, as if for warmth and inspiration, around a ma and pa corner grocery store with rusting forty-year-old “PEPSI COLA... in the big bottle!” signs on either side of the door. People came and went bearing groceries bought with food stamps and the quick sad last of paychecks; shuffling shambling stumbling away if they were into hootch or cough syrup or street drugs; moving briskly and soberly if they had some sort of purpose, kids to feed, jobs to get to. In the cold drizzle, the dark faces staring at me held distrust and anger and curiosity; only a few smiled. I wouldn’t have smiled at me, either.

For a time, I stood out on the corner looking at the place, in front of the laundromat that also rented videos, where John Wade had been shot to death and where a woman who had looked not unlike Carla DiMonte had been seen fleeing.

The jaunty little man in the blue vinyl coat stood maybe thirty yards away, leaning into a doorway and hacking harshly around his cigarette. Twice we made eye contact. I doubted I’d be hiring him in the near future to do any leg work.

Inside, the grocery store smelled of spices, overripe fruit, and blooded meat.

A tiny bald black man in a proud white apron stood behind a counter dispatching people with all the efficiency and courtesy of a supply sergeant dispatching recruits. His plastic name badge read PHIL WARREN. He was one of the people I was looking for.

One woman was stupid enough to question a certain odor from the bundled hamburger she laid on the counter and the little black man said, “You want to talk about your bill now, Bertha?”

The woman dropped her gaze. He wrote up her ticket and jammed it into a large manilla envelope taped to the wall next to endless rows of cigarettes. In Magic Marker the envelope was labeled CREDIT.

When my turn came, I said, “I’d like to ask you some questions about John Wade.” I’d waited until the place was empty except for a chunky woman sweeping up in back. The only real noise in the place was the thrumming of cooler motors too old to work efficiently.

The little man, who looked to be about forty and who wore a snappy red bowtie across the collar of his white shirt, said, “I can tell you exactly two things about John Wade. One is that he’s dead; two is that he deserves to be dead.”

“I understand you were an eyewitness?”

“Yes, I happen to be.” He looked at me carefully. “You’re not the law, are you?”

“Not the official law.”

“You couldn’t be a friend of his because drug dealers don’t have friends.”

“I suspect that’s true.”

“So you’re trying to find out exactly what?”

“If you saw this woman kill him.”

“Oh, I saw it all right.”

I described the woman to him.

“That’s her, all right,” he said.

“And you actually saw her shoot him?”

“I actually saw her shoot him.”

“And then get into a Mercedes-Benz and leave?”

He nodded. “Umm-hmm. Why would you be interested now? He’s been dead for some time.”

“A client is interested.”

“Oh,” he said. “A client. Must be an interesting business you’re in.”

I smiled. “Sometimes.”

For the first time, he smiled, too. “This used to be a nice neighborhood. Oh, I don’t mean like your white neighborhoods. But nice. If you lived here, you were reasonably safe.” He shook his head. “And there were drugs. I mean, I can’t deny that. Why, I can remember after coming back from Korea, all the marijuana I suddenly saw here. But the past ten years, it’s different. They’ll kill you to get the drug money and the pushers are gods and that’s maybe the saddest thing of all. How the youngsters look up to the pushers.”

“So John Wade was—”

“—was just one less pusher to worry about.”

I was reaching over to take a book of matches from a small white plastic box that said FREE when I saw something familiar written on a notepad next to the black dial telephone.

“Charlene called you.”

“Pardon me?” he said, suddenly snappy as his bow tie.

“Your notepad there.”

He saw the problem and grabbed the notepad.

“You had my name written on it. So, unless you’re a psychic, Charlene called ahead about me and told you my name.”

He decided to give up the ruse. “You know how it is in a neighborhood. People take care of each other.”

Just then, from the back, a tall, good-looking woman of perhaps twenty-five came through curtains and walked up to the register. She had the kind of coffee-colored beauty that lends itself to genuine grace. She said to Phil Warren, “Here’s a list of everything I took, Phil. Just put it on the Friend House account.” She glanced at me dismissively and went out the door, toting a large square cardboard box heavy with groceries.

“Would that be Karen Dooley?”

“I suppose,” he said.

I nodded. “Thank you.” Then I went out the door quickly.

She was already halfway down the block by the time I reached her. She walked with her head down to avoid the stinging drizzle.

“I’d be happy to carry that for you,” I said.

“It’s fine just the way it is.”

“My name’s Parnell.”

“Hello, Mr. Parnell.”

“I take it Charlene called you about me.”

She surprised me by laughing. “Charlene is very fast on the phone. That’s why the machine always tries to recruit her at election time. She can call five people in the time it takes others to call two.”

“You work at Friend House?”

“I’m the director there.”

“And you were an eyewitness to John Wade being murdered?”

She stopped. Stared at me. “Charlene said you were going to ask me that. What is it you want, Mr. Parnell?”

“I’m just looking into some things for a client.”

“I see.”

Her beautiful eyes held mine for a long time. Then we were walking again.

Behind us, the man in the blue vinyl coat was limping along.

She said, “These are getting heavy, Mr. Parnell. Maybe I’ll take you up on your offer to carry them, after all.”

I felt almost idiotically blessed by her decision to let me help her in some small way.

The first thing you noticed about Friend House was the new paint job. A two-story frame house with a long front porch and a steep, sloping roof, Friend House looked as if it had been lifted out of a very nice middle-class neighborhood and set down here, in the middle of this bombed-out neighborhood, to serve as a reminder of the lifestyle that awaited those plucky and lucky enough to seize it.

The new casement windows sported smart black trim, the roof vivid new red tiles, and the new aluminum front door a dignified gray that complemented perfectly the new white paint.

Inside, the marvels continued, each room I saw was a model of middle-class decorum. Nothing fancy, you understand; nothing ostentatious, just plain good furniture, just plain good taste, including a red-brick fireplace with an oak mantel in the living room and country-style decor throughout.

Here and there along the trim, or in a slightly crooked line of wallpaper, you could see that the refurbishment had not been perfect but it was easy to see that what had probably been a run-down house had been transformed, despite a few flaws, into a real beauty.

In the kitchen, I set the groceries on a butcher block table and turned to see two young women watching me.

“Dora, Janie, this is Mr. Parnell, the man Charlene told us would be coming.” She looked at me and smiled. “And Mr. Parnell, we’re the three eyewitnesses you wanted to interview. Along with Phil Warren, we’re the ones who went to the police.” She nodded to a silver coffee urn on the white stove and said, “Would you care for a cup?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

After the coffee came in a hefty brown mug, the four of us sat at the kitchen table. Steam had collected on one of the kitchen windows and was now dripping down; beyond the pane you could see the hard gray November sky. In the oven a coffee cake was baking, filling the air with sweet smells. I felt warm for the first time in an hour, and pleasantly dulled.

Dora was a white girl of perhaps twenty. She wore a blue jumper and a white turtleneck sweater and her blonde hair was caught back in a leather catch. She said, “Charlene says you wouldn’t tell her why you were asking questions, Mr. Parnell.”

I smiled. “Nothing all that mysterious. I’m trying to find out a few things about the woman who shot John Wade.”

“About the woman?” Janie said. She was Dora’s black counterpart — almost prim in her starched aqua blouse and V-neck sweater and fitted gray skirt. “About the woman?” she repeated, glancing at Karen.

Karen said, “I’m afraid we don’t know much about the woman, Mr. Parnell.”

From my pocket, I took out the newspaper clipping and read to them the gospel according to the Tribune, from the account of the shooting itself, to the description of the murderess.

“Is that about the way it happened?” I asked when I’d finished reading.

“Exactly,” Karen Dooley said.

“She didn’t say anything?”

“Say anything?” Karen asked, obviously the official spokesperson for the three of them.

“The woman. The killer. She didn’t shout anything at Wade?”

“Not that I heard,” Karen said. “Do either of you two girls remember hearing anything?”

They shook their heads.

“And then she just got in her car and sped away, right?”

“Right.”

“The same kind of car as described in the newspaper account, right?”

“Right.”

“And that’s about it?”

“That’s about it.”

“You never saw her previously; you’ve never seen her since?”

“Right.”

Dora put her pert nose into the air. “I’d say that coffee cake’s about done.” She smiled her lopsided smile. “Mrs. Weiderman upstairs will sure be glad to hear about that.”

She got up and went over to the stove, grabbing a wide red oven mitt on the way. “You’ll want some of this, Mr. Parnell.”

I looked back at Karen. “So all you saw—”

“—was exactly what it said we saw. In the paper, I mean.” She laughed. “We’re kind of frustrating, aren’t we? We had the same effect on the police. They went over and over our story but this is about all they could get from us.”

Janie put down her coffee cup and said, “We were scared, Mr. Parnell. I know that people who live outside the neighborhood think that we get used to all the violence, but we don’t. We get scared just like everybody else.”

Dora opened the oven door. Billows of warm air tumbled toward us bearing the wonderful scent of coffee cake. “The truth is, we don’t know what happened, Mr. Parnell, because we were so frightened we tried to duck behind a lightpole. I know that sounds pathetic, but that’s what we did.” She grinned. “Three of us behind the same lightpole.”

“And anyway,” Karen said, “it happened very quickly. It was over in no more than half a minute or so. She just stepped from her car and shot him.”

“And then got back in and drove away,” Janie said.

“And we never saw her again,” Dora said.

“Honest,” Karen said.

The cake cut and cooled slightly, Janie served me a formidable wedge. She also gave me more coffee.

While I was eating, two very old people came into the kitchen, one with a chrome walker, the other with a cane. Both were men. Karen introduced us. We all nodded. She told them about the cake they’d have in their rooms. They smiled like children. Dora led them away.

When I was nearly finished, a young man came into the kitchen and stood watching me eat. I tried not to be self-conscious. He was probably Janie’s age, of mixed blood, and wore a BEARS sweatshirt and jeans. He twitched very badly and in the course of a minute or so, teared up twice, as if overcome by terrible emotion.

Karen, who had excused herself to go to the bathroom, came back, saw him and said, “Kenny, this is Mr. Parnell.”

Kenny bobbed his head in my direction. He looked both suspicious and exhausted.

Just then Dora appeared. Karen gave her Kenny’s elbow as if she were passing off a baton. “Why don’t you go back to your room, Kenny, and Dora will give you some coffee cake.”

“Jackie Gleason’s on,” Kenny said. “Pretty soon.”

“I forgot,” Karen said tenderly, “how much you like Jackie Gleason.”

“I like Ed Norton more,” Kenny said.

“Good,” Karen said and glanced at Dora, who led Kenny away.

Karen came back to the table and sat across from me. “Would you like some more coffee cake, Mr. Parnell?”

“It’s tempting but I think I’ve had enough.” I looked around the kitchen. “You’ve got a nice place here. What is it — a shelter of some kind?”

“I guess that’s a fair way to put it. Friend House is a place where anybody in the neighborhood can come and stay for a while when things get too bad on the street. Those two older gentlemen, for instance, they’re staying here because the landlord of their apartment house didn’t pay the gas bill — and they’re too old to freeze. Soon as the gas goes back on, we’ll take them back. And Kenny — well, he’s trying to kick heroin. Right now, he’s very afraid of going to a clinic. His brother died there of some complications with methadone. We had a doctor check Kenny and the doctor said Kenny was fine to stay here for a few days.”

“So no permanent solution but at least a temporary one?”

“Exactly.”

“How many guest rooms do you have?”

“With the four new ones in the basement, we’ve got fourteen. That’s nowhere near enough to help everybody in the neighborhood who’s hurting very badly but at least it’s something.”

“It must be pretty expensive, running a place like this. Does the city contribute?”

“Yes, the city.” She made a clucking noise and glanced down at the slender gold watch on her slender brown wrist. “Ooops, I’m sorry, Mr. Parnell. I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting upstairs. Have we helped you?”

I stood up. “As much as you could, I guess.”

She put out her hand and we shook.

“I hope you find whatever you’re looking for, Mr. Parnell,” she said.

In less than a minute, I was standing on the sidewalk again. The coffee cake kept me full and warm.

I decided to find out who was following me and why.

4

We went two blocks. A hard wind came and chafed my cheeks and nose, a mumbling drunken black man bounced off a building and nearly fell into me, a cop ticketed a rusted weary VW that looked as if it had not been moved in weeks, and the man tailing me got all worked up when I took two steps into an alley.

Pressed against the wall, I waited, making a fist of my gloved hand.

But he was in no shape to swing on me when he came trotting into the alley, a small man the color of hickory, his chest heaving from a long lifetime of cigarettes.

He ran right into me and I grabbed him.

I didn’t put him against the wall with any special force but even so he looked afraid. His nose was running in the cold and he hadn’t cleaned his eyes so well this morning.

“Make it easy on yourself,” I said. “Who put you on to me?”

“Tommy,” he said between gasps.

“Who?”

“Tommy, man.”

“I don’t know any Tommy.”

His brown eyes narrowed. “Her son. Charlene’s.”

I thought of last night, the late phone call, the young black voice. “Why’d he put you on to me?”

“Don’t know.”

“Bull.”

“Don’t, man. Honest. He’s jes’ a good kid so I tol’ him I’d help him.”

“Why didn’t he tail me himself?”

“Aw, I guess ’cause he believes some of m’ah stories. Been tellin’ them stories for years and years, ever since he was a little kid.”

“What stories?”

“You know, man, how I was an MP in Korea. That whole gig.”

“And you weren’t?”

He shrugged. “Had a buddy who was, I guess.”

“How did Tommy know about me?”

“He heard about you bein’ in the neighborhood yesterday, then he saw you with his ma this morning.”

“He isn’t in school?”

“Dropped out.”

“Where do I find him?”

He told me.

5

Steam rolled from the front end of the car wash like smoke from an angry dragon. Inside the smoke you could see a shiny new red Buick struggling like some metal monster to be born. As soon as the Buick reached the park area, the smoke evaporating now against the gray sky, four black boys descended on it with dirty white rags and dirtier white wiping mitts, shouting things to each other over the top of the car as rap music played above the roar of the cleaning and buffing machinery inside. One of the boys, I suspected, was Tommy.

Inside the office, the plump dark woman in the lime-green blastjacket put down her Kool filter-tip and said, “Tommy’s a good kid.”

All I’d asked was where I’d find him. Nothing else.

“Not all the kids who work here are good kids, if you know what I mean,” she went on. “But Tommy is. Most definitely.”

“I’m not going to hurt him.”

“He ain’t done nothin’, if that’s what you’re about.”

“I’d just like to ask him some questions.”

“He’s straight. In every sense. No fightin’, no drugs, nothin’. He’s the one I leave in charge when I got to go to the doctor or somethin’. You can trust him.”

Feeling eyes on me, I turned at an angle. Through the glass separating the wind tunnel of the wash itself from the shabby waiting area, I saw a tall, lean young man, gray in the shadows now, watching me.

I nodded in his direction. “Tommy?”

She saw him, too. “Yes.”

“Thanks.”

I went out the door and into the wind tunnel. The roar was deafening. Customers waved white tickets at the cleaning kids and then piled in their cars. It reminded me of working around fighter planes in WW II, the ceaseless and overwhelming noise that you got lost inside of.

For a moment, Tommy looked afraid, and I had the sense that he might run.

Then he surprised me by tossing his rag to another kid and coming toward me.

“I’m Tommy,” he shouted over the roar.

“Yes.”

“Let’s go in the back where we can have a cup of coffee.”

“Fine.”

I followed him down a narrow concrete path that paralleled the cleaning equipment. Sudsy spray flicked at us. It was freezing in here. The kids probably had head colds all winter long.

In a small room with two vending machines and a long, scarred table, Tommy got two cups of black coffee in paper cups and set them down on either side of the table.

He sat down and I did likewise.

“I figured you’d come looking for me,” he said.

“You were the one who called me last night, right?”

“Right.”

I watched him. He had a good, high, intelligent forehead and somber, intelligent eyes. Even dressed in a sweatshirt and a dirty blastjacket, he carried himself with poise and dignity. He had long but very masculine hands the undersides of which were tan in contrast to the dark uppers. He was one of those kids who would have been mature around age ten. He said, “I want you to find out who killed my father.”

“From the police and press reports, I gather it was an unidentified white woman.”

“No.”

“You know something they don’t?”

“I just know it wasn’t an ‘unidentified white woman.’ ”

“How do you know that?”

“Because of what Phil Warren did to me.”

“The guy who runs the grocery store?”

“Right.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Slapped me. Real hard.”

“For what?”

“For eavesdropping.”

“When?”

“The night my father was killed. I went looking for my mother — my little brother told me she was over at Warren’s — and I heard them in the back room there. Phil’s got a little room where some of the neighborhood people meet when something bad happens or when they want to get some neighborhood project going. At least, they used his little room till they got Friend House.”

“So what did you hear?”

“When I was eavesdropping?”

“Right.”

“Nothing. I was just there a minute or two, you know, kind of pressed up against the door, and I stumbled against something and Phil came out and—”

“Why didn’t you just go inside the room or knock? Why were you eavesdropping?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I heard voices and I didn’t want to interrupt. So I kind of started listening and—”

In the silence I could hear the distant roar of the car wash. It was like the distant sound of war.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“My father didn’t get much education. He did pretty well.”

“Yeah, he did pretty well all right, Tommy. Somebody shot him to death in the street.”

Tommy’s eyes dropped to his coffee. “Maybe I’ll go back sometime. You know, to school.”

“The longer you’re out, the harder it’ll be to go back.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“She seems like a decent woman.”

He didn’t say anything, which I found odd. Most boys agree with nice things said about their mothers.

I said, “Who do you think killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You want to try and look me in the eye and tell me that?”

He raised his gaze. “I don’t know.”

“C’mon, Tommy. There’s something you’re not saying.”

“Some white chick killed him.”

“You believe that, do you?”

“That’s what the papers said, right?'” He glanced down at a battered Timex on his right wrist. “Mr. Franklin don’t like us taking long breaks. I better get back.”

“You heard something, didn’t you? When you were eavesdropping.”

He took his soggy paper coffee cup and tossed it for three points into a wastebasket to our right. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. He stood up. “I better get back, man.”

When he reached the roar of the cleaning machines, he shouted a goodbye and disappeared into the chill rolling steam.

6

“When did Tommy drop out of school?” I said.

“I don’t know. A while back.”

“Right after his father was murdered, maybe?”

Charlene looked at me with growing impatience. “I already told you, Parnell, I’m busy.”

She wasn’t kidding about that. The restaurant was packed with suppertime customers. Grease and cigarette smoke were heavy.

“Tommy dropped out of school because he found out who really killed his father,” I said. “He figured being a good boy wasn’t worth it any more.”

“Is that right?” she said, reaching past me to take a green ticket from a customer.

She punched it up with her usual formidable efficiency.

“He also called me in my room last night so I’d be sure to do some investigating,” I said.

“Have a nice night,” she said to the customer, a man who looked at me with equal degrees of malice and pity, bothering the pretty woman as I was.

“He knows who killed his father but he won’t tell me,” I said.

This time it was a chunky woman bundled up inside a threadbare brown coat. She looked like a nearsighted bear.

“Don’t forget, your favorite show’s on TV tonight, Emma,” Charlene said, as she handed her back her change.

The old woman, nearsighted, tromped on my foot as she moved past the register.

“If your son knows who killed his father, that means you do, too,” I said.

Only at the last did I see the flick of her eyes, a preordained signal of some kind that brought a dusky fellow too young, too angry and too big for me to do anything about.

“He’s hassling me, Roland,” Charlene said.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

Down the block was an old-fashioned glass phone booth whose dim light was like a forlorn beacon in the gathering gloom. Though it was not yet four-thirty in the afternoon, night was here.

Inside, a drunken kid with a mean facial scar stood bounding on his feet as if he had to go to the bathroom very badly and trying to explain in a whining voice why he’d been unfaithful to the woman he was attempting to sweet-talk on the other end of the phone.

Finally — she must have known telepathically how cold I was getting waiting my turn — she hung up on him. For the next minute silver breath poured from his mouth as he shouted at the phone he’d just slammed.

Tearing open the door, he came out onto the sidewalk, seeing me for the first time.

“She’s a bitch,” he said, and vanished into the shadows.

There wasn’t, of course, anything left of the phone book except the black plastic covers. I had to call information for the general number and then I had to ask the operator who answered the general number to whom I might speak about funding for halfway houses.

In all, I talked to four people at some length before I got my answer.

By then, I was very cold and not just physically. Now, I understood why an otherwise all right kid like Tommy would drop out of school.

Down by the restaurant, I waited next to a tree, smoking cigarettes eight, nine and ten for the day, until Charlene came walking fast out of the restaurant.

7

“I’d like to talk with you,” I said, trying to match her quick steps.

Turning, seeing who I was, her pace only increased. “I’ve had enough of you, Parnell. Now, I want you to leave me alone.”

People appeared and disappeared in the darkness like phantoms. I caught up with her and took her arm and slowed her down.

“He knows,” I said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Parnell.”

“Your son. Tommy. He knows what happened.”

Only for a moment did her eyes allow the possibility that she was afraid. Then she tried to cover everything in anger again. “Leave me alone.”

“It isn’t too hard to figure out, when you think about it,” I said. “A drug dealer making a drop is going to have a lot of money on him. Did he have it in a suitcase?”

Ahead, in the faint streetlight, I could see the new, clean shape of Friend House, obviously her destination. Knowing what I knew now, that did not surprise me.

Silhouetted on the front steps, the open door pouring warm yellow light into the chill night, stood Phil Warren. He held his hand out to her, as if to a drowning victim.

She went up the steps two at a time, huddling next to him like a girl to her father when the neighborhood bully came ’round.

“You don’t have no call to be here, Mr. Parnell. Now you go on back to where you belong,” Warren said. In his cardigan sweater, white shirt and gray slacks, he looked relaxed and composed. Not even his voice betrayed the panic he must have been feeling. “Out of this neighborhood,” he said, in case I didn’t get the point.

“There wasn’t any white woman who shot John Wade, was there? She was somebody you made up and told the police about.”

“You heard me, Mr. Parnell. You get away from us and stay away.”

He took Charlene’s arm and turned to guide her inside.

“There’s a sixteen-year-old boy who wants to know why the five of you murdered his father,” I said, there in the glow of the porch light, my breath cold. Down the street a dog barked angrily at the quarter-moon.

Warren had the grace and good sense to let that one stop him. To Charlene, he said, “You go on inside. I’ll talk to him.”

She glanced down at me and said, “Maybe you don’t understand everything you think you do, Parnell.”

“Hand me my coat, would you, Charlene?” Warren asked, going back to the threshold and putting his hand out. He bundled up inside a dark topcoat and then came down the stairs.

We walked two blocks before saying anything. In the soft moonlight the ugliness of the neighborhood, the buildings half-toppled, the rusted, deserted automobiles, the brothers standing loud and boastful in the red-lit roaring mouths of bars — in the moonlight and shadows none of this looked so forlorn and menacing. There was even a lurid beauty about it, one only a tourist like myself could appreciate. The practiced eye of the resident would see far different things.

“You know what it’s like to need help and have nowhere to turn?” Warren asked.

“Not really. I’ve been lucky.”

“It’s about the most terrible feeling there is.”

“And that’s what Friend House is all about?”

“We’ve helped more than three hundred people in less than a year. That’s a lot of people.”

“What happens when the money runs out? You going to kill another dealer?”

He kept walking but looked over at me. “If we have to.”

“What happens if I tell the police what I know?”

“Somehow, I think you’re a better man than that.”

We walked another block. Babies cried. Couples argued. Music played too loud. In front of us a homeless man crouched with a bottle of wine in a doorway. Warren knelt down to him and said, “You know where you should be, Clinton. Now you git, hear me?”

“Charlene there?” the man asked, his face buried somewhere in a dusty dark stocking cap and several days’ growth of beard.

Warren grinned. “She’s waiting for you, Clinton. You’re her favorite.”

Clinton grinned back. He had no teeth.

“Now git. It’s suppertime,” Warren said.

Clinton struggled to his feet and moved off in the direction of the shelter.

After another block of silent walking, Warren said, “You know how this neighborhood has changed over the past fifteen years?” He was being rhetorical, of course. “Back then, we were poor and angry and we had a lot of resentment toward white people — but we didn’t prey on each other. Not very much, anyway. Then the drug dealers appeared in our midst and—” He shook his head. His rage was visible. “Now in the neighborhood, we have two kinds of slavery — we’ve got black skin and half our children are hooked on crack cocaine.”

“So you killed him?”

“He was a sonofabitch, Mr. Parnell. He took some of his drug money downtown and bribed a judge into helping him get custody of his two kids. Charlene’s a hardworking, decent woman and she’s raised those boys well. You know the kind of lifestyle they would have seen with their father? All his thugs and whores? Charlene came to me and I knew then that was the only way to stop him.”

“Where did the money come in?”

He shrugged. “Well, when you’ve lived in the neighborhood as long as I have, you see just how many people need help. I have to turn them away in my store. I can’t give everybody credit or I’d go broke myself. So I had the idea for a place like Friends House for a long time, even went to talk to some politicians about it but got nowhere. So then I thought — well, we waited until a night when John Wade was making a drug deal and we shot him. He had a lot of money in his car.”

We had reached the steps of a massive stone Catholic church whose spires seemed tall enough to snag the passing silver clouds.

“I’m sorry Tommy found out,” Warren said. “When I saw him that night, standing by the door while we were counting the money — you know, Charlene and me and the two girls you met — I knew he’d heard what happened.”

“Making it right with him is going to be difficult. Killing his father and all.”

“Maybe when he’s a little older, he’ll understand why we had to kill him. What kind of parasite his father and all drug dealers are. How they prey on their own, how they take the last ounce of hope and dignity from people who have very little hope and dignity to begin with.”

“You’re going to kill more so you can keep Friend House going?”

“As the need arises, Mr. Parnell; as the need arises. And as far as I’m concerned, we’ll be doing the neighborhood and our society a favor.” He put his hand out.

He had a firm grip.

“You know what you’re asking me to do?” I said.

“I know.”

“Conceal evidence from the police.”

“Maybe if you lived in the neighborhood, you’d understand my point of view a little bit more.”

“I’m going to have to think about it I’ll call you later tonight and let you know. I really don’t feel right about this. I spent my life as a law officer.”

“It’s not easy for any of us, Mr. Parnell. But it’s something that needs to be done.”

The two guys in the next room were watching a country-western cable channel and remarking on how big the women’s breasts were. The guys seemed almost appealing right then, juvenile and naive and clean-cut. A long way from a neighborhood where you had to make judgments on predators so that others could live.

I called Faith and she put Hoyt up to the phone and he babbled a few of those squeaky wet two-year-old noises that can break your heart when you’re alone and far away and then I told Faith how much I loved her and how much I missed her and that I would be coming home tomorrow.

“So how did it work out?” she said. “Was Carla DiMonte involved in the murder?”

“Huh-uh. I’ll call Carlucci tomorrow and tell him.”

“You sound tired.”

“Yeah, I guess so, hon. Long day.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get a good night’s sleep for once.”

“Hope so. Love you, hon. Very much.”

I sat five minutes in the room with two quick cigarettes and a can of beer and then I looked up Warren’s number in the plump red Chicago phone book and called him.

“I’m kind of nervous, Mr. Parnell,” he said. “I mean, a lot’s riding on your answer.”

“Some of these dealers may catch on to what you’re doing and come after you.”

“I’m willing to take that chance.”

“Then I wish you luck, Mr. Warren. I wish you a lot of luck.”

“You’re going to keep our secret?”

“I am.”

“God bless you, Mr. Parnell.”

“I just hope Tommy can understand someday.”

“We’ll all say prayers for that, Mr. Parnell. We’ll all say prayers.”

Afterwards, I went over to the set and cranked up The Honeymooners. It was the episode where Ralph confuses a cat’s terminal illness with his own.

There’s an especially moving scene where the great Gleason sits at the shabby table in the shabby little apartment and tries to make sense of the things that composed his life. And can’t.

I thought of Phil Warren and what he was doing and how wrong it was yet how right it was, too.

Some things you can’t make sense of, I guess; some things you just can’t.