Fiddlers

8.

FIRST THING MONDAY morning, right after the blues had mustered downstairs and filed out to their cars or their foot posts, Captain John Marshall Frick called Byrnes into his corner office, and read him the riot act.

‘I just got a call from the Commish,’ he said. ‘He is not pleased. He is definitely not pleased.’

Byrnes thought Frick should have retired long ago. He suspected that all the Captain did was sit at his computer all day long, e-mailing Old Fart jokes to other Old Fart captains in precincts all over the city. Not that Frick was truly old. What was he, after all? Sixty, sixty-five, in there? It was just that he was truly an old fart.

‘Not pleased at all,’ he said, putting it yet another way. “He wants some immediate results on these Glock Murders. Immediate. He thinks we’re fiddling around up here. He wants us to quit fiddling around up here.’

‘Fiddling around?’ Byrnes said. ‘I’ve got the whole damn squad working twenty-four/seven, the whole damn squad’s on overtime, he calls that fiddling? We’re dealing with a case where maybe the motives go back centuries, you’re telling me we’re fiddling around?’

‘I’m telling you what the Commish told me. He wants us to quit fiddling around and bring him some results. Immediate results. He’s cut us enough slack, is what he said. He knows he owes us on the terrorist bust, but we can’t ride on past glory forever, is what he said. We’ve got five vics so far, and Christ knows if this lunatic is done yet, and he wants results, immediate results, is all I can tell you! The papers and television are screaming!’

‘You’re the one who’s screaming, John,’ Byrnes said softly.

‘I don’t like getting bawled out by the Commish.’

‘And I don’t like getting bawled out by you,’ Byrnes said.

‘Then stop fiddling around and bring me some results!’

* * * *

At a quarter past nine that Monday morning, Hawes spoke to the young priest who’d arranged for Helen Reilly’s funeral, and her burial yesterday. His name was Father Kevin Ryan.

‘After the terrible tragedy three years ago,’ he said, and crossed himself, ‘there really were no surviving relatives.’

‘You mean the gang shooting,’ Hawes said.

‘Well, what appeared to be a gang shooting, at any rate. One never knows the truth of such matters, does one? And they never apprehended the shooter, did they? Martin’s sister discounts the gang theory entirely. She and Helen didn’t get along, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Or so some of the parishioners told me. In any event, she didn’t come to Helen’s funeral, so I guess there’s some truth to it.’

‘Why didn’t they get along?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Lucy Hamilton.’

‘Where does she live, would you happen to know?’

* * * *

Martin Reilly’s younger sister was seventy-four years old…

Everybody involved in this case already had one foot in the grave…

… and she still believed her late, unlamented sister-in-law had something to do with Martin’s murder.

‘I never for a minute believed this big love affair of theirs,’ she said, clasping her hands to her bosom in a mock swoon. ‘Tristan and Isolde, Eloise and Abelard, baloney. She was in an unhappy marriage she wanted to get out of, and my poor brother became her hapless victim.’

Hawes knew when to shut up.

Lucy Hamilton was just gathering steam. A widow herself, she had no sympathy whatever for her brother’s recent widow. Described her as a barmaid with no education and no manners…

“… deliberately ensnared Martin, abandoned her husband and children the moment she saw greener pastures. I didn’t like her the first time Martin brought her around, and I never did get to like her.’

‘Tell me more about these children,’ Hawes said.

‘What?’

‘You said she abandoned…”

‘Oh. Well, that’s what I deduced. Wouldn’t you?’

‘How do you know there were children?’

‘My brother mentioned it one night. Married woman with a pair of kids. When he was telling me, for the thousandth time, how much Helen loved him. Said she’d adored him so much that she’d been willing to leave her husband and two kids for him.’

‘Boys or girls? These kids?’

‘He just said “kids.” I didn’t press him, I didn’t give a damn. When he met Helen, she was twenty-two years old, married, with two kids, and sleeping around with every man in sight. So Martin brings her home. And in the end, he gets shot coming down from a train station.’

‘You see these two events as linked, do you?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘You think Helen somehow had something to do with your brother’s murder?’

‘That’s what I told the detectives.’

‘What did you tell them, Mrs. Hamilton?’

‘Told them she probably started sleeping around again. Told them my brother had become an inconvenience, just like her first husband.’

‘After almost fifty years of marriage, whatever? A seventy-year-old woman? Sleeping around?’

‘A leopard doesn’t change spots, Detective Hawes.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I sensed it.’

‘You sensed that what they called their great love was really…”

‘A sham,’ Lucy said, and nodded.

‘I see,’ Hawes said.

‘Which is why she got her most recent boyfriend to shoot my brother on the way home from the city.’

‘And this “recent” boyfriend. Any idea who he might have been?’

‘You don’t advertise something like that.’

‘But we know she was living alone at the time of her murder.’

‘Appearances are sometimes deceptive.’

‘You think she might have been living with someone, is that it?’

‘The boyfriend,’ Lucy said, and nodded again.

Hawes figured he was wasting his time here.

* * * *

You can change your telephone number as often as you change your underwear. You can change your street address every fifty years or so, even more frequently if you happen to be upwardly or downwardly mobile. Every time you buy a new car, you can change your license plate number. And it’s a simple matter to change your credit card numbers whenever you so desire. But if you live in the United States of America, there is one set of numbers that sticks with you for your entire life.

Nine digits across the face of a simple blue card.

Nine digits divided into three parts.

Area numbers, group numbers, and serial numbers.

The number assigned to you the first time you get a job, and the number that will stay with you forever.

Your Social Security number.

A call to Social Security Admin tracked Helen Reilly back to when she was Helen Purcell and further back to when she was still Helen Rogers and took her first job at the age of seventeen. Hawes knew that her first husband’s name might have been Luke; Paula Wellington had suggested this. On the off chance that someone named Luke Purcell was still alive…

If so, he’d have to be in his late seventies or early eighties…

… Hawes checked all of the city’s five telephone directories. He came up with hundreds of Purcells, but no Lukes.

A call to the Department of Records unearthed a death certificate for a Luke Randolph Purcell, who’d died of lung cancer seven years ago, at the age of seventy-one. Several phone calls later, Hawes recovered a marriage certificate from 1950, for a Luke Randolph Purcell and a Helen Rogers, and a subsequent certificate of divorce for the couple. But if Luke and Helen Purcell had had any children - boys or girls - before they went their separate ways, the kids were still largely anonymous in a city of largely anonymous people. Hawes called the office of Vital Statistics, and asked a man named Paul Endicott to see what he had on any children for a Luke and Helen Purcell.

‘You know how many Purcells there are in the records down here?’ Endicott asked.

Hawes confessed he did not.

‘There are thousands,’ Endicott said. ‘Purcell is a very common name. Would you yourself like to come down here personally, Detective, and go through the thousands of Purcells on file here? Looking for a Helen or a Luke to see what their fucking kids’ names were?’

‘I wish you’d help me,’ Hawes told him. ‘This is a homicide we’re investigating.’

By eleven o’clock that Monday morning, Hawes had gone through four of the city’s five telephone directories and was working on the fifth, slogging through the book, dialing, and then identifying himself, and then doggedly asking the very same question of every Purcell who answered the phone: ‘Are you related to a Luke or a Helen Purcell?’

At times he felt like a telemarketer; people just hung up on him, even after he told them he was a detective. Other times, he felt hopelessly old-fashioned. In this day and age of instant messaging, there had to be a quicker, simpler way of zeroing in on the progeny of Helen and Luke - if, in fact, they even existed; so far, he had only the word of Helen’s sister-in-law for that.

He looked up at the wall clock. Sighed. Ran his finger down the page to the next Purcell in the Riverhead directory. Jennifer Purcell. Began dialing again. Listened to the phone ringing on the other end.

‘Hello?’

A woman’s voice.

‘Hello, this is Detective Hawes of the Eighty-seventh Squad. I’m trying to reach Jennifer Purcell…”

‘Yes, this is Jennifer?’ the woman said. Youngish voice, late twenties, early thirties, clearly puzzled. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Ma’am, I’m trying to locate the children of Luke and Helen Purcell. I wonder…”

‘They’re my grandparents,’ she said at once. ‘Are you investigating her murder? I heard about it on television

‘Yes, I am,’ Hawes said at once, relieved, leaning closer into the phone. ‘Miss Purcell, I’d like to come there to talk to you, if I may. Would there be any time this morning… ?’

‘I’m sorry, I was just about to leave for work. Can we make it sometime tonight? I get home around five.’

‘Well… can you spare me a few minutes on the phone?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I really have to go, I’m late as it is.’

‘Then can I come to your workplace? This is really…”

‘No, it’s a restaurant, I’m sorry. Can’t you come here later today?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ he said.

‘Can you be here around five, five thirty? I should be home by then.’

‘Your grandparents had two children, is that right? Can you tell me… ?’

‘I’m sorry, but I really have to go. We’ll talk this evening.’

‘Wait!’ he shouted.

‘What?’

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘1247 Forbes Road, Apartment 6B.’

‘I’ll see you at five,’ he said.

‘Five thirty,’ she said. ‘I have to run. I’m sorry,’ she said, and hung up.

‘Damn it!’ Hawes said out loud.

Jennifer’s own name was Purcell, so he figured her for either single or else divorced and using her maiden name. Either way, this meant her father and not her mother was one of the abandoned kids. He’d wanted to ask her whether the other Purcell kid was a boy or a girl. He’d wanted to ask whether she’d ever even known the grandmother who’d abandoned Luke and the two kids to run off with her lover. Lots of questions to ask. He couldn’t wait to ask them.

He looked up at the wall clock.

Five thirty tonight seemed so very far away.

* * * *

These holy, solemn, religious places gave Ollie the heebie-jeebies. Before the priest got himself killed, the last time Ollie’d been inside a church was when his sister Isabel got stranded at the altar by a no-good Jewboy grifter he’d warned her against from the very beginning, but who listens to their big brothers nowadays? He wondered, in fact, if Patricia’s kid brother, Alonso, was warning her against Ollie himself right this very minute. As well he might be. Which was another thing that made Ollie uncomfortable about being here in Our Lady of Grace, the fact that he was actively planning, in the darkest recesses of his primeval mind, the seduction of Alonso’s older sister, Patricia Gomez, a fellow police officer, no less. This coming Saturday night, no less.

All these goddamn candles.

The smell of incense.

Sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows.

And all he could think of was taking off Patricia’s panties.

Three or four religious fanatics were sitting in the pews, praying. A guy in his fifties was polishing the big brass candlesticks behind the altar railing. Ollie walked down the center aisle like a bishop, approached the man.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ he asked, same as he would at a crime scene.

The guy looked up, polishing rag in his right hand.

Ollie showed his detective’s shield.

‘Is there a head priest or something?’ he asked.

The man seemed bewildered. Sparrow of a man with narrow shoulders and thin arms, blue eyes darting from the shield in Ollie’s hand, to Ollie’s face, and then back to the shield again. Ollie figured he wasn’t playing with a full deck.

‘Are you looking for Father Nealy?’ the man asked.

‘Sure,’ Ollie said. ‘Where do I find him?’

* * * *

Father James Nealy was preparing next Sunday morning’s sermon when Ollie walked into his rectory at eleven thirty that Monday morning. Ollie knew right off the man would be of no earthly help to him; he was in his early thirties, and couldn’t possibly have been here at Our Lady of Grace when Father Michael was. He asked his questions, anyway.

‘Did you know Father Michael personally?’

‘Never met the man,’ Father Nealy said. ‘But I’ve heard only good things about him.’

‘Never heard anyone say he wished the old man was dead, right?’

Father Nealy smiled. He was wearing black trousers and a black shirt, looked like some kind of tunic. White collar. Black, highly polished shoes. Ollie figured he had to be some kind of fag.

‘No, I’ve never heard anyone say he wished Father Michael was dead.’

‘Everybody loved him, right?’

‘I don’t know about that. But I’ve heard nothing but praise from our parishioners.’

‘Some of them still remember him, is that it?’

‘Oh yes. He was a beloved leader.’

‘Like I said. Everybody loved him.’

‘Am I detecting a mocking tone here?’ Father Nealy asked. He was no longer smiling.

‘No, you’re detecting a detective investigating the murder of somebody everybody loved.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Father Nealy said. ‘Obviously, someone didn’t love him.’

‘Ah yes,’ Ollie said. ‘But you wouldn’t know of any friction back then when he was a priest here.’

‘As I said, I haven’t heard of any.’

‘Why’d he leave here for St. Ignatius, anyway?’

‘Priests are moved from one parish to another all the time,’ Father Nealy said. ‘The diocese sends us wherever we’re needed to do the Lord’s work.’

‘Of course,’ Ollie said, thinking, The Lord’s work, what total bullshit. ‘Well, thanks for your time, Father,’ he said. ‘If you can think of anyone who might’ve had mischief on his mind, give me a call, okay? Meanwhile, may God bless you and keep you,’ he said, and shook hands with the priest and walked out.

He came down the long corridor that led through the sacristy, lined with clear leaded windows streaming morning sunlight, and then back to the church proper. Inside the church, the same holy lunatics were scattered in the pews, mumbling their prayers, the same guy was behind the altar, polishing brass. He spotted Ollie the moment he came through the door into the church, almost as if he’d been waiting for him to come back.

‘Detective?’ he said.

Ollie turned, went to him.

‘Are you investigating?’ the man whispered.

Eyes wide and frightened.

‘Why?’ Ollie asked. “What do you know?’

‘Jerry!’

A woman’s voice.

Ollie turned to where a redhead going ugly gray was striding down the side aisle of the church like a witch who’d lost her broomstick.

‘Leave my brother alone!’ she shouted, startling the holy at prayer, and took Jerry by the hand, and dragged him away from the altar.

But this was Oliver Wendell Weeks she was dealing with here.

As brother and sister came out of the church, Ollie was right behind them.

* * * *

Kling was beginning to sound to Brown like one of those tormented private eyes or rogue cops he read about in seven-dollar paperbacks that used to be dime novels that used to be penny dreadfuls. White guys mostly who went around moaning and groaning and tearing out their hair about everything but what was supposed to be their work. Their work here was supposed to be finding out who had put two bullets in Professor Christine Langston’s face, plus some other faces as well.

Instead, he was telling Brown that he’d been to bed with a girl named Sadie Harris this past Friday night -another black girl, no less - whom he hadn’t yet called back, but he hadn’t called Sharyn again, either, and now he was asking Brown his advice on what he should do because he thought he might already be in love with this Sadie Harris, who was a librarian in Riverhead. Tell the truth, Brown didn’t care whether he called Sadie or Sharyn, or went to bed with either or both of them, or even with Britney Spears in the window of Harrods department store in London, England. Kling’s troubles with women - black women, no less - were of minor consequence to the real issue at hand, which happened to be murder. Murders. Plural. Five of them so far, and maybe still counting.

Of major consequence and immediate concern was Warren G. Harding High School, where a twenty-three-year-old teacher named Christine Langston had long ago given an eighteen-year-old boy a C when he’d desperately needed an A to keep him out of the Army.

What they wanted to know was the name of that boy.

But all of this was all so very long ago and very far away.

What they were talking about here was more than forty years ago. Guy would have to be in his late fifties by now. This whole damn case was buried in ancient history.

What they learned at Harding High at twelve noon that Monday was that no one currently teaching there -no one - had been teaching there back then when Christine was promising ‘A’s and handing out ‘C’s instead. Nor had anyone employed in the Clerical Office today been working at the school back then.

So…

Either they had to admit they’d reached a dead end on the professor’s murder…

Or else they could try some other means - God knew what - of tracking down each and every member of the graduating class back then, and all of the teachers who’d been at Harding when Christine was but a mere twenty-three, in her green and salad days, and learning how to trade grades for apparently scarce sex.

Fat Chance Department, both cops thought.

They headed back to the squadroom to discuss it with the Loot, who wasn’t in such a good mood himself just then.

* * * *

What goes in must come out.

What goes up must come down.

These are things you learn after years of dedicated police work.

Jerry and his sister, the graying redheaded witch, had gone into the building at 831 Barber Street at twelve-oh-seven this afternoon, and it was now twenty to one, and neither one of them had yet come out. Ollie felt certain of three things.

One: Jerry’s elevator wasn’t reaching the top floor; he was what the police in this city categorized as an EDP, for Emotionally Disturbed Person.

Two: Jerry believed the church was under investigation for something or other.

Three: Jerry’s sister didn’t want him talking to cops.

Which made talking to him seem all the more imperative.

Ollie supposed he could knock on a few doors, ask a few questions, and zero in on which apartment Jerry and his sister lived in. But then he would have to question Jerry in the presence of the harridan sister, and he would prefer not having to do that; he was still afraid of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, and he’d seen that movie only on television. So he waited across the street from their building: What goes in must come out; what goes up must come down.

Meanwhile, all he could do was think about Patricia Gomez. Should he change their date from Saturday night to Sunday morning? Andy Parker said that a cozy little Saturday night dinner at home would set off a real Panty Block alarm. So maybe he should call her and change it to a Sunday brunch if indeed he was planning on getting in her pants, which he guessed he was, else why was he thinking such evil thoughts about the girl, and why was there a sudden erection in his own pants right this very minute?

Oh well.

It also bothered him that Andy Parker thought he was losing his essential Ollie-ness, which he certainly did not wish to do; he liked himself too much. Then again, Patricia seemed to like him a lot, too. Especially now that he’d lost ten pounds. So, when you thought about it, what would be so wrong about two consensual, non-homosexual human beings joining together for some fine and fancy Saturday night - oops.

Here they came.

Walking out of their building together, Jerry and his sister with her graying red hair flying around her head like a halo of bats.

* * * *

Alicia Hendricks’s old neighborhood was beginning to feel like home to Parker and Genero. They even stopped in at Rocco’s for lunch that Monday, where they had the clams Posillipo and another chat with Geoffrey Lucantonio, who was eager to tell them more about his derring-do with the then-fifteen-year-old Alicia, but they opted for other more pertinent information.

They were here in the Laurelwood section of Riverhead again, trying to track down any of Alicia’s former classmates at Warren G. Harding High, which the Commish might have considered fiddling around but which nonetheless had been her last educational venue before she sailed off into the wider world of waitressing, manicuring, sales repping, and eventual dope-dealing. Geoffrey told them that not many of Harding’s alumni still lived in the old hood. Although the foundation stones were still here -

Our Lady of Grace Church…

Roger Mercer Junior High…

Warren G. Harding High…

- the neighborhood was now predominately Spanish, and erstwhile natives of Jewish, Italian, or Irish descent had long ago fled for greener pastures. One holdout was a woman whose parents had owned a house here ‘when the neighborhood was still good,’ Geoffrey said, not recognizing he was slurring the people who currently lived here. She’d inherited the house when her parents died, and was still reluctant to give it up.

‘Her name is Phoebe Jennings,’ he said. ‘Her and her husband come in here all the time. I forget what her maiden name was back then. She lives in the two-story brick behind St. Mary’s.’

* * * *

Phoebe Jennings still bore a faint resemblance to the photo of the plain eighteen-year-old girl in Harding’s yearbook. She remembered Alicia Hendricks well…

‘Well, who could ever forget her?’ she said, and rolled her eyes.

They were sitting under a striped umbrella in the backyard of the house, the yearbook open in her lap. In the near distance, the bells of St. Mary’s…

Good title, Genero thought.

… chimed the hour.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

The way Phoebe remembers it…

‘My maiden name was Phoebe Mears,’ she told the detectives. ‘That’s the name in the yearbook there…’

Tapping the photo of a young girl in eyeglasses, a tentative smile on her mouth. Phoebe Jennings still wore eyeglasses, but she was not smiling as she remembered those days back in high school.

‘Alicia was the most popular girl in the class,’ she said. ‘Gorgeous, drove all the boys crazy. Well, everyone wanted to be near her. All of us. She just radiated this… glow, you know? I realize now it was a kind of hyper-sexuality… well, we were all so young, you know, so very young.’

‘How well did you know her, Mrs. Jennings?’ Parker asked.

‘Oh, not well at all. I’m sorry, did I give that impression? I was hardly in the same league as Alicia and her Chosen Few… well, look at my picture. I was what kids today call a nerd. The In Crowd wanted nothing to do with me. This tight little circle of girls, you know, maybe five or six of them? Flocked around Alicia as if she were the queen bee. Hoping some of her allure would rub off on them. Well, I hoped so, too, I admit it. I’d have given anything to be like Alicia Hendricks. And yet…”

She looked at her photo in the yearbook again.

‘You’re here because she met with a violent death. I’ve been happily married for almost thirty years now. My two daughters are married, too, both of them college graduates. My husband is a decent, faithful, hardworking man, and we live a block away from the church where we worship every Sunday. So does it matter that forty years ago I was a wallflower at Our Lady of Grace’s Friday night dances? Does it matter that the boys stood on line waiting for a chance to dance with Alicia or even one of her friends? Where are any of those other girls now? Are they as happy as I am?’

‘Would you know where any of them are now, Mrs. Jennings?’ Genero asked.

* * * *

Holding tight to her brother’s hand, the graying redhead led him up the street, Ollie a respectably invisible distance behind them. Damn if she wasn’t leading him into a small coffee shop. Were the siblings about to enjoy a good lunch, which Ollie himself could use along about now? His stomach growling in agreement, he took up a watchful position across the street, and was surprised when the pair came out some ten minutes later, each carrying a brown paper bag.

He watched.

The sister kissed Jerry on the cheek. Gave him some sisterly advice, Jerry nodding. Kissed him again in farewell, and then marched off, leaving him alone on the sidewalk.

Ollie waited.

A moment later, Jerry was in motion, brown paper bag clutched tight in his right hand. Was he heading back to the apartment? If so, Ollie would follow him right upstairs this time. No sister, no problem. But instead, he walked right past his building, and kept on walking south, crossing under the elevated-train structure on Dover Plains Avenue, and then past the next street over, something called Holman Avenue, and then to the street bordering the park, and onto a footpath leading into the park itself, Ollie some fifteen feet behind him now, and rapidly closing the distance between them. The moment Jerry found a bench and sat on it, Ollie moved in. Even before Jerry could reach into the brown paper bag, Ollie was sitting beside him.

‘Hello, Jerry,’ he said.

Jerry turned to him. Blue eyes opening wide in recognition and fear.

‘I didn’t do nothing,’ he said.

‘I know you didn’t,’ Ollie said. ‘What’ve you got there, a sandwich?’

Jerry looked puzzled for a moment. Then he realized Ollie was referring to the paper bag on his lap. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And a Coca-Cola.’

‘What kind of sandwich?’ Ollie asked.

‘Ham and cheese on a hard roll, butter and mustard,’ Jerry said by rote.

‘Wanna share it with me?’ Ollie asked. ‘I’ll buy us a few more of them later.’

‘Sure,’ Jerry said, and grinned, and reached into the bag. He unwrapped the sandwich. The roll had already been sliced in two, which made things easy. Together, they sat on the park bench, chewing. Jerry popped the can of Coke, offered it to Ollie. Ollie took a long swallow, handed it back.

‘So what is it you didn’t do?’ he asked.

‘Nothing with the father,’ Jerry said, and shook his head.

‘Father Nealy, you mean?’

‘No. Father Michael.’

Ollie nodded, bit into his half of the sandwich.

‘You knew Father Michael, huh?’ he asked.

‘Yes. When I was small.’

Forty, fifty years ago, Ollie figured. Time frame would’ve been right for when Father Michael was a pastor at Our Lady of Grace.

‘You’re investigating, right?’ Jerry said.

‘Investigating what, Jerry?’

‘What he done to us.’

‘What’d he do to you, Jerry?’

‘You know.’

‘No, I don’t know. Tell me.’

‘To both of us.’

‘Uh-huh. What’d he do, Jerry? It’s all right, you can tell me. He’s dead now.’

Jerry’s blue eyes opened wide.

‘He can’t hurt you anymore.’

‘He made me and this other kid…”

The blue eyes welled with tears. He buried his face in his hands. Shook his head in his hands. Sobbing into his hands.

‘You and another boy?’

‘Not together.’

‘Separately?’

Jerry nodded into his hands. Mumbled yes into his hands.

Ollie sat still and silent for several moments.

Then he said, ‘What was this other boy’s name?’

‘Was it Carlie?’ Jerry asked.

* * * *

In her mid-fifties, Geraldine Davies was still an attractive woman, and the detectives could easily imagine her as one of Alicia’s inner circle of friends back then in those halcyon days at Mercer Junior High and Harding High. Wearing lavender slacks and a matching cotton T-shirt, strappy low-heeled sandals, she greeted them at the door to her apartment in Majesta, offered them iced tea, and then led them out to a terrace seventeen stories above the street. There, within viewing distance of the Majesta Bridge, they sat sipping tea and enjoying the cool early afternoon breezes.

‘I was always sorry I lost touch with Alicia,’ she told them. ‘She was a very important part of my life back then. Well, all of us. Any of us who were fortunate enough to get close to her. She was a very special person. It’s a pity what happened to her. Well, getting killed the way she did, of course. But now I understand there was some sort of drug connection as well, is that right? Didn’t I see on television that she was selling drugs or something, some sort of Korean connection, was it? Is that true? If so, it’s a shame. She was so special.’

Then why did someone want her dead? Parker wondered.

Genero said it out loud.

‘Can you think of anyone back then who might have had reason to kill her now? Anyone bearing a grudge, for example?’

Long time to be bearing a grudge,’ Geraldine said, and raised her eyebrows.

‘Lots of nuts out there,’ Parker said.

‘Even so.’

On the bridge, even from this distance, they could hear the rumble of heavy trucks making the river crossing to Isola.

‘Well, you never know, I suppose,’ Geraldine said, thinking.

‘Yes?’ Parker said.

‘But there was this one boy

‘Yes?’

‘… had a terrible crush on her. What was his name again?’

The detectives waited.

‘I remember one night… at Our Lady of Grace… they used to have these Friday night dances at the church, they were very popular, used to draw a big crowd. This boy used to follow Alicia around like a lost puppy, panting at her heels… well, she was really quite beautiful, you know, I can’t say I blamed him, what was his name?

‘Anyway, this one Friday night… they had the dances in this huge recreation hall at the church, you know… well, it seemed huge to me, I was only thirteen. We would sit on these wooden chairs lined up against the wall, waiting for boys to ask us to dance. I have to tell you, nobody in Alicia’s crowd had to wait very long. I don’t want to sound conceited, but we were the most popular girls at Mercer, and later at Harding. The boys flocked around us like bees to honey. That sounds terrible, I know, but it’s true.

‘This one Friday night… this boy who everybody said had tendencies, you know what I mean? Like he, uh, walked light, you know what I mean?’

She was suddenly a teenager again.

And not a very nice one, they realized.

Smiling now, remembering, she told of how this boy with tendencies came walking across the entire long length of this huge recreation hall, and stopped in front of where Alicia and she were laughing at something one of them had just said…

‘She was wearing a yellow dress, I remember, ruffled, short to show off her legs, she had terrific legs, well, listen, she was just a terrific girl…

‘… and he asked her to dance… what was his name, I can’t imagine what’s wrong with my memory these days! Held out his hand to her. “Would you care to dance?” he said, such a wuss. Alicia looked up at him. Ray Charles was on the record player, I remember now. Looked him dead in the eye. Said, “Get lost, faggot.” Which he deserved. I mean, everybody said he was.

‘He just turned and walked away. But you should have seen the look on his face. If looks could kill

Geraldine shook her head.

‘Walked that whole long distance back across the rec hall again, went out the door, and out of the church for all I know. Never followed Alicia around again, you can bet on that. Never. I wonder whatever happened to him. Such a wuss. I can’t even remember his name.’

‘Mrs. Jennings,’ Parker said, ‘try to remember his name.’

‘Chuck Something?’ she said.