Mischief

2.

“WHAT I DON’T LIKE about what I’m seeing here is this is a freebie gig we’re doing and it’s only twelve days away and we’re gettin no coverage at all on it,that’s what I don’t like about it,” Jeeb said.

Jeeb was the lead rapper in the group. There were four of them altogether, Jeeb and Silver and the two girls, one of them named Sophie and the other named Grass. The group called itself Spit Shine. It was Jeeb who’d thought up the name. This was when they were still rapping on street corners in Diamondback and calling themselves Four-Q, which was certainly appropriate for the kind of music they were making, but which Jeeb figured might not go down too well in the big time, which was where they planned to go , man, straight to the top, man.

Jeeb remembered his grandfather telling him they used to use the word “shine” to describe people of color back in the old days, though he didn’t know where the word had come from, maybe it had something to do with black folks’s skin looking shiny, was what his grandpa told him. Anyway, it was an expression in common use back then, shine. Jeeb figured it’d be good to throw that word right back in Whitey’s face—shine, huh?—but attach the word spit to it so it came out spit shine, like a black man snarling and spitting, which is what their music was all about, anyway. The girls thought the new name was terrific. Silver thought it sucked. Silver thought it was cool somebody came up to you, ast you what the name of this crew was, you tole him, “Four-Q.” Silver thought that was real cool, man. Jeeb told him it would put off a record producer, he’d think you were tellin him to go fuck himself. Silver said that was ex actlythe attitude they should be tryin’a project here, man, you don’t like what we’re tellin you, then Four-Q, man.

The girls said they were embarrassed to tell they mamas Four-Q. Grass, especially, who was only fourteen back then when they were rapping for nickels and dimes on street corners, she was ashamed to say the name of the band out loud, her mother’d hit her one upside the head if’n she did. Grass was the only virgin Jeeb knew at the time. He respected her opinion because he felt there was something pure about her. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t mind rapping the word fuck but was ashamed of saying Four-Q, he couldn’t understand that at all. He knew in his heart, though, that Spit Shine was a better name than the one they had, and he also knew it wouldn’t pay to get all huffy with Silver, tell him Hey, man,I’m the leader of this crew, so you know what you can do, man, don’t you? That wouldn’t work with Silver, who had more pride than anyone Jeeb knew. So he just took him aside one day and reasoned with him and then told him it’d be great could Silver write a new song for them called “Spit Shine,” spellin it all out for anybody out there wasn’t gettin the message. Silver liked that idea. He wrote the best lyrics of any rapper in the business, wasn’t anything he liked better than writing. He took that name Spit Shine and turned it into a rap that shook thunder from the sky.

Shine what you call me,

Shine what I am,

Spit in your eye, man,

Shine that I am…

Was Spit Shine the song that flew off their first album and right onto the singles chart. Was Spit Shine the song that made a household name of Spit Shine the crew . Silver never let Jeeb forget it was him who’d written that song. Silver never let anybody forget anything . Only thing he was willing to forget was the name he was born with, Sylvester. Sylvester Cummings. Hated that name like poison, said it made him sound like some pansy served dinner and helped you get dressed. The girls told him Sylvester Stallone wasn’t no pansy, and Silver said Stallone didn’t call himself Sylvester , you might’ve noticed, he called himself Sly . So whyn’t you call your self Sly, Sophie asked him, and he said, Whyn’t you call your self Slit , which was a reference to the fact that Sophie had been a hooker before she’d joined the crew.

That was four years ago.

Sophie was now twenty-two years old, and Grass (whose real name was Grace) was now eighteen and no longer a virgin thanks to Jeeb, whose real name was James Edward Beeson, which he’d shortened to Jeeb, and Spit Shine was now famous enough to do a free concert in Grover Park, sponsored by a chain of citywide banks that now called itself FirstBank although its original name was First National City Bank.

Sophie was still Sophie.

“I agree with Jeeb,” she said. “The bank gets a free ride and tons of publicity but so far the gig’s almost here and there’s still nothing but a trickle about us performing.”

“Other crews gettin all the splash,” Silver said.

He was twenty-three years old, the senior member in the crew, lanky and handsome, with eyes as dark as river mud, a nose like a Roman centurion’s, and dreadlocks that could scare away a witch. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with the name of the crew in neon yellow across the front of it,SPIT SHINE .

Actually, he didn’t have his mind completely on what they were talking about here. He’d recently come across an album of calypso songs written by a singer who’d been murdered some years back, and one of the songs had stuck in his mind as a good example of early rap, though it was set to a calypso beat. He’d rapped the song for Sophie, skipped the tune entirely, just rapped out Chadderton’s lyrics—that was the singer’s name, George Chadderton, he used to bill himself as King George. The songs had been discovered in a notebook he’d kept before he got killed and a singer who did a pretty good Belafonte imitation had recorded them for an obscure label in L.A.

Sophie hadn’t much liked the song, which was titled “Sister Woman,” but that was because the song was about hookers and she thought Silver was tryin’a dis her about the days when she’d earned her money walking the streets. As she argued back and forth with Jeeb now about ways they could get more publicity out of their forthcoming concert, Silver went over the Chadderton lyrics in his mind one more time:

Sister woman, black woman, sister woman mine,

Why she wearin them clothes showin half her behine?

Why she walking the street, why she working the line?

Do the white man dollar make her feel that fine?

Ain’t she got no brains, ain’t she got no pride,

Letting white man dollar turn her cheap inside?

Takin white man dollar, lettinheinside?

Sister woman, black woman, why she do this way?

On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay?

She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,

On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay.

On her knees, sister woman, is the time to pray,

Never mind what the white manhegot to say,

Let thewhitegirl do what the white man say.

Sister woman, black woman, on her knees give head

To a man like he like to see her dead

Can’t she see, don’t she see, can’t she read in his head?

She a slave to his will, and the man want her dead.

She a nigger for sure, she a slave still in chains,

And the white man’ll whip her ankeepher in chains.

Sister woman, black woman, won’t she hear my song?

What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.

Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong,

Sister woman, black woman…

“What do you think, Sil?”

Jeeb’s voice, cutting through the lyrics that were sliggeding through Silver’s head. Good hip-hop, for sure. The album sleeve had credited copyright to Chloe Productions, Inc. He wondered who the hell that was.

“Silver? You with us.”

“I say we call FirstBank an’ tell ’em we’re outta this thing entirely ’less they take a big ad headlinin us.”

Grass, who had been silent until now, very softly said, “That’s the onliest way, Silver, the man dissin us like that.”

And smiled at him.

Jeeb all at once wondered if something was going on between these two.

CATALINA HERRERA was in the waiting room of the Morehouse General Hospital morgue when Parker joined her. This was now two o’clock on that afternoon of March twenty-third. The sun was shining, but the temperature was still somewhere down there in the low-to-mid-thirties and more rain was expected tonight, some spring this was.

Catalina was in her late twenties, early thirties, Parker guessed, a diminutive woman with large brown eyes, dark hair, and the major hooters you found on all these spics. He guessed she’d got knocked up with young Alfredo when she was twelve, thirteen years old, they matured early down there in the tropics and it was difficult for all those macho caballeros down there to keep their hands off all those ripe boobs under the palms in the sand. Catalina’s eyes were luminous with tears. He was here only to ascertain that the dead kid in there was, in fact, Alfredo Herrera and not somebody who’d copped his I.D. Sobbingly, she told Parker that the kid on the slab in there was her son.

“He was a good boy,” she said.

Which is what they all said. Looked you straight in the eye after their kid had killed his grandmother, his four-year-old sister, his pet beagle, and his three goldfish, and told you without flinching, “He was a good boy.” Parker had already done a computer run on the late Alfredo Herrera and had come up with zilch. The kid was clean, albeit dead. Parker wondered if his mother knew how handy he’d been with a spray can. He also wondered if she knew whether or not her son had been into anything that might have invited two big ones in the face and another one in the chest. He decided to ask her to have a cup of coffee with him in the hospital coffee shop. He was thinking he might try taking her to bed, those boobs. Parker thought women found him irresistible.

In the coffee shop, with doctors and nurses sitting at tables all around them—some of them in green surgical gowns ostentatiously spattered with blood, green surgical masks hanging down around their throats like they’d just come from some tremendous lifesaving operation mere mortals couldn’t appreciate—Parker asked Catalina if she knew what her son was doing out in the middle of the night last night, which was presumably when he’d got shot.

“I don’ know wha’ he wass doing,” she said.

Thick Spanish accent that Parker found attractive on these Latino women but disgusting on the men, who should for Christ’s sake learn how to speak English.

“When’s the last time you saw him?” he asked, and ended the sentence there, without adding the word alive , thereby rescuing himself from another Seaman Shavorskyism.

“When I come home,” she said. “I was out.”

“What time was that?”

“Siss, siss-t’irty,” she said.

Very charming. Made him think of guitars and black lace, languid breezes playing. Made him think of fucking her, too.

“We ha’ supper together.”

Lilting to the ear. Lovely. You got used to it after a while, it almost sounded accent-free. He wondered if she’d ever made love in English. He almost asked her. Instead he said, “What’d you talk about during dinner?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Many things.”

“Like what?”

“He told me he wanted to buy a car.”

“Does he have money to buy a car?”

Parker immediately thought dope. Eighteen-year-old kid tells his mother he’s thinking of buying a car, where’s he gonna get the bread for the car? Dope, right? Besides, he was Hispanic. On Parker’s block, that meant he was into dope.

“His grandmother left him money when she died,” Catalina said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It was my husband’s mother,” she said, dismissing the woman with a shrug.

She’s got a husband, Parker thought.

“What sort of work does your husband do?”

“We’re divorced, I don’t know what he does anymore. He went back to Santo Domingo. I haven’t seen him in maybe six months.”

But still counting, Parker thought.

“What time did your son leave the house last night?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I left before him.”

“Where’d you go?”

A boyfriend, Parker thought.

“To a movie,” she said.

She likes movies, he thought.

“Alone?” he asked.

She looked at him. He realized all at once that she thought he was asking her for an alibi, trying to make sure she hadn’t dusted her own kid and then painted him red afterward, which of course was a possibility, wet eyes or not.

“With a girlfriend,” she said.

He wondered if he should ask her to go to a movie with him tonight.

“What time did you get back?”

“Around midnight.”

“And he was gone.”

“He was gone,” she said, and burst into tears again.

Parker watched her.

Everywhere around them, all these medical people were discussing anything but medicine. It was as if there was an unwritten rule in the coffee shop that you didn’t talk about appendectomies or catheters or loose bowel movements or anything that had to do with work. This was break time, and you didn’t let blood and pus interfere with the enjoyment of your cheese Danish. Parker was a little embarrassed that some of the nurses had turned to look at Catalina crying. The doctors couldn’t care less, they were in a universe of their own, but some of the nurses had turned to stare at this tiny, very attractive brunette who was crying her eyes out, and Parker was afraid they might think he was the one who’d made her cry, not that he gave a shit. Besides, this was a hospital, there were people dying here every ten minutes, the nurses should’ve been used to seeing somebody crying, it wasn’t such a big deal. Still, it made him feel uncomfortable, the two or three nurses who turned to look at them, one of them wearing a green O.R. gown, she’d probably just come from looking inside somebody’s stomach or chest.

Awkwardly, he watched her.

“He was a good boy,” she said again, this time into her damp handkerchief.

He waited.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, hey,” he said. He didn’t feel comfortable comforting people. He wanted to ask her if she’d ever seen any spray cans around the house, but he figured he’d better wait till she stopped crying. He also wanted to ask her if her son had been in any serious fights or arguments with anybody in the neighborhood recently, like somebody who might want to pump three shots into him because of it, and then paint him red besides. But she was still crying.

He kept waiting.

At last the crying stopped, sort of. She still kept dabbing at a stray tear every now and then, but the real storm had passed, she was in control of herself again. He asked her if she’d like another cup of coffee, and she looked at her watch, and it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps there was a job she had to get to, her son’s murder had consumed the major part of her day so far. But he’d reached her at home this morning, and that had been before lunchtime. He wondered if her husband in the Dominican Republic was paying alimony.

“More coffee?” he said again.

“I would like to, but…”

Another look at her watch. Tears welling in her eyes again. So frail, so beautiful.

“Do you have to get to work or something?” he asked.

“I work at home,” she said.

“Oh. What do you do?”

“Typing.”

“Ahh,” he said.

“Yes. But today…I want to help you. I want you to find whoever…”

And burst into tears again.

Jesus, he thought.

He signaled to one of the volunteer pink-lady waitresses and ordered two more cups of coffee, trying to disassociate himself from this woman bawling across the table from him, people looking at him now like he was a wife-beater or something. He felt like taking out the little leather fob holding his shield, flash the tin, let them know he was a fucking police officer here doing a job, trying to get some information from this woman here, whose dumb spic son went around writing on walls. Again, he waited. He was beginning to get a little irritated with her, busting into tears every thirty seconds.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, into the very wet handkerchief now.

“Hey, no,” he said again, but without as much conviction as last time.

The coffee came. He watched as she spooned four teaspoons of sugar into it, they had sweet tooths, these Latinos. Just a dollop of milk, she liked it dark. She was under control again. He hoped that this time he could get some answers from her before she turned on the tears again.

“Did he belong to a gang?” he asked.

Flat out. Get to it. Get it over and done with.

“No,” she said.

“Anybody putting any pressure on him to join one?”

“Not that I know about.”

“I have to ask this, was he into dope?”

“What do you mean? Using dope? No, Alfredo never…”

“Using it, dealing it, I have to ask. Was he in any way connected with narcotics?”

“No.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Positive.”

Brown eyes flashing something very close to anger now.

“Did you know he was a wall-writer?”

“No. A what? What’s that, a wall-writer?”

“A graffiti artist. A person who sprays graffiti on walls. With paint.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“We’re pretty sure that’s what he was doing when he got shot. Unless somebody went to a lot of trouble putting his fingerprints on the spray can, your son’s. Ever see him leaving the house with a spray can?”

“No.”

“Ever see any spray cans around the house? This one was red, ever see any red spray cans around? These cans that spray paint?”

“No, never.”

“Ever hear the name Spider?”

“No.”

“Do you know that’s what your son was called on the street?”

“No.”

“But you say he didn’t belong to a gang.”

“He did not belong to a gang.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Her eyes said You better.

“Will you need help with funeral arrangements?” he asked.

For Christ’s sake, don’t bust out crying again, he thought.

“I’ll give you a hand with that, you need help,” he said.

“Por favor,”she said, and lowered her head to hide the tears that were brimming in her eyes again.

Parker felt something like genuine sympathy.

THIS WAS A CITY on the thin edge of explosion.

Everywhere you looked, you saw anger seething just below the surface.

The Deaf Man liked that.

One out of every two teenagers in this city owned a handgun. You saw some kids up to some kind of mischief in the street, you didn’t tell them to behave themselves, you had to be crazy to do that because if there were four of them, two of them might be the ones packing the guns. You had to be very careful about people getting angry in this city.

You hailed a taxicab in this city, and you didn’t see the guy standing on the corner with his hand raised to call the same cab, and the cab stopped for you instead of him, and the guy came running over yelling, “You fucking asshole, didn’t you see I had my hand up?” and when you told him, “Hey, I’m sorry, I didn’t see you, take the cab,” he said, “Don’t lie to me, you fucking asshole, you saw me all the time,” not happy with your giving him the cab, not happy with your apology, wanting to extend the argument, wanting to get even somehow for something you didn’t even do,hurt you somehow for some imagined offense you hadn’t committed.

This was a city waiting to erupt.

Good, the Deaf Man thought.

You’re waiting on a street corner for the light to change, and finally the signal turns toWALK and you start across the street and a limo makes a left turn into the block, almost knocking you over when he’s supposed to stop for a pedestrian crossing with the light and you raise your eyebrows and spread your hands as if to say Hey, come on, gimme a break, willya, and he leans over the seat and yells through the window on the passenger side, “What the fuck you want me to do, you cocksucker, drive up on the sidewalk?”—but it’s best not to argue. He’s not a teenager, he’s maybe thirty-three, thirty-four years old, but the anger is there and who knows whether or not he’s got a gun in the glove compartment, teenager or not.

Ready to flare.

Ready to take offense.

Ready to strike out.

The Deaf Man liked all that.

THAT NIGHT, as the temperature began to drop again, two kids were larking around under the lamppost on the corner of Mason and Sixth. One of the kids was eleven years old. The other was twelve. They were just clowning around, making a little mischief on a night at the beginning of spring, you know how kids are. The guns they were packing were made of plastic, super squirt guns with a capacity of two gallons, capable of shooting water fifty feet or more. The kids were running around the lamppost, squirting water at each other, their breaths feathering out of their mouths on the frosty air. It was a cold night, but spring was already three days old, and the sap was beginning to run someplace in America, so they were running around having a good time, what the hell. Giggling as they ran around the lamppost squirting each other with water, these huge jets of water gushing out of the plastic guns every time they squeezed the trigger, yelling and screaming like Indians surrounding the cavalry in the days of the Wild West. But this wasn’t the Wild West, this was the big bad city. And there was anger in this city.

The man who happened to be walking by had his hands in his pockets and his head was bent and he wasn’t paying any attention to the kids and their game because he had problems of his own. The first he even knew they existed was when some drops of water splashed onto his sleeve. He turned with an angry scowl on his face, started to say “What the fuck…?” and that was when the second jet of water hit him in the face. He turned at once, furiously screaming “You fuckin little shits,” and a gun came out of his jacket pocket. This gun was not made of plastic, this gun was made of steel, this gun was a Colt .45 caliber automatic, and he fired it three times, killing the eleven-year-old on the spot, and shooting the twelve-year-old through the left lung.

He ran off into the night while the kid who was still alive twisted on the sidewalk, gasping for breath and coughing up blood and crying for his mama.

OUT ON THE SPIT, there’d been lightning, and the old lady in the backseat had begun whimpering each time the lightning flashed. Here in the city, there wasn’t any lightning at all, but she was still mewling back there. Rocking back and forth where she sat against the window on the right-hand side of the car, keening like a widow at an Irish wake, but softly and weakly, as if she didn’t have the strength to let out a real cry of terror. He kept his eye on her in the rearview mirror, alternating his gaze from the road ahead to where she sat whimpering and looking bewildered.

“You don’t have to worry,” he told her. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. This is for your own good.”

The old lady said nothing, just kept whimpering in that soft weak way, rocking, rocking.

“This is an act of love,” he told her.

Whimpering. Whimpering.

“That’s why I’m doing this. You’ll be better off, wait and see.”

Fuck am I trying to explain anything to her, he thought. She doesn’t even know her own name anymore. Still, she had to understand this wasn’t an act of cruelty. He wouldn’t do anything cruel to her or anyone else. Wasn’t in his nature to do anything cruel or even thoughtless. This was a merciful act here, what he was doing.

“This is a merciful act,” he told her.

“Where are we?”

Her words came out of the blackness behind him, as startling as a gunshot explosion, surprisingly strong and clear and demanding.

“If I told you, would you know?” he asked, and grinned into the rearview mirror.

“Tell me,” she said.

“You familiar with the city?”

“No,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Would you remember if I told you?” he said, and grinned into the mirror again.

“Do I know you? Are you my grandson?”

“You remember your grandson, huh?” he said.

“Buddy,” she said, and nodded.

“You remember Buddy, huh?”

“Or Ralph. Are you Ralph?”

“That’s a dog’s name, Ralph. Here, Ralph,” he said, and laughed aloud.

“You must be Buddy then,” she said.

“Whatever you say, Grandma. We’re almost there now, so you just take it easy, don’t trouble your head with anything at all. This is something good I’m doing for you, you’ll thank me later on, you’ll see.”

“Ralph wasn’t a dog,” she said.

“Here, Ralph,” he said, and laughed again.

“I think he drowned,” she said.

“Maybe so.”

“I wish I could remember things.”

“I wish I could forget things,” he said. “You don’t know how lucky you are. People who love you, who are willing to do this for you, make life comfortable for you, you don’t know how lucky, really.”

“i am lucky,” she said.

“I know, Grandma. What have I been telling you? I know you’re lucky.”

“I am.”

“Almost there now. I’ve got a nice blanket here on the seat beside me, I’ll wrap it around you later, keep you nice and warm. Spring’s never coming this year, is it?”

“Did I say good night to Polly?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’mthe one who can’t remember,” she said, and began chuckling. He laughed with her. Together, as the car moved through the empty hours of the night, they laughed together in the dark.

The railroad station at two in the morning was deserted and dark except for a single light that burned inside the locked and empty waiting room. He had reconnoitered the station and he knew that the waiting room was locked from 10:30P .M. to 4:30A .M., fifteen minutes before the first morning train came through. He also knew there was a Mickey Mouse lock on the door—well, nothing to steal in there, why bother with anything fancier than a simple spring bolt? There were three cars parked in the lot adjacent to the station. He found a spot close to the waiting room, parked near the meter there, opened the driver’s side door, told her, “I’ll be right back,” and stepped out of the car. He debated whether he should put a quarter in the meter, and decided he’d better just in case some cop happened to cruise by while he was inside the waiting room. He deposited the quarter, twisted the knob, nodded, and then walked up the steps to the platform and around to where there was a door facing the tracks. There was another door on the other side of the waiting room, but it was visible from the street, and he didn’t want anyone spotting him while he worked the lock. Wouldn’t be any trains coming through this time of night, he’d checked the schedule. Swiftly, silently, he loided the lock with his American Express credit card, opened the door, and left it ajar.

She was sitting in the backseat where he’d left her. She was whimpering again. He opened the front door on the passenger side, took the plaid blanket from the seat, draped it over his arm, and then opened the door where she was sitting.

“Time to go, Grandma,” he said.

She didn’t say anything as he lifted her from the seat and into his arms, so frail, almost weightless, rested her head against his shoulder as he carried her up the steps to the platform, whimpering into his shoulder. He moved swiftly to where he’d left the door ajar, carried her into the waiting room, and gently kicked the door shut behind him.

“Nice and warm in here,” he said.

She kept whimpering.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

He carried her to the bench along the streetside wall of the room, the far end of the bench where there was a little nook formed by the armrest, and he lowered her to the seat and said, “You’ll be comfortable here. There’ll be a light burning all night long, nothing for you to be afraid of here, someone’ll be in around four, they’ll take good care of you, don’t worry.”

She just kept whimpering.

“So I’ll be running along now,” he said.

Whimpering.

“Goodbye, Grandma,” he said, and left her alone in the room with the dimly burning light.

OLD CHANCERY HOSPITAL—familiarly called the Chancery, or sometimes the Last Chancery—was on Old Chancery Road, three blocks from the Whitcomb Avenue Station on the Harb Valley line, which ran all the way upstate to Castleview. Two radio motor patrol cops from the Eight-Six had responded to a call from the stationmaster at 4:35 this morning. They had picked up the old lady and—on the orders of their sergeant—had dropped her off at the Chancery’s emergency room some ten minutes later. It was now five o’clock on this early Tuesday morning, the twenty-fourth of March. The doctors who stood around the bed in the old lady’s room on the third floor of the hospital were trying to elicit some answers that would get her off their hands and back where she belonged, wher ever that might be.

Granny dumping was not a new problem for them. It had started at the Chancery some ten years ago, when the first of the elderly victims had shown up sitting in a wheelchair outside the emergency room, an unsigned, hand-lettered note pinned to her chest:I AM ABIGAIL .I HAVE ALZHEIMER ’S DISEASE.PLEASE HELP ME . During that first year, five to ten elderly people were abandoned at the hospital each and every month, a trend that peaked some three years later, after which the number dropped to two or three a month.

“Do you know your name?” Frank Haggerty asked.

He was the hospital’s Chief of Staff, one of the two medical men who stood around the bed, a man some sixty-three years old with a mane of white hair, riveting blue eyes, and a skin prematurely wrinkled by years of indifferent exposure to the sun. With him in the old lady’s room were his E.R. Chief and his Director of Social Services. This was the sixth case of abandonment the hospital had experienced in the past month, up from four the month before. Granny dumping was back—with a vengeance. Haggerty couldn’t afford any more of these incidents; the city had cut its hospital budget by thirty-five percent last year and the Chancery was a city hospital. It was now working with a skeleton staff more appropriate to a clinic in Zagreb than to a hospital in one of the world’s largest and most influential cities.

“Ma’am?” he said. “Can you tell us your name?”

The old woman shook her head.

She’d been carrying no identification. All of the labels had been cut out of her clothes: the nightgown and robe she was wearing, the panties underneath those, even her diaper.

“Do you know where you live?” Max Elman asked.

The other doctor, E.R. Chief, forty-seven years old, brown eyes, black hair, dark complexion, looking more like one of the Indian residents working under him than he did an American Jew. His wife was a doctor, too, working at a hospital in Calm’s Point. The only way they really got to see each other was to retreat to the little farmhouse they’d bought in Maine; they particularly liked it during the winter months, go ask.

“With Polly,” the woman said.

“Who’s Polly?” the third man asked.

He was the only civilian in the room, even though, like the two others, his title was Doctor . Dr. Gregory Sloane, whose master’s had come from the USC School of Social Work, and whose doctorate in Social Medicine had come from Ramsey University, right here in the city. At thirty-eight, he was the youngest of the three men, twice divorced and going bald, a not-unrelated physical phenomenon; his hair had begun falling out when his first wife, Sheila, left him for a man who scouted ballplayers for a major-league team. He guessed that along about now, she’d be with him in some backwater town someplace, watching would-be stars shagging pop flies. Buck, his name was. The scout.

“Polly,” the old lady said. “That’s who.”

“Is she your daughter?”

“Don’t have any.”

“No daughters?” Sloane asked.

“You deaf?” she said.

Four out of five American families were caring at home for their sick or elderly parents. Women constituted seventy-five percent of these caretakers, who sometimes got stuck with aging uncles or aunts as well, relatives who’d been dumped on them when a spouse died or a son suddenly ran off to Outer Mongolia. Millions of American women who’d once thought they might begin pursuing their own lives once their children were grown and out of the nest now discovered they’d been sadly mistaken: They were doomed to care for their parents even longer than they’d had to care for the children. Which was why they’d asked if Polly was a daughter.

“How about sons?” Elman asked. “Have you got any sons, ma’am?”

“I can’t remember,” she said.

“Any grandchildren? Would you remember any grandchildren?” Haggerty asked.

“Ralph,” she said.

“Ralph wha…?”

“That’s not a dog’s name,” she said.

“Ralph what, would you remember?”

“Here, Ralph,” she said.

“What’s his last name, do you know?”

“I can’t remember,” she said. “He drowned.”

“Any other grandchildren? Any boys or girls you can…?”

“Buddy,” she said.

“Buddy what? What’s his last name?”

“I can’t remember. Where am I?”

“Old Chancery Hospital,” Haggerty told her.

There were four million Alzheimer’s sufferers in the United States of America. This number was expected to triple within the next twenty-five years. But not all cases of abandonment were Alzheimer’s victims; some of them were suffering from other chronic illnesses, some of them were merely old and frail. The woman seemed to be an Alzheimer’s victim. The care of an Alzheimer’s patient was at best trying on a family, at worst debilitating, a round-the-clock regimen of incessant attention that more often than not led to stress, despair, burnout, and eventual physical, emotional, and financial breakdown. It was easy for these men to understand why Polly—or whoever—had wanted out.

Two of these men were doctors.

They had taken the Hippocratic oath.

But what were they to do when someone requiring extensive testing and exhaustive personal care was dropped off on their doorstep with no one in sight to pay the bills?

“Can you tell us anything at all about yourself?” Sloane asked.

“I always wet the bed,” the woman said. “Polly doesn’t like it.”

Haggerty sighed.

“Let’s call Missing Persons,” he said. “Maybe she wandered over to that railroad station all by herself. Maybe somebody’s out there looking for her.”

Sloane doubted it. Besides, wouldn’t the people at the Eight-Six have called Missing Persons before bringing her here? Actually, he doubted that, too. This was a pass-the-buck society.

“Couldn’t hurt,” he said.

But he was thinking they were stuck with her.

THE FROZEN-YOGURT PLACE was on Stemmler and North Fifth, not too distant from the Eight-Seven’s station house. This was now only nine in the morning. The teenage kid working the counter had just opened the place when the man walked in, and stood there for a while, looking at the chart, and finally told the kid that what he wanted was the no-fat chocolate on a cone. Then, so he’d have his hands free when the kid served him, he said, “How much will that be? So I can get the money out now.”

The kid said, “Depends what size you want.”

His wallet already in his hand now, the man said, “What are the different sizes?”

“There’s the small and the large,” the kid said.

“What’s the difference between them?”

“The small is about this high,” the kid said, holding the palm of his hand some three inches above the top of the cone, “and the large is about this high,” he said, raising his palm a few inches higher.

“I’ll take the small,” the man said.

“Okay,” the kid said, and pulled a lever and began swirling yogurt onto the cone.

“So how much will that be?” the man asked, ready to take from his wallet the bill or the several bills or whatever it would cost to pay for the yogurt before he was unable to handle cone and wallet at the same time.

“I have no idea,” the kid said. “I just started…”

“Excuse me,” the man said, his wallet still in his hand, “but didn’t you just tell me the price depended on the size?”

“Yeah, but…”

“So I ordered the small, you’re making me a small right there, so what’s this you got no idea what the price’ll be?”

“What it is…”

“You tryin’ a be a wise guy?” the man said.

“No, sir, it’s just…”

“You tryin’a make a fuckin fool outta me?”

“Sir, today’s my first…”

“You don’t know what the fuckin price is, huh? You know what this is?” the man said and the kid found himself standing there with a no-fat chocolate on a cone looking into the barrel of a gun. The kid began shaking. The man said, “Never mind, I don’t want the fuckin thing no more,” and shot the kid in the chest.

It was the city’s first shooting that day.

Another one would take place fifteen hours later.