by Ed Gorman
"What stories?"
"You know, man, how I was an M.P. 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.
v
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 plump dark woman in the lime green blast jacket 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 WWII, 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 blast jacket, 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 Friends 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 we reached the roar of the cleaning machines, he shouted a good-bye and disappeared into the chill rolling steam.
vi
"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. Smoke and grease 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 anymore."
"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 s
aid.
"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.
vii
"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 Friends 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 four 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 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 Friends 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 were 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 Friends 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 fired."
"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 dog's terminal diagnosis with his own.