And to the state of things in these projects.
When Hal turned off Third Street and onto Evans, the dampening light warned that night was closing in. He turned up Keith Street and wound into the heart of the projects where two kids were in the street, riding bikes so small that their knees nearly touched their chins.
Farther down, a handful of others played hockey with the loose chunks of asphalt from the street. This was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Bay Area. The kids who grew up here had almost no chance of getting out. According to some statistics, more than a quarter of them wouldn’t live to see eighteen.
Almost none lived with both parents. Some didn’t live with any parents at all. Maybe half went to school, fewer regularly. Even Hal wasn’t safe here. No police officer was.
He arrived at the building where James Robbins lived and looked around for the backup patrol officers who were supposed to meet him. He’d arrived first.
Robbins’s mother died of cancer two years earlier. His father was AWOL. He and his sister were in the care of a woman named Alice Parker. Records showed Parker had a different apartment number than Robbins and his sister. Dispatch confirmed the car was en route, so Hal went to take a look around, maybe talk to a couple of Robbins’s neighbors. He climbed the stairs to the third floor.
Smells of trash and urine filled his nose as he stopped at Robbins’s door, the first unit on the west end of the building.
To the left of the door was a small square of concrete balcony space, maybe three feet by three feet. It was littered with trash, cigarette butts and bits of broken bottle. He walked to the edge and looked down at the street, saw the kids still riding their miniature bikes, still playing hockey.
When he turned back toward the door, he noticed chalk drawings on the outside wall of Robbins’s house, just a foot or so above the ground. Beneath them, the dirty patio had been swept clean of debris.
He squatted down and looked at a child’s rendering of a cat or rabbit. The chalk wiped off on his fingers, so he assumed it had been done recently. A short piece of chalk was wedged in a crack in the wall.
He wondered about the artist.
At Robbins’s door, yellow police tape sealed the scene. Along the hinge, the tape was pinched as though the door had been opened. On the opposite side, someone had slit the seal to enter. He knocked twice, hard, standing against the wall beside the door and holding his thumb over the peephole.
There was the sound of the door scraping in its jamb and then it opened. A small girl loaded books into a backpack.
“I’m just getting my books—” Her gaze shifted from the bag to his feet. She looked up and began to shriek.
Dropping the bag, she shoved the door closed with two hands. Hal held it open by putting his foot in its path.
“Help!” she screamed. “Mrs. Parker!” She ran back into the apartment.
A door down hallway burst open.
“You get ‘way from there. I’m calling the police,” shouted a heavyset woman in a green flowered dress. Mrs. Parker?
Hal lifted his badge. “Hal Harris, ma’am. I’m an Inspector with the police department.” He turned toward her, his foot still in the open doorway, but she stepped back into her apartment.
“You ain’t fooling me, mister,” she shouted from behind the door. “Don’t take but fifty cents to get you one of those badges.”
Hal pulled his phone from his pocket slowly, showed it to her as he radioed dispatch. When he requested a status on his backup, he was told they were still en route.
He kept his back to the wall between Robbins’s apartment where the girl was still hiding and the big angry woman down the hallway, not ready to turn his back on either one. “I’m here because of James Robbins,” he said loud enough for both to hear. “He’s confessed to a shooting that I don’t think he committed.” He waited a minute and added, “I need to get some answers, so I can prove he’s innocent.”
Mrs. Parker poked her head out from behind the door. “You the police and you don’t believe he did it?” She narrowed her eyes, pointed a finger at him. “Now I know you a fake.”
“I’m not a fake, ma’am,” Hal insisted, taking a quick glance into Robbins’s quiet unit and feeling more than a little on edge. This was no place for a stranger, let alone a police officer without backup. Where the hell was the black and white? “Do you know James Robbins, ma’am?”
“Course I know him,” she said indignantly. “Practically raise him and Tawny since their mama died.” She waddled out into the hallway, pulled the door closed behind her and keyed the two locks. Coming at him, she filled the hallway almost from one side to the other and Hal pressed against the wall as she passed.
She looked into the Robbins’s doorway. “You probably scared her to death, poor child. After what she seen.” She stepped into the apartment, followed by the musty smell of malt liquor that might’ve been a few days old and the floor moaned beneath her. “Tawny!”
“What did she see?” Hal asked.
She looked Hal up and down, shook her head and continued inside.
Hal searched the street for his backup. Nothing.
“I’m Mrs. Parker. Betty Parker.” Then halfway down the hall, she shouted back, “You coming in here or what?”
Hal radioed that he was entering the Robbins’s unit and asked dispatch to please status his backup. They should’ve been there by now. Hal stepped into the apartment and shut the door behind him, pushing hard as it stuck. He kept to one side as he moved down the hallway, back to the wall. The first room he passed was a bedroom, empty. “Ma’am,” he called out. “Mrs. Parker?”
“We down here,” she said from the far end of the hallway.
“I need to know who’s in the unit, ma’am. How many people.”
“Ain’t but the two of us,” she said. “Me and Tawny.” She waved her arm and the heavy flesh of it swung back and forth behind her motions. “Come here, girl,” she snapped.
The young girl emerged from the shadows. “Me,” Mrs. Parker said then turned to the girl. “And Tawny. Only ones here.”
Hal kept his badge up in his left hand, the right resting on his holster. “Is James your brother?” he asked Tawny.
She nodded.
“You mind if I look around?”
“What you looking for?” Mrs. Parker barked.
“Nothing specific, ma’am. I’d just like to see the place.”
She frowned then waved at him. “Go ahead. Don’t you touch nothing though.”
He nodded and backed into the first bedroom, carpeted in an ugly dark brown, a different shade from the dirty beige of the rest of the place. Remnants of the visit from CSU were visible in the black powder on the desktop and small bits of numbered tape from the places where they had removed evidence. Otherwise, it was pretty clean, especially for a kid’s room.
Cleaner than his own.
The bed was covered with a ratty blue – and white-striped comforter that had been thrown back over the pillows in a lazy attempt to make the bed. A few clothes hung over a beat-up wooden desk chair. One of the chairs had a broken leg that had been repaired with duct tape.
This had to be James’s room. The walls around the bed were plastered with posters of bands he’d heard of from his sister’s kids and some Sheila had listened to—Drake, Jay Z, Wiz Khalifa. On a small desk beside the bed there was a boom box and attached to it a small, square MP3 player. In the closet, old jeans and shirts were folded in stacks on a long shelf, underwear and paired socks in bundles on another.
No new equipment, no fancy clothes, nothing suggested Robbins had extra cash.
On the floor beside the bed was a binder with a math textbook splayed open across it. Hal bent down and opened the binder, flipped through pages of homework assignments. At the top of each was a grade circled in red: 8/10, 9/10, a 7/10 where the teacher wrote:
“You can do better, James!”
James was a straight kid. Good grades, tidy. Behind the homework pages was a test with an 87 written in red at the top. Hell, that was better than he’d done in high school. The floor groaned as Mrs. Parker came into the room, eyeing him suspiciously. “What you planting in here?”
“Nothing, ma’am.” He nodded to the binder. “Looks like James’s a good student.”
“Course he is.”
Hal moved past her, down the hall and found a second bedroom, the girl’s. He paused in the doorway. It was done in yellows, worn and faded.
Like James’s, the room was kept tidy by someone who cared for her things, even if they were secondhand. In the living room, the girl sat on the floor against the wall, watching him as he walked into the kitchen area where a few dishes sat in the sink, rinsed and stacked.
On the refrigerator door was a photograph of Robbins and the girl. In it, she grinned widely, her front two teeth missing. Hal pulled the photo loose, turned around and surveyed the blood spatter that covered the two couches and the walls behind them.
When he looked over at Tawny, she, too, was eyeing the wall.
Hal dragged a chair from the kitchen table and sat down.
Tawny pulled her knees to her chest, hugged them tight.
“Were you here the night your brother was shot?”
She looked up at Mrs. Parker, standing in the hallway.
Hal did, too, but she wasn’t looking at either of them, her gaze somewhere on the ceiling as though she were making an important decision. Mrs. Parker moved slowly into the room and lowered herself into a corner of the couch, as far from the blood as possible. “Go on and tell ‘im, girl.”
Tawny licked her lips. “I was outside, drawing on the wall.” She paused. “With chalk—not paint or anything. The chalk washes off in the rain—”
“I saw it. A cat?”
She nodded. “Started out a bunny but the tail got too long.” She chewed on her mouth a moment.
“Who was here that night?”
“Just my brother and Fish.”
“But someone else came later, didn’t they?” he asked.
Tawny looked back at Mrs. Parker.
“You got to tell ‘im all of it, Tawny. Ain’t gonna help James to lie,” the old woman said.
“I know your brother didn’t shoot his friend,” Hal said. “I need your help to find who really did.”
Tawny looked at him. “James said not to tell.”
“I can’t help him unless you tell me.”
“Go on, child,” Mrs. Parker said, impatiently.
Tawny looked at the couch on the far side of the room. Where her brother had been sitting.
“I was drawing when I heard a pop like someone in a movie getting shot.” She furrowed her brow. “But there weren’t no screaming.”
“Wasn’t any screaming,” Mrs. Parker corrected.
“They’re always screaming in the movies when somebody gets shot.” She glanced sideways at Mrs. Parker. “Plus, I saw the movie him and Fish was watching and it didn’t sound right—too quiet. It weren’t—it wasn’t a quiet movie.
“So, I stopped drawing and listened. It was real shots. I thought James would come out to get me. He always knew if trouble was coming. He was real careful about me since Mom—” She blinked hard.
“Go on, girl,” Mrs. Parker whispered.
“James always told me to get down on the ground when I heard shots, so I did. I heard someone coming down the hallway and I thought it was James. But then the door stuck. James knows you got to pull down on the handle to get that door open. All his friends know it, too. I stayed in that corner. The door finally opened and that man cussed loud. I didn’t move one single inch.”
Hal leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees and kept his voice steady. “Did you see his face, Tawny?”
Her eyes grew into dark saucers. “His face was turned. I saw his hands. They were real big. Way bigger than James’s.” She looked at Hal. “Big as yours.”
Hal studied her, stood up. “You sure he was as big as me.”
She stared up at him. “I think so. He was real big.”
Hal figured James was five-eleven. He made notes. Not many guys were as big as he was. Six-four tended to put you on the high end of the spectrum unless you were talking about the NBA.
“He had some new shoes on, too. Jordans.”
Hal wrote that down.
“Black with red,” Tawny continued. “Brand new.”
“Besides the shoes and his hands, what else did you see?”
She tugged her lower lip. “He cut his hand when he came out the door.” She looked at Mrs. Parker. “On that metal you always telling me to watch for.”
“There’s a piece of rebar sticks out of the cement wall over there. Must’ve called on it a dozen times. Don’t nobody come fix nothing ‘round here.”
“Do you know how badly he cut himself?” Be a nice break if he ended up in a hospital. Hospitals kept records.
“He was bleeding some,” she said.
Probably not bad enough for an ER visit, but he might’ve left some DNA.
“I didn’t see nothing else,” she continued. “He was dressed dark and there’s not real good light out there. I mostly draw in the dark till my eyes get used to it.” After a few moments, she cocked her head and added, “I guess there was one more thing kinda weird.”
“What’s that, Tawny?” he asked.
“He clicked.”
Mrs. Parker sighed heavily from the couch and when Hal glanced back, she was asleep.
“What you mean, he clicked?” Hal asked.
She studied her hands.
“Tawny?” he pressed.
“Like he had a paperclip in his mouth. It clinked around his teeth.”
Hal tried to imagine the sound. What would the guy have in there? A bullet? “You’re sure it was in his mouth?”
“Yeah. It weren’t like change in his pocket or anything. It sounded like he had something in his teeth.” How was he supposed to go about searching for someone with a clinking in his mouth?
There was pounding on the door. “Police.”
Mrs. Parker shot upright.
Tawny scurried to sit at her feet.
“Hang on,” Hal said, motioning to her to stay seated. “They’re with me.” Pressed to one wall, he shouted down the hallway. “This is Inspector Harris. I’m already inside.”
Someone pushed on the door. It stuck.
There was the thunk of a foot striking the wood, a sharp scrape and the door swung open. Two patrol officers stepped into the open doorway, weapons drawn.
Hal stood in the hallway with his badge in one hand, the other clearly visible. “You guys are a little late.”
The officers holstered their weapons. “We had a burglary in-progress on the way.”
“You can go ahead and hang outside. I’ll be out in a minute.” The guys went back out the door, and with some effort, shut it behind them.
“Where are you staying?” he asked Tawny.
“She’s staying with me,” Mrs. Parker said.
“I understand you’re her legal guardian.”
Mrs. Parker frowned. “I ain’t illegal.”
“But you don’t live here.”
“Like hell I don’t.” Mrs. Parker struggled to get off the couch. “Go on get your stuff, Tawny. We getting out of here.”
“What about James?” Tawny asked.
“I’m going to talk to him next.”
Hal led them out, past the uniforms, and walked Mrs. Parker and Tawny down the exterior corridor to the woman’s unit. The sky was dark and the buildings were quiet now. It felt almost eerie. Mrs. Parker unlocked the two deadbolts, stuck a third key into the knob and opened the door, breathing hard from
the effort.
He got Mrs. Parker’s phone number and told them he’d call tomorrow. He needed to talk to James Robbins first.
The corridor was dank as he walked back toward the officers, assaulted again with the stink of rotting trash.
“We got another call,” one of the patrol guys said.
Hal nodded, following them to the stairs. “Go ahead. I’m heading out anyway.”
At the top of the stairs, he called Roger’s cell phone. Roger was still in the lab when Hal had taken Jim’s letter down an hour earlier. He’d said something about a long night. Hal hoped he was still there.
“Sampers.” Behind him were the sounds of the labs—printing, people talking, the loud humming of one of the machines.
“It’s Hal. I’ve got some blood at a scene at Hunters Project that might connect to our case. Any chance we could get someone out to collect it?”
“Text me your location and I’ll get someone right out.”
“You’re the man.”
“You know it,” Roger bantered back.
That made Hal laugh. Progress. They were actually making progress. He sent the address to Roger and started for the stairwell.
An explosion. A piece of cement stung his ear. The bullet sank into the siding behind him with a thump.
Hal dropped. The phone fell from his fingers. “Damn.”
He drew his gun as another bullet kicked up a chunk of cement over his head. A third brought the sound of shattering glass and screams from a floor above.
Hal didn’t move. His heart hammered at his throat. A moment of quiet then the gunfire erupted in a rapid rat-a-tat. He froze, pressed as close as he could to the wall of the balcony. Tried to count the shots. Ten or maybe eleven. An automatic weapon.
Then the firing stopped.
He studied the silence. Heard the crunching sound of shoes on dirt—someone walking.
On his belly, he crawled toward the stairs, hidden behind the cement railing wall.
The steps went silent.
Hal eased himself down the stairs, still low behind the railing.
Above, someone yelled about a broken window.
Hal pushed through a pile of black garbage bags until he was pressed against the dumpster. His back to the cold cement, knees to his chest, he was protected on two sides.
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