“I can’t help but feel like something else is bothering you, you know what I’m saying?”

She nodded vigorously in confirmation, withdrawn but alive to the moment, as if waiting for a first kiss, the right question.

“I’m gonna ask you again. Do you want a female investigator in here?”

She shook her head no, still waiting, her chest visibly rising and falling with each breath.

A movement caught his eye: one of the seemingly empty beds erupted in a flurry of sheets. Someone had been lying under the rumple all this time and now was coming to life with a musical moan, making the diabetic sigh loudly and mutter, “Jesus Christ.”

“Brenda. Did you know the guy?”

She slowly hit herself in the forehead with the Curlex splint. Then she did it again, clenching her teeth and keening. Lorenzo read the tune as fear and frustration.

He pressed in closer, stayed on her, almost touching.

“Who’s the guy, Brenda.”

She glared at the wall, her eyes iridescent with tears, the keening kicking up a notch.

He touched her knee. “Brenda, this is your lucky night. I own Armstrong. There isn’t nobody I don’t know. Who’s the man, Brenda? Who did this?”

“My son…” she said to the wall.

“What?” Lorenzo was thrown, reading her as around thirty years old. “Whoa.” He put out a hand like a stop sign. “Hold on.”

Brenda packed up, her body jerking involuntarily, once, twice, as if cold.

He moved to touch her again, get her back, then decided to keep his hands to himself.

“Your son what…”

She raised her forearm to mask her eyes, knocking the soda can to the floor. The hollow clatter made the diabetic cluck his tongue.

“Is in the car.” The words came out of her in a tremulous hoot. Lorenzo sat up as she finally stared at him straight on, no more peekaboo, her eyes terror-blasted, as if she expected him to rise to his full height and beat her to death.

2

At ten past ten in the evening, the stains that dappled the cement steps of the D-Town tenement stoop were still vivid, uncongealed, and Jesse Haus’s first thought was that her timing was off, that she had made the scene too early. On the other hand, although a Dempsy police cruiser was still parked next to her brother’s Chrysler, the crowds were gone and the bright plastic crime-scene tape lay in a discarded tangle atop a balding shrub.

She had heard about this shooting over an hour ago, but if she had shown up as soon as the call had come over, the cops would have been too cranked to talk, too shut down; the neighbors would either be in the dark or, if they knew anything, talking to the cops themselves; and she would have had to play human bumper pool with the handful of other reporters who had probably overheard the same radio squawk she had. Besides, there was no rush. It was long after the six o’clock deadline so, short of a mass suicide or an assassination, everything was for tomorrow night’s edition anyhow.

Back at the rally in the Armstrong Houses, she had barely heard one word of what Lorenzo Council or that Muslim cleric had said, having just dropped in to kill time as she waited out the initial hubbub on this double shooting, like someone ducking into a shop to wait out a sudden shower.

In fact, all she could recall of that exercise in civil futility was the cleric calling the killer “a thing, a punkified0 thing,” a tag that reminded Jesse of her roommate. She had just found out that the woman, a lawyer or a broker, had been charging her seventy-five percent of the total rent. Jesse was forking over nine hundred dollars a month for a don’t-tell-management bedroom created by bisecting the living room with an unpainted sheet of Masonite.

Since she had moved in eight months ago, responding to an ad in her own newspaper, Jesse had always paid her portion of the rent to her roommate, the tenant of record, and had never actually seen the monthly invoice from the building. But earlier today, she had come on it by chance while making her midday breakfast in the kitchenette, the mingled aromas of Jean’s or Jane’s collection of International Blend instant coffees making her queasy as she stared at the tab: twelve hundred dollars, not eighteen hundred like she had always assumed. Seventy-five percent, and that slick bitch had the real bedroom too.

But even at six hundred a month the place was a dump, a hastily built waterfront apartment house featuring starter pads for young professionals, the hallways reeking of canned air and the construction so tentative that her roommate’s never-used mountain bike, which hung suspended from ceiling hooks in what remained of the original living room, swayed every time the PATH train rumbled underneath the ground-floor health club. The interior walls of the building were so porous that, when Jesse had gone next door to complain about the Greatest Hits of the Eagles one day, she had discovered that, in fact, the music was emanating from the next apartment down the hall. Her own Masonite wall was, of course, no better: she awoke every morning to the sound of wet, smacky chewing from the kitchenette, her roommate a nine-to-fiver.

The only aspect of her current living arrangement that she enjoyed was the view from her bedroom, the broad expanse of the Hudson River and, at the far shore, the West Side skyline of Manhattan, a vista she found both potent and serene, so much so that she had pushpinned a tourist poster of basically the same sight alongside her view of the real thing. That odd, redundant wall hanging was the only effort she had made in the last eight months to decorate, personalize, or somehow soften the ten- by fifteen-feet makeshift cell that she called, for now, home.

Jesse had left the community center in a fog of agitation, but she was not so distracted that she didn’t register the look of mild dismay Lorenzo Council had thrown her way as she began crouch-walking up the aisle. And not so distracted that she didn’t hear the momentary fumble in his delivery as she headed out the door.

He was a good guy, fighting the good fight, as her father would say, but vain and touchy about his reputation and popularity in the community.

Thinking about Lorenzo as she finally began climbing the steep, narrow tenement stairs to the third-floor crime scene, she found herself once again wishing that she had never written that profile of him for the paper a few months ago. There still seemed to be some requirement for appreciation around him that made her feel more like a publicist than a reporter. The high, funky, crumble-textured hallways of the tenement had last been painted a glossy maroon and mustard, and the claustrophobic colors, combined with the dense waft of cauliflower and fried meat, made the hike to her floor an oppressive experience.

A young cop stood spread-legged before the open apartment door. As she rose to the landing, Jesse could see behind him, triangularly framed by his ankles and legs, an overturned dinette chair and a large spatter of creamed corn on a rug.

“Hey, how you doing?” She made herself sound exhausted.

“I’m sorry, you can’t go in.” The cop sounded polite, bored.

“But I was sent here,” she said vaguely, huffing now, going for the Oscar.

“I’m sorry.” He crossed his arms like a genie.

Then Jesse saw the other cop, inside the apartment.

“Willy!” she called out, the uniform at the door now null and void.

“Hey, Jess, what’s up?”

Willy Hernandez came out smiling, having grown up with Jesse in Dempsy’s Powell Houses—her family had been one of the last white families, the Hernandez clan among the first of the Puerto Ricans.

“What happened here?” Jesse asked, sounding personally dismayed.

Hernandez shrugged. “Guy comes in, pop, pop, the old lady, the kid, then into the night.”

“They’re gonna make it?”

“I think so.” Hernandez shrugged again. “I hope so.”

“Where’d they go, the OMC?”

“Saint John the Divine.”

“Who’s catching?”

“Cippolino and Fox.”

Jesse nodded, knowing Cippolino, knowing that whatever she couldn’t get here in the moment she’d get from the detective later on over the phone.

“You know the actor?”

“We’re looking.”

“Who is he?”

“So how’s your folks doing?” he said, stonewalling her.