Lorenzo knew that tomorrow, or maybe even tonight, some of the kids would most likely try to find a way inside those death traps and make little clubhouses for themselves. Housing had laid the things flat on their backs, fearing that the kids would start tipping them over, but no one had had the additional brains to lay them door-side down. And what made it even more ominous was that every refrigerator had its destination chalk-scrawled on its side, like “12G 14 Hurley.” Like “This coffin’s for you.”

Lorenzo also got hot on seeing the Convoy brothers out there, them and that bonehead Tariq Wilkins, hanging in the breezeway of One Building. Even though most of the guys their age were avoiding this meeting, avoiding that tap on the shoulder, the others at least had the decency to refrain from rolling outside tonight, a gesture of respect for the people who did show up. But these three…

And this crowd in here, just what he would expect—mostly seniors like the murdered couple, showing up out of a lifetime reflex of heeding the call. But they were scared. You could see it in their lack of verbal response, in how they looked off or down, looked anywhere but at the memorial photos or the speaker.

“The, the cowards, the coward, no…The thing; ’cause whoever did this ain’t even human, so I’ll call it a thing, a punkified thing.”

The people nodded soberly, stone-faced, a tear here and there, a baby crying, a whiff of sweetish liquor. But it had been a whole year. Although this first-anniversary memorial rally had been Lorenzo’s idea, he was skeptical about anything tangible coming out of it. And this cleric was straight-up boring him to death.

Nine-thirty He had arranged a split shift for tonight with his partner, Bump Rosen, who would field all jobs from four o’clock to nine-forty-five. Lorenzo would return the favor from nine-forty-five to midnight so that Bump could race home in time to catch his twelve-year-old son’s acting debut on Law and Order.

Nine-thirty Fifteen minutes to go, and he hadn’t even got up to speak yet.

One of the purposes of this “rally” was to get the murders back in the news, to keep the crime warm if not hot, but only two reporters had shown up—the runner from the Dempsy Register and some intern with the Jersey Journal. Neither the police nor the press could throw much energy into two homicides committed in a county that had since tallied up 59 fresher ones.

Lorenzo eyed the street reporter from the Register, Jesse Haus. He’d known her going on eight years, this small, overdenimed, overmascaraed, fine-boned young woman sitting on the aisle and scowling at her nails, reminding him, as she always did, of a race car stuck in traffic—crossed legs pumping, untended notepad bobbing in her lap, a nervous flicker in the eye, as if some of that mascara had gotten under the lid.

A few months earlier, she had spent some time with Lorenzo, writing a profile of him for the Register that had landed him on the Rolonda Watts program. Now, absorbing her oddly vacant yet alert expression, Lorenzo found that her frenetic impatience was intensifying his own, making him feel more keenly that this whole show was slipping out of his control. Telepathically he beamed to her: Wait.

Anxiously caressing his shaved head, Lorenzo studied the portraits of the elderly Barrett twins—both faces heart-shaped and genderless, each topped with a short iron-gray crop, the old lady’s eyes beady and disapproving, her brother’s equally narrow but impish. Uncle Theo, in his seventies, had still favored tight continental slacks and, even in the hottest months, turtleneck sweaters. He had retired as a bookkeeper at the Apollo but remained a fey smoothy who addressed everybody as “Baby”—everybody except the great entertainers he had been introduced to over the years. He referred to them as “Mister” Billy Eckstine, “Miss” Dinah Washington, “Mister” Sam Cooke, and “Miss” Sarah Vaughan. Uncle Theo was a “character” who had enticed decades of projects kids with ice cream and pizza, suckering them into digging Lionel Hampton jive his way through “Hey Ba Ba Re Bop,” Joe Liggins work out on “The Honeydripper,” Billy Ward and the Dominoes go on about a “Sixty Minute Man.” He always asked the boys if they knew what that meant, Sixty Minute Man, but that was as far as that kind of stuff ever went with Uncle Theo. Hundreds of Armstrong kids over the years, Lorenzo included, sitting on that plastic-sheathed couch, trying not to laugh at him. A character, Lorenzo thought, a singular individual who is no more—a loss honestly felt in him, one that justified this extra effort tonight.

As far as Mother Barrett went, Lorenzo had never really liked her, although, given her brother’s flamboyant sexuality, her memory would be the smarter of the two to invoke at a rally like this. The hell of it was that Lorenzo, just like everybody else in the room, knew who had committed the murders, but no one, neither clergy nor cop, could speak the name in public, because the actor had never been charged.

It was the grandson, Mookie, a die-hard crackhead—huge, explosive, semi-intelligent, not all there. Lorenzo was sure he’d done it, because Mookie had been homeless except for the times his grandmother and granduncle had taken him in, let him sleep on the floor, raid the refrigerator; and whoever had committed this monstrous act had afterwards laid neatly folded blankets under the victims’ heads, as if to make them comfortable—a gesture of remorse. The apartment hadn’t been trashed, just that one drawer left open in the bedroom, a scatter of food stamps and pocket change still in it: whoever had done this had known just where the money was hidden. But the Homicides had fucked up, had failed to get Mookie’s statement down on tape last year, so there was nothing to pin his contradictions against. After a few agitated sit-downs, the kid had simply refused to talk anymore, then had left the city for Brooklyn, where, unbelievably enough, he had “family” to take him. Without a murder weapon and without a witness, without someone’s stepping forth and saying, “Yeah, I saw him going in, I saw him coming out, I heard his voice raised in anger,” there was next to nothing Lorenzo or anyone else could do. And even though no one was talking—out of fear of payback, fear of involvement—all of Armstrong was raw and testy tonight, suffering through the first anniversary of one of its most shameful hours.

“You know,” the cleric said, smiling and adjusting his hornrimmed glasses, “I could muster a hundred men with one phone call. Raise me a army, go out tonight, and it would be nothing for me to execute this, this creature right on the spot. Nothing.” The cleric grinned at the cops in the rear of the room, a few of whom grinned right back, softly bouncing their spines against the glaze-tiled wall.

“But what we have here in this country, as, as flawed as it is, is a system, a judicial system…”

Everything was rubbing Lorenzo wrong—like the arrest this morning of Supreme Griffin, the kingpin of the minute.