“Yeah,” I said, agreeing with his silence.
“So what the fuck is it to you?” Piedmont was feeling cornered again.
“I just need to know did you see her again after you took Rhone home.”
“No,” he said brusquely.
He took a step away from me.
“Maybe somebody else at the red house knows,” I said.
That simple speculation stopped him in his tracks.
“No. I’m the one drove the man. Why the hell you think the congregation knows?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “After you turned in your fifty dollars to the community jar, maybe they sent somebody over to thank her or something.”
I knew damn well that Piedmont hadn’t turned in the money he’d gotten for driving Rhone. When he’d joined the congregation he probably didn’t have twenty dollars to his name. Now that he was a member in good standing he probably did little jobs now and then, donating that money to the community pot. But something big like the fifty dollars he collected from Pete Rhone went in his pocket as silently as a shark sinking down under a swimmer’s dangling feet.
“Why you wanna be messin’ wit’ me, man?” he said.
“All I want, Mr. Piedmont, is for you to tell me what you know about the night you drove that white man home.”
“I pulled up in front of her house,” he said. “The white man jumped in, told me where he lived, and I drove off. That’s it.”
“Did Nola come down to see him off?”
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, he waved at the doorway but she didn’t come out.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“Naw, man. It was three o’clock in the mornin’. And they still had the curfew. Wasn’t nobody out except me and that white boy . . . and a old bum push a shoppin’ cart an’ live in a vacant lot down the street.”
For a moment I saw only white. It was like I had been struck by lightning and everything was bleached out and bright.
“What old bum?” I whispered.
“I’ont know his name. All I know is he live in a cardboard lean-to over off’a Grape.”
“How long?”
“How long what?” he asked.
“How long has he lived there?”
“Couple’a months. I don’t know. Bums come and go around here. On’y reason I even knew who he was is ’cause one day he asked me for a dime. I told him to get a job.”
“Where off Grape?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Not why,” I said. “Where?”
For an instant I think Piedmont was angry at my tone. There was even a shift in his shoulders indicating he was considering throwing something at me. It would have been the biggest mistake in his boxing career. The rage in my blood right then would have broken his jaw and a few ribs. He saw the fury and told me where to find the empty lot.
I WENT TO my car first. There I pulled the tire iron from the trunk and made my way to the lot. It was between what was once a grocery store and the chain-link fence of a single-family home. He’d piled ten or twelve sheets of heavy cardboard against the market wall. I cleared away the makeshift paper roof with two swipes of my iron club. I was ready to swing again but there was no one home. Lucky for me because I would have killed him if it was who I suspected.
There were all the comforts of a camping life in the hovel. A glass bottle half filled with water, a dirty green blanket on a foam mat. He had a fork and three cans of sardines, a chipped china plate, and three
Under his filthy pillow was a square green tin with the emblem of a crown on the silhouette of a man’s head at the center of the lid. Inside the tin there were three .22 caliber shells.
I went down on my knees in the dirt and rested my head against the wall. The anger in my heart was monumental. I thought back some months to a young woman named Jackie Jay and her Middle Eastern boyfriend, Musa Tanous. Jackie had been beaten to death and the cops thought that the killer was Musa. But I came to believe that a hobo named Harold had done it. I’d found Jackie’s doll collection in Harold’s lean-to and I’d seen some of her clothes in his stolen shopping cart.
The police didn’t believe me and I never saw Harold again. But I was convinced that he killed Jackie because he
