forget about it. My kids was talking about it in school the other day. What kind of thing is this for kids to be talking about. I say let it die, stop stirring up trouble.' Jimmy said, 'You're saying because everybody involved is black it shouldn't interest the rest of us?'
'They're just killing each other,' Ronnie said.
'Ronnie, you listening to me, Ronnie?' Jimmy said. 'I want you now to go out in the garage and start up your car and suck on the tail pipe.'
He punched up the next button. More callers' names crawled across the television screen. 'Marvin from Quincy, go ahead, you're on the air.'
'I think Mr.' ah, Spenser there, your guest, is right and I appreciate his courage, you unnerstand? I mean they cover stuff up all the time.
All they care, they want to look good in the papers, you know. Most of them got on the force so they could push people around…'
'I think the Negroes should take care of their own problems…'
'… think your mistake is quite simply attempting human solutions to a problem whose cause is elsewhere. Have you ever considered Beelzebub?
…'
'These crimes are symbolic of a larger sickness in this country. In a sense, every woman is bound and…'
And so it went. At ten-thirty I got a call from a guy who suggested that if I was deranged enough to be on this show, I wasn't likely to be much use solving a series of murders.
'Is this you, Goldman?' I said.
'I admit to nothing,' the caller said. But it was Maynard Goldman, and I knew it.
'You saying there's something wrong with this show?' Winston said. I could hear the amusement in Maynard's voice.
'If only we could get it down to something,' he said.
Winston made the cut sign to the engineer and Maynard was gone. Susan smiled at me encouragingly.
The last caller before the eleven o'clock newsbreak wanted to know, if I ever caught the Red Rose killer, what I'd do to him.
'Make him come on this show,' I said.
Jimmy did the news segue and lit up another cigarette as I hung up my earphones and pushed my chair back.
'No need to crap on the show,' Jimmy said. 'We're the people's forum here. They got a right to their opinion.'
'That's not opinion,' I said. 'That's pathology. This is a forum for public masturbation.'
Jimmy shrugged and turned back to look at the opening promo copy. 'Nice talking to ya,' he said.
'Gee,' Susan said, 'behind all the glamour and glitter…'
She took my hand and we left.
Hawk was taking a turn sitting with Susan while I went down to the office to look at my mail and bill a couple of clients. I walked up Berkeley Street with the wind coming off the river behind me and scattering McDonald's wrappers before me as I walked. Susan was all right as long as Hawk or I stayed with her, but it was no way to live, and I knew how much she hated needing someone to guard her.
Inside my office I picked up the mail from the pile on the floor beneath the mail slot and went to my desk and sat down with my feet up to open it. There were several calls flashing on my answering machine, and while I opened mail I turned them on.
The first one said, 'Hello, nigger lover. I heard you last night on Jimmy Winston, and I heard you trying to say it was a white man instead of letting the nigger fry like he should. Someone ought to shut your mouth for you.' I finished reading through my telephone charges, as I always did, with the fond hope that I would catch the bastards in a mistake. There were five more messages on my machine. All concurred in various elegant ways with the first, except one which was a computerized vacation real estate pitch that made me yearn for the racist threats, and one in which a male voice said softly, 'Maybe you're right about Red Rose, maybe he's still out there.' I stopped looking at my mail and played that one back again. Then I took out the message tape, put in a spare one, and slipped the Red Rose tape in my jacket pocket.
I finished up on the phone bill, opened a note from Rita Fiore, written on lavender paper and smelling of lilac scent. It said she was just checking in to see how I was and maybe we should have lunch. While I was mulling this the door opened into my office and five guys, who clearly did not represent the League of Women Voters, came in one by one and formed a semicircle around my desk. The last guy in shut the door.
'You guys are in the Kerry Drake fan club,' I said, 'and you've come by to ask me to your next banquet.'
The leader was a weight lifter, obviously. The quartet backing him were all good-sized, although none of them would have scared me alone. The weight lifter had on baggy prewashed jeans and black Reebok coaches' shoes and a sleeveless blue muscle shirt that said Universe Gym across the front. Given the weather outside, he must have been freezing, but how else to scare me with his muscles?
He said, 'We want to talk with you, nigger lover.' I said, 'Ah, didn't I just hear you on the phone?' He said, 'You're trying to get that nigger off.' I said, 'Truth, I am truth's servant, and I don't think he did it.'
'Yeah, well we do,' he said.
'Persuasive,' I said.
