“Any idea who killed her?” I said.
“Jordan?”
“You know another woman been killed recently,” I said.
“No.”
“So any idea who killed her?”
“No.”
“How about her husband?”
“Don’t know nothing about him,” Red said.
“If Perry needed a shooter,” I said, “would he know where to get one?”
“He don’t need no shooter.”
“Of course not, but hypothetically, would he?”
Red looked proud.
“I know my way around,” he said.
“You could get him a shooter?” I said.
“I know my way around.”
I looked around the cafe. It was hung with Taft pennants, and pictures of Taft athletes past and present. There was a picture of Dwayne Woodcock above the big stainless coffee urns. I’d done some business with Dwayne before he went on to a big career in the NBA. I wondered what happened to him after basketball. I wondered if he could read yet, at an adult level. I wondered if he was still with Chantel. I hoped so.
“I gotta go,” Red said. “Perry likes me to be around in case there’s any trouble.”
I nodded. He stood.
“You sucker punched me this time,” he said.
“Well, for what it’s worth,” I said, “you take a good punch.”
He looked at me for a moment.
“Yeah,” he said. “Next time I’ll be a little more careful.”
He turned and walked out of the cafe. I sat around for a little while, drinking coffee and appraising the coeds, trying to be one on whom nothing is lost.
37.
We were in Susan’s spare room. Vinnie was asleep on the couch.
“Red did not look like so much to me,” Chollo said.
“He’s big and strong,” I said. “But he doesn’t know how.”
“Most people don’t know how,” Chollo said. “Guys his size don’t often need to.”
“’Cept they run into somebody that do,” Hawk said. “You think he’s a shooter?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d guess no. He sounds like a dope, except when he starts mouthing what Alderson taught him. Then he sounds like a parrot.”
“How ’bout if Alderson tell him to?” Hawk said.
“He might,” I said. “He thinks Alderson’s divine.”
“So are we,” Hawk said. “And there be four of us.”
Susan’s office door opened and a fiftyish woman in an anklelength black coat hurried out, not looking at anything. She went out the front door and down the steps and turned left toward Mass Ave without altering her gaze. Hanging around Susan so long, I’d learned that no eye contact was sort of de rigueur when departing from your shrink’s offi ce. Chollo watched her go.
“You looking at that woman’s ass?” I said.
“As I mature,” Chollo said, “my age limits loosen. We are very romantic, south of the border.”
“Age got nothing to do with it,” Hawk said. “Only two kinds of music: good and bad.”
“That would be Duke Ellington,” I said.
Hawk nodded.
“It would be,” Hawk said.
“I’m a Desi Arnaz man, myself,” Chollo said.
“ ‘Babalu’?” I said.
“Exactly,” Chollo said. “How you going to top ‘Babalu’?
Duke whatssis ever do ‘Babalu’?”
“God, I hope not,” Hawk said.
