Angioni said, ‘And Sunday, the jeweler isn’t open at all.’
Williams said, ‘You want to do it this Sunday, or a week and a half from now?’
‘This Sunday,’ Marcantoni said. ‘Who wants to hang around?’
‘Nobody,’ Parker said.
3
When he heard the first news on his police scanner, Goody popped a call to Maryenne, cellphone to cellphone. ‘You home?’
‘No, I’m at the family center.’
All the mamas read to their babies at the family center. ‘Read to him tomorrow,’ Goody said. ‘I’ll meet you your place. I got news for you.’
‘What news?’
‘Tell ya when I see ya, lovey,’ Goody said, and broke the connection, because this wasn’t the kind of news you’d talk about, chat away, back and forth, on a cellphone,where any fool in the world can be listening in.
Goody shut off the scanner, started the Mercury, and drove away from the post where he’d been sitting the last hour and a half, one of the few cars moving in this miserable slum neighborhood. Three blocks later he made a left on to a one-way street and stopped next to the Land Rover parked at the left curb, where Buck sat in the backseat with his two bodyguards up front. The bodyguards eyeballed him, but they knew Goody, and looked down the street again instead.
Goody lowered his window and Buck did the same thing on the other side, saying, ‘You leavin early? Somethin wrong back there?’
‘No, I got a family emergency,’ Goody told him. He picked up the shopping bag from between his feet, with the merchandise and the money in it, and passed it over to Buck. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, same as ever.’
‘I didn’t hear nothin on the scanners,’ Buck said. He frowned like he was trying to work out what he should be suspicious about.
‘No, I got it on my cell,’ Goody told him, and raised the phone from the seat to show it. ‘Family business,’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow.’
Buck wouldn’t recognize that name, Brandon Williams, one of the three hardcases that had just bust out of Stoneveldt outside town, leaving behind them one dead inmate and a lot of aching heads. Buck wouldn’t know it, what had all those police dispatchers talking so fast, ordering this car that way, that car this way, but Goody would. And where else would old Brandon go now, when he had to lay as low as a footprint, except to his sister Maryenne? And where else would Goody go, to see the boy?
Maryenne lived in a third floor back with her grandmother and her sister and her sister’s boyfriend and her baby Vernon and her sister’s two babies. Maryenne didn’t have a boyfriend right now that Goody knew of, so he thought he might move in for a while, see how that would play, make life easy while he waited for old Brandon.
When he got there and knocked on the door the street door downstairs wasn’t locked because the push- buttons in the apartments hadn’t worked for thirty years it was opened by a short heavy girl with a baby on her hip. ‘I’m Goody,’ he told her. ‘Maryenne’s expecting me.’
She gave him the look she probably gave every man since she got the baby I know your type, keep your distance and said, ‘If she’s expecting you, come on in.’
He went on in, and the living room was full of them, young mamas and their babies. It looked as though Maryenne had brought her whole reading group from the family center, and maybe that was supposed to be a hint to Goody that she wasn’t of a mood for romance, but that was okay. He could be the friend of the family, work just as well, be there in moments of need, like when old Brandon showed his face.
It wasn’t only that Maryenne had her whole reading group here, they’d all brought their books, too, and there they were, all over the room, on the couch and the chairs and the floor, babies in their laps, books in their hands, reading out loud. They were all quiet about it, but there sure were a lot of them, and it reminded him of the sound of the pigeons on the roof, in a big cage room that had been on top of one of the buildings where he’d lived when he was a kid, ten or eleven years ago. The guy that owned the pigeons was a bus driver, and he didn’t mind if Goody or some of the other kids came up there with him sometimes, hang out with the pigeons. He and his wife didn’t have any kids of their own, Goody remembered.
Huh; maybe that was why he had the pigeons.
Maryenne was in a chair by the switched-off TV set, Vernon in her lap. Vernon was about a year old now, and Goody couldn’t for the life of him see what the point was in mamas reading to babies that little that they didn’t know anything yet, but it was supposed to do some kind of good or another and everybody believed in it, so maybe so. Vernon was going to need all the help he could get anyway; his papa was Eldon, who’d got himself killed in that bank he was in with old Brandon. The one thing Goody definitely didn’t ever want Maryenne to know was that he’d been Eldon’s dealer, including on that final day.
‘Say there,’ Goody said, and walked around a lot of mamas and babies to grin at Maryenne up close. She was a nice girl, a lot younger than old Brandon, he being their mama’s first and Maryenne being her last.
She was nice, and she was young, but she also had that same look on her face as the one that had opened the door to him. ‘You got some kind of news, Goody?’ she asked him.
The news was going to be known by everybody in this room, and in this city, soon enough, but Goody wanted it to start off a special secret just between the two of them; the beginning of that closeness he’d need until old Brandon showed up. So he said, ‘Come on in the kitchen, Maryenne, let me tell you just you.’
‘There’s nothing you can’t tell me here,’ she said. She still held the book up thin, bright colors, called The Very Red Butterfly like she wanted Goody done and gone so she could get back to reading, like she was in a hurry to know how the story would come out.
He put a solemn face on and said, ‘I think you’d want me to tell this to just you, Maryenne.’
So then she treated him a little more seriously, becoming worried, saying, ‘Is it something bad?’
‘You tell me. Come on, girl.’
