In City Hall, Voncille was on the phone, solitaire on her computer. He laid his hat and sunglasses on his desk among the day’s scattered paperwork and got his coffee cup and filled it at the water fountain and drank it so fast it made his neck hurt.
“That was Shannon from the paper,” Voncille said when she hung up, rolling her chair over to hand him a message. “Said she wants to talk to you about your trifecta, as she called it. Reckon she figures it’d make for a good feature story. What an outstanding constable you are.”
“Right. I’m headed over to River Acres.”
“What for?”
“See Mrs. Ott.”
“Larry’s mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. You look like you ain’t slept in a month,” she said. “But I’m glad you finally stopped by. If you don’t go out and write some tickets, the mayor’s gone have your head.”
AT FIVE-THIRTY, AT River Acres, he climbed out of the Jeep, which continued to run as it had been doing lately, like a stutterer.
Inside, Brenda was reading a magazine at her desk. “She tried to call her son on his cell phone,” she said, “and when nobody answered she started getting upset.”
He pictured the phone lighting up, rattling in the box in French’s office, vibrating the pictures and all the other evidence.
“How is she now?”
“Little calmer. Good thing about Alzheimer’s is they don’t stay mad long.”
He thanked her and said he remembered the way.
Entering the room he was hit by the stink of feces. Ina Ott lay flat on her back with her right hand fluttering, flies buzzing in the bright light through the window. The tiny black woman beside her was asleep.
“Mrs. Ott?” Silas took off his hat.
She looked up at him without recognition. “I’ve messed myself,” she said. “Where’s Larry?”
He saw the dark stain around the sheets at her crotch, her useless hand laying right in it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’ll get a nurse,” he said, glad to leave the room and its smell.
“Second shift’s coming on in half a hour,” Brenda told him, hardly looking up. “They’ll clean her.”
“How long’s she been laying like that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You what?”
“Laying’s all she can do.”
“She ain’t got to lay in her own stink,” he said.
“You don’t smell so good yourself.”
“If her son come up and seen her like that what would yall do?”
“Last I heard he ain’t going nowhere.”
“This how yall treat folks?”
Brenda gave him a sharp look. “Nigger, don’t come up in here telling me how to do my job. We got forty-five old people here and we get to em best we can. Come in here all high and mighty just cause you got your picture in the paper?”
“Fuck this,” he said and went back down the hall.
He found a closet with clean sheets and a box of disposable wipes and snatched the sheets off the rack and put the wipes under his arms and went looking for an orderly.
A man standing by a broom pointed him down the hall and he pushed through a glass door in the back and found Clyde, leaning against the wall, smoking.
“You best come with me,” Silas said. “Now. Mrs. Ott done had a accident.”
“Chill out, bro,” he said. “I’m on my break.”
Silas got up in his face. “You go clean Mrs. Ott up right now or I’m gone take your sorry ass back to the jail.”
“For what?”
Silas plucked the cigarette from Clyde’s lips and threw it down and pushed the sheets and wipes into his arms. “I’ll think of something.”
He stood outside her door, just in sight of Clyde, making sure he treated her right.
“I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “I messed myself again.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ott. We getting you all clean now. It’s somebody out there to see you.”
“My son?”
“Naw, ain’t him. Somebody else.”
“It’s not true,” she said, “what they’re saying?”
Clyde came out wearing rubber gloves and carrying the soiled sheets and her nightgown in a plastic bag. “You happy now, motherfucker?” he said.
Ignoring him, Silas went in and she looked better, her bed raised and the smell nearly gone, the window opened.
“Mrs. Ott?”
She turned toward him where he stood holding his hat. Her good eye widened but otherwise she showed no surprise at a big strange black constable in her room.
“I’m Silas Jones, ma’am,” he said. “People call me 32.”
“32?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned her head to regard him from another angle. Wedged between the beds, a small table held nothing but a worn-out Bible. Out the window, past the black woman still asleep and beyond the chain-link fence, cars on the highway. Her dying view.
“I may have met you,” she said. “But I’m forgetful.”
“Yes, ma’am. I come seen you once before, about your son. I used to be friends with him, a long time ago.”
“He’s okay, idn’t he?”
“Well,” he said.
“I called him but nobody answered.”
Silas looked down at his hat. Maybe this was why police wore hats, for the distraction they provided when you had to tell somebody their daughter had not only been strangled to death but beaten and raped first, or to tell a woman her son had not only been shot but maybe had shot himself, and that if he ever woke up he’d be charged with killing the girl.
“Well,” he said again.
“He didn’t have many friends,” Mrs. Ott said. When he looked up from his hat she was watching him.
“I came to ask you about my mother,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
“Alice Jones.”
“Who?”
He took the photograph of her from his wallet and showed it to her. Alice holding Larry as a baby. Silas realized that she must have been pregnant in the picture, though she didn’t show.
“Why, that’s my boy,” Mrs. Ott said. “And that was our maid, I can’t recall her name.”
“Alice,” he said.
“Yes. Alice Jones. But she had to leave.” Mrs. Ott lowered her voice but continued to look at the picture. “A nice colored girl, but loose. She got herself in a family way and wasn’t married. I don’t know what ever happened to her. What was her name?”
“Alice,” he said gently. “She died a while back. Had a heart attack in her sleep.”
She reached out to touch his hand, laid there on the side of her bed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Reason I came,” Silas said, “was to ask you if you know who her baby’s daddy was.”
