me-pleased! Yes, pleased. My customers have learnt good taste here at my stand.” Ngame’s chin tilted up. “When they get wealthy, they’ll buy the real Gucci and the real Rolex.”
“Like Skeeter Hodges,” Frank said.
Ngame gave Frank a heavy-lidded, somber look. “He didn’t buy here. He kept the real Mister Rolex in business.”
“What’s the talk?” Jose asked.
Ngame looked up and down the sidewalk. He did it casually, but he did it.
“Conjecture?” Con-jec-ture?
Another glance, this time across the street. “From the Puerto Ricans I hear it was the Jamaicans. The Jamaicans tell me it was the Puerto Ricans. And the blacks”-Ngame shrugged-“the blacks all point their fingers at one another.”
“No names?” Frank asked.
Ngame shook his head. “No pretender to the throne. But then again, Detective Kearney, it was only last night.”
Ngame reached down, then came up with a watch in his hand, gleaming gold in the morning sunlight.
“A Rolex President? I will give a discount.”
A block north of Waverly Ngame’s stand, Frank and Jose made their way down an increasingly crowded sidewalk.
“Like I care.”
Frank angled his head slightly to catch the disembodied male voice behind him. It had a demented quality, like that of a man talking to himself.
“The garbage?”
The pitch rose.
“Ten dollars?”
The voice came nearer, and passed to Frank’s right.
“Mary? Mary?”
A lanky white kid in baggy jeans and a Bulls sweatshirt walked by. He held a cell phone out at arm’s length, as if that would somehow put him in visual contact with Mary? Mary?
“Shit,” the kid muttered.
Jose and Frank watched him walk on. Another couple of steps, and he was punching another number into his phone.
“Voices everywhere,” Jose said.
“Schizophrenia or Sprint?”
The 7-Eleven had a frayed, secondhand look, as though time had been working it over with an eraser. A ragged man sprawled on a bench near the entrance. Close by, a clear plastic bag stuffed with blankets, aluminum cans, and scraps of unidentifiable clothing. Over his head a sign warned “No Loitering-Violators Will Be Prosecuted.” At the curb, a battered and rusting ten-speed bike, stripped of its front wheel, was Kryptonite-locked to a parking meter.
Frank stopped to take in a faded poster in the 7-Eleven window. It carried an image of a gold-foil District Metropolitan Police Department shield; above the shield, “Official Location,” and below it, “Police Community Work Station.” Malcolm Burridge, the previous mayor, had had these posters put up after a wave of convenience-shop holdups and killings. They hadn’t stopped the killings, but they’d made one of Burridge’s political fat cats a little fatter with the proceeds from the printing contract.
“Hex sign,” Frank thought he heard Jose say. He looked at his partner. “What?”
Jose was looking at the poster too. “Hex sign,” he repeated, “like on those barns… up in Pennsylvania… Keep away the devil.”
Kim Tae Ho looked up from the Post sports section. Two blurred foreigners. The first through the door black and big. Kim’s right hand dropped under the counter, under the cash register. At the same time, he ducked his head to peer over the top of his reading glasses. His hand came up from below the counter.
“Ah! Mr. Phelps. Mr. Kearney.” He smiled.
“Mr. Kim.” Jose took his hand.
“Mr. Kim,” Frank said, shaking the man’s hand after Jose.
“You still keeping the forty-five under the counter, Mr. Kim?” Jose asked casually.
Kim widened his eyes. “Mr. Phelps! A private citizen cannot possess a handgun in the District. It is illegal.”
Frank glanced around. A male customer at the back rummaged through the beer cooler; otherwise the place was empty.
“Somebody shot Skeeter Hodges last night, Mr. Kim,” Frank said.
“Yes.”
The pinched way Kim said it, Frank knew there wasn’t going to be any more.
“You hear any talk?” Jose asked.
“No.” Kim looked past the two men.
Frank heard footsteps behind him. The man from the cooler stood there with a tall can of Wild Bull. Frank stepped aside. Wordlessly, the man set the can on the counter and pulled a couple of rumpled singles out of his pocket. Frank noticed the man’s hand trembled ever so slightly.
Kim made change and slipped the can into a paper bag. He stood still and watched the man leave. The door closed. Kim’s eyes came back to Frank and Jose.
“No,” Kim repeated. The tension in his voice had disappeared. “There is no talk. After a killing, there is usually much discussion of it. Such as after a baseball game.”
Frank thought of Edward Teasdale, sitting in his Barcalounger, watching the Birds shut down the Red Sox.
“You knew Skeeter?”
“Oh, yes.” Kim’s face tightened.
“And…?”
“He held me up.” Kim pointed. “He walked right through that door and he held me up.”
The forty-five… when was that?” Frank asked.
He and Jose stood on the sidewalk outside the 7-Eleven. The man on the bench hadn’t moved. Frank glanced at him to see if he was breathing.
Jose massaged the back of his neck. He looked at the man on the bench too. “Two, three years ago. June… no… July. Yeah, July. Right after the Fourth.”
Frank placed it. He and Kate, just back from Spain. An epidemic of violent holdups and dead convenience- store owners in Southeast, near Eastern Market.
“Cecil and Forrest…?” The last name floated just outside Frank’s reach.
“Gibbons,” Jose furnished.
It had been a hot summer night, and the 911 dispatcher had reported shooting inside Kim’s 7-Eleven. First officers on the scene found the Gibbons brothers sprawled among toppled shelves of canned goods. Each had been killed with a single headshot: Cecil between the eyes, Forrest through the right temple. Cecil’s fingerprints were all over a SIG-Sauer, and Forrest still clutched a Glock 17. Forensics connected both weapons to the earlier Southeast killings.
Kim had claimed that the Gibbons brothers and a third gunman had gotten into an argument. He-Kim-had ducked behind the bullet shield by the cash register. The third gunman had fled after shooting the Gibbonses. The convenience-store killings stopped. The alleged third gunman had never been found, nor had the forty-five he’d allegedly used.
The man on the bench yawned.
“Might try that, one a these days,” Jose mused.
“Sleeping on a bench?”
“Fella makes it look comfortable.” Jose checked his watch. He pointed down Seventh Street toward the nineteenth-century rambling brick building that was Eastern Market. “What say we buy Gideon a roll?”
Mid-morning shoppers filled the market’s aisles. Gideon Weaver’s stall was empty. A broad counter ran
