have an alibi for the day Sweet Gordon was killed?”
“She’s not the most subtle woman,” Ike said.
Shaka winked at him. “No, she’s not. But as long as I’ve got her old Dodge hostage in there, I’m going to operate on the assumption she’s on my side.”
“I’m on Gordon’s side,” I said.
Shaka took off an imaginary hat and tipped it to me. “So am I. He was a fine man.”
“And you’re a fine man,” I said.
Shaka didn’t quite know what to do with that. First he smiled and then he frowned. “I was here until ten- thirty that Thursday. Seeing if I couldn’t coax another hundred-thousand miles out of the Apple Street Baptist Church’s old Sunday school bus.”
“Have the police talked to you?” I asked.
“I’ve told them that, yes. But I was here alone. From five on, anyway.” He hesitated. “I don’t know if that gets me off the hook or not.”
The coroner’s report, of course, had put Gordon’s death sometime between noon and midnight that Thursday, anywhere between 36 and 48 hours before Andrew J. Holloway called from the landfill. “Neither do I,” I said.
Shaka rubbed the twitch out of his nostrils. “Well, they haven’t hauled me downtown yet.”
I struggled off the car seat and peered through the glass office door. My car was high on a rack. Two young mechanics were standing underneath it, heads tipped back like a pair of bewildered turkeys trying to figure out where the rain was coming from. “Did the police ask you why you weren’t at this year’s Kerouac Thing?”
“No, they didn’t ask me that.”
“And what would you have told them?”
“The brutal truth, Dolly. That sometimes those stuffy old poops are more than I can take. Every damn year reading those same old cob-webby poems. Telling those same old hyperventilated stories. Living in the past like they’re already dead.”
“One of them is,” I said.
“Another premature funeral,” Shaka said.
I asked him what he knew about Gordon’s argument with Chick over Jack Kerouac’s hamburger. “Another reason why I didn’t go,” he said. “Who wants to listen to two old white men argue about cheese?”
“They really got into it this year,” I said.
“That’s what I hear,” he said.
I asked him what he knew about Gordon’s relationship with Chick.
“Sometimes I got one vibe, sometimes I got another,” he said.
I asked him if he thought Chick could have murdered Gordon.
“No more than I could’ve,” he said.
Then I asked him if he thought Gordon could have murdered David Delarosa.
“I’d like to give you the same answer,” he said. “But the truth is, after those unrequited fisticuffs at Jericho’s, I was neither surprised nor dismayed to learn of that boy’s fatal fall. There was something infinitely unlikable about Mr. Delarosa.”
Finally I asked him if he knew what Gordon might have been looking for at the landfill. “The young cat he used to be,” he said. “That’s what I always figured.”
“So, you were aware of his digging out there-long before he was murdered?”
“Long, long before,” he said. “Like all the beans in the jar.”
I was following Shaka’s jive just fine, but Ike’s Republican mind was having trouble with it. “Beans in the jar?” he asked.
I explained: “Members of the Baked Bean Society,” I said. “And by virtue of that membership, the sizable number of suspects in Gordon’s murder.”
“Right-o-roonie,” said Shaka. “One big black bean and a whole bunch of little white ones.”
My Dodge Shadow had new belts and hoses, a tune-up, five quarts of fresh oil, the proper amount of air in the tires. It was scooting through Thistle Hill like a rocket ship on its way to the moon. The ancient streetlights were as dim as stars. “I’m glad you came along, Ike,” I said.
I was expecting him to say something supportive, something like I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Instead he said this: “Wish I hadn’t.”
“Wish you hadn’t? You begged to come along.”
“I know I did. He just seemed so life size.”
“Heavens to Betsy, he’s big as a bear.”
“It was just tough watching him squirm, I guess.”
I wasn’t smart enough to let up. “Squirm? Were you and I looking at the same man?”
“No, I don’t think we were.”
“Good gravy, Ike.”
“Don’t good gravy me, Maddy. He’s an important man in the black community.”
“I know that.”
“Not the way I know it, you don’t.”
It was my turn to be the bear. “This is not a black and white thing. A friend of mine has been murdered.”
“Oh yes, and you just wanted some impressions.”
“That’s right. I would never do anything to get Shaka in trouble. Not if he didn’t deserve it.”
“And you think there’s a chance he does?”
“I think we better talk about something else.”
“I think we better talk about this.”
I’d known Ike for twenty years. And he’d never spoken to me like that. Like a man that mattered. And, to tell you the truth, I rather liked it. “I don’t know what to think,” I whispered. “Not now.”
He softened, too. “You pick up on something, did you?”
“You remember when he shuffled through all those papers on his desk and pulled out that copy of The Harbinger?”
Ike bristled. “You were surprised somebody from Thistle Hill reads the college newspaper?”
“Don’t go there again, Ike. The only thing that surprised me was the address on the mailing label. Last Gasp Books. Effie’s store.”
Ike pondered the implications of that. “I think I understand-no, I don’t think I do.”
I explained: “Effie, as I’m sure you’ve already gathered, was a lot closer to Shaka than the rest of us. She provided police with his alibi for the night David Delarosa was murdered. Now when she sees in the college paper that I’m looking into Gordon’s death, she goes straight to Shaka.”
Now Ike did understand. “Gave him a heads up?”
We were back downtown, where the streetlights were bright enough to illuminate the inside of the car. “When that story in The Harbinger came out, I’d already been to see Effie at her book shop. I’d asked her oodles of questions about David Delarosa. So she knew where my mind was going on this. And then she gets her copy of The Harbinger and sees that Maddy Sprowls isn’t just concerned about Gordon’s murder-she’s investigating it. ”
“It could be innocent enough,” Ike said.
I turned onto South Main and floated past the empty storefronts toward the Longacre Building. “You remember that libidinous chum stuff about David Delarosa? That beagle sniffing for a snuggle bunny stuff? Effie didn’t put it quite so colorfully, but she pretty much told me the same thing.”
“So you think she’s trying to get you to look under the wrong rock?”
I pulled up in front of Ike’s coffee shop. “I think maybe the rocks are in my head.”
He reached across the seat and gently patted my shoulder. I reached across the seat and gently patted his. He got out. Closed the door with a gentle kloomp. He bent low and waved good-bye through the window. I gently waved back.
