As a starting point the corpse had been little help. White male, early to middle twenties. No outstanding physical characteristics. He had been remarkable only in dress, and lack thereof: no shirt, no underwear, no socks. His pants had been baggy tweeds out-of-style even at Goodwill. He had worn a curiously archaic hairstyle, with every strand oiled in place. He had carried no identification. His pockets had contained only $1.37 in change. Lieutenant Railsback, a small-time coin collector, had made cooing sounds over the coins: Indian Head pennies, V nickels, a fifty-cent piece of the kind collectors called a Barber Half, and one shiny mint 1921 Mercury Head dime. Sergeant Cash had not seen their like for years.
He and Harald were interviewing the tenants in the flats backing on the alley. And not making anyone happy.
They were pressed, not only by the weather but by fifty-two bodies already down for the year. The department was taking heat. The papers were printing regular Detroit comparisons, as though there were a race on. The arrest ratio pleased no one but the shooters.
'That's the way it is,' Cash mumbled. He shivered as a gust shoved karate fingers through his coat.
'What?' Harald kneaded the elbow of his throwing arm.
'Nobody wants to help. But everybody wants the cops to
'Yeah. I been thinking about taking up jogging. Getting out of shape. What do you think?'
'Annie grew up on this block. Says it's always been tough and anti-cop.'
'She married one.'
'Sometimes I think maybe one of us wasn't in their right mind.'
The flats had been erected in the century's teen years, to house working-class families. The two- and four- family structures had not yet deteriorated, but the neighborhood was beginning to change. For two decades the young people had been fleeing to more modern housing outside the city. Now the core families had begun to retreat before an influx from the inner city. Soon the left-behinds would be people too poor to run. And landlords would give up trying to stave off the decay of properties whose values, they felt, were collapsing.
'I thought we'd get some cooperation 'cause they know us,' said Harald, after having been cold-shouldered by a high-school classmate. Cash lived just two blocks away, on Flora; John had grown up in the neighborhood.
'Badge does something to people. Puts them on the defensive no matter how hard you try. Everybody's got something to feel guilty about.'
The entire morning had been a no go. People had answered their questions only reluctantly, and had had nothing to tell. No one had seen or heard a thing.
Not that they cared, Cash thought. They just answered fast and true to get the cops off their doorsteps.
Cash had met a girl once, Australian he now suspected, who had had a strange accent. That had been a long time ago, college days, before he had married. He no longer remembered who had introduced them, nor what the girl had looked like, just her accent and the fact that he had mimicked it, thinking she had been putting him on. He still felt ashamed of the incident.
Little things like that hang with you, he thought, and the big things get forgotten.
The memory was triggered by the old woman at 4255, Miss Fiala Groloch.
Miss Groloch's was the only single-family dwelling on the block, a red-brick Victorian that antedated everything else by at least a generation. He found it odd and attractive. He had been having a love affair with stuffy, ornate old houses since childhood.
Miss Groloch proved more interesting still. Like her house, she was different.
He and Harald grumped up her unshoveled walk, onto a porch in need of paint, and looked for a bell.
'Don't see one,' said John.
Cash opened the storm door and knocked. Then he saw the bell, set in the door itself. It was one of those mechanical antiques meant to be twisted. It still worked.
Miss fiala groloch was the name printed in tiny, draftsman-perfect letters on a card in a slot on the face of a mailbox that looked as if it had never been used. Miss Groloch proved to be
'May I help you?' Her accent was slight, but the rhythm of her syllables conjured visions of tiny European kingdoms perishing beneath the hooves of the Great War.
'Police officers, ma'am,' Cash replied, tipping his hat. That seemed compellingly appropriate. 'I'm Detective Sergeant Cash. This's Detective Harald.'
'Well. Come in. Is very nasty, yes?'
'Sure is. Who'd have thought it this late?' To John, whispering, 'Knock the shit off your shoes, Hoosier.'
They followed the woman to her parlor, exchanging frowns. That curious accent. And she talked slowly, as if trying to remember the words.
'It has been a long time since company I've had,' she said apologetically, clearing a piece of needlepoint from a chair that, Cash suspected, had been an antique before his birth. She brisked to another, woke a fat tomcat and shooed him. 'Tea I will have in a minute.'
'No thank you, ma'am,' said Harald. 'We've only got a minute. Sorry to bother you like this, but we've got to visit everybody on the block.'
Cash chuckled. John was trying to be genteel. It was the contrasts. Harald's contemporaries had all the gentility of Huns in rut. But that house, and that woman, demanded it.
'Oh, fooey. What bother? Already the pot is hot. Just time to steep it needs. You
What could they do? The little lady rolled along like a train. They hadn't the heart to derail her.
