Caleb waved the can in front of him. “Well, we got something else.”
Davon looked at him sourly. “Lucky punch,” he said knowingly. “You didn’t get a clean bust. You just bumped into it.”
“That don’t matter to the judge,” Caleb reminded him.
Davon smiled contemptuously. “Bust me fine, I do the time.”
“A poet,” Caleb said with a grin.
“Do me bad, I make you sad.”
Suddenly a streak of anger flashed over Caleb’s face. He grabbed Little by the shirt and wrenched him forward. “Listen to me, you little shit, you’re a thief and a pimp, and in your whole goddamn life you haven’t done one good thing.” His voice hardened and grew cold. “You fuck with me, and I’ll go through you like a spear.” He let him go, and Little stumbled backward slightly.
Frank stepped over to him. “You’d better come squeaky clean on this one,” he said. “The girl in that picture was the owner of that BMW, and somebody killed her.”
Little’s eyes shot away from Frank. “I ain’t got nothing to say.”
“You figured it out, didn’t you?” Caleb said. “You knew that car was about as hot as a car could get, and so you dumped it on a cutter.”
Little said nothing.
“Didn’t you?” Caleb asked loudly.
Little nodded slowly. “But I didn’t kill no girl. I didn’t even
“Was anything in the car when you stole it?” Frank asked.
“No. It was clean. Looked like it had been done over real good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cleaned up real nice.”
“Did you see anyone around it?”
Little shook his head. “You think I’d took it if I’d seen somebody ’round it?”
“Where did you take it?”
“I rode around a little,” Little said. “It’s something, a flashy car. I knowed it was dumb not to just let it go to a fence. Car like that, it’s easy to spot. But I just couldn’t do it for a while. I liked riding in it too much.” He shrugged. “So, I took the chance.” He smiled. “Don’t take a chance, you got nothing in your pants.”
“So you rode around awhile?” Frank said.
“That’s right,” Little said. “I even thought of just heading off up North or something.” He looked at Caleb. “I’m righteous ’bout that woman. She ain’t nothing to do with me. She a friend’s whore.”
“When did you decide to drop it?” Frank asked.
Little turned back toward him. “When I seen that girl’s picture in the paper. It said she was from that school, what you call it?”
“Northfield Academy.”
“That’s right,” Little said. “And in the glove compartment, well, they was this piece of paper that had the name of the school on it, and her name too.”
“The play program,” Frank said.
“Is that what it was?” Little asked. “I don’t know. I just left it in the glove compartment.” He turned to Caleb. “I knew the car was burning when I seen that paper.”
“So you took it to the cutters?” Caleb asked.
“Fast as I could drive, that’s for sure,” Little said. “I didn’t want to hang around nothing that girl had. She too hot.” He looked back at Frank. “And that’s the righteous truth.” He shook his head. “I ain’t never seen that girl.”
“You still living on Simpson Street, Davon?” Caleb asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t pull any deals in that house, you understand? You got little kids living there.”
Davon peered toward the soda can. “What you going to do ’bout that?”
Caleb lifted it toward him. “I’m going to toss it into the garbage, Davon, and let the narcs clean up their own house. But if I ever hear of a deal going down around those kids, I’ll come get you myself.”
Davon nodded vigorously. “Yeah, all right, man.”
Caleb shoved the can in his jacket pocket. “Don’t fuck with me, Davon.”
Frank took out one of his cards. “Call me if you hear anything about this girl,” he said.
Little took the card and gave it a peremptory glance. “Yeah, right, okay.” He shifted nervously on his feet. “So that’s it, then, right?”
“Just don’t leave the city without telling me,” Frank warned.
“Nah, I won’t go nowhere,” Davon assured him.
“And stay out of the zoo,” Caleb added. “Do your business in a parking lot somewhere.”
“I don’t like the zoo, noways,” Little said. “All them animals, it stinks like shit ’round here.” He walked a few feet away, then glanced back tentatively, as if half-expecting to be shot down where he stood.
For a few minutes, Frank and Caleb stood together outside the reptile house. The heat seemed to swirl around them, despite the motionless air.
“What do you think?” Caleb asked.
“I think we got the straight story,” Frank told him.
“Me too. He ain’t got the guts to kill a girl like Angelica.”
Frank drew out her picture and looked at it.
Caleb watched him closely for a moment. “You think about her a lot, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” Frank said. He put the picture back in his jacket and glanced around the park. “Sometimes I get tired of talking to people like Little.”
“High society’s not much better, I bet,” Caleb said with a short laugh.
“I wasn’t really thinking of that.”
“Oh yeah,” Caleb said. “What were you thinking about?”
Frank shrugged wearily. “Nothing really,” he said, and realized that it was a lie. He had, in fact, been thinking about someone, and not for the first time. As if carried on a current, her image came unbidden, dark hair, dark eyes, with a curled rose still resting in her open hand.
14
There was a black Mercedes parked in the driveway of Karen Devereaux’s house when Frank arrived, and he found its presence there disquieting. It was too elegant, and its elegance was something against which he felt utterly powerless. He could not help but compare it to the battered, dusty frame of his old Chevrolet, the unwashed windows and plain blackwall tires. Parked beside it, the Mercedes shimmered brilliantly in the cascading sunlight. It was beautifully polished, and Frank immediately imagined its owner as equally sleek and stylish, a man in a black tuxedo and red cummerbund who knew one wine from another and smoked expensive European cigarettes.
Once at the door of the house, Frank hesitated. He did not want to intrude upon her, but he also felt himself powerfully drawn back to her. It was as if the line connecting them, the one he’d felt the night before, was sturdier than he had imagined, and that it was forever being tugged gently and insistently in some effort to bring him back.
The man who opened the door was exactly what Frank had expected. He was tall, blonde, and very handsome. He wore dark gray pants and a black velvet jacket, and looked to be in his middle thirties. He seemed at home in his surroundings, utterly natural in clothes that would have looked like a costume on almost anyone else. As Frank faced him silently, he felt his own disarray, the frazzled suit and rumpled hat, but he realized that he did not in the least feel shamed by them, and for an instant he felt a sudden, exhilarating pride in what he wore.
He pulled his badge from his coat and watched as the gold shield glinted in the light.
“I’m here to see Karen Devereaux,” he said.
