Ben nodded.
The man’s eyes widened. ‘That’s not nice. That’s not friendly. How come you toting a piece?’
‘It’s just my service revolver,’ Ben told him, hoping that would explain it.
The man looked at him oddly. ‘Service revolver? You in the service? How come you ain’t wearing no uniform?’
‘Police Department,’ Ben said.
The man took a step toward him, his eyes darting about nervously. ‘You with them Black Cat boys?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what you want then?’
‘I’m looking for Roy Jolly.’
The man looked surprised. ‘You is? How come you looking for Mr Jolly?’
‘I want to talk to him about something.’
The man smiled, his large white teeth glowing yellow in the kerosene lamp which rested on the rail beside him. ‘You sure them Black Cat boys didn’t send you?’
‘I’m sure.’
The smile disappeared. ‘Well, you ain’t too smart coming over here all by yourself, looking for Mr Jolly.’
‘Is he here?’
The man took the lamp from the rail of the porch and held it up to Ben’s face. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said, ‘and I bet Mr Jolly don’t know you neither.’ He lowered the lamp toward Ben’s chest. ‘Open your coat.’
Ben drew back the sides of his jacket, and in a single, smooth motion, the man quickly reached beneath his arm and snapped out the pistol. ‘Nasty little thing,’ he said as he tossed it over Ben’s shoulder.
It plomped softly into the dry grass, and at the very edge of his vision Ben could see it glinting dully in the lamplight.
‘I’m not here to cause anybody any trouble,’ he said.
The man continued to stare at Ben suspiciously. ‘What you want then?’
‘A little girl was murdered a few days ago,’ Ben said.
‘So what?’
‘A little colored girl.’
The man stared at Ben expressionlessly.
‘So I was hoping Mr Jolly might be able to help me find out who did it.’
The man said nothing. He placed the lamp back on the railing and stepped forward slightly. A purple stud-pin winked from his shirt. Two enormous fingers adjusted it unnecessarily, then crawled up to straighten a light-blue silk tie.
‘We found her body over in that old ballfield not far from here,’ Ben added.
The man cocked his head slightly, as if to listen to the chorus of crickets and katydids that filled the air around them.
‘Just a little girl,’ Ben said. ‘About twelve years old, something like that.’
In a movement that was blindingly swift, the man suddenly swatted at a moth that had swept up from the lantern. ‘Got it,’ he hissed. His hand squeezed together, then opened, and one of the women stepped up and wiped the crushed moth from it with a white handkerchief.
Ben could feel his skin tightening around him. ‘Somebody shot her,’ he said. He pointed to the back of his head. ‘Right here.’
The man grinned lethally. ‘You scared, mister? You look scared.’ He turned to the women and laughed. ‘Don’t he look scared to you?’
‘He gone die of it pretty soon,’ one of the women said jokingly.
Ben nodded quickly and offered her a thin, nervous smile. ‘Yes, ma’am, I think I might,’ he told her.
For a moment the man regarded him closely. Then his belly shook with a small laugh and he stepped back toward the front door of the house. ‘I’ll check with Mr Jolly,’ he said almost playfully. ‘Come on in.’
The people inside stopped talking immediately as Ben followed him slowly through the whole narrow length of the house. The front room was almost entirely filled by a large pool table, but in the second the walls were lined with pinball machines. An odd assortment of chairs and settees were scattered about in the center of the room, along with a few makeshift card tables. Men and women sat drinking from paper cups or playing at the pinball machines whose bells and whistles echoed throughout the smoke-filled house. Their eyes followed him intently as he continued through the house, elbowing his way left and right through the steadily thickening crowd. At the rear of the house, a large bar had been set up, its top covered with a dull speckled formica top, and behind it a man in a dark-blue shirt dispensed bonded whiskey by the bottle, and clear white lightning by the cup. A large sheet of plywood had been spread out near the center of the room, and people danced languidly on it while an old woman in a flowered dress and pillbox hat played honky-tonk tunes on a baby-blue upright piano.
The man stopped abruptly at the door of the last room of the house and tapped lightly at its heavy metal.
‘Yeah?’ someone said in a husky voice.
‘It’s Gaylord, Mr Jolly,’ the man said. ‘I got a fellow wants to talk to you ’bout that little girl they found.’
When there was no answer, Gaylord gently opened the door, then stepped aside and let Ben pass into the room.
Roy Jolly looked enormously old as he sat behind a plain wooden desk in an unlighted corner of the room. His hair shot out from the top of his head like thin silver wires, and his watery yellow eyes stared out from a face that looked as if it had been carved from a dark, crumbling wood. His breath broke from him in shallow gasps, and his voice sounded as if it came from somewhere deep beneath a pool of water.
‘Go on back to the front,’ he snapped at Gaylord, who instantly left the room, closing the door tightly behind him.
His eyes shifted over to Ben, as his hand waved over the stacks of money which were piled on his desk. ‘Set down,’ he commanded.
Ben took a seat opposite the desk. In the corner of his eye, he could see another man in the room, tall, his body half hidden in shadow, but with just enough of it visible that Ben could make out the stock of the shotgun he cradled in his arms.
Jolly leaned back in his chair and drew in a loud, wheezing breath. ‘Gaylord say you come ’bout that dead gal?’
‘Yes.’
Jolly took a white meerschaum pipe from a rack of twenty or thirty of them and shakily filled the bowl with tobacco, his palsied hand scattering dark-brown fibers across the length of his desk. ‘What fur?’ he asked after he had lit it.
‘I’m with the police.’
Jolly’s eyes rolled upward toward a ceiling which, Ben noticed, had been carpeted with a dark-blue shag. ‘That don’t mean shit to me,’ he said. ‘Even them Black Cat boys is with the police, and they ’bout sorry as you can git.’ He blew two columns of smoke into the air, one from each corner of his mouth. ‘How come you mess with me?’
‘I didn’t come to make trouble,’ Ben told him.
Jolly didn’t seem to hear him. He reached for a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, the lenses a solid, impenetrable black, and put them on slowly. ‘Police ain’t nothing but trouble,’ he said. Then he laughed to himself. ‘Like most everything else.’ The two black lenses settled on Ben like the twin barrels of a shotgun. ‘Old man, he deserve his peace, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘How come you disturbing mine, then?’
‘I’m just trying to find out something about a murdered girl.’
‘What’s a murdered little colored gal to you?’ Mr Jolly demanded harshly.
‘A case,’ Ben said.
‘We had gals dead from murder before,’ Jolly went on. ‘How come ain’t nobody seen you then?’
‘I’ve never been assigned to Bearmatch.’
Jolly’s lips parted slowly, revealing an array of golden teeth. ‘So it ain’t been your problem before?’
