The Crime Writer

I hopped into my car and headed to pick him up. He'd managed to run nearly three miles. I found him sitting on the concrete wall by the bathrooms, smoking a cigarette. He was new to the game, still working on a cool-looking exhale. I parked and walked over. I debated telling him how worried I'd been, but it would have been awkward for us both.

"What happen?" he asked.

I told him.

"Big Brother got some moves." He held up his hand, and we high-fived. "Even if he is old."

"I'm thirty-eight."

"Like I said." He tapped the pack of Marlboro Reds against the heel of his hand awkwardly, a trick he'd probably just picked up.

"When I was a kid, my grandfather caught me smoking and made me finish the whole pack," I said. "Every last one. I got so sick I never smoked again."

"Yeah? Any other a' them folk tales you got to tell?"

"No. But why don't you give it a go?"

He shrugged. "'Kay." He teased out another cigarette and held it up ceremonially before lighting it. He went after it quick and hard, the cherry lurching several millimeters a pull. He finished, lit the next off the butt.

After he'd smoked two more, I asked, "How do you feel?"

"Great."

The next three cigarettes he seemed to enjoy even more.

"How about now?"

"Million bucks."

By the ninth he'd mastered the French inhale. By the thirteenth he was blowing smoke rings. He crushed the fifteenth on the wall between his knees, paused to stretch his arms happily to the sky, then lit up another.

I climbed up on the wall, sat next to him.

"Bum one off you?" I asked.

Caroline looked me in the eye as if she were sizing up an opposing boxer. Her index finger moved from her chest to mine. "There's no chemistry here."

"It's just dinner," I said.

She crossed the shag rug and settled behind her desk, as if she felt better with a large object between us.

I peered at the photographs on the bookshelves. Group-home kids of all ethnicities lined up for the Matterhorn, like a carefully cast Disney brochure photo. A crew of counselors around a campfire, kids sprawled in the foreground and across laps. On the side of the desk, there was a picture of Caroline laughing, arm around a black kid in his early teens. She was younger, her face unmarred yet by injury, and her beauty was radiant. I pointed at the picture. "Who's that?"

She slammed the photo flat and slid it into a drawer.

I said, "I meant the boy."

She flushed. Her collar fluttered from the pivoting fan. With quiet dignity she reached back into the drawer, removed the picture, and propped it up again. "That was J.C. I had a lot of jobs before this one."

I checked my watch. "I called Kasey Broach's apartment manager this morning. If his answering machine is to be believed, he's available only from six to six-thirty. To implement the Caroline Raine home-visit rule, I've got to get moving. I'd love you to take up my invitation to dinner tonight, but your deliberation is getting unflattering, and I'm fragile."

Her lips twitched not quite a smile. "Don't invite me to dinner because you think it's doing me some favor." She stared at me evenly. "I'm just fine on my own."

"Yeah, you seem great the picture of well-adjusted, just like me. That's why I think you and I could use each other." I walked over, paused by the door. "Eight o'clock?"

She gave me a faint nod.

The counselor with the bitten-down fingernails stood just outside in the hall, pretending to tidy up the telephone table.

She looked up as I passed. "You hurt her, I'll kick your ass."

"I hurt her," I said, "I'll help you."

Chapter 29

Kasey Broach's family moved through the open doorway of Apartment 1B to a U-Haul and back again, toting lamps, trash cans, cardboard boxes. Strong family resemblance in the parents and the younger sibling, whom I recognized from the news. They moved in automated silence through the powerful beam of the truck's headlights. Now and then one would halt along the brief path from truck to door and lean against a post, bending over as if catching lost breath.

Frozen meals thawed in a translucent trash bag by the doorway. Kasey's father paused to dump in an armload of toiletries fraying toothbrush, faded razor, half carton of Q-tips while his daughter wound a telephone cord around the base unit before stuffing it into a salad bowl. The logistics of loss. The awesome minutiae.

The 110 rattled along behind a vast concrete barrier a half block away. A group of kids ran around the dark street, waving toy guns that looked real enough to get them shot by worn-down cops. Their laughter seemed to mock the somber procession of surviving Broaches.