Chapter Two - Shady Dealing

SO THE POLICE CAME, headed by Detective Lieutenant Ernest Perlman Morgan, and went all through the place and examined the corpse while Morgan questioned Bo and me. Morgan is a balding, heavyset black man who wears his suits meticulously neat without a wrinkle or a stain and speaks in a deep baritone. When there's a smile on his face, there's usually a mean gleam in his eyes and an ugly suspicion in his brain. He smiled the whole time he questioned us. At last he quit talking, snapped his notebook shut, and lit a cigarette.

"Are we suspects?" I asked.

Morgan waited a few seconds before answering, hoping to make me squirm. Like I said, he doesn't like me.

"No." Morgan exhaled a cloud of tobacco smoke. "You can go. But don't go far. Make sure I can reach you fast if I need to."

"You know where you can reach me, Morgan."

"Yeah, I sure do. And the girl?"

Bo didn't answer, obviously at a loss.

"She's staying with me," I said abruptly.

Morgan looked at Bo questioningly. Bo hesitated, gave me a quick glance, then nodded.

Morgan seemed satisfied. We left the kitchen through the back door, clambered down the stairs to the parking lot jammed with squad cars and curious neighbors, and somehow managed to maneuver my jeep through the mess. Absorbed in our loss, we didn't speak as we made our way back to my second story garage apartment near Candler Park.

Twenty minutes later, Bo was sitting at the table as I heated a kettle of water on the stove. I like my apartment. On nice mornings I can sit out on the porch at tree level looking down on the world as I have my coffee. Also, it's cheap. Like me. I'm the kind of guy who could be happy living in a tent, and I tend to keep expenses to a minimum. It means don't have to work so much.

Finally I sat two mugs of hot water on the table--instant coffee for me, tea for Bo.

"Let's get down to it," I said, breaking the silence that had lasted since we'd left Barry's apartment. "What do you know that you didn't tell the cops?"

Bo took a dainty sip of her tea and put the mug back down. She looked me straight in the eye--and said nothing.

I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms across my chest.

"I knew Barry for ten years," I said. "We always dealt straight with each other. Sometimes he helped me out on jobs."

"I know. He told me that."

"So how did you get mixed up with his murder?"

"Because I got a phone call from him telling me to come quick, something big was up. I threw some things in my bag and came running."

"Most nieces aren't quite so devoted to their uncles."

"He isn't--wasn't like most uncles. He took me in when my folks got killed. I was thirteen. He kept me until I was seventeen and went away to college. You met me when I came home for summer visits. And do you think any woman likes being called a skinny little teenager?"

"Even if she was one?"

"Especially if she was one."

"Your parents got killed?" Then I almost bit my tongue in two. Of course her parents had been killed. Her father was Barry's brother.

Bo seemed not to notice my lapse of memory. She clenched her teeth and a hard look came over her face. "Yeah." She took a slow sip of her tea, and for a few seconds I thought she wasn't going to say anything more. "My parents were the original hippy dippy, flower power peace creeps, a pair of crusading lawyers out to save the poor and oppressed from the evil fascist establishment. That's how I got the name Bo--short for Rainbow. Can you think of a worse name than Rainbow?"

"Easily. How about Starchild? Or Moon Angel? Or Brotherhood? Or Peace? Lots of folks did acid in the sixties. Tell me how you ended up living with your uncle."

"Anyway, one of the poor and oppressed victims of a racist, sexist society that they saved--"

"Do I detect a note of sarcasm here?"

"--was accused of raping and murdering two women. They said he was being framed because of his politics and his skin color and got him off. It was a big trial with lots of publicity, and it got in all the papers. Anyway, my folks took him into our home so he could get back on his feet. One night about a week later he killed my father in his sleep. While he was busy with my mother, I slipped out my bedroom window, got to a neighbor's house, and called the police. She was dead before they got there."

I couldn't tell who made her angrier--the killer for being a beast, or her parents for being fools. I said nothing. An offer of sympathy would have sounded silly and insincere.

"Well, that was when Uncle Barry took me in," she went on. An undertone of grief had crept into her voice, but she didn't cry. Somehow I could hear in the sound of her words the frightened little girl who'd looked to her Uncle Barry for a safe port in a storm. "He fed me, put clothes on my back, gave me a place to sleep, and saw to it I studied hard and won scholarships left and right. And he taught me everything he knew, too. That's why I can handle a thirty-eight, survive for weeks alone in the wild, and beat hell out of most of the men you see on the street."

She took another sip of tea. "What do you make of all this?"

"Well," I said, raising my mug to my lips and trying to look thoughtful, "he called the both of us and told us that something big was up. And somebody thought it was worth the risk to kill him and search his apartment. I'd say he was trying to link up with a couple of folks he knew he could trust and who knew how to take care of themselves." I put the coffee mug back down on the table. "Did he tell you anything else? Anything at all?"

"Just one thing." Her eyes were searching my face.

"What's that?"

She hesitated. "He told me that if anything happened to him, I was to get in touch with you and a lawyer named Sid Dougherty." She reached in her bag, pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

I looked at the card, but I didn't need to. Of course I knew Sid. I did some work for him from time to time. Because he'd owed me a favor and I asked him to, Sid had helped Barry out of a minor legal scrape. I just nodded my head as if I'd been expecting this all along.

"Okay," I handed the card back to her. "So now tell me something else."

"What?"

"Do you trust me?"

She looked at me a long time without answering. Her face was completely inscrutable.

"Do you trust me?" she said at last.

I nodded once. "Yeah. I'm remembering you better now, for one thing. For another, there aren't a lot of people who know the connection between Sid, Barry and me. Anyway, I got a good feeling about you, and I tend to trust my instincts. Now, one more time. Do you trust me?"

Again she waited a long time before answering. "I guess so."

"All right." I stood up and drained the last of my cup. "Let's hop in Sheba and find out what Dougherty knows about all this." I phoned Sid's office and told his secretary that we were on the way over.

We left.

Next episode: Sleazeball de Jure