The Hours of the Virgin (15 page)

The inner door opened and someone came out onto the porch. Small bright eyes peered at me through the screen, and then that door opened too. It almost hit me in the face. I'd expected an interrogation. People in Detroit don't open their homes to just anyone, even in the better neighborhoods.

The small bright eyes belonged to a round black face, unapologetically female, set square on a lot of print dress with a blue plaid apron tied around the waist. The odors of lemon wax and hot butter curled out from behind her, enveloping me in a cloud of bittersweet nostalgia. The place had smelled exactly the same twenty years before.

“I know you,” said the woman. “You're that detective. Did you ever find that man that shot your friend?”

16

I didn't have a comeback for that one. I had spoken to her for maybe five minutes when I was twenty-five. She had been about fifty then and had to be knocking on seventy now, not that you could place her age by looking at her. There wasn't a crease in the plump face, moist from the heat of a stove, and the shine in her eyes was not the soft luminescence of old age but the new-penny glitter of childhood.

The jolt jump-started my own memory. I could almost see the blue spark arcing from hers. “Mrs. Spurling,” I said. “Mesta.”

“Nesta,” she corrected. “Mrs. Clark, now. Well, the widow Clark. I married Mr. Clark in eighty-three. Buried him last year. Mr. Cooper, wasn't it?”

“Close. Amos Walker.”

“That's it. I'd of had it in a minute. Things that happened, folks I met when I was ten, I see all that like I'm looking at a picture. I can't tell you what I had for supper last night.”

“It's not last night I want to talk about. May I come in?”

She thought about it. She had a checkered dishtowel in her hands and the muscles in her forearms jumped as she kneaded it. She could have arm-wrestled the bartender at the Erin. “Devon wouldn't like it. That's my son. He told me not to let nobody in unless I knows them. But I guess I knows you.” She held the screen door for me and when I had it she turned and went in through the inner door, leaving it open. Her feet were wide and flat in cheap low-heeled black pumps. The veins on the backs of her knees looked like Renaissance crackalure.

The living room was small and oppressively warm. The heat was blowing hard through an old-fashioned floor register the size of a subway grate. An inexpensive broadloom rug lay on the floorboards and the furniture was old enough to have had several owners, but the wood glistened and the upholstery was clean, doilies pinned conscientiously over the worn spots. One of those pictures of Jesus whose eyes open and shut hung above the sofa. When they were shut I felt abandoned. When they were open I wondered what He thought of my visit. I unbuttoned my coat and put my hat on the coffee table supporting a three-year run of
Reader's Digest
in neat stacks.

“I'd offer you a drink of water, but Devon's coming to pick me up in a few minutes. It's only two blocks to church but he don't like me walking nowhere alone.” She came out of the adjoining kitchen minus the apron and dishtowel and bent her knees to look in a mirror while she pinned a felt teardrop hat to her hair. The mirror, flaking in an oval Bakelite frame, should have been hung three inches higher for convenience. Probably it was hiding a crack in the plaster. “Devon's my oldest. He had a older sister but she got ran over on her way home from school. Lordy, she be fifty come next month.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Ain't no reason you should be, unless you was driving. I done forgave that man forty years ago. Can't love the dead more than the living, that's what Walter said. He was Aline's father. Aline, that was Devon's older sister that got ran over.”

“Walter was Mr. Spurling.”

“Lordy, no. Mr. Spurling was Devon's father. Walter done stepped on a mine in Korea. Colored troops went in first them days. I married Lucius in fifty-six. That was Mr. Spurling. He had a hardware store on Twelfth Street till the riots. They found him under a burnt rafter.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Can't love the dead more than the living.” She took a green cloth coat out of a closet and put it on. The hat was gray but that was all right. She was a summer rummage sale in the middle of a bleak January. “Lucius made four good children, not counting miscarriages and the one that was born dead. They all coming home for Easter. Well, except Manvil, he's still in Jackson. They caught him with a gun on probation.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It wasn't even his gun. He was holding it for a friend. But Manvil's a good boy underneath it all, just angry on account of not having no daddy. I was carrying him when Mr. Spurling got burnt up. Manvil he never got on with Mr. Clark. Cut him once over some little thing.”

I wasn't going to say it again. “Can we talk about the night of the shooting?”

“Shooting?” The bright eyes flickered. “Oh, your friend. What you want to talk about?”

“I asked you some questions the day after it happened. You said you were asleep and didn't hear the shots. You told the police the same thing.”

“I said that.” She nodded, and went on nodding as if she'd forgotten to stop. She was thinking about something.

A dim bulb flared deep in my skull. I didn't move. A wire might be loose and I didn't want to jiggle it. “Who told you to say that?” I asked. “Devon?”

“‘Stay out of it,' he said. ‘Ain't nothing to us what one white man does to another.'”

My nails were digging into my palms. I opened my fists and flexed my fingers. “What did you see?”

“Devon ain't no racist, reverse or no otherwise. I raised him according to the Good Book. He's just had him a hard life. Folks say things they don't mean when they're mad. Devon's mad a lot.”

I took in a lungful of lemon wax and hot butter and let it out slowly. Waited. The furnace fan clicked, hummed, then cut in with a whoosh. I figured it was mocking me.

“I ain't missed a sunrise in forty years,” she said. “I was chief cook at the House of Corrections eighteen years, had to be at work at four ayem. Took early retirement on account of my legs. That was twenty-two years ago, and I still can't stay in bed much past two. I was in the kitchen washing cups.”

The sink, an old-fashioned white porcelain one with separate taps for hot and cold, was visible through the kitchen arch. The window above it looked out on the basketball court. It hadn't been a basketball court then. I could feel the revolver in its holster on my belt. It throbbed as if it had nerve ends.

“It was dark,” she said.

The fan cut out, wobbling a little against its bearings as it slowed to a stop. When it became obvious she wasn't going to go on I said, “There was a light over the front door of the motel. It was burning that night.”

“It wasn't much of a light. The bulb was dirty. Anyway the light was behind the man. I couldn't see his face.”

“Which man?”

“Oh, the man on the motel porch. I seen your friend clear enough when he turned. He looked like the picture they run in the
News
the next day. He was on the sidewalk and the light kind of slid acrosst his face when he turned.”

“Turned which way?”

“Away from the other man. They been talking.”

“Talking?”

“Uh-huh.” She was fooling with her hatpin, adjusting the angle of the hat.

Dale and North talking wasn't the police take, or mine. Dale had followed him to the American Eagle, been spotted, and got shot. That was as close as anyone had been able to piece it together without an eyewitness.

“You were the one who called the police,” I said.

“Uh-huh.” She'd found a pair of gloves in her pocket and put them on, taking time with the fingers. “I called Devon after. He was mad. He said I shouldn't of called the police at all, even if I didn't leave my name. Said—”

“What were they talking about?”

“The men? I couldn't hear. I don't even know they was talking, not to swear to. They just kind of looked like they been. I mean, two men standing that close on a empty street just naturally got to say something to each other, even if it's just the weather.”

“Twenty feet isn't close.”

“Oh, they wasn't twenty feet apart. Not at first. Your friend he was at the bottom of the steps that other man was standing on top of. He was just turning away when I looked out. I remember thinking, now what's them two doing out there at no two-thirty in the ayem? Your friend he walked away some and then the other man called out to him and he turned around and that's when the other man shot him.”

“You saw it.”

“I seen it. Wisht I hadn't.”

“What did he call out?”

She shook her head. “It was cold out. I had the window shut. But the man that was walking away stopped quick and turned around like you do when somebody calls your name. So I figured that's what the other man done, called his name. I guess they was twenty feet apart then. Them shots, they sounded like a popgun. I wouldn't of knowed they was real except your friend jerked and fell down.”

“What kind of gun?”

“I don't know nothing about guns. Anyway it was clear acrosst the street. It was shiny, I seen that. The light hit it just before he shot it.”

I unbuttoned my peacoat, took out the revolver, and held it in front of her on my palm. “Did it look like this?”

“No. That looks like the gun Manvil had. I don't think this one had that cylinder thing.”

“It was a semiautomatic?”

“If that's what it's called. I don't know nothing about guns.”

That checked. The slugs the medical examiner dug out of Dale were copper-jacketed. I put away the Smith. “What did the shooter do afterwards?”

“Run, I guess. I didn't see on account of I ducked down under the window. I didn't want to see no more. I heard a car start up and drive away fast. The tires screeched.”

The screen door banged. I jumped out of my shoes. The big man who came into the living room stopped when he saw the gun come out.

“What the hell,” he said. “It's Sunday.”

He had on a corduroy coat over cleaned and pressed work pants and a black tie on a white shirt; not a tall man but big in the chest and shoulders with a short thick neck and hastily blocked-in features, as in a charcoal sketch. He had a strong mouth, suspicious eyes, and the general air of a man who was carrying around ten or fifteen more years than he was, if he was who I thought he was. His skin was the color of dull slate.

“Devon, this here is Mr. Cooper. He's the man whose friend got shot out there that time. He come to ask some more questions.”

“With that?” He tipped his head toward the gun.

I put it away again. “Sorry. You came in kind of loud and it's that sort of neighborhood. The name's Walker.”

“What you tell him, Ma?” His eyes stayed on me.

“The truth, Devon. Just the Lord's own truth.”

I saw how he was going to play it, a point in his favor. If you can manage to grow up in that part of town without hiding your emotions under a bucket, you're an authentic individual. He wouldn't be caught holding a gun for someone else. No one would find him under any burned rafters.

“You better not pay no attention to what she says,” he said. “She don't think so good these days.”

She shook a finger at him. “I was in labor with you for sixteen hours, boy. That was my worst day for thinking and I still thought better than you on your best. So don't you skin my shins.”

I grinned. “‘Skin my shins'?”

The finger came my direction. “I lived on this street a long time. I walk past whores and gang-bangers to get to the bus. Ain't no buttons on these shoes.”

“You a cop, let's see your badge.” Devon hadn't looked away from me yet.

I got out the folder and showed him the ID and county buzzer.

“You ain't no sheriff.”

“The metal's just for serving papers. This is a private investigation.”

“Uh-huh. Who's the private?”

“I'd like to tell you,” I said. “The only thing holding me back is it's none of your goddamn business.”

I got a finger shook at me again. “No G.D. in this house. Not on the Lord's day and not ever.”

I apologized. That made Devon madder. “I knowed you wasn't no cop. What you doing busting in on people?”

“He didn't bust in. I let him.”

“Shut up, Ma.”

She took two steps and backhanded him across the mouth. She had to go up on tiptoe and she was wearing gloves, but the noise was like a pistol shot. “You don't tell me shut up, boy. Your daddy told me shut up once and I bust a bread board over his head. I got another bread board.”

It was a picture: Big, coarse-featured Devon, built like an earthmover, rubbing his mouth and getting a finger shook at him by an old woman who could have sat in his hand. I didn't laugh.

“She won't have to tell it again in court,” I said. “She can't identify the shooter, and anyway a teenage defense lawyer would make coleslaw out of an eyewitness testimony twenty years after the crime. They don't let you smack people in court.”

“I should of said something then.” She adjusted her hat again. “Only mistake I ever made in my life was letting men do my thinking for me.”

I said, “Maybe that's why your brain's just like new.”

She smiled then. You hardly ever see gold teeth anymore. “Well, now, if you wasn't quite so pale and had some more moss on you, I'd ask you to come to church with us.”

“He ain't no Baptist,” Devon said. His lower lip had begun to swell and he was trying to stop the bleeding with his finger.

“You'd better get some cold water on that.” I looked at his mother. “What are they collecting for this year, a new roof or a new building?”

“Both. Well, when you gets a new building the roof just naturally gots to go along.”