“I love you.”

When she had gone, he looked around the apartment and noticed that his parents were not among the crowd.

He asked the woman who lived downstairs if he could use her phone. In her apartment, he phoned Detective Dolittle at the station. Five minutes later, his call was returned. There was little to report on the case. No usable fingerprints had been turned up at the scene. No witnesses had come forward. Kenneth Willis had been picked up on a gun charge the Monday afternoon before the murder. Dolittle said he would interview Willis in his holding cell soon as he “got over that way,” and when Strange suggested he do it now, Dolittle said, “Don’t worry, Willis isn’t going anywhere.” Lula Bacon had been located, but Alvin Jones was not at her apartment. He had left her place, she said, in the middle of the night, and had not revealed his destination.

“You talked to Bacon?” said Strange.

“On the phone.”

“Why don’t you go over and see if he’s there instead of taking that woman at her word?”

“That’s an idea,” said Dolittle, his voice slow and heavy with sarcasm. Strange wondered what bar Dolittle had come from last.

He asked for the location of the Bacon apartment, and Dolittle gave him the address. He asked for the make of Jones’s car, and Dolittle told him that a green Buick Special was registered in his name.

“Find him,” said Strange. “Focus on him.”

“I’m workin’ on it,” said Dolittle.

Strange hung up the phone, his eyes fixed on nothing across the room.

He returned to the impromptu wake, made his way through the crowd, and found his parents back in Dennis’s room. He closed the door behind him, muffling the rumble of conversation coming from the main area of the apartment. His father stood with his back against the wall, a beer in his hand, his sleeves rolled up. His mother sat on Dennis’s bed, her hands folded neatly in her lap.

Alethea looked up. “Who would do this, Derek?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

Alethea glanced at her husband, then stared at Derek in a way that made him feel ten years old. “You’ve got to let the Lord settle this in his own way. Do you understand me, son?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Derek.

CHARLIE BYRD HAD that sound. You could close your eyes and listen to his guitar and know that it couldn’t be anyone playing it but him. Frank Vaughn found himself smiling, hearing it now.

He sat at the bar of the Villa Rosa, on Ellsworth Drive in Silver Spring. The place was done in dark wood and paneling, and it was a pleasant place to drink. Married couples, adulterous couples, and singles sat around him, talking low, as Charlie and his quartet played that jazzy samba sound from back in the Byrd’s Nest, the show area of the restaurant and club.

“How’s it goin’, Frank?” said a smooth voice as a man in a turtleneck and a bright sharkskin sport jacket passed behind him.

“I can’t complain,” said Vaughn to Pete Lambros, the owner of the club. Lambros had owned the Showboat, down on 18th and Columbia, for years and had recently opened the Villa Rosa out in the suburbs. Crime and a lack of Adams Morgan parking had driven him north, over the D.C. line.

“Another?” said the bartender, long sideburns, longish hair, had that Johnny Reb-Civil War look going on. He had just come on shift. Vaughn didn’t need another. He was on his fourth.

“Beam,” said Vaughn.

“Rocks, right?”

“Make it neat.”

The tender free-poured bourbon into a heavy glass and set it on a cocktail napkin. Vaughn drew an L amp;M from the deck and used his Zippo to give it fire. With the fetishism common in bar lovers, he placed his lighter squarely atop his pack of smokes and pulled a tray to within ashing distance of his hand, leaning his forearm just so on the lip of the stick. Cigarettes, whiskey, and walking-around money. What more, thought Vaughn, did a man need?

Well, there was work. And women. He had two of those. One for companionship and memories, and one for sex. He’d been with Linda that afternoon, and it had been good. He’d fucked her strong, and she had given that strength back in equal measure. Her thighs were in spasm when they were done. Their lovemaking had been so physical that when it was over, the bed was halfway across the room from where it had started.

“You know those little round rubber things,” said Vaughn, “you put ’em under the rollers of the bed frame? You need to get a set of those.”

“That would spoil the ride.”

Vaughn chuckled low. Linda kissed him hard on the mouth, her long brown hair damp with sweat.

He wasn’t in love with her, and he wasn’t with her just for sex. He could get that free and clear from any one of the many prostitutes he knew downtown. Vaughn needed to know that there was a woman out there who still wanted him, waited for him to drop by or call, thought about him that way when he wasn’t there. Not out of marital duty or mercy but because it made her dizzy to imagine him. It meant he was still in the game and still very much alive. And that’s what it came down to with him. That’s why he fucked a woman he didn’t love instead of staying faithful to one he did. When he was deep inside that silk, he was laughing at death.

Vaughn drank off half his shot. He dragged on his cigarette and tapped ash off its tip.

At least he was pure at work. Not honest, but pure. His job was to close homicide investigations, and, regardless of his methods, there was no one better at it than he. But he had been a genuine sonofabitch to his family. He’d been a real failure with Ricky, who he hardly knew. The best he could say was that he’d kept Ricky out of harm’s way.

Not that anything could guarantee your kid’s safety. You could still lose them, even if you did them right. Look at Alethea and her husband, what was his name, Darrin, somethin’ like that. No, he was thinking of Derek, the young man, the cop. That good young black cop. There, I said black instead of colored. You happy, Olga? God, I am drunk.

Alethea had lost her oldest to the streets. Wasn’t surprising, where they lived. Down there, coloreds were the perpetrators and the victims. But it never should have happened to a nice family like that. What they needed now was the satisfaction and peace of knowing who killed their son. That false pat on the shoulder, telling them the murder had been “solved.” Of course, no murder ever got solved, not unless you could bring back the dead. And there’d always be another grieving mother, right behind the last. Like the mother of that boy who got run down on 14th, and now Alethea Strange. There just wasn’t any way to protect the ones you loved. Even when you did them right…

“You all right here?” said the bartender.

“Gimme my check,” said Vaughn.

He raised his glass, looked at his heavy-lidded eyes in the bar mirror, and killed his drink.

LATE IN THE evening, Strange left his parents’ apartment, drove over to his place, showered, and changed his clothes. He put on a black leather car coat, dropped his badge into one of its pockets, and slipped his service revolver, a.38 Special, into the holster he had clipped onto his belt. He went back out to his Impala, parked on 13th, and drove down the big hill alongside Cardozo High.

He had no destination in mind. He rolled down the windows and let the cool, damp air of April hit his face. He got the all-news station on the radio, listened to a report on a massive rally for RFK on Park Road in Columbia Heights, and switched the radio off. He drove into the heart of Shaw.

Heading west, he passed the Republic Theater, the London Custom clothing store, National Liquors, and the Jumbo Nut Shop, and came to the intersection of 14th and U, which had been cleared of debris from the disturbance on the previous night. On the northeast corner, cardboard had been inserted in the broken glass door of the Peoples Drug. Hustlers, pimps, whores, men dressed as women, pushers and addicts, workers who had gotten off buses and had not yet gone home, and kids who were out too late for their own good cruised the sidewalks.