“Hey, Jackie,” says Garvey, motioning for her to follow him down the sidewalk a respectable distance from the crowd outside the apartment house.

Jackie Lucas catches up to the detective, who then walks a few more yards down the pavement.

The conversation begins where such conversations always do, with the dead woman’s boyfriend, habits and vices. Garvey has already learned some things about his victim and the people in her life from earlier conversations with family members; the details from the crime scene-the absence of forced entry, the pile of clothes, the rice and gelatin caps-add to the knowledge. As he begins asking questions, Garvey touches the young woman’s elbow lightly, as if to emphasize that only the truth should pass between them.

“Your mother’s boyfriend, this boy Frazier, he’s selling drugs…”

Jackie Lucas hesitates.

“Did your mom deal for Frazier?”

“I don’t…”

“Listen, nobody cares about that now. I just need to know this if I’m going to find out who killed her.”

“She just held the drugs for him,” she says. “She didn’t sell none, not that I know about anyway.”

“Did she use?”

“Marijuana. Now and then.”

“Cocaine?”

“Not really. Not that I know of.”

“Does Frazier use?”

“Yeah, he do.”

“You think Frazier could have killed your mother?”

Jackie Lucas pauses, focusing the image in her mind. Slowly, she shakes her head sideways.

“I don’t think he did it,” she says. “He always treated her nice, you know, never beat her or anything.”

“Jackie, I have to ask this…”

The daughter says nothing.

“Was your mother, you know, kind of loose about men?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“I mean, did she have a lot of boyfriends?”

“Jus’ Frazier.”

“Just Frazier?”

“Jus’ him,” she says, insistent. “She was seeing another man a while back, but only Frazier for a long time since.”

Garvey nods, lost for a moment in thought.

Jackie breaks the silence. “The policeman downtown say we shouldn’t say nothing to Frazier,’ cause if we do he might run.”

Garvey smiles. “If he runs, then at least I know who did it, right?”

The young woman takes in the logic.

“I don’t think he’s your man,” she says finally.

Garvey tries a different tack. “Did your mom let anyone else up into her apartment? If she was alone, would she let anyone besides Frazier come up?”

“Only this boy named Vincent,” she says. “He works for Frazier, and he been up there before for the drugs.”

Garvey lowers his voice. “You think she would fool around with this Vincent?”

“No, she wouldn’t. I don’t think Vincent ever been up there without Frazier being there, too. I don’t think she would let him in,” she adds, changing her mind.

“You know Vincent’s name?”

“Booker, I think.”

“Jackie,” says Garvey, turning to one last detail. “You told me before about Frazier keeping a gun in the bedroom.”

The daughter nods. “She has a twenty-five, and sometimes Frazier keeps a thirty-eight there.”

“We can’t find them.”

“She keeps them in that cabinet,” the daughter says. “Up on the back of the shelf.”

“Listen,” says Garvey, “if I let you go up there and look for the guns, do you think you’ll be able to find them?”

Jackie nods, then falls in behind him.

“Is it bad?” she asks on the way upstairs.

“Is what bad?”

“The room…”

“Oh,” says Garvey. “Well, she’s gone… but there’s some blood.”

The detective leads the young woman into the rear bedroom. Jackie looks briefly at the red stain, then walks to the metal dressing cabinet and pulls the.25 from the rear of the top shelf.

“The other one ain’t here.”

From a shelf in the closet directly behind the bed, she also produces a case containing a little more than $1,200 in cash, money that her mother had collected from a recent insurance settlement.

“Did Frazier know she had that money?”

“Yeah he did.”

“Did he know where it was?”

“Yeah.”

Garvey nods, giving this fact a moment of thought. Then a Western uniform bounds up the stairwell and into the hall of the apartment, looking for the detective.

“What’s up?” asks Garvey.

“The rest of the family wants to come up.”

Garvey looks at the lab tech. “You have everything you need?”

“Yeah, I’m just packing my stuff.”

“Yeah, go ’head,” says Garvey to the uniform, who goes downstairs to open the front door of the building. Seconds later, half a dozen relatives, including the victim’s mother and older daughter, move quickly into the apartment, creating instant pandemonium.

The older family members busy themselves with taking stock of the kitchen appliances, the color television, the stereo system. For places like Gilmor Street, the reclamation of a victim’s valuables is a postmortem imperative, less from greed than from the certain knowledge that as soon as word of the murder hits the street, any number of break-in artists will plan to acquire the worldly wealth of the newly departed, providing they can get into the place after the police leave and before the family has a chance to think. Grief may come later, but tonight the victim’s mother has no intention of leaving to the wolves that multichannel home entertainment center.

The rest of the family is curious in a morbid way. A cousin points to the coagulated red pool on the bedroom carpet. “That Lena’s blood?”

A Western uniform nods, and the cousin turns to the victim’s older daughter.

“Lena’s blood,” he says again. Bad thought. Because now Jackie’s older sister is wailing for all she’s worth, making a bee-line for the red stain, her arms extended, palms open wide.

“MOMMY, MOMMY, I SEE MOMMY.” The kid is rubbing her hands through the pool, gathering up as much of the wetness as she can. “MOMMY. I SEE MOMMY…”

Garvey watches as the cousin and another relative grab the older daughter and lift her away from the blood.

“… MOMMY, DON’T GO, MOMMY…”

The girl comes up screaming with her forearms extended, both palms covered with blood. Sensing an ugly dry cleaning bill, Garvey steps back, then moves toward the door.

“All right, Jackie,” he says. “Thank you, honey. You’ve got my phone number, right?”

Jackie Lucas nods, then turns away to comfort her sister. As the screaming reaches a still higher pitch, Garvey makes his escape, following the lab tech down the steps and crawling into the cold interior of the Cavalier. He has spent a little less than four hours working the scene.

Before returning to the homicide office, Garvey makes a point of driving another twelve blocks north to see if an extra hand is needed on a suspicious death call that came in three hours after the call for Gilmor. Earlier, Garvey telephoned the office and heard from Dave Brown that the second call might also be a murder and might in some way be related to Gilmor Street. Garvey arrives on the second floor of a Lafayette Avenue rowhouse to find Rick James and Dave Brown working the murder of a fifty-year-old man.

Like Lena Lucas, the Lafayette Avenue victim has been shot in the head and stabbed repeatedly, this time in the chest. And like Lena Lucas, there is a pillow near the victim’s head, marred by a large amount of gunshot residue. Moreover, the face of this victim is also covered by the same series of shallow cuts-more than twenty this time. Obviously dead for some time, the victim was found by several family members who had become concerned and entered through an unlocked rear door. Here, too, there was no sign of forced entry, but this time the room where the victim was found had been ransacked.

The two cases become unequivocally joined when Garvey learns that the dead man is Purnell Hampton Booker, the father of one Vincent Booker, who is the same entrepreneurial lad who works for Robert Frazier, who sells dope and sleeps with Lena Lucas. Standing in the dead man’s bedroom, Garvey knows that the same hand almost certainly took both lives.