“Oh, yes, this chico means it, man. Is all right, Saber,” Manny said. He looked back at me. “We like you, man. We don’t got no grudges. I was kidding about Huntsville. You’d like it, man. Somebody would take care of you. Bring scarf to your cell. Introduce you to friends. Give you a cigar.”
“Step over here,” I said.
“Let it slide, Aaron,” Saber said.
Manny was grinning, his teeth as white as Chiclets. Saber stepped between us, then shoved me when I didn’t back up. “Go home, Aaron.”
I looked at him for a long time. The girls stopped giggling. One hung her head. Cholo hooked his thumb on his right-hand pocket. A police cruiser drove fast down South Main, flasher on, siren off. “Have a good life, Sabe.”
“Don’t be like this,” he said at my back. “Come on, Aaron. We’re buds.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, my father was at the icehouse. My mother was washing dishes.
“You should have left those for me,” I said.
“I don’t mind. Detective Jenks called,” she said. “He wants you to call him back.”
“What about?”
“He said he would like to consult with you.”
“?‘Consult’?”
“That’s the term he used. He was quite gentlemanly.”
“Don’t be taken in,” I said.
“A cynical attitude doesn’t become you, Aaron. He was very nice. He’s obviously a man of breeding, even though he may be of humble origins.”
I had learned long ago that any authority figure who treated my mother with a few words of respect became an immediate substitute for the father she never had. The consequence was almost always a disaster. But I didn’t argue. I used the telephone in my father’s study to call Merton Jenks at the number he had left.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Why don’t you learn some manners?” he replied.
“We’re of no help to you, Detective Jenks. We don’t commit crimes. Why don’t you leave us alone?”
“You know about music. You know what kids listen to. Now shut the fuck up before I have to come out there again,” he said.
“Sir, what do you want?”
“A forty-five was playing on the hi-fi in the game room when Clint Harrelson got blown into the swimming pool. The song was ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’ by Albert Ammons. You know it?”
“You bet.”
“Here’s the thing. There was no other jazz or swing or boogie-woogie or nigra music in the record racks. People who knew Harrelson say he couldn’t stand any of that stuff and wouldn’t allow it in the house. You got any idea who might have been playing that song on his hi-fi?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Grady Harrelson doesn’t listen to that kind of music?”
“Guys like Grady listen to crap by Pat Boone,” I replied. “Besides, I read that Grady was on a sailboat when he got the news about his father.”
“Nobody in your acquaintance would have motivation to shoot Clint Harrelson?” he said.
I was already remembering my conversation with Saber’s Mexican friends, particularly Cholo, who had said they were living in the Fifth Ward, the heart of the black district. They had a lot of records at their place. Albert Ammons’s music was the kind you bought in a colored barbershop or a beauty parlor, not in a white neighborhood. Saber believed Clint Harrelson was behind Mr. Bledsoe’s firing. He had also stolen Grady’s convertible and sold it in Mexico. Was his desire for revenge so great that he would break into the Harrelson estate and torment the father with a rhythm-and-blues recording, then kill him?
It sounded ridiculous, except he had broken into Mr. Krauser’s house and torn up his