She took a deep breath. "All right. What do you want to know?"
"Answer my question."
"Yes, he’s hurt me before."
"Once, twice, daily?"
"More than once, and let’s leave it at that," she said quickly, and defiantly.
"All right, Mrs. Childers. Tell me about Jake then. Where he lives, where he works, his girl friends, who he hangs out with?"
"He has an apartment on Bronxwood." She wrote down his address and handed it to me.
"You got a key?"
"No."
"Know of anybody who does?" I asked.
"Jake is too particular about his things for him to let a lot of people have a key."
"He have a girlfriend?"
"Lisa Ellison," Mrs. Childers replied. I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t like her.
"What about her? She got a key?"
"I don’t know."
"You know if she’s heard from him?"
"I don’t know."
"You ask her?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Mrs. Childers rolled her eyes. "I don’t like her." At least she was real about it.
"What about friends? Anybody he hangs out with?"
"I don’t know," she said quickly. Then she said, "He’s got a friend, Rocky. He grew up down the block from us in Philly. Him and Jake hang sometimes, but not that often."
"Do you have a picture of Jake?" Mrs. Childers reached in her purse and handed me a picture. "Looks like the bomb party. What’s the occasion?"
"Jake’s last birthday. We never had birthday parties when we were kids. So we really make a big thing of them now."
"How old is he?"
"Jake’s thirty."
"He the oldest?"
"Yes."
"Whose that in the picture with him?"