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  I pled the Fifth.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? Or do you actually like coming home with bloody noses and black eyes all the time? Because if that’s what you really want, to hurt yourself, there are easier ways of going about it. But you already know that, don’t you, because you know everything.” Her upper lip was twitching; she was worked up now. “Well, you don’t know everything, you only think you do, and that makes you your own worst enemy. Neecey and I can’t be there to protect you from yourself all the time anymore. You’re getting too old for that. I’m sorry, Genie, I really am, but that’s the way it is. So you have to start helping us out. God knows I’ve begged your grandmother, begged her, not to encourage you to play detective, but your grandmother, she doesn’t… she can’t—” mom’s voice cracked and she stopped. She raised the tips of her index fingers under her eyelashes and held them there. “Shit, if this mascara runs, then I’m really gonna be late.”

  “Mom, sewer mouth.” Someone had to lighten the mood, because it’d gotten too damn heavy all of a sudden.

  “Oh,” she sniffled, faking a laugh, “you’re right. Sorry.” She looked at her watch. “Crap. I have to run.” She cleared her throat, looked me in the eye, and said, “Promise me you’ll drop it.”

  Now, that was a pickle.

  “Stop frowning, Genie, it makes you look simple. Well, are you gonna promise or do I have to get on the phone with Pauline?”

  And that was just good, old-fashioned hardball. The whole thing had been a setup from the start, and I’d bought every bit of it. It made me wonder how much of what she’d told me was true, because I already knew that people would say just about anything to get what they wanted, especially moms. But I had to give her credit—true or not, she’d suckered me good.

  “All right.” She turned to leave. “If that’s your decision, I’ll get on the phone right now. I can always tell them I was late because I had trouble finding a sitter.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Yes?” She raised her eyebrows and looked surprised, like she didn’t know what I was gonna say. I hated that crap.

  “All right. You win.”

  “What did I win?”

  Christ, now she was making me work for it. “You know.”

  “No, I don’t. Unless you say, ‘I promise to drop the case,’ I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  I pronounced the words.

  “That’s great, Genie, I’m relieved to hear it. But now that you’ve promised, I’m gonna hold you to it.” Mom straightened her shoulders and smoothed her hair. “Look, I know she probably gave you some money. Shh, I know, I know, she told you to keep it a secret. She always did that with me, too. It made it more fun. Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you any more about it. Keep the money. I’m sure it’s not a lot. Think of it as a reward for a lesson well-learned.”

  “And then what?” I only asked because if she wanted to wreck my plan for the day, then she should at least have the courtesy to offer me a new one.

  “I don’t know. You’re the one on vacation. Go to the mall, see a movie, take your bike down the Shore.”

  Just what I thought—nothing. “It looks like it’s gonna be crappy,” I said.

  “Genie, you have a brain most people would kill for. I’m sure you can figure out something that doesn’t involve trouble or getting hurt. Try using your head.”

  I nodded.

  “Remember, you’re gonna be in the house on your own tonight, so no going out after dark and no funny business, okay? I mean it. There’s money for pizza on the counter. I’ll call you later.” She kissed me and smiled. “I’m trusting you to do the right thing.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s my little man. I love you.”

  I wasn’t in the habit of making promises to my mother that I had no intention of keeping, and that put me in a bad situation. But she’d left me no choice: I’d already given my word to grandma, who was higher up the chain of command than mom and had fronted the dough to make sure I delivered the goods. I knew all kinds of vandalism and suspicious bullshit were going on at the retirement home and that nobody was sticking up for grandma or any of the other old-timers, so that’s what I had to do. Besides, Marlowe, Spade, and Holmes always had to work around the authorities and run the risk of getting into trouble themselves in order to get to the bottom of things—it was just part of the job. But I had to be careful. If mom found out what I was up to, I wouldn’t have to contemplate the trouble my future might bring, because I wouldn’t have one. Period. But she’d said the whole business scared her to death anyway, and since I didn’t want to worry her, it was better to keep her in the dark, at least for her own protection. As for her lecture on the right thing to do, I already knew what it was. I had to break this fucking case wide open.

  I got out of bed, did my exercises, and tried to figure out the exact moment that Neecey had switched teams, which she must’ve done, because she’d never sunk this low before. In the past year, she and mom had been ganging up on me more and more about all kinds of things—making an effort with other kids, avoiding fights, staying out of trouble—but Neecey ratting me out about the sign was by far the most extreme of her connivance. Sure, she’d always entertained herself at my expense, like putting dresses and makeup on me when I was little or telling me that eating dirt would make me grow or making me hand her towels or Manning the Lookout or that time she convinced me to lick one of the metal posts holding up the back porch in the wintertime. Being treated like her pet monkey drove me crazy sometimes, and a lot more lately, but it was just the usual sister-brother sort of crap, at least for us. Telling on me wasn’t. We’d never done that. Never. Even the time I’d punched out the front window, we’d both sworn it was broken when we’d gotten home from school and that I’d cut my hand making a sandwich. I didn’t think mom really believed us, but there wasn’t anything she could do, because we’d stuck together.

  But all that was over and done with now, and those days were gone forever. Not only had Neecey held out on me about what Razor had been doing here and lied to me about the sign, which Darren had definitely told her about, but she’d also dropped dime to get me banned from the case. I couldn’t be sure what she was playing at, or with whom, but whatever it was, that shit just wasn’t gonna float. Whether she was in cahoots with mom to mold me into someone more to their liking, or whether she thought her stupid friends and boyfriends were more important than her own grandmother, Neecey had gone too fucking far this time. She’d crossed over to the dark side, and while watching her go down in flames wasn’t my idea of a great time, there wasn’t much I could do to stop it now.

  After I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and spiked my hair, I pulled out a pair of white shorts and a light blue T-shirt and got dressed. Then I grabbed Thrash and my backpack and went downstairs. I was in a Marlowe state of mind, ready to take care of business, but I had to eat first. Marlowe’s breakfast of choice was soft-boiled or scrambled eggs, toast, and strong coffee. He made it himself in the morning because he was a bachelor and lived alone, but if he had a dame over who’d spent the night, he’d sometimes make it for her, too. Me, I didn’t like eggs, wasn’t allowed to touch coffee yet (except as ice cream), and was prohibited absolutely from cooking anything on the stove or in the oven without adult supervision. But I knew how to make crispy bacon in the microwave between sheets of paper towels, how to put chocolate syrup in milk so it sort of looked like a cup of joe, and I could burn toast with the best of them. After I’d eaten a couple bacon-toast-and-cheese sandwiches and polished off about a quart of milk, I cleaned up in the kitchen and headed out.

  Stepping outside felt like being wrapped head-to-toe in a steaming quilt, and the haze was so thick that it seemed like I was looking at the world through a pane of frosted glass. I was only three or four blocks from home and already I was practically soaked with sweat. It couldn’t go on like this. The weather would have to break soon, and when it did, it would sure a
s hell be something to see, but not anything you’d want to get caught out in.

  I wanted to speed up but knew that doing so could lead to heat stroke or dehydration or plain old spontaneous combustion, so I settled back on the banana seat and took it easy. The church wasn’t that far anyway, and that’s what I was going to check out, to see what there was to see. Thrash had been right from the start—about Darren lying because he was a liar—and I needed to step back a little, reconstruct all of the events of Saturday night as best I could, and then use them to build my case. There might be nothing where I was going; in fact, if the crew had hit the church on Saturday night, then there should be nothing, except maybe signs of a fresh coat of paint on the church wall and rectory. But there was no reason for me to believe Darren or anybody else; they were all lying or scheming or holding out in some way, and that meant I had to go check everything for myself if I wanted to get anywhere near the truth. And then, piece by piece, I’d figure this damn thing out.

  I drove through the parking lot of what used to be the parochial school, but was now a school for K-through-6 kids with special needs who rode the short bus, then hung a left at the back of their freestanding gymnasium—which had a full-sized basketball court and an indoor pool—before coming up on the rectory. It was a three-story Colonial with wide steps, white columns on the porch, white wood siding, and stained glass in all the front windows. The windows were closed and there were no A/C units anywhere to be seen, which meant there was probably just enough left in the collection plate each week to foot for central air. Then again, without air-conditioning, Father Paul might be too exhausted from the heat to chase altar boys in the summer months, and that just wouldn’t be fair.

  Directly to the right of the rectory was the back of the church. The building itself was ultra-modern in style: the kind of architecture that was supposed to look like it’d come from the future when they’d built it about twenty years ago. Luckily for us, it was a future that decided not to bother showing up when it saw what it would have to look like. Most of the building was brick and most of the rest was tall stained glass in stainless-steel frames, but what threw it off completely were the three short gabled roofs in the front. One spread out wide in the center over the entryway and the other two were recessed from that on the sides. Taken together they looked like wings—three seagulls in dive-bomb formation or maybe a space ship that didn’t have enough thrust to get off the ground. Either way, the whole thing looked more like something you’d see in The Jetsons or get beamed up to than a place you’d go to pray.

  Then again, I didn’t go there and I didn’t pray, so I really didn’t care what the hell it looked like. All I cared about was the right wall of the rectory, the back of the church, and the footpath in between. I got off the Cruiser, walked it between the two buildings, and then dropped the kickstand to have a look. All the wood siding on the rectory was white, but anyone could see that there was a large patch, maybe five feet by six, that was whiter than the rest, as if it’d just been painted. I turned around and stepped over to the back of the church. There was a heavy cross-and-Bible door leading in the back way and about four feet of brick on either side, creating a small mudroom or vestibule at the rear entrance. As I got closer, I could tell that the door had recently gotten a couple of coats of white, whether for the first time or as a touch-up, because there was hardly any dust or pollen or dirt streaks on it, which should’ve been the case given the time of year and all the humidity and rain we’d been having lately. Wide swaths of the bricking on both sides of the door were slightly off-color and faded, too, as if someone had gone out there with turpentine and a hard-bristle brush and gotten to work in a hurry.

  That cinched it. Either Darren and the crew had actually hit the church on Saturday night and the tag had been covered up in a rush the next morning, or the church needed to think about hiring a new handyman because the one they had sucked. If the first conclusion was the true one, then it seemed that Darren hadn’t lied to me, because the crew couldn’t have vandalized the sign at the retirement home if they’d been here instead. Then again, they could’ve done it sometime before or after, or since there were seven of them, they could’ve easily broken themselves up into teams to pull two separate jobs at the same time if they’d wanted to. All of that was possible. The only problem was that none of it was certain.

  If the crew had hit both the church and the retirement home on the same night, though, I’d have some new questions to mull over. Like, why would they go to all the trouble of coordinating hits at different places across town from each other on the same night? And why, if that’s what they’d done, would one of the tags be so piss-poor awful? Because they’d almost gotten nabbed at the home and been forced to rush it was one answer. Another was that maybe there was something more than just graffiti going on—maybe something else was at stake.

  I jumped on the Cruiser, popped the kickstand, and had a tickly sensation in the base of my brain, like I was getting close. Close to what, I couldn’t say yet, but closer than I’d been so far, that much was sure. Just then I thought I saw a flash of movement in the rectory window on the left. I looked up to see a balding head, wire-rimmed glasses, and a pale, jowly face staring down at me from behind a parted curtain. It was Father Paul. His mouth arched downward at the corners, he wasn’t wearing his collar, and he had a telephone pressed against his ear.

  Even though there was a wall separating us, being that near to him made me feel a little bit wary, kind of like the first time you tried to go in the ocean after seeing Jaws. But then the rest of it hit me like a shot. The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime—and there I was, inspecting the location of a tag that Father Paul and the people at the church probably thought nobody knew about. I could see it all too clearly: on the other end of the line was someone in a dark blue uniform, pen in hand, copying down the suspect description Father Paul was giving them—my description.

  I’d already checked my calendar earlier this morning, and playing the fall guy wasn’t on it. I spun out of there, fast, staying away from the main roads and zigzagging randomly down one side street after another until I’d put enough crooked distance between me and the church that I felt certain I couldn’t have been tailed. The effort took its toll. I was gushing sweat from every pore, my legs were like heavy rubber, and my throat was aching from thirst. I had to sit down somewhere and take a break for a few minutes or I’d overheat. I slid back on the seat and coasted as far as I could without using the pedals, then turned them over a few times to maintain my forward momentum, and coasted again, saving my energy and catching my breath.

  I passed an empty, fenced-in lot where the Stewart’s Drive-In used to be and a mom-and-pop liquor store with a comatose-looking German shepherd collapsed in a heap on the front walk. A little farther on there was an asphalt park with a rusted swing set, monkey bars, and a dented-up slide next to a macadam basketball court with no nets on the rims. I knew without looking up at the street signs that I’d crossed over to the part of town where most of the black people lived.

  They called it the Woods, like almost everybody else did, because all the streets in the area were named after trees: Maple, Spruce, Pine, Oak, Walnut, Elm. There were mostly ranch-style houses throughout the neighborhood, but the few two-story homes popping up here and there were just like mine, only they seemed older in some way, or just more weathered. The blocks themselves were smaller than where I lived, which meant most of the places had front porches and larger front yards because the backyards only had enough room for a view of the rear wall of someone else’s house. Both new cars and old cars were parked in driveways and along the curbs; some houses had nice gardens and landscaping and porch furniture and some didn’t; and there were mailboxes and trash cans and flagpoles and the occasional fire hydrant like you’d see anywhere else. What I didn’t see was anything that made this part of town any different or worse or more frightening than any other, and I knew that the handful of sub-morons I’d heard call i
t the Jungle instead of the Woods had probably never even seen the place, and most definitely didn’t live there, so what they called it didn’t amount to the stink off shit.

  You could tell that the people who did live here had plenty of common sense, though, because the streets were practically empty. Everyone was probably inside in the air-conditioning or sitting in front of a fan with an ice-cold drink instead of roasting their chestnuts off in the punishing heat like I was. But I was in luck; I saw a couple of benches under some tall trees about a block ahead, so I glided over and took a load off. I mopped the sticky, hair-gelled sweat off my forehead and face, wiped it on my shorts, and wished I’d shoved a canteen of lemonade in my backpack instead of Thrash. He heard that and started to go off on one of his rants, but I was too busy looking at the building across the street to pay him much mind.

  If someone had asked me what the chance was that I’d visit two churches in one day, I would’ve said zero before they’d finished the question. But since I was sitting across from the second church this morning, I guess I would’ve been wrong. This one was a much simpler affair than the last one; in fact, it looked almost exactly like the rectory at the other church, except that this building was taller, the front steps and porch were much narrower, the stained-glass windows on the sides went all the way up to the roof, and there was a small belfry with a steeple toward the back.

  The only reason it caught my attention at all was that there were three people standing to the side of the building, looking up and pointing. There was a tall, caramel-skinned man in a black suit; a short, stout, dark woman in a floral blouse and beige skirt; and a younger, barrel-chested guy with workman’s jeans, T-shirt, chiseled arms, and a copper-colored Afro. I traced the direction of their upturned faces and fingers toward the church and saw what they were looking at: a massive star-shaped hole in the top half of one of the stained-glass windows, a good thirty feet or more above their heads. I looked back at the trio and saw that the man in the black suit was holding a baseball-sized rock in his right hand, tossing and catching it, as if he were measuring the kind of throw it would take to send that rock up and through the stained-glass window the way someone else had already done.