Grief Street

responsible.”
    “You should know better.”
    “But I'm a fool.”
    “No, you’re not. You’re in the dark. People are afraid of the dark. Why shouldn’t they be? When it’s dark, people have to think. Thinking is scarier than knowing.”
    “I wish there was some way out of the dark.”
    “There is—looking.”
    As quickly as Ruby’s tears had come, they were now gone. She sat up and asked, “Is that why you became a detective? Because you’re afraid of the dark?”
    “Maybe it is. I don’t know—I never thought about it.” But I thought now about poor Fat Buns, and our remembrances of darkest school days at Holy Cross. “That’s the second time today I said that.”
    “What was the first time?”
    “When I went to see Harry Darcy, up at Rikers. He warned me that King Kong Kowalski doesn’t wish me all the best.”
    “Big surprise. What else did you talk about?”
    “We go a long way back, Harry and me. I think he was glad to see somebody from the old neighborhood.” I thought, Harry Darcy had been one of the lucky kids who left the Kitchen, but where had it got him? “Darcy got something off his chest about when we were kids in school together.”
    “You can take the boy out of Holy Cross, but you can’t take the Holy Cross out of the boy.” Ruby slid off me and stepped over to the couch. She uncovered a loaf and tapped the top of it with a finger. “This one I baked with olives and sun-dried tomatoes. We’ll have it with dinner.”
    “Tomorrow’s Easter. I’ll be going to mass. I can take a few loaves with me. You want to come?”
    “Ask me in the morning.”
    For the rest of the evening, we talked about other things— anything besides the case. I was grateful for the rest. We talked of dogs, and bread, and the idea of a big new apartment—one with a proper kitchen to it—and whether the newest Hockaday would be boy or girl.
    Toward the very end of the night—after a fine dinner of salmon, boiled new potatoes, fresh asparagus, and Ben & Jerry’s kiwi-strawberry sorbet for dessert; after I had done my duty and cleaned up the dishes; then, as we were lying together in the dark—Ruby again raised the subject of being a detective.
    She asked, “What’s the toughest thing about your job?”
    I thought for a long moment. “Sometimes I feel like I’m blind,” I said. “A blind man born with sight, but who lost it, then lost even the memory of seeing.”
    “Too much to think about?”
    “Always—and with the added trouble that I’m not too bright. Maybe that’s why I drank.”
    “Go easy on yourself.”
    “How do I do that?”
    “You made a baby for us. Wasn't that nice and easy?” Ruby pushed close against me. She lifted my arm around her waist, and tucked a leg between my own. “Mama used to tell me another way of being easy.”
    “What was that?”
    “Try not to hold all your thoughts in one hand, or else you’ll be afraid to ever open it.”
    “One thought at a time?”
    Ruby slipped herself beneath me, circled her arms around my back, and pulled me down into her warmth and softness. “Tell me what you’re thinking now, Irish.”

    And then later, after Ruby had drifted into sleep, I sat up and looked out the window to a moon so bright I could feel its light on my face.
    I thought about the play, too. And how with all that was happening, maybe this was the only time I had to read it. So I crept out from bed, put on my robe, and went to the parlor. The manuscript—with Ruby’s lines, in the character of Annie Meath, highlighted in yellow—lay on the end of the sofa without the bread.
    For the next two hours, I read, searching for clues in a made-up story of grief and violence from years ago that could help me in the present murderous day. As if the play was a blueprint, written by a simple author. A writer worth reading makes a riddle out of an answer. I found no answers in the fluent pages of Grief Street. Nor clues, nor even foreshadowings of conceivable things to come, notwithstanding Slattery’s breathless suggestion of all this help in the simple pages of the Post.
    I found instead a drama of immigrant sorrows, told by someone who knew what he was talking about; I saw the early texture of a neighborhood that came to shape souls, for better or for worse; I met eloquent characters variously disappointed by the myth of an American dream. The least eloquent of the cast—a brooding cop, stumbling around toward resolution of double murder at Easter