Grief Street

sold?”
    “Today,” Ruby answered, with no further elaboration besides the big smile on her face. That was her news? Really big news it was. She turned to Quent. “But what about you? Didn’t I read in one of the trades about something you had going not too long ago?”
    “Yeah, last winter I had a one-man show with three other guys,” Quent said. I thought to myself, Only an actor could deliver a line like that. “Since then it’s like I can’t get arrested.”
    “Ever think of writing a play?” I asked.
    “Why?”
    “Just curious.”
    “Maybe I should write. It’s not like I want to spend the rest of my life working in a gym with guys gone to flab, you should pardon the expression.” Quent considered the empty beer bottle he was holding. “Maybe I ought to get another one before we start.”
    Quent loped off to the bar and I asked Ruby, “Can he write?”
    “Everybody thinks they can write. Especially unemployed actors.”
    “Anyway—so you closed on the theater today?”
    “That’s not all.”
    Ruby started to tell me more, but then Godwin broke things up again. He ding-dinged one of the skin-breaking sterling forks against a wineglass until everybody in the room fell to quiet.
    “Boys and girls—let’s all mosey over this way now,” he said. He was standing in a back corner of the room with the folding chairs. Johnny Kay stood there beside him, looking through the crowd toward something up front. Godwin said, “It's show time.”
    Ruby kissed my cheek and left me for her place behind e music stands. Quent was already sitting on his stool, running over script pages, lips moving as he read.
    I sat down in a folding chair in the back row and waited, trying to guess Ruby’s additional news. I might have got it, too, if not for the smell of grilled beef in the air.
    Also there was suddenly a tapping on my shoulder.
    I swiveled around in my chair and looked up at King Kong Kowalski.
    “Bad news,” Kowalski said. He was chewing on a hamburger wrapped in a yellow sheet of McDonald’s waxed paper. And how did he know where to find me? “I’m talking real freaking bad.”

Twenty-eight

    “ Y ou’re saying nobody could of got through the front door?” Kowalski asked the group of women assembled in the dining room. Webster and Matson were out back, shining flashlights around the garden where the struggle had taken place. A forensics unit was dusting for prints in the kitchen, where they had also taken the Glenlivit bottle and glass from the dining room.
    “This here’s a shelter, Sergeant,” one of the women said. “It’s where we run to so we can get away from all this kind of violent man-type shit...” She stopped, and broke into weeping. Two women closed around her, patting her back.
    “We all of us got three kind of keys to get in and out of the shelter,” another woman said. She held up a jangling chain for Kowalski to see.
    “Anybody try breaking through the door, there’s supposed to be a silent alarm go off at the police station,” someone else said. “So whyn’t you be telling us if the guy come through the front or not.”
    “Back door’s wired up, too,” the first woman said. “So’s the windows. Sister Roberta, she had to open up that ack door to somebody she know.”
    There was general agreement on this point.
    “And you were all gone out of the house at the time?”
    Kowalski asked. He was reading questions from a list he had dashed off on a pad, checking them off as he asked them.
    “Yeah, just like we say. Some got jobs, some got counseling downtown. All of us got errands to do, people to see. You know.”
    “Now, when everybody came home this afternoon—”
    “Marie, she was the one who found her like that.”
    “Marie—?”
    “I got to tell you again?”
    “Please.”
    “All right, it’s my night in the galley,” Marie explained. “So I get home after working, and I go upstairs to my room like everybody else. Only I don’t get the chance to lie down for a nap like everybody else. Only got time to wash my face, then I go down to the kitchen to start up the dinner.”
    “That’s when you found Sister?”
    “Not right off. I set the kettles to boil, and I take out the salad things and put them on the chopping block to prep. I don’t know why, but I never thought nothing of that back door being swung open like it was.”
    “Anyway,” Kowalski said, “the next thing you did, you walked out back in the garden?”
    “First, I notice the