Manhattan Is My Beat

front of Robert Kelly’s building, turned. The woman she’d met in the entryway, the woman with the bag of cans, was standing unsteadily on the stoop, arms crossed, tears running down her face.
    They’d just brought the old man’s body out. Rune had started to leave, after Manelli returned to the apartment, but then she’d decided to stay. She wasn’t sure why.
    “Your name’s Amanda?”
    The woman wiped her face with a paper towel and nodded. “That’s right. How you know?”
    “The cops mentioned it. I’m Rune.”
    “Rune …” She spoke absently.
    Other tenants had come downstairs, gossiped about the shooting, then returned to their rooms or headed up the street.
    The two detectives left. Manelli said, “Good-bye.” The captain hadn’t even glanced at her.
    Amanda cried some more.
    Unable to stop herself, Rune cried too. Wiped her face with the tail of the shirt again.
    “How you know him?” Amanda had an accent, Rune decided, that sounded like a female Bob Marley’s. Low and sexy.
    “From the video store. Washington Square Video. Where he rented movies.”
    Amanda looked at her like a VCR and renting movies were a luxury she couldn’t even imagine.
    Rune asked, “How’d
you
know him?”
    “Neighbors. Met him when he move in, a month ago. But we got close real fast. What it was, about Robert, he
talk
to you. Nobody else here talk to you. He always ask about my kids, ask where I came from. You know … So hard to find somebody who just likes to listen.”
    Amen, Rune thought.
    “He asked me a lot about me too. But he no say much about himself.”
    “Yeah, that’s true. He never seemed to like to talk about the past.”
    “I no believe this happen. What do you think it was? Why somebody do this?”
    Rune shrugged. “Drugs, I’ll bet. Around here … What else?”
    “I no understand why they kill him. He wasn’t no threat. If they want to rob him they could take it and just let him be. Why kill?”
    Murder’s crazy
…
    “He so nice,” Amanda continued, speaking softly. “So nice. When I have problems with the landlord, problems with INS, Mr. Kelly help me out. I only know him one month but he write letters for me. He real smart.” More tears. “What’m I gonna do?”
    Rune put her arm around the woman.
    “He help me with my rent. The INS, they took my check. My paycheck. I working but they took my check. I applied for the card, you know. I was trying to do it right, I no cheat nobody or anything. But they wouldn’t let me have any money…. But Mr. Kelly, he lend me money for the rent. What’m I gonna do now?”
    “They going to send you back home?”
    She shrugged.
    “Where’s that?” Rune asked. “Home?”
    “I
come
from the Dominican Republic,” Amanda said, then added defiantly, “but
this
is my home now. New York City is my home….” She looked back at the building. “Why they kill somebody like him? There’re so many bad people out there, so many people with bad hearts. Why they kill somebody like Robert?”
    There was no answer for that, of course.
    “I have to go,” Rune said.
    Amanda nodded, wiped her eyes with the shredding paper towel. “Thank you.”
    Rune asked, “For what?”
    “Waiting till they take him away. To say good-bye. That was good of you. That was very good.”

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Near quitting time, Tony came back to the store.
    “So where the hell were you this afternoon?”
    “I needed to clear my head,” Rune told him.
    Tony snickered. “That’d take more than one afternoon.”
    “Tony, no crap.
Por favor
.”
    He dropped his backpack in front of the counter and dodged around a cardboard cutout of Sylvester Stallone, who brandished a large cardboard gun. He checked the receipts. “You should’ve argued with the cop. Christ, that tape … it’s over a hundred bucks wholesale.”
    “I gave you the name of the cop to talk to, you want,” she shot back. “It’s not
my
job. You’re the manager.”
    “Yeah, well, at least you should’ve come back after. Frankie Greek was here by himself. He gets overloaded when he’s got to work by himself.”
    She said in a low voice, “He gets overloaded when he has to tie his shoes by himself.”
    Frankie, a scrawny aspiring rock star and high school dropout, had long, curly hair and reminded Rune of the poodle on the pink skirt she’d bought last week at Second-Hand Rose, a vintage clothing store on Broadway. He was in the back room at the moment.
    “Well, where
were
you?”