The Accidental Detective

have been one of its first black residents and he would have been denied entrance to the amusement park only a few blocks from his house. Now the neighborhood was more black than white, but still middle-class.
    A tiny woman answered the door to Mr. Harrison’s bungalow, her eyes bright and curious.
    “Mrs. Harrison?”
    “Miss.” There was a note of reprimand for Tess’s assumption.
    “My name is Tess Monaghan. I met your brother two nights ago in the, um, fracas.”
    “Oh, he felt so bad about that. He said it was shameful, how the only person who wanted to help him was a girl. He found it appalling.”
    She drew out the syllables of the last word as if it gave her some special pleasure.
    “It was so unfair what happened to him. And then this mix-up with the warrant …”
    The bright catlike eyes narrowed a bit. “What do you mean by ‘mix-up’?”
    “Mr. Harrison just doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of man who could kill someone.”
    “Well, he says he was.” Spoken matter-of-factly, as if the topic were the weather or something else of little consequence. “I knew nothing about it, of course. The warrant or the murder.”
    “Of course,” Tess agreed. This woman did not look like someone who had been burdened with a loved one’s secret for four decades. Where her brother was stooped and grave, she had the regal posture of a short woman intent on using every inch given her. But there was something blithe, almost gleeful, beneath her dignity. Did she not like her brother?
    “It was silly of William”—she stretched the name out, giving it a grand, growling pronunciation,
Will-yum
—“to tell his story and sign the statement, without even talking to a lawyer. I told him to wait, to see what they said, but he wouldn’t.”
    “But if you knew nothing about it …”
    “Nothing about it until two nights ago,” Miss Harrison clarified. That was the word that popped into Tess’s head, “clarified,” and she wondered at it. Clarifications were what people made when things weren’t quite right.
    “And were you shocked?”
    “Oh, he had a temper when he was young. Anything was possible.”
    “Is your brother at home?”
    “He’s at work. We still have to eat, you know.” Now she sounded almost angry. “He didn’t think of that, did he, when he decided to be so noble. I told him, this house may be paid off, but we still have to eat and buy gas for my car. Did you know they cut your Social Security off when you go to prison?”
    Tess did not. She had relatives who were far from pure, but they had managed to avoid doing time. So far.
    “Well,” Miss Harrison said, “they do. But Will-yum didn’t think of that, did he? Men are funny that way. They’re so determined to be gallant”—again, the word was spoken with great pleasure, the tone of a child trying to be grand—“that they don’t think things through. He may feel better, but what about me?”
    “Do you have no income, then?”
    “I worked as a laundress. You don’t get a pension for being a laundress. My brother, however, was a custodian for Social Security, right here in Woodlawn.”
    “I thought he shined shoes.”
    “Yes, now.” Miss Harrison was growing annoyed with Tess. “But not always. William was enterprising, even as a young man. He worked as a custodian at Social Security, which is why he has Social Security. But he took on odd jobs, shined shoes. He hates to be idle. He won’t like prison, no matter what he thinks.”
    “He did odd jobs for the man he killed, right?”
    “Some. Not many. Really, hardly any at all. They barely knew each other.”
    Miss Harrison seemed to think this mitigated the crime somehow, that the superficiality of the relationship excused her brother’s deed.
    “Police always thought it was a burglary?” Tess hoped her tone would invite a confidence, or at least another clarification.
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That, too. Things were taken. Everyone knew that.”
    “So you were familiar with the case, but not your brother’s connection to it?”
    “Well, I knew the man. Maurice Dickman. We lived in the neighborhood, after all. And people talked, of course. It was a big deal, murder, forty years ago. Not the happenstance that it’s become. But he was a showy man. He thought awfully well of himself, because he had money and a business. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made such a spectacle of himself and then no one would have tried to steal from him. You know what the