The Twelfth Card

sometime.”
    “You . . .?” Bell asked.
    “Ou’ kin, Charles. I feel him. Like the other haints.”
    Haint . . . Bell knew the word from North Carolina. An old black term for ghost.
    “He restless, I’m feeling,” the great-aunt said.
    “I don’t know about that,” her grandniece said with a smile.
    No, Bell thought, Geneva hardly seemed like the sort who’d believe in ghosts or anything supernatural. The detective, though, wasn’t so sure. He said, “Well, maybe what we’re doing here’ll bring him some rest.”
    “You know,” the woman said, pushing her thick glasses higher on her nose, “you that interested in Charles, there some other relations of ou’s round the country. You ’member yo’ father’s cousin in Madison? And his wife, Ruby? I could call him an’ ask. Or Genna-Louise in Memphis. Or I would, only I don’t have no phone of my own.” A glance at the old Princess model sitting on a TV table near the kitchen, her grim expression evidence of past disputes with the woman she was staying with. The great-aunt added, “And phone cards, they be so expensive.”
    “ We could call, Auntie.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t mind talking to some of ’em. Been a while. Miss having family around.”
    Bell dug into his jeans pocket. “Ma’am, since thisis something Geneva and I’re working on together, let me get you a phone card.”
    “No.” This was from Geneva. “I’ll do it.”
    “You don’t—”
    “I’ve got it,” she said firmly, and Bell put the money away. She gave the woman a twenty.
    The great-aunt looked reverently at the bill, said, “I’ma get me that card and call today.”
    Geneva said, “If you find out anything, call us again at that number you called before.”
    “Why’s the police all interested in Charles? Man musta died a hundred years ago, at least.”
    Geneva caught Bell’s eye and shook her head; the woman hadn’t heard that Geneva was in danger, and the niece wanted to keep it that way. Through her Coke-bottle lenses the woman didn’t catch the look. Geneva said, “They’re helping me prove he didn’t commit that crime he was accused of.”
    “Are they now? After all them years?”
    Bell wasn’t sure the woman exactly believed her niece. The detective’s own aunt, about this woman’s age, was sharp as a needle. Nothing got by her.
    But Lilly said, “Be right nice of y’all. Bella, let’s make these folk some coffee. And cocoa for Geneva. I remember that’s what she likes.”
    As Roland Bell looked out carefully through a space between the drawn curtains, Geneva started through the box once again.
    *   *   *
    On this Harlem street:
    Two boys tried to outdo each other at skateboarding down the tall banister of a brownstone, flaunting the laws both of gravity and of truancy.
    A black woman stood on a porch, watering somespectacular red geraniums that the recent frost hadn’t killed.
    A squirrel buried, or dug up, something in the largest plot of dirt nearby: a five-by-four-foot rectangle dusted with yellow grass, in the middle of which rested the carcass of a washing machine.
    And on East 123rd Street, near the Iglesia Adventista Church, with the soaring approach to the Triborough Bridge in the background, three police officers looked diligently out over a shabby brownstone and the surrounding streets. Two—a man and a woman—were in plain clothes; the cop in the alley was in uniform. He marched up and down the alley like a recruit on guard duty.
    These observations were made by Thompson Boyd, who’d followed Geneva Settle and her guards here and was now standing in a boarded-up building across the street and several doors west. He peered through the cracks in a defaced billboard advertising home equity loans.
    Curious that they’d brought the girl out into the open. Not by the book. But that was their problem.
    Thompson considered the logistics: He assumed this was a short trip—a hit-and-run, so to speak, with the Crown Victoria and the other car double-parked and no attempt made to hide them. He decided to move fast to take advantage of the situation. Hurrying out of the ruined building, via the back door, Thompson now circled the block, pausing only long enough to buy a pack of cigarettes in a bodega. Easing into the alley behind the tenement where Geneva now was, Thompson peered out. He carefully set the shopping bag on the asphalt and moved forward a few more feet. Hiding behind a pile of garbage bags, he watched the blond