Page 65 of Hanging and Burning

“Called himself Randy and was dealin’ in powder,” Fracas said on a sneer. “Big B had to straighten him out a few times.”

“You think they’re there now?”

“Nah, Joe. He’d been stayin’ in a room he let from Mama Day. She was this old Jamaican lady who would rent out her extra bedroom to people, you know, by the week. One day Randy took Mama to the doctor, and she never came back. A few weeks ago, we got the death notice from the city, and we been goin’ through the eviction process so that her people could move in.”

“Was she murdered?” I asked.

“Naw,” Brawl said. “The cause of death was congestive heart disease. At least that’s what the doctor’s report said.”

“We was prepared for a long drawn-out thing,” Fracas added, still talking about the eviction. “But then they just moved out one day, about two weeks ago.”

“At the same time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Somebody else in there?” I asked.

Fracas escorted me up to the seventeenth floor of building 32, where the dead man had been staying, temporarily.

The place was a mess. Food containers and empty bottles, dust, all kinds of litter, and dirty clothes strewn around too. There was a strong musty odor that pervaded. Fracas opened a sliding window and used a chair to hold the door wide in order to get a cross draft.

She was the opposite of her younger brother. Maybe forty-two, she was short with dark features, olive skin, and brown eyes. Her movements were deft and precise, and I believed that if I was ever looking for a partner in the detective business, she would be the first one I’d ask.

Detritus everywhere, I was afloat and adrift on some useless ocean. There were a few notes scrawled on tattered sheets of paper. Shopping lists, names and phone numbers, and some abbreviations that made no sense to me.

There was a wadded-up washcloth on the floor in the bathroom that had been soaked through with blood that was now dried and black.

I was carrying the rag, wrapped up in a bath towel, into the living room where I was showing it to my friend, when there came a knock on the open front door.

“Randy?” a young woman called.

“No, Lucy Reynolds, not Randy but me,” Fracas said, almost as if in warning.

“Oh.” Wearing a loose calico dress that had never been dyed, the young woman had tawny brown skin and a voluptuous body with a contradictorily thin face. “Hi, Miss Pickering. I heard some noise down here and I thought that Randy might be back. He said he hoped he had to go to California for only a few days.”

“You know that fentanyl gonna kill you one day, child,” was somehow Fracas’s response to what Lucy said.

“I know.” The young woman looked down at the floor, but she didn’t seem contrite. It was more likely, I thought, that she was looking for something specific.

“Did you know Randy’s friend?” I asked, reaching for the name. “Tina Marie?”

“Mm-hmm,” Lucy hummed, none too happy with the owner of that name.

“Did she go with Randy out west?”

“She left him the minute he got the eviction notice.” Lucy was still scanning the floor, searching for the pill or powder that would one day end her life.

“Did they have some kind of fight up in here?” Fracas asked pointedly. “There’s blood on this rag from the toilet.”

“Randy got in a fight the day before he went out to Cali,” Lucy said on a nod.

“Drug business?” I speculated.

“He said somebody was after him. I think maybe that’s why he left.”

“Did he say who he’d been fighting with?”

“Just that it had something to do with his girlfriend’s godmother.”