When the Detectives Came
Buddy answered the door when the detectives came. He was nearly nineteen and his father, Budd Sr., had been Irene’s most loved, oldest brother. Budd Sr.’s been dead since Buddy was twelve; now Buddy is nearing ninety, but he remembers detectives on the front stoop of Grandmother Olive’s St. Felix Street rooming house.
“The door stood open,” he tells us, “open enough so’s they could see in. I had my hands full — a glass of milk and a sandwich. There was a pickle on the floor.”
The “us” he tells is mainly Karin. She’s a cousin from California with straight white hair and about as big around as a pencil. She isn’t Buddy’s first cousin, but she is the daughter of one. Louis. Sweet baby Louis, who was the son of Alex and Lovie. Alex, the youngest of Irene’s siblings and the one who wielded the whistle back in the day.
“Did I say there was a black and white Packard parked at the curb?” he asks. He would ride to Hell’s Kitchen in the Packard, but mostly Buddy doesn’t mention the car. He tells about the two dark-suited men, the persistently even vapors around the head of the thin note-taker and the bursts of breaths from the jowly one with the demands. “It was cold, you know,” Buddy says, “the way January gets. No snow, but mean-mean cold. But I didn’t invite them in.”
Other times, when Buddy tells us about that day, he doesn’t remember a sandwich with pickles, one pickle dropped to fill out the hexagonal shape of the foyer’s tiny tiles. Karin sometimes prods him, offers prompts: “You remember? Your hands were full with the milk and the sandwich with the ham, how it was slipping off the rye.” But when Buddy can’t remember, he can’t. He pulls a long face, sighs, adds a hopeful grin, tells Karin: “Any story about sandwiches and pickles was just a reason, an excuse, for leaving those detectives to shiver on the brownstone’s stoop.”
He says, “I just made that up. When are you gonna learn to stop trusting every word I tell you?” He has said this to Karin more than once and will probably say so again.
Karin says, “I think news that Irene might be dead would account for any failure on your part, Buddy, to invite them inside.”
“I don’t think I got it. I don’t think what they told me sunk in, not really. It’s one thing to hear there’s a dead body. It’s a whole other thing to see that body. It wasn’t her. Fixed on her side like that. Not the right color at all.”
