بخش 02 - فصل 18

18

The interview room is small and stifling hot, the overhead heating pipes clanking away. Still, it’s probably the nicest one they’ve got, because there’s a little sofa and no perp table with a cuff-bolt sticking out of it like a steel knuckle. The sofa has been mended with tape in a couple of places, and that makes Hodges think of the man Nancy Alderson says she saw on Hilltop Court, the one with the mended coat.

Dereece Neville is sitting on the sofa. In his chino pants and white button-up shirt, he looks neat and squared away. His goatee and gold neck chain are the only real dashes of style. His school jacket is folded over one arm of the sofa. He stands when Hodges and Higgins come in, and offers a long-fingered hand that looks designed expressly for working with a basketball. The pad of the palm has been painted with orange antiseptic.

Hodges shakes with him carefully, mindful of the scrapes, and introduces himself. “You’re in absolutely no trouble here, Mr. Neville. In fact, Barbara Robinson sent me to say thanks and make sure you were okay. She and her family are longtime friends of mine.”

“Is she okay?”

“Broken leg,” Hodges says, pulling over a chair. His hand creeps to his side and presses there. “It could have been a lot worse. I’m betting she’ll be back on the soccer field next year. Sit down, sit down.”

When the Neville boy sits, his knees seem to come almost up to his jawline. “It was my fault, in a way. I shouldn’t have been goofing with her, but she was just so pretty and all. Still . . . I ain’t blind.” He pauses, corrects himself. “Not blind. What was she on? Do you know?”

Hodges frowns. The idea that Barbara might have been high hasn’t crossed his mind, although it should have; she’s a teenager, after all, and those years are the Age of Experimentation. But he has dinner with the Robinsons three or four times a month, and he’s never seen anything in her that registered as drug use. Maybe he’s just too close. Or too old.

“What makes you think she was on something?”

“Just her being down here, for one thing. Those were Chapel Ridge duds she was wearing. I know, because we play em twice every year. Blow em out, too. And she was like in a daze. Standing there on the curb near Mamma Stars, that fortune-telling place, looking like she was gonna walk right out into traffic.” He shrugs. “So I chatted her up, teased her about jaywalking. She got mad, went all Kitty Pryde on my ass. I thought that was cute, so then . . .” He looks at Higgins, then back at Hodges. “This is the fault part, and I’m being straight with you about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Hodges says.

“Well, look—I grabbed her game. Just for a joke, you know. Held it up over my head. I never meant to keep it. So then she kicked me—good hard kick for a girl—and grabbed it back. She sure didn’t look stoned then.”

“How did she look, Dereece?” The switch to the boy’s first name is automatic.

“Oh, man, mad! But also scared. Like she just figured out where she was, on a street where girls like her—ones in private school uniforms—don’t go, especially by themselves. MLK Ave? Come on, I mean bitch, please.” He leans forward, long-fingered hands clasped between his knees, face earnest. “She didn’t know I was just playing, you see what I mean? She was like in a panic, get me?”

“I do,” Hodges says, and although he sounds engaged (at least he hopes so), he’s on autopilot for the moment, stuck on what Neville has just said: I grabbed her game. Part of him thinks it can’t be connected to Ellerton and Stover. Most of him thinks it must be, it’s a perfect fit. “That must have made you feel bad.”

Neville raises his scratched palms toward the ceiling in a philosophical gesture that says What can you do? “It’s this place, man. It’s the Low. She stopped being on cloud nine and realized where she was, is all. Me, I’m getting out as soon as I can. While I can. Gonna play Div I, keep my grades up so I can get a good job afterward if I ain’t—aren’t—good enough to go pro. Then I’m getting my family out. It’s just me and my mom and my two brothers. My mom’s the only reason I’ve got as far as I have. She ain’t never let none of us play in the dirt.” He replays what he just said and laughs. “She heard me say ain’t never, she be in my face.”

Hodges thinks, Kid’s too good to be true. Except he is. Hodges is sure of it, and doesn’t like to think what might have happened to Jerome’s kid sister if Dereece Neville had been in school today.

Higgins says, “You were wrong to be teasing that girl, but I have to say you made it right. Will you think about what almost happened if you get an urge to do something like that again?”

“Yes, sir, I sure will.”

Higgins holds a hand up. Rather than slap it, Neville taps it gently, with a slightly sarcastic smile. He’s a good kid, but this is still Lowtown, and Higgins is still po-po.

Higgins stands. “Are we good to go, Detective Hodges?”

Hodges nods his appreciation at the use of his old title, but he isn’t quite finished. “Almost. What kind of game was it, De­reece?”

“Old-school.” No hesitation. “Like a Game Boy, but my little brother had one of those—Mom got it in a rumble sale, or whatever they call those things—and the one the girl had wasn’t the same. It was bright yellow, I know that. Not the kind of color you’d expect a girl to like. Not the ones I know, at least.”

“Did you happen to see the screen?”

“Just a glance. It was a bunch of fish swimming around.”

“Thanks, Dereece. How sure are you that she was high? On a scale of one to ten, ten being absolutely positive.”

“Well, say five. I would’ve said ten when I walked up to her, because she acted like she was going to walk right out into the street, and there was a bigass truck coming, a lot bigger than the panel job that come along behind and whumped her. I was thinking not coke or meth or molly, more something mellow, like ecstasy or pot.”

“But when you started goofing with her? When you took her game?”

Dereece Neville rolls his eyes. “Man, she woke up fast.”

“Okay,” Hodges says. “All set. And thank you.”

Higgins adds his thanks, then he and Hodges start toward the door.

“Detective Hodges?” Neville is on his feet again, and Hodges practically has to crane his neck to look at him. “You think if I wrote down my number, you could give it to her?”

Hodges thinks it over, then takes his pen from his breast pocket and hands it to the tall boy who probably saved Barbara Robinson’s life.