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“Looks like you got a friend. Can’t be too careful these days.”

I turned and saw the angry young white man whose fists were still crying out for satisfaction.

I gave Mel an abbreviated account of what had happened.

“Wait here,” he said, and then he strolled over to Junior.

A few sentences passed between them, and Mel took out a cell phone. He entered something, said something, and then handed Junior the phone. The younger man had a brief conversation at the end of which he shook his head as if indicating to whomever he was speaking that he did not wish whatever had been suggested. Then he gave Mel back his cell, turned, and hightailed it to whatever bar he used to assuage his feelings of inferiority and loss.

We walked fourteen blocks from the train station to the church and didn’t speak until we were both seated in a kitchen set behind where the choir once praised God.

“Yeah, sometimes it’s like that” were Mel’s first words to me.

“Like what?”

“Sometimes there’s just a black cloud over your head. If there’s trouble anywhere near, it will come to you first.”

“Like your red bird.”

Mel smiled.

“What did you say to Junior?” I asked just to be talking.

“I called a guy named Genaro. He’s one of the connected guys on the island. He told Junior to climb back in his hole.”

“Genaro knows you’re here?”

“On the island. I got an apartment on the water in Saint George.”

“There was this guy on the train,” I said. “Junior called him Ernesto.”

“Used to be an enforcer in the fifties and sixties,” Mel said, nodding.

“Now he just rides the trains?”

“It’s a peaceful life out here,” he said, and we both laughed.

Mel made a tomato sauce with chicken thighs and hot peppers, which he poured over vermicelli. With that we had sweetened Chianti and a salad that any French chef would have been proud of.

I told Mel about the kidnapping and Antrobus, also about Inspector Dennis Natches and how he might have something to do with the frame that bounced me out of my profession.

“You’re still a detective,” he pointed out.

“But I’m not a cop.”

“Yeah,” Mel admitted. “When pretty high school girls grow up they’re no longer cheerleaders, but they’re still pretty girls.”

He poured me some more wine and I considered the odd comparison.

“But tell me something, King.”

“What’s that?”

“Does Braun have anything to do with Natches?”

It was then I told him about both of the cases I was on. He listened quite closely, nodding now and again.

“Now, let me get this right,” he said when I had finished. “You’re trying to prove a conspiracy against this Free Man?”