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The old man grinned and nodded.

“I believe it,” he said.

“I’m trying my best. In the meantime, you’re pretty safe in the building, though I’ll get my grandmother to help you change rooms without putting the new one in the system.”

“Don’t you think they’ll put me out if I’m that kind of danger?”

“Her boyfriend would not allow that.”

“He that bad?”

I nodded.

“… Man gets you to hire me to find his granddaughter,” I was saying to Grandma B, needing to complain even though I was fully aware that there was no turning back. “He doesn’t tell you that he’s a suspect in a murder that never happened, that the man who tapped him to kill the woman is a predator of the lowest kind, that his granddaughter is really his daughter, and that the people he ran with are Cosa Nostra or worse. Now this predator is out and might not ever get prosecuted.”

I’d been going on like that for a while.

My grandmother listened patiently, nodding now and then. There was pain in her eyes but not physically. A few months ago, it had been cancer and chemotherapy that made her bones ache. Now it was her heart that throbbed with hurt.

“Joe,” she murmured.

Just that one word was all she had to say. I was torturing her because the war was on, but there was nothing she could do.

“Sorry, B,” I apologized. “I got myself into this. It’s just, I’d love to have an easy way out.”

“You gonna kill him?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Your grandfather had to kill a man one time.”

“In a fight?” I asked, shocked at the revelation.

“Shot him in the back when he was comin’ out of a outhouse in the woods. White man too. His name was Lawrence, Lawrence Steadfast.”

“Why’d granddad kill him?”

“Steadfast had done terrible things to quite a few Black folks. Like this guy you talkin’ ’bout—this Malto man. Your grandfather lived too far away and had never had no mess with the man hisself. He knew that the law would never get that white man and so he did it one morning when all the people that could’a done it was in church. There was even a white minister, a good man, in attendance that day.”

“How’d Grandpa take it?”

“That first night he drunk a quart’a his own moonshine an’ beat his own self with a handful of hickory switches. Blood all ovah everywhere. He was somber for a whole season there. But in the end, he knew…”

“Knew what?”

“That he was wrong but there was nuthin’ else he could do. And, Joe, I want you to know that I will never get you to do my dirty work again.”

That simple vow brought a smile to my face. I hugged my elder with enough strength for her to feel my acceptance of everything that had happened.

33.

MELTON LAMMING AND Kenneth Rouche went missing.

Lamming’s Brentwood manor had a FOR SALE sign affixed to the front of the great hedge that surrounded it. I told Van Arc about his house off Sunset, but that was abandoned too. I wasn’t too worried, however. Twyla, her mother, Mara, and Mara’s daughter Aurilia were safe with Melquarth back on Staten Island. Aja was staying at Roger Ferris’s mansion on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Even Olo had taken a military jet out of California.

I had asked Leaf to go home, but she didn’t want to leave me.

“I’m staying,” she said after giving my request a full ninety seconds of consideration.