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“Lot of ladies on the block ask him for help,” said Mrs. Bird, with a note of pride. “He’s the neighborhood tech guy.”
“So where did she buy this computer?” asked Frost.
“I found her one on eBay. It was a pretty sweet deal. A 2012 MacBook Air for a hundred fifty bucks. The graphics didn’t matter to her, and I figured four gigabytes of memory was all she needed. She was just gonna use it for research.”
Frost jotted in his notebook. “So, a MacBook Air, 2012…”
“Thirteen point three inches diagonal. One point eight gigahertz Intel Core—”
“Hold on, you’re going too fast. Let me get this all down.”
“How ’bout I just print up the technical specs for you?” Jamal turned to his computer and tapped on the keyboard, pulling up the information. Seconds later, his printer whirred to life and a sheet of paper rolled out. “It was silver,” he added.
“And you said it was only a hundred fifty dollars?” said Jane.
“Yeah, she had the winning bid, and the seller had good ratings. When she got it, I went over there and helped set up her Wi-Fi too.”
“Gee,” said Jane. “I could use someone like you on speed dial.”
For the first time Jamal smiled, but it was a tentative smile. He didn’t yet trust them. Maybe he never really would.
Mrs. Bird said: “Some of the ladies do pay him, you know. So his help wouldn’t come free.”
“But I never asked Sofia to pay me,” said Jamal. “She was gonna give me some tamales instead.”
“That woman, she cooked some mighty fine tamales,” said Mrs. Bird.
The tamales that never got made, thought Jane. Sometimes it was small things, like tamales, that bound a neighborhood together.
“What about her cell phone, Jamal?” asked Frost. “You remember it?”
Jamal frowned. “Is that missing too?”
“Yes.”
“Weird. ’Cause it’s just some old Android she had forever. She was having trouble surfing on it, ’cause of her eyesight. That’s why she needed the laptop for her research.”
“What kind of research?”
“She was trying to track down some old newspaper articles. That’s hard to do on a little phone when your eyes aren’t good.”
Frost flipped to a new page in his notebook and kept writing. “So it was an old Android. What color?”
“I know it had a blue case with all these tropical fish on it. She liked fish.”
“Blue case with tropical fish. Okay,” said Frost and he closed the notebook. “Thank you.”
Jamal heaved out a sigh, clearly relieved the interrogation was over. Except it wasn’t. There was one more question Jane had to ask.
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Jamal,” she said. “But I need to be thorough. Can you tell us where you were last night, around midnight?”
In an instant, a cloud seemed to pass over his face. With that one question, she’d just destroyed any trust they’d built with him.
“I knew it,” Mrs. Bird snapped in disgust. “Why do you want to go asking that? That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? To accuse him?”
“No, ma’am. This is a completely routine question.”
“It’sneverroutine. You’re looking for a reason to blame my son and he’d never hurt Sofia. He liked her. We all did.”
