IT’S—WHAT? BEGINNING OF April? Eleven o’clock at night, eleven-thirty maybe. Chick I know is over, we’re making out, watching some show on the tube, nothing special. My old man and my old lady off at the track. Jimmy comes in, doesn’t knock or nothing. I remember because I had my hand down Charlene’s shirt right around then and I was working on the ground floor. He interrupted the mood, you might say.
“We’re in deep shit, man,” he says to me. “Cops came round asking all about Larry Maretto. Guy said they aren’t buying the burglary angle. Said people at school are saying we hung out with her. Asked what I knew.”
“So what did you tell him?” I want to know.
“Nothing,” he says. “You think I’m crazy?” But he’s worried. Once they start sniffing around there’s no telling what could happen.
“Look,” I say. “They’ve been looking into this thing for weeks now and if they don’t have a thing by now, what are they going to come up with? We got rid of the gloves, right? Nobody seen us, nobody seen Lydia take the gun. We’re cool.”
Jimmy says the cop wanted to know how he liked Mrs. Maretto. “She’s real pretty isn’t she, Jim?” he says. “I never noticed,” says Jimmy. Yeah, right. “Anyways, she’s old.”
“I hear you’re quite the TV star,” says the cop. “You really bared your soul to Mrs. Maretto on that tape of hers. Anything else you bared while you were at it?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” says Jimmy.
“All’s I’m saying,” says the cop, “is I suppose you had to spend quite a bit of time with Mrs. Maretto, working on an in-depth piece of journalism like that.”
“A little,” Jimmy tells the cop. “Not that much. It was more Lydia.”
“Well then I guess we better go talk to Lydia,” says the cop. And that’s when we get worried.