AN HOUR OR so later I still worked over the Thomas Guide making notations right on the map book.
From outside, Ned said, “Coming in.”
You never walked, unannounced, into someone’s house. Not in the ghetto. His feet clumped on the wooden steps. He appeared in the doorway, his hair a little disheveled, and lacking the famous Ned smile.
“Sorry I’m late picking up Beth.”
I put the pencil down next to my revolver on the table. “I told you she could stay as long as you needed her to. Come on in, have a seat.”
He came in the rest of the way and sat across from me, automatically facing the open door. His eyes looked a little bloodshot, and an odor of beer followed him in, and filled the room removing the softness from the scent of warmed milk and Olivia.
I reached in my pocket, took out a wad of twenties, and slid it across the table to him. “I stopped at the ATM on the way home tonight. If you need more than that, I’ll go to the bank in the morning. Just tell me how much you need.”
“What’s this for?” He picked up the money.
“Don’t play me, Ned. Something’s going on. You stormed out of the office this afternoon. And I gotta tell ya, I wouldn’t talk to Wicks like that again. He’s got a long fuse when it comes to his men, but when he goes off, he really goes off.”
He tossed the money on the table. “You think this is all about money?”
“I don’t know what it’s about. You won’t let me in, and I’m kinda gettin’ angry about it.”
His voice went up a little. “Oh, I see. This morning when you asked for my fed money, I’m shy forty bucks. So now it’s that old warning they drilled into us at the academy, ‘watch out for the deadly three Bs: booze, broads, and bills.’ And you think it’s the bills running me down. Keep your money, Bruno, my friend, and thanks for the offer.”
“If it’s not money, then what is it?”
He kind of stared off, his eyes going a little blank, in a semi-trance.
I watched him.
He finally said, “You ever think about Olivia? I mean, who would take care of her if something happened to you?”
“Sure, all the time. What brought this on?”
“What? Oh, something that happened on patrol in Lakewood. I never used to let those old calls bother me, but they come back on me now, more and more, since I have Beth to think about.”
“Sometimes it’s better to talk about it instead of keeping it all bottled up.”
He nodded, still not looking at me. “I don’t think so.”
“Try me.”
He shrugged, still not fully engaged. “It was a call of a med aide, ‘man down.’ This guy, about thirty years old, a dumbshit, really, for not turning off the electricity in his emptied pool before he changed out the light. Electrocuted himself. He was dead. This left his five-year-old son there by himself. The poor kid didn’t know what to do. He only knew that when someone was hurt you put a Band-Aid on it.” Ned turned to look at me, his eyes vacant as if he relived it. “When I got there, the dead dad was laying in the bottom of the empty pool, with Band-Aids all over his face and arms.”
I hadn’t been present at the call Ned described, but it resounded deep inside me.
Dad wandered into the living room and broke the spell from the story. He stood in his pajamas, sleep heavy in his expression. “What’s going on?” He rubbed his right eye with a fist.
“Nothing, Dad. Sorry, we didn’t mean to wake you a second time.” I looked at Ned. “Me and Ned are just reviewing what we’re going to do tomorrow.”
Dad said to Ned, “Hey, I wanted to talk to you about Beth.”
Ned took a couple of steps closer to Dad. “Is something wrong with her?”
“Maybe it’s nothing, but she seems more skittish than a little girl should be. She spooks real easy.”
“I haven’t noticed anything like that, but then I’m not real used to having a little girl around. You think it’s something important? Should I do something?”
“Like I said, it might be nothing. We’ll just keep an eye on her for now, okay?”
“Sure, you know better than I do, so I’ll defer to your experience. And thanks again, Mr. Johnson, for helping me out with her.”
He waved off the gratitude and came further into the kitchen. He looked at the map book on the table and saw my more recent notations. “That’s our neighborhood. Son, who are you hunting this time? Is it someone we know?”
Ned said, “We’re looking for a girlfriend of a bank robber.” Ned turned to me. “Hey, did your informant come through with a name?”
“No, after you left, Ollie called me back. She only caught a whisper on the street. A big maybe is all she could get for us. She got a possible first name, that’s it, and it’s paper-thin at best. She gave me ‘Bea,’ as in Bea Arthur, like the actress, or bee, like the insect. Don’t know which. Now we have to go door to door to find her, so we can get her real name. It’s a long shot. She might not even be the girlfriend of the Bogart Bandit.”
Dad leaned over and squinted. He put his finger on the map. “Bea lives right there just off of Mona, 1500 block of 115th.”
My mouth sagged open in awe. Dad could do that to me, right out of the blue, step up and make my world just a little easier. He’d been doing that since I was a kid. Way back, I started calling it daddy magic.
“Son of a bitch,” Ned said.
“Watch your language, Ned,” Dad said, “we got children in the house.”
“Sorry.”
“Dad, you really know a Bea who lives in this area?”
“Just said I did, didn’t I? Nice little gal, everyone calls her—”
“Honeybee?” I said.
“That’s right, that’s the one.”
The skin on my back and neck prickled at the confirmation and the abrupt shift in the situation.
Dad said, “But she doesn’t live there anymore. Her mama doesn’t know where she got off to. Ran away with some street gangster. It’s really sad. Her mama thinks she’s pregnant. That’s why she took off, ran away from family and friends who are just tryin’ to help her. Thinks she went somewhere south, maybe Moreno Valley or Hemet. Somewhere like that.”
“Do you know her last name?”
With his knuckles, he knocked on my head. “’Course I do, Son. I’m a mailman, remember? They call her Honeybee Holcomb. Bea Holcomb.”