“Don’t you even bring up Howard Beach.”

“ and it gets treated like a national tragedy. Which it is. But,” I said, “a white kid in Fenway gets stabbed eighteen times by black kids, and no one says a goddamn thing. ‘Racial’ never comes into it. It’s off the front page the next day, and it’s filed as homicide. No racial incident. You tell me, Richie, what the fuck is that?”

He was staring at me, holding his hand a foot in front of him, then moving it to his head where it massaged his neck, then down onto the desk, where he looked at it, not sure what to do with it. He started to speak a couple of times. Stopped. Eventually, he said quietly, but almost in a hiss, “Those three black kids killed the white boy, you think they’ll do hard time?”

He had me there.

“Huh?” he said. “Come on. Tell the truth.”

I said, “Of course. Unless they get a good lawyer, get ”

“No. No lawyers. No technicality bullshit. If they go to trial and it reaches jury, will they be convicted? Will they end up doing twenty to life, maybe worse?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, they will.”

“And if some white guys killed a black guy and it wasn’t, let’s pretend, called a racial incident, if it wasn’t considered a tragedy, what then?”

I nodded.

“What then?”

“There’s a better chance they’d get off.”

“Damn right,” he said and dropped back into the chair.

“But, Richie,” I said, “that sort of logic is beyond the average guy on the street, and you know it. Joe from Southie sees a black death turned into a racial incident, then sees an identical white death called a homicide, and he says, ‘Hey that ain’t right. That’s hypocritical. That’s a double standard.’ He hears about Tawana Brawley, and loses his job to affirmative action, and he gets pissed off.” I looked at him. “Can you blame him?”

He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “Aww, shit, Patrick. I don’t know.” He sat up. “No, OK? I can’t blame the guy. But what’s the alternative?”

I poured myself another shot. “It ain’t Louis Farrakhan.”

“And it ain’t David Duke,” he shot back. “I mean, what we’re supposed to do away with affirmative action quotas, minority grants, racial incident cases?”

I pointed the bottle at him and he leaned forward with his glass. “No,” I said, pouring his drink, “but...” I leaned back. “Damnit, I don’t know.”

He half smiled and leaned back in the chair again, looking out the window. The Peter Gabriel tape had ended and from the street came the sound of the occasional car scooping up air as it hummed past on the asphalt. The breeze coming through the screen had cooled and as it drifted into the room, I felt the weight of the atmosphere dissipating. Somewhat anyway.

“Know what the American way is?” Richie asked, still looking out the window, his elbow up, drink poised halfway to his mouth.