It was a plain-looking bungalow-style house on Forty-Sixth Street a few blocks west of McKinley Avenue. The siding was composed of dingy, overlapping, lime-colored aluminum slats. The roof was flat and the front door open behind a closed screen. The lawn was mostly bare earth sporting a few swaths of dying St. Augustine grass. No tree or even a bush afforded any shade from the relentless summer sun.

I was half the way to the screen when a small boy appeared from nowhere and shot me four times with a silver-painted plastic cap pistol.

“Bang, bang!” the boy yelled.

I heard a giggle and then saw, off to the left, a girl-child, maybe four, two years younger than her brother.

“Is your father home?” I asked the grinning girl.

She had six pigtails with five yellow ribbons and one blue one tying them off at the ends. She was barefoot in a stained but still bright red dress. She shrugged her little shoulders in an exaggerated fashion saying either that her father wasn’t home, or she didn’t know if he was home, or maybe she didn’t understand what I was saying.

“Daddy’s in jail,” the boy shouted.

Before I could turn and ask the little assassin if his father was named Dennis Plennery a gruff woman’s voice asked, “Who you talkin’ to out here, Theodore?”

The screen door slammed open and a young light-skinned woman came out. Looking at her I imagined that Dennis must have been fairly dark because the boy and girl were the dusky color of pecans.

“Alan Fredericks,” I said to the sensibly protective mother.

“Penny,” she snapped at the girl. “Get in the house and put on your tennis shoes.”

The little girl laughed, skipping behind her mother and into the house.

The boy, Theodore, was moving around the edges of the yard, shooting his cap gun at phantoms.

“Am I supposed to know you?” the mother dared me.

“I was Ketch’s friend,” I said. “His mother called me to the hospital.”

“Hospital why?”

“He was stabbed. He’s dead.”

She wanted to ask more, but the reality of death stopped her.

“Fredericks, you said?”

“Alan,” I agreed.

“My name’s Corrine.” She took a step forward to offer a hand. “Why don’t you come in, Alan.”

“No, Mama,” the little cowboy protested. “He dead. He have to stay out here an’ play with me.”

The house was larger and more substantial than I expected. The wide living room had buff-colored shag carpeting and ornate sea-green furniture. The coffee table sported a dozen or so small standup frames containing photographs of Corrine and her family. That was the first time I saw Dennis Plennery. Tall and gawky, he held himself like Clark Gable with Corrine playing the role of some starlet on his arm. He was dark-skinned, as I had imagined, topped off with a bushy mustache.