The center wasn’t much, but it was our hangout. It had a gym, but the ceiling was too low for shots from more than twenty feet away. You’d even hit the ceiling from fifteen feet if you didn’t flatten out your shot. You could always tell a guy that had learned his ball in the center, because they all had this line-drive jumper. There were four keys to the office. I had one, and Paul, Ox, and Breeze had the other three. We kept records, magazines, extra sneakers, and that kind of stuff in the office. We also had a rusty .32 with a broken handle that we were always threatening each other with. But the thing that made the office special was that Ox kept his parakeet, that he had named Sparrow, there. The parakeet couldn’t talk, but we had got into the habit of saying “Hi” to the bird whenever we went into the office. There was a telephone in the office, too, and nobody knew who paid the bill. We figured the center must have been paying for it.

While I was in the center, I got a call from Mary-Ann. She was worried. She said she had been at the after-hours club where she worked and had been in the boss’s office and seen this envelope with her brother’s name on it.

“Paul’s name?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I didn’t even know he knew Tyrone.”

“Well, so what?” I said. I knew she thought Tyrone, the dude who ran the place, was into the rackets, but I really couldn’t figure Paul being involved.

“So I asked Tyrone what he was doing with my brother’s name on an envelope and he said that Paul had come and asked him for a job. That don’t sound right to me.”

“So why you asking me about it?” I asked. “Ask Paul.”

“I asked him, and he got all nasty,” Mary-Ann said. “Talking about how I should stay out his business. He don’t act that nasty for nothing. What you think?”

“What was in the envelope?” I asked, not really wanting to deal with the whole subject.

“How I know?” Mary-Ann’s voice got real high. “If I knew what was in the envelope, I wouldn’t be asking nobody why it had his name on it. I’d know.”

I told her I’d talk to her about it when I saw her, and she got mad and said that I didn’t care about anything except myself. I let her talk until she got mad enough to hang up, and then I went over to Lenox Avenue and shot some pool.

I didn’t have anything to do later, and so I went back over to the center, and Paul and Walter were there playing tonk. I wanted to talk to Paul about what Mary-Ann had said, but I didn’t want to talk in front of Walter. I played tonk with them until I saw that I wasn’t going to have any luck, and then I just watched them. I was thinking about going to a flick, but there wasn’t anything I wanted to see in the neighborhood and I didn’t have enough money to go downtown. I was torn between watching television and trying to borrow some money from Walter, who was winning at tonk, when somebody rapped on the door. Paul looked at me and opened the door. It was Cal.