I didn’t know how else to go about it, so I started knocking on doors. When they answered I had a pad and pen in my hand and I said, “I’d like to ask you about the murder that took place in the neighborhood.” That always got their attention. Most of them didn’t know anything about it. Most of them didn’t know anything at all. They wanted their own answers. Most of them never knew there was a body found down the block. They thought they were safe. They wanted to know why they weren’t.

I never said I was the police, or anything. I never had to say I was anything. All I said was that I was investigating a murder that had happened in the neighborhood. Maybe people assumed I was a cop. I will admit that I went to a thrift store and bought an old suit, one that looked as if some detective had sat at his desk in the thing for ten years or more. I dressed the part, that’s true, but I never said who I was or what I was. Maybe they thought I was a reporter because of the notebook I had. I never cared and they never asked. They all talked. That’s all I cared about. But most of them had nothing to say.

During the day the street was deserted. I could have robbed almost every house on the block in about twenty minutes. Everybody worked or had better places to be during the day. There were a few nannies who watched small children. They weren’t around at night, hadn’t been there to see anything, and the one who was there was fast asleep. There was a woman dying across the street from the target house. She had hospice care and the caregiver answered the door. I could see the woman in the living room, propped up in a hospital bed. She was too young to be on her way out. The caregiver spoke English fine, but with a thick accent. Somewhere in Africa, I thought, and then was embarrassed by my ignorance. It was like thinking she was from somewhere in North America, or the Southern Hemisphere. What did I know about it? The caregiver didn’t know anything about what I needed to know. “I’m not here at nights,” she said. “Never at night. Eight to eight. That’s when I’m here.”