“I know Frank had no business in that neighborhood, no reason to be there. It’s not a spot where anyone would go for drugs. There were a lot easier places to find them, if that’s what he’d wanted. I know it doesn’t make sense that he was there, with his arm all shot up the way it was.”

“Do you know a Robert Bowie?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t talk to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“He says you talked to him.”

“Okay.”

“He says you talked a lot about the neighbors, asking about them.”

“Probably,” I said. “I asked about the people who weren’t around. I asked as many questions as they would let me.”

“Do you know Andrew Molina?”

“Did I talk to him too? I don’t know the names of the people I talked to. I don’t know these people at all. I only talked with them for a few minutes.”

“Did you talk to Andrew Molina?”

“I don’t know. Which house was he in?”

They showed me a picture of the house. Andrew Molina was in the house we had robbed. He was the father of the kid who’d been killed. We had finally gotten where they wanted to go.

“I didn’t talk to him.”

“So you talked to everyone else in the neighborhood but not this guy?”

“I don’t think anyone was home when I was there,” I said. “Most of the people weren’t home. It was in the afternoon when I was there.”

“You ever go back to that house?”

“I talked to the neighbors who were there and then I left.”

“Why didn’t you go back?”

“I found out enough,” I told them. “I know Frank wouldn’t go there on his own.”

“But he was seen there, by a neighbor, you said.”

“He was with someone else, they said.”

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t know.”

“Who saw him?”

“An older woman. She was looking out the window and saw them.” I don’t know why I lied. They probably knew I was lying. I should have told them about the hospice aides; they probably knew about them already. I wasn’t doing myself any favors.

“She knew it was your friend.”

“She said she recognized him from the photo.”

“Which house was she in?”

They took out a small map of the street and I narrowed it down to a couple of houses. I just kept telling them everything that had happened. Somebody must have told them I passed myself off as a cop. They brought it up again.

“And you never said you were a police officer, attorney, detective, nothing like that?”

“Never. I never had to say who I was.”

“You never said you were Frank’s partner or whatever?”

“I never said anything. I just asked some questions and they answered.”

“You’re persuasive.”