On the phone we heard her breathless and disbelieving: “It’s a trap. They aren’t even looking for anyone else. They think it was Jerr’s car—the one Jerome gave him. They think. But Jerr has said if he’d hit something that night, he thinks it was a deer. He’d washed off the bloodstains, he said. He’d thought it was a deer, that was what you would do, if—if it was a deer you’d hit . . . And they are saying, this Johnson boy, this black boy, he’d been involved in drugs. They all are . . . I mean, so many of them are, right in the high school. In the middle school. The dealers are in the Falls, black drug dealers in the Falls and in Buffalo, with ties to New York City. They drive expensive cars—sports cars. They wear fur coats, gold chains, diamond fillings in their teeth. They murder one another all the time and nobody cares, the police look the other way because they are on the take. It comes up from Colombia in South America, the drug—heroin, I think it is. Opium.”

And: “It was a personal connection, this ‘Hadrian Johnson’ was killed by a boyfriend of his own mother . . . He was beaten to death with a tire iron. They left him to die by the side of the road. The police say, the ‘murder weapon’ was thrown in the river. And this isn’t the first time, there have been other times nobody even knew about, that never got in the papers because white boys were not accused. The media has it out for white boys—you know . . . It’s the way it is. But we have a very good lawyer. He says, the murderer is probably Hadrian Johnson’s own mother’s boyfriend and a major drug dealer, lives in the Falls and the police never touch him, he has gotten away with murder a dozen times.”

And, later: “We just heard—it was a Hells Angels attack. ‘White racists.’ A motorcycle gang, in the Falls. They rode to South Niagara the other night, looking for blacks to kill. You see them sometimes in the daytime in military formation—roaring on their Harley-Davidsons. It could have been anyone they killed. That poor boy—‘Hadrian Johnson.’ Only in high school, and Les says he was a quiet boy, and a good basketball player, everybody liked him. People who have trouble with black kids say they’d never had trouble with him.”