“Did you.”

“I did. I regret certain things in my life. But I would swear on any Bible that I had nothing to do with what happened to the Greenlease money. I pray…I pray for that poor child often. Just think, as a parent, what they been through! Breaks my heart. But I read that Mrs. Greenlease, she’s very religious, too. And she understands God works in mysterious ways.”

“You mean like shooting a little boy in the head?”

He got choked up. “Please…please. I know you don’t think I’m sincere, but I swear I am. That’s why I’ve become a deacon of the church.”

Fuck you, Heller, I’m a deacon of the church.

“I’ve even begun my studies.”

“What studies are those, Lou?”

“To become a minister.”

I laughed. I went over to the bar and paid for our beers, then went back to the booth and said, “Let me preach to you, Lou, from the gospel of Who the Hell Do You Think You’re Kidding. You’re not crying for that dead kid. You’re not even crying for your lost career. You’re crying because you threw it away for a fortune that slipped through your goddamn fingers.”

And I left him there in his pew.

* * *

The storefront in the shopping district at Chippewa Street and Hampton Avenue wore white neon letters on a pale green background—

D & S Dry Cleaners

—and various hand-lettered signs all but blotted out the windowed front: “ONE HOUR” SERVICE, QUALITY “QUICK” DRY CLEANING, PRESS WHILE “U” WAIT and the like. All those quotation marks were troubling—desperation merged with hedging a bet.

As I went in, the kerosene-like odor of dry cleaning welcomed me. The slender man behind the counter didn’t; his face was a blank space waiting for an expression to happen, his smock as white as a doctor’s, with D & S stitched in red on the breast pocket.

I’d only seen him that one time five years ago at the Coral Court, but I knew the ex-uniformed cop at once. At the time, Elmer Dolan had reminded me of a younger version of Shoulders, as if he were the man’s son—similar dark hair, high forehead on an oblong head, bushy grown-together eyebrows and small, full-lipped mouth. His eyes were dark too, but lacked the shifty quality of the older man’s.

While even now he was boyish-looking, Dolan was no kid anymore, though Shoulders had still referred to him as such. Yesterday’s twenty-five-year-old rookie patrolman was today’s thirty-year-old businessman now, draped in melancholy much as the clothing in hangers on their rack, awaiting pick-up, wore plastic bags.

“Mr. Heller,” he said, with a nod. As if the last (and for that matter the first) time we’d met hadn’t been briefly, five years ago.

“So your partner called you with a heads-up,” I said, crossing to the counter and leaning there. “He’d be the ‘S’ in ‘D & S.’”

“And I’m the ‘D,’” he said. “But it doesn’t stand for dumb. Lou says I don’t have to talk to you.”