“Eighty-nine. Maybe 1990. I was researching something else. I forget what. Some cop thing. Housing police, maybe. We ran into him, in a bar, I forget the name, which I do a lot lately, but it was on Fifty-Fourth? Fifty-Fifth? Something like that, and Ninth. I was introduced as a writer, then one of the cops said, ‘Not a motherfucking scum-sucking lying cocksucker of a journalist…’ ” Beinhart stopped, looked at Allison, and said, “Hey, sorry.”

“Oh, not a problem,” Allie said, sounding like a kid delighted to hear grown-ups swear, though I suspect that’s not a big deal anymore. From time to time I hear kids that age talking to each other. They fucking, sucking swear more than cops did back in the sixties when mother was half a word. “But why wouldn’t you use his real name?”

“It’s amazing sometimes what people will tell you,” Beinhart said. “Sometimes it’s strangers-on-a-train syndrome. Where people who think they’re strangers and will never see each other again, they say things they want to say, but would never say to anyone who might see them tomorrow. Sometimes it’s the moment. Like…” He got slightly stuck, then said, “like a short love affair.” I realized he’d been looking for a genteel euphemism for a one-night stand out of concern for the ears of the fourteen-year-old junior high school girl who was actually a prostitute.

“At that point, Winston thought a shit-storm was about to break and he’d be standing right under it. He was a character. Did you ever read Chester Himes?”

I said yes. Allison shook her head no. Beinhart took that to be a teaching moment. “You should. Black writer, from a time when that was extremely rare. His biggest success, and what he’s known for, is a series of crime novels…Cotton Comes to Harlem, made into a movie. Blind Man with a Pistol, best title, but a mess of a book.”

Allison was giving him her gaze of fascination. Good girl. Mick was totally bored. But he couldn’t figure a way to interrupt. He wandered off. He’d be back the next moment the girl was detached.

“They all feature two black detectives working in Harlem when it was like a foreign country, Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. Damn, I’ve searched all my life for character names as great as that. Walker starts talking to me, and it’s like one of them has come to life. Some of the things he was telling me…which is why I wouldn’t use his name…were crimes.”

“You can say what they were now,” I said. “He just died.”

“Damn,” Beinhart said. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I went to the funeral,” I said.

Maddie pulled me away at that point. She wanted to warn me about how Mick was going to try it on with Allison.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PRODIGAL