Mann laughed. He felt at home. Ever since 1996, when Jerome Lightfoot worked as a short-order cook at a Fifth Street greasy spoon where Mann’s mom waitressed, the man they called Lighty had always fascinated him. With his prosthetic leg and easy smile, he was both off-putting and alluring. He was smart in his way, and in between collecting disability and working odd jobs, he kept up with everything and everyone in the three-mile stretch of North Philly from Girard Avenue to Hunting Park. He was an observer, and that was invaluable to Mann.

“All right, Charlie, what you need?” Lighty said, turning on the television and sitting back against the couch.

“Damn, you can’t even offer a brother a glass o’ water before you start askin’ questions?” Mann said as he placed a picture of the suicide victim on the coffee table.

“You rude, Lighty. Real rude.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Lighty said, getting up and snatching the picture from the table.

He looked at it for a few moments, studying the bullet hole in the man’s temple.

“What you know about him?” Mann asked.

Lighty put down the picture. His smile had disappeared. “I know he wasn’t wrapped too tight,” he said, glancing at the television as Good Morning America flashed yet another picture of the Cecil B. Moore Avenue crime scene.

“You talk to him before?”

“I didn’t, but the boy up the street who work in that Temple guard shack on Fifteenth Street had words with him.”

“When?”

“Like two, three days ago. The guy was walkin’ down Montgomery Avenue wearin’ them black clothes and kinda stumblin’. The boy thought he was drunk, so he got out the guard shack to help him. When he asked him if he was okay, dude started talkin’ all this crazy stuff ‘bout princes and angels and wars. Then he started noddin’, right in the middle o’ what he was sayin’. He just leaned up against the wall and dipped. The boy tried to wake him up and the guy started yellin’ again. It didn’t last long, though. After while he just started scratchin’ his face and talkin’ real slow. Next thing you know, he was slumped on the wall again. The boy ran to the guard shack to call the cops, but by the time he came back to check on him, he was gone.”

“So he was on heroin,” Mann said. “Sure as I’m sittin’ here talkin’ to you,” Lighty said. “My cousin Eugene Brown used to see him a lot before he got strung out. He told me he used to come down to Thoughts From The Heart and Soul and the two of them would talk poetry for hours. Then he just stopped comin’. After while, I heard he was goin’ cross town coppin’ yellow bags from the Ricans up there on Second and Indiana.”

“You know this for sure?”

“I know everything, Charlie,” Lighty said with a grin.