This September night, only a month or two since she’d been hired, she looked to see who was left in the Room. She still felt uncomfortable, noticeable. She was grateful no one was near; it was after ten. She didn’t like anyone to see her spraying Windex. Her beat-mate, the day cops-reporter, slavered. A corkboard hung above and beside their shared desk. Her side was empty. His was triple layered in snaps and reminders, dirtied by malt balls, caramel bites, Lipton bags, burnt coffee. As she worked, she saw she wasn’t alone after all. Stanley Belson, the night editor, her boss, was walking her way. She put down the spray bottle.

He was a short-waisted man with house-help posture and a wide collection of international shirtwear. He was colorfully polite. Whenever he conferred with Vera, he sat lightly on the nearby empty chair of Marcus, who covered the mayor and regularly tried to interest her in a drink after work. Vera didn’t drink. She didn’t much like the taste or the feeling. Marcus couldn’t believe that. His working premise seemed to be: I’m the mayor, you’re night cops. You should want to date, or at least, once or twice, bed down. She told him one day that she liked women. No more drink invitations came. You could never tell what a person would accept as fact.

“Miss Vera,” Stanley said when he was in earshot.

“Hey, Boss Man,” she called.

“You keeping up with your dancing?” he asked.

Vera had been close to ballerina star-life. She’d moved to Manhattan for training, made the corps at seventeen. By nineteen, she was finished, grown too tall and hotted-up curvalicious. She enrolled at Howard University, but her grades were uninspired C’s. After freshman year, her parents sent her south, to Knoxville, for a summer of healing with grandmother, aunts, and cousins. Vera hid what she was in tracksuits, tainted all she saw with resentful bale. Looking for trouble, according to her mama’s mama.

She found something else that summer. It started with Nola Waters, who lived alone across the street from Vera’s aunt. In the wee hours, Miss Waters made out burglars at her own window. Vera heard little of it that night—not the shots, only some of the sirens. Vera got the official story the next morning on WKHT. Officers responding to a burglary in progress shot and killed Nola Waters, an eighty-five-year-old woman in the 3700 block of Catalpa Avenue in East Knoxville after she charged them with a loaded .22 from her front porch.