How can I help you?”

Call me biased but I immediately identified the person who replied as female, black and uneducated.

“McEvoy? When you goin’ to tell the truth, McEvoy?”

“Who is this?”

“You tellin’ lies, McEvoy, in your paper.”

I wished it was my paper.

“Ma’am, if you want to tell me who you are and what your complaint is about, I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’ m—”

“They now sayin’ Mizo is’n adult and what kinda shit is that? He did’n kill no whore.”

Immediately I knew it was one of those calls. Those calls on behalf of the “innocent.” The mother or girlfriend who had to tell me how wrong my story was. I got them all the time but not for too much longer. I resigned myself to handling this call as quickly and politely as possible.

“Who is Mizo?”

“Zo. My Zo. My son, Alonzo. He ain’ guilty a nothin’ and he ain’t no adult.”

I knew that was what she was going to say. They are never guilty. No one calls you up to say you got it right or the police got it right and their son or their husband or their boyfriend is guilty of the charges. No one calls you from jail to tell you they did it. Everybody is innocent. The only thing I didn’t understand about the call was the name. I hadn’t written about anybody named Alonzo—I would have remembered.

“Ma’am, do you have the right person here? I don’t think I wrote about Alonzo.”

“Sure you did. I got your name right here. You said he stuffed her in the trunk and that’s some motherfuckin’ shit right there.”

Then it came together. The trunk murder from last week. It was a six-inch short because nobody on the desk was all that interested. Juvenile drug dealer strangles one of his customers and puts her body in the trunk of her own car. It was a black-on-white crime but still the desk didn’t care, because the victim was a drug user. Both she and her killer were marginalized by the paper. You start cruising down to South L.A. to buy heroin or rock cocaine and what happens happens. You won’t get any sympathy from the gray lady on Spring Street. There isn’t much space in the paper for that. Six inches inside is all you’re worth and all you get.

I realized I didn’t know the name Alonzo because I had never been given it in the first place. The suspect was sixteen years old and the cops didn’t give out the names of arrested juveniles.

I flipped through the stack of newspapers on the right side of my desk until I found the Metro section from two Tuesdays back. I opened it to page four and looked at the story. It wasn’t long enough to carry a byline. But the desk had put my name as a tagline at the bottom. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the call. Lucky me.

“Alonzo is your son,” I said.