“Right, right.” I took a pull on the neck of my beer, trying to recover. “Here’s the thing,” I said, leaning toward her across the table. “Your pops said this happened a month ago.”

“A little less than a month ago. We’re just really stressed about how long all this is taking, you know?”

“Right, but a month ago?” I sit up straight. “A month ago is not a story today. After a month, there’s no story. I’m sorry.”

“But my brother is dead.” Janette’s aggressive demeanor crumbled.

“You’re talking suicide here.” I shook my head sympathetically. “That’s tragic, but I can tell you straight up: If your brother chose to kill himself, we ain’t gonna run it in the paper now, know what I mean?”

“My brother did not choose to kill himself.” Janette’s eyes flashed angrily.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, call the detective.”

“Wait.” I wave the waiter over for another round. “If you already have a detective working the case, why the call on the scanner?”

Janette ignored my question and turned to the waiter. “I’ll have a Jack and ginger.”

“And,” I continued, “if you already know he took his own life, why not just grieve and clean out that bedroom and move on?”

She remained silent.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“I’m not offended,” she shrugged. “Your questions are valid.”

“Any answers?”

“If I had answers, would I be sitting here talking to you?” She smiled slyly. “I think not.”

I never cared for police precincts. Not that I’d had much experience with them.

Occasionally, I was sent to the local station house to clarify a fuzzy docket that’d come over the teletype, but the officers always seemed less than welcoming. I usually got out of there as soon as I could, which was what I intended the afternoon following my interview with Janette. In a moment of hopeful lust, I’d promised I would speak to this Detective Spurlock, and she, in turn, promised she’d speak to me again. So here I was in the 103rd Precinct at the detective squad.

“Come on back.” Detective Spurlock motioned toward one cluttered desk among many. With a swish of a burly arm, he cleared a chair of paperwork for me to sit. “You got good timing, kid. Caught me right before sign-out. Minute later, I’d a been gone for the night... Coffee?”

I glanced over his shoulder at a stained-glass pot that contained what looked to be black sludge. “No thanks.”

“Smart,” he shrugged, sipping boldly from a chipped mug. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m here about the Stuckey case.”

“The Stuckeys.” Spurlock ran a pink hand through a thick head of white hair. “Listen, I don’t know what your connection to this family is, but—”

“I’m a reporter for the Weekly Item,” I interrupted.

“That so?” He nodded. “Well, good luck. Once they’ve got your number, you’re getting no peace from then on. My advice: Steer clear. There’s no story there.”

“That’s what I’m thinking too, but if there was,” I lean in, “what would it be?”

Spurlock furrowed his brow. “Meaning?”

“The parents seem to think their son was murdered.”

“Okay, kid, I’ll indulge you, I’ve got nothing but time, right?” He shuffled through a stack of bulging file folders before selecting the thinnest one. “Here we go.” He took a swig from his mug and whipped on his reading glasses. “Edwin Stuckey, age twenty-two, found hanged in his own bedroom, March 2.” He paused at the date, gave me the once-over, continued reading from his notes. “Apparent suicide, no suspicious circumstances, blah, blah, case closed.”

Spurlock sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

“Wait a minute.” I flipped through my own notebook. “If you began your investigation on March 2, why did the call come over my scanner just two days ago?”

“Ahh,” the detective laughed. “They won’t stop, these people. I closed this case one week after it happened, and they’ve been phoning 911 ever since.” He shook his head. “Hell, I’d arrest the two of them for Aggravated Harassment if it weren’t so damn sad.”

“So there’s nothing? Nothing to suggest the murder that the family thinks occurred?”

“Nope.” Spurlock reopened the folder and flipped through the paperwork. “The sister gave me a couple a names of some friends of his, who turned out not to be friends at all. The boy didn’t have any friends.” He handed me the list. “Church members. A bit too pious for my tastes, but hey, to each his own.” He closed the folder and switched off his desk lamp. “Like I said: case closed.”

Of course, there was no story. But I went ahead and crafted a lead and pitched it to my editor.

He glanced at it before tossing it aside. “We don’t do suicides.”

Still, I wanted to see Janette again. I steeled myself for the journey. It took me nearly two hours: the F train, then the Q76 bus to the end of the line. The bus wove its way down residential streets before groaning to a halt at the concrete 165th Street terminal in Jamaica, Queens.

It was bedlam. Greyhound on crack. People mobbed each designated bus slot, frantically directing the drivers into their respective spaces. An open, buzzing vegetable market operated behind the commuters, and as the day was a hot one, clouds of flies swarmed crates of long onions and collard greens. An old woman wearing a hairnet sat on a folding chair selling spices and exotic remedies sealed in plastic baggies. There was too much going on here; I was used to separation: a bus terminal being a bus terminal, a vegetable market being a vegetable market. Here, in Janette’s neighborhood, everything was everything all at once.

I cut behind the terminal through the Colosseum Mall and down tight aisles displaying brightly colored skirts and cell phone accessories. Out on the other side stood the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica; Edwin’s funeral had been held there.

“Yo, man, you good?” A guy about my age peered at me from beneath an open car hood.

“What? Oh, yeah man, yeah.” I kept moving.

Jamaica Avenue, almost there. On the “Ave,” all the girls resembled Janette, with their manicured hands, toes, and eyebrows. Women sashayed bare-legged, wearing tight clothes; streaked, braided hairdos; metallic purses; chatting casually on headsets while munching on meat kebobs and cubes of sugared coconut.

I was tripping.

“Help? A little help?” A thin, thin, thin woman with a red cap pulled so low that she had to raise her chin to look at me blocked my path. “Ice-e?” She extended a cart toward me with a brutal shove. A regulation grocery cart, sealed in duct tape, enclosed with a plastic lid, a cardboard cut-out of brightly colored ice creams taped to its sides.

“Whoa,” I muttered, gripping the cart to keep from being run down. A plastic wheel jumped the rim of my sneaker, leaving a marked trail.

“Ice-e?” the woman repeated sternly.

I hadn’t noticed the man next to her. The old cat was just squatting there on the balls of his feet, arms extended at awkward angles from where they rested on each knee. In front of him stood a stack of newspapers and, atop the stack, a neat pile of quarters. I recognized the paper, a freebie like mine, but here on the street it cost a quarter.

I slapped some coins in his palm and snatched up a copy. The lead caught my eye: