Free Now You See Her by Cecelia Tishy Page B

couple lottery tickets. Maybe we hungry.”
    So if I furnish the refreshments, maybe they’ll tell me where she lives. If they know. If this isn’t a petty con game. Am
     I desperate enough to buy two Colt 45s, two lottery tickets, and take-out chicken?
    Yes.
    After a couple of minutes, I hand out the bribes while juggling Biscuit in one arm. “But this here bottle ain’t cold, lady.
     This here feels warm as spit.” With my neck and face flushing hot, I go back inside to exchange the warm bottles for iced.
    “Tha’s better.” The short one scrapes his scratch card with a fingernail, which a manicurist would admire. Both men clink
     bottles and chugalug and peer into the bag of buffalo wings. Finally, the short one points to a sky-blue duplex midway in
     the next block. “Try up there.”
    By now, it feels like a Grail quest. The woman who answers the door won’t say her name. She’s medium height, mid-thirties,
     her skin a golden bronze, hair in close-cropped black waves. She stands in ironed jeans and a ripped white T-shirt, her legs
     planted wide apart as if the porch is a rolling deck. Big-frame dark glasses hide her eyes.
    “I’m looking for Kia Fayzer. Are you Kia?”
    “You a caseworker or a cop?”
    “I’m Reggie Cutter. If you’re Kia, I’d like to ask about your brother Henry.”
    She ignores the dog. Her eyes say don’t waste my time. Biscuit yips. She folds her arms across her chest.
    “I’m here on my own. I’m not a law enforcement officer. Somebody thinks maybe Henry is innocent of the crime that sent him
     to prison. Somebody wants to look into it. I agreed to help. Are you his sister?”
    “So you not a cop?”
    “Citizen” sounds righteous, but “psychic” is loony. Words do fail. “If you’re Kia, would you give me fifteen minutes?”
    In a movement that is both sinuous and cynical, she rolls her hips and lets me into a room that’s crammed with clothes and
     cosmetics. Her T-shirt, I see, is not simply ripped but torn cleverly. The dark glasses are unnerving.
    She clears an armload of nylons and lingerie from a chair. I recognize a certain Victoria’s Secret black lace bra—the Very
     Sexy Seamless Plunge—which also nestles among my own lingerie, with tags still on. Mine awaits debut on a romantic night,
     an act of faith in my future.
    “What’s on your mind?”
    She sits on the edge of the mattress of a pullout sofa. I perch on the chair and speak to the lenses. “I understand Henry
     lived at a house on Eldridge Street thirteen years ago, before the mur— before a young man, Peter Wald, was killed. The house
     had a preacher named Big Doc. He was a Rastafarian. Was your brother a follower?”
    “Was Henry a follower?” She snickers. “You could say he followed a boom box voice inside his head.”
    “Was it Rasta music?”
    “His own kind of music.”
    “He was a musician or… did Henry hear voices?”
    “He went his own way, did his own thing.”
    Is this possible: a loner in a group house? An individualist in a cult? “I understand he had an arrest record.”
    “Sure he did. Get arrested, that’s how you qualify, you hear what I’m saying.” The lenses flash.
    Maybe I don’t really hear. We could easily talk past one another for the whole fifteen minutes. “What did Henry do for a living?”
    “You do what you gotta do.”
    “Jobs?”
    “Henry was self-employed.” She falls silent. I remind her I’m trying to help. I ask for specifics. “Like when he was little,
     he got old sandwiches from 7-Eleven and sold ’em at beauty parlors for double what they cost.”
    “And when he got older?”
    “He sold some clothes.”
    “He clerked?”
    “He went moppin’.”
    “Cleaning floors?”
    She laughs loud and hard. Biscuit cocks her head and barks once. I shush her and pat her head. Her cutest expressions are
     going to waste. The woman is dogproof. She says, “Henry filled orders.”
    “You mean he made deliveries?”
    The angle of her