The Julius House

Angel asked.

"No, she's just here a few weeks a year," Lanelda Cole-man told us.

I was totally at sea.

I opened my mouth to ask where she was the rest of the year, but my cohort kicked me in the ankle.

"Then we'll just go, I can tell you've got your hands full," Angel said sympathetically.

"Oh," Lanelda said, "I do. We're just terrified Kickapoo is hurt bad. We've about decided to take him to the vet. It's so expensive!" I moved restlessly. They adored the dog but hadn't taken him to the vet?

"It sure is," Angel agreed.

"Carl and I just were up all night with this little thing," Lanelda said abstractedly, her attention on the dog.

"The man who kicked him should pay for the vet visit," Angel said.

I turned to stare at her.

Lanelda's face looked suddenly determined. "You know, lady, you're right," she said. "I'm go

We conferred by the car.

"We need to ask some questions," I said.

"But not of her. She's been told not to talk about the arrangements for that house by someone, someone she's scared of. We don't want her calling whoever it is and telling them we've been asking questions." "So what do we do?"

"We move the car," Angel said slowly. "Then we go from house to house. Her curtains are closed, and she's busy with the dog. She may not notice. Our cover story is that we're canvassing old people in the neighborhood about the need for a community center with hot meals and transportation to and from this center every day. I just hope Metairie doesn't have one already. Ask questions about the old ladies who own Number Twenty-one." I looked up at Angel admiringly. "Good idea."

I wasn't so enthusiastic an hour later. I'd never knocked on strangers' doors before. We'd waited until after five o'clock so people would be home; most of the mothers here would be working mothers.

This was an experience that I later wanted to forget. I was never intended to be a private detective; I was too thin-ski

"So you don't think Mrs. Totino lives anywhere in Metairie?" I asked, to keep up the fiction. "We need to contact her about the center, if she does." "Alicia said she was going back up to someplace up north—Georgia, I think—to live with her daughter."

"Do you remember about when that was?" I managed to say. I'd been struck almost speechless at the thought of Georgia being far north to this woman. Georgia, north! If my hair had been shorter, it would've bristled. When Mrs. Sistrump opined it'd been about five years, more or less, since she'd talked to Alicia—though she'd caught glimpses of her since then going into and out of the house—she admitted it had caused her no grief, not seeing the sisters. And that was the impression I'd gotten from all the people on the street who would actually talk to me.

Flattened by the whole experience, I returned to the rental car to find Angel leaning against it staring off into space. Angel had a great quality of repose. "Carl's home," she said. "It must be him. He went in without knocking."

It took me a few seconds to track that down mentally.

"Okay," I said cautiously.

"Lanelda said," Angel reminded me, "that when Carl came home, she would talk to him about calling the man who'd kicked their dog. And that's the man who must know where Alicia Manigault is."

"So what do we do?" I asked uncertainly.

"I can try to creep in there under the windows and listen," Angel said dubiously. "Or we can just wait to see if the man comes. He'd have to to give them the money for the vet visit, wouldn't he?" "Sounds pretty iffy. What if the dog died this afternoon? What if the man says he won't give a dime?"

"Got a better idea?"

Well, we could go back to our luxurious hotel and order a great meal. But that wasn't why we were here, I told myself.

It was still light, but fading fast. While we waited for it to get darker, so Angel could gauge if she could risk her creep, we drove to the nearest fast-food place. While we dealt with French fries and chicken sandwiches in the rental car, we exchanged stories about our block canvass. Of the people Angel had talked to, only two householders remembered the sisters. The other people had moved in since Alicia had rented the house. The two accounts Angel had pieced together basically matched Betty Ly

"And got my head bit off for asking," she'd told Angel. "I guess I was just being nosy, but wouldn't you be? I mean, what if she'd had a robbery or a prowler? Those are things other people in the same neighborhood need to know about, aren't they?"

"And she never asked you why a do-gooder trying to find out if Alicia Manigault needed a ride to a senior citizens' center would need to know that?" "Nope," Angel said, simply. "She just wanted someone to talk to. And she wanted to know if the bus that would take them was equipped to handle wheelchairs. I had to tell her the whole thing was still pretty much up in the air. She was disappointed."

We looked away from each other, off into the distance. Angel drank the last of her Coke. Spenser and Hawk we weren't; not even Elvis Cole and Joe Pyle.

"What do you think, is it dark enough?" I asked. "Yep. But I've been looking at that yard, and I don't think there's a single place I could get that I wouldn't be visible from at least four other houses." "Um. You're right."

"So we better just watch for a while. Maybe he'll come. Whoever he is." In the short time it had taken to collect our food, return, and eat, the character of the neighborhood had changed. More cars were home; the little street was jammed with people who'd had to park at the curb. The streetlights had come on in the deep dusk and cast sharp-contrast shadows. There were some children outside playing. Angel was right, creeping around that little property was out of the question in a neighborhood as congested as this one. It was hard to see how we could sit and observe, even. How did police stake out places like this? Surely, if we started moving and kept driving by, someone would eventually get suspicious.

We left for a minute, and pulled in down the street a little, in front of a house that was still dark and had no vehicles in the driveway. We looked at our watches and shook our heads; pantomime of people waiting impatiently. Then Angel watched in the rear-view mirror and I watched the side mirror. "I thought you were used to this, Angel," I said.

"How come?"

"You used to be a bodyguard."

"Then, I was watching out for people like me. I was trying to find anyone waiting for my employer. I never waited for anyone." "Oh. What happened to your last client? Martin never told me." Angel diverted her eyes from the mirror to look at me directly. "And for good reason," she said. "Believe me, you don't want to know." I had a feeling she was right.