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“What’s his habit?”

“Used to get two hits at a time. For a while there I was seeing him three times a day.”

“Two at a time?”

He nodded.

“Then that’s what I need you to sell me.”

Bread and Bees Homeless Shelter got its name from the beehives Arnold Fray kept on top of the building. He used the honey to feed his homeless, wino, and addict population.

“Honey,” Arnold would say, “is the food of God.”

When Arnold died, his daughter, Hester, took over management of the retreat. She was big like her father and tough like him too. She maintained the apiary and baked the bread.

I strolled up to the desk of the men’s shelter and said, “Hi, my name is Joe Oliver.”

“The cop?” Hester asked, standing up from her walnut office chair.

“Last time I saw you, you couldn’t have been more than sixteen,” I said. “And I don’t look anything like I did.”

“I got a long memory,” she said. “You need it in this calling.”

She wore a long black dress that completely hid any figure she might have had.

“What else you remember ’bout me?”

“All I need to know is that you’re a cop.”

“Not anymore. I was fired more than a decade ago.”

Her smile was unbidden.

“I came to see if I could find a guy called Burns,” I said.

“And you expect me to help you?”

Her eyes were gray and, I knew, mine were brown. We studied each other, looking for a reason to trust, but there was nothing there.

“I’ll promise you that I have no evil designs on Theodore and on top of that I’ll donate a thousand dollars to the shelter, in cash, right now. I’ll agree to meet him under your supervision too.”

28.

After the financial transaction Hester summoned a wraithlike young black man to lead me to a shed up on the roof, near the beehives. He had gray eyes like hers.

The shanty-shack’s door was secured by a padlock. After the impossibly thin young man had used his key, I asked, “What’s your name?”

“Mikey.”

“Give me the lock, Mikey.”

He did so and I attached it to the eye of the latch so that the door would have to remain unlocked.

“I’ll take the key too.”

He almost balked but then acquiesced.

Inside he found the pull chain that flooded the one-room work shed with at least four hundred watts of yellow light from a single bulb.