Homicide Related by Norah McClintock

going over there any more than he could imagine Lorraine cooking Sunday dinner.
    His uncle heaved himself up out of the chair and stood there a moment, studying the empty glass. Finally he picked it up and carried it into the kitchen. Dooley heard him unscrew the top off the bottle of scotch. He heard the glug-glug-glug of a generous measure being poured. His uncle reappeared, glass in hand. As he walked back through the living room, he paused and said, “I’m sorry.” He walked carefully through the living room, clutching the glass, and made his way unsteadily up the stairs.
    Dooley stayed where he was. The TV was playing a rerun of a sitcom that was on a hundred times a day. The characters were all young and had great apartments filled with all kinds of cool stuff, which didn’t make sense to Dooley because most of them had crap jobs. But Dooley wasn’t really watching. He was wondering what his uncle meant. Was he sorry Lorraine was dead? Or was there something more to it?

Four
    I f anyone had asked him, Hey, imagine if Lorraine suddenly stopped breathing, what do you think you’d be doing the very next day? , he never would have come up with what he was actually doing, which I was shoving books into his locker that he didn’t need for the morning and pulling out others that he did need. He paused as his hand closed around his math textbook. What the hell was he even doing here? His mother had just died. You were supposed to do something when that happened, weren’t you? Something besides the same-old same-old.
    â€œHey, Dooley,” someone said behind him.
    He turned to look at Warren’s moon-shaped face and his nervous eyes blinking behind black-rimmed glasses that made him look like the picked-on brainiac that he was.
    â€œHey, Warren,” Dooley said, even managing a smile so that maybe Warren would relax a little. Dooley wasn’t sure why, but Warren approached him every time as if he wasn’t quite sure if Dooley was going to shake his hand or rip off his head, and this after Dooley had saved his ass that one time and Warren had repaid the favor. “How you doing?”
    â€œGood … I guess,” Warren said. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and glanced down to the end of the hall, like he was wishing he could be there instead of here at Dooley’s locker.
    â€œEverything okay?”
    He looked miserable as he squared his shoulders and drew in a deep breath, looking to Dooley like a guy who was being forced at gunpoint to walk barefoot through a nest of rattlesnakes and was now thinking that a quick bullet in the head would be preferable to the sure but slower and more painful death by venom that lay in store.
    â€œWhat’s going on, Warren?”
    Warren dug something out of the binder he was carrying—an envelope—and stared at it for a moment before thrusting it at Dooley.
    â€œAlicia’s birthday is coming up,” he said. Alicia was Warren’s sister. She had Down’s syndrome. She came by the video store at least once a week. For a few months, she’d been renting the penguin movie. Now she was into the one with the little girl and the talking bear, the one in full-body armor. She could have bought a library of DVDs with the money she spent renting the same movie over and over again, always when Dooley was on shift, always coming to Dooley’s cash or, if he was on the floor instead, waiting up at the counter until Linelle or whoever else was up there called him and stepped aside so that he could scan Alicia’s choice and take her money. “She wants you to come,” Warren mumbled, his eyes focused on his shoes. “You know, if you’re not working or whatever.”
    Dooley opened the envelope and pulled out an invitation.
    â€œI’ll check my schedule,” he said.
    â€œRight,” Warren said, as if this were exactly the answer—the dodge—he’d been