You Know Who Killed Me by Loren D. Estleman Page B

with twenty years’ worth of birds’ nests and exhausted condoms. I could have used the guns the time I almost left my brains on the softball diamond, soaked to my knees with snow. A lifetime ago. Someone’s parole would be coming up for review.
    There was talk of turning the island over to Lansing and making it a state park; anything to avoid paying for the upkeep. Everything on it needed painting or patching or tearing down and burning up.
    Well, the same was true of the city where I work. It was rotting from the top down and from the inside out like Dutch elm. The politicians let the homeless live in tents on public property and boarded up the houses they didn’t tear down.
    I turned on a classical station to stop that train of thought. It could only lead to another three weeks in the Amy Winehouse Memorial Spa.
    They’d picked the ball field to pitch their tents; a little Hooverville, only with nylon instead of canvas and space heaters powered by borrowed generators making a racket like billiard balls bouncing off the skulls of pro wrestlers. This was where all the folks who sold dead flowers on exit ramps and stood on street corners holding cardboard signs made from the north walls of their houses came to rest. Campfires were burning, against ordinance. I smelled Spam frying, coffee boiling, and cannabis. Joan Baez was driving Old Dixie down one last time on a portable CD player. Hip-hop vomited out of someone’s earbuds, loud enough to cause a brain hemorrhage to the one wearing them. It seemed no one wanted to bother to learn the harmonica anymore.
    I parked and approached a group of men and women constructing a bonfire on the pitcher’s mound with chairs and mattresses. There’s nothing like the smell of urine cooking to take your mind off the cold.
    â€œWho’s in charge?”
    A man who was all white-stubbled chin and hook nose leaned a maple headboard against his knee and pulled a filthy scarf away from the bottom half of his face. He’d used his teeth to open bottles. “All of us are, brother. The island’s a socialist state.”
    â€œOkay, Woody. That’s a shore-bound breeze wafting from Canada at about a thousand miles an hour. Where you going to sleep after you burn down all the tents?”
    â€œWhat do you care, brother? What’s anybody care what happens to us no more?”
    â€œYou know what McDonald’s is paying by the hour?”
    â€œFuck you.”
    â€œI don’t either, but everyone else seems to. Happen to know where Amelie Gates is working today?”
    â€œDon’t know nobody by that name.”
    â€œThere a volunteer tent?”
    He blew his nose on the sleeve of his camo coat. He was a colorful character. “That white one there, up by the fountain.”
    â€œMuch obliged, Woody.”
    â€œThe name’s Howard. Who’s this Woody you got me confused with?”
    â€œA guy who sang about rock-candy mountains and jails made out of tin. You ought to look him up on your smart phone.”
    â€œGot one, wise guy.” He dug it out of a pocket and shook it in my face.
    â€œOkay, Howard. No offense meant.”
    He was poking at his phone in the rearview. If he dug up Woody Woodpecker first, I was going to get my car keyed.
    The bust of Dante Alighieri topped a marble pedestal on the main drag, wearing a cabbage on his head. What the author of The Divine Comedy was doing in that location was anybody’s guess. He didn’t look any too pleased to be there.
    The tent erected nearby was really a canopy, stretched across the tops of aluminum poles secured with ropes and stakes. A long trestle table ran down the center with clam chowder, dumplings, scalloped potatoes, and shaved ham staying warm in aluminum containers above Sterno. A bevy of women wearing aprons over topcoats and earflapped caps kept the containers filled from an army of gas grills at the back of the tent and ladled the contents onto