“Seamus is dead,” croaked out the woman with the cigarette and the short red hair, and there was something in the way she said it, something bitter and sad and not matter-of-fact at all.

Beth heard it, too, because she said, “Are you Mrs. Dent?”

“What are you, cops?” said the woman sitting behind the other two. She was small, with nervous hands and bright eyes. It was still morning, but it didn’t look as if that had stopped her.

“Do we look like cops?” I said.

“She does,” said the third woman, pointing at Beth.

I stepped back, turned toward Beth, crossed my arms, and examined her as if I were examining a sculpture of Beth as created by Duane Hanson. “Really, now? And what makes her look like a cop?”

“That station-house pallor,” said the nervous woman.

“Excuse me,” said Beth.

“And those eyes.”

“What’s wrong with my eyes?”

“You might be right,” I said. “She is rather pale, and her eyes are shifty.”

“My eyes are not shifty, they’re attractively cautious. What about him?” said Beth, sticking her thumb at me.

“He’s too soft,” said the woman. “He looks like he sells insurance.”

“Or maybe a high-school guidance counselor,” said Beth. “Does that fit?”

“Could be. Is that what he is?”

“No,” said Beth.

“You aren’t Mrs. Dent, are you?” I said to the woman with the cigarette.

She looked at me a long moment, took a last drag, dropped the cigarette, and crushed it beneath her sneaker. “No,” she said. “Betty’s away on vacation.”

“Any idea where?”

“She has a sister in California.”

“How long is she supposed to be gone?”

“She didn’t say, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I was you.”

“Henry’s looking after the house,” said the heavy woman, “which is like letting a fat swine run free in your garden.”

“Henry’s a big guy?”

“Oh, he’s hurly-burly, he is.”

“And he’s trouble, is that it?”

“Double trouble. All them Dent boys were.”

“Including Seamus?” I said.

The woman with the red hair lit another cigarette. “The worst of the three, you ask me,” she said.

I looked at Beth, raised an eyebrow.

“Him and his friends,” said the third woman. “They were like a pack of wolves.”

“Who, the Dent boys?” said Beth.

“No, Seamus and his two friends, the second Harbaugh boy, Wayne, and then Kylie.”

“Seamus, Wayne, and Kylie,” I said. “The terrible trio. What kind of things did they do? Pranks and stuff? Light bags of dog poop on fire and then ring the doorbells?”

“That the kind of stuff you did as a boy?” asked the red-haired woman.

“I just did that yesterday in Chestnut Hill.”

“Aren’t you something wicked.”

“They were just bad, those kids,” said the nervous woman sitting above the other two. “Sneaking places, stealing, sex and drugs. Even when they were young, they were trouble. But the drugs, well, you know, that just ruins you.” She spoke like she remembered what she was talking about, like she wouldn’t mind a drink to forget.

“The police had them in their sights, I suppose,” I said. “Always coming around.”

“Not till the end. Them kids was too smart to get caught, even when everyone knew it was them.”

“And Seamus was the ringleader,” I said.

“No,” said the red-haired woman with the cigarette. “It was Kylie.”

“Any idea where we could find her, this Kylie?”

“None,” said the woman. “She’s gone.”

Again there was that thing in her voice, like a bitter lozenge that had been stuck in her throat for a decade. I looked closely at the woman, she looked away. “You’re Kylie’s mother, aren’t you?” I said. “I can tell just by the way you speak about her with so much affection.”

“We have history.”

“And you have no idea where she is?”

“Don’t care neither. But I can tell you this, mister, wherever she is, she’s on her back.”

“Sweet. Member of the PTA, were you?”

“Who’d you say you was?”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Why are you so interested in Seamus?” said the heavy woman.

“It’s my profession to be interested. I’m a lawyer, that means I’m greedy and I’m nosy.”

“Then you’d fit right in around here,” she said, and the three of them laughed.

“How about that Wayne you mentioned? Is he still around?”

“He works at the church,” said the third woman.

“What is he, the priest?”

“The janitor.”

“I suppose you have to start somewhere. You mentioned that the police didn’t come around until the end. What did you mean, the end?”

“After Seamus was killed,” said Kylie’s mom. “A detective come around to talk to Betty. I think his name was same as the fat guy on that old TV show.”

“Detective Gleason?”

“Right. He told Betty they had found the guy who did it.”

“Was there a trial?”

“Wouldn’t have been much use, seeing as the one who did it ended up with a bullet through the head.”

“About time the cops did something for this neighborhood,” said the heavy woman, laughing, and the other two joined in.

That was enough for me. Good, sweet neighborhood ladies laughing about a bullet in the head. If I ever spent my life sitting on a stoop, spilling gossip to the passersby, you might as well save the bullet for me.

I thought about what they had said, turned to look at the empty Dent house once again. “She go away much, this Betty Dent? Always traveling?”

“Nope,” said the heavy one. “Barely left this street the whole of her life.”

“So how’d she get to California? She drive?”

“Flew. I drove her to the airport myself.”

“When?”

“Just a day or two ago.”

“She say how she got a ticket?”

“Said she just got it.”

“Nice for her.” I took out three cards from my wallet, passed them out. “My name is Victor Carl. Anything you can remember about Seamus, about the things he did or any troubles he had with the police, especially that, I’d appreciate hearing from you.”

“Don’t hold your breath on that one neither,” said Kylie’s mom.

We could hear their cackling as we walked away.

“Why do I feel,” I said, “like I just walked out of a scene from Macbeth?”

“How long do you suppose they’ve been sitting on that stoop?” said Beth as we drove through the narrow streets of Fishtown.

“From the dawn of time,” I said. “They’ve buried kings, presidents, husbands, Seamus Dent. And they’ll bury us if we give them half a chance and half a bullet.”

“It took us, what, about thirty seconds to pry the Seamus Dent story from them?”

“If that. Another twenty minutes we would have had the sexual history of the entire block, and the parish priest, too.”

“So why didn’t Whitney Robinson come down here and ask those same ladies about Seamus Dent before François’s trial?”

“Good question,” I said. “Whit was a sharp lawyer and knew what he was doing. Maybe he did come down, learned what he could, and decided it wasn’t reliable or admissible.”

“But he didn’t tell you about it.”

“No, he did not. So that’s one puzzle we need to figure out. And I sure would like to know who sent Betty Dent a plane ticket to California right after we took the case. That’s the church over there.”

We parked on Gaul Street, just across from the church, a Romanesque stone structure with the requisite stained-glass window showing Jesus first carrying the cross and then nailed to it. On our side of the street was the school and a shrine to Our Lady of Knock. I was about to make a crack to Beth about the name and then stopped, because the shrine was beautiful and heartfelt and I’d heard enough jokes for the morning.

The church inside was tinted with the blues and reds from the stained-glass window. Heavy columns ran down both sides of the interior, leading to a lovely painted altar. The pews were burnished wood, the confessionals were not too ornate, the wood beneath the flickering candles was spattered with wax, and there was that solemn hush that always follows you into an empty church.