I looked at the number. A cell. It probably didn’t mean anything, but what seemed an out-of-the-way location might pan out.

“You thought to look under his monitor?” I asked.

“Richard spent hours at his computer, writing books and sermons. I figured anything he needed would be close at hand. You supplied the idea, I just did the looking.”

I pocketed the Post-it. “Miz Scaler mentioned Richard going out late at night, returning hours later. Ever see that?”

“Three weeks ago. I came in the morning before going to my office. Richard pulled in behind me in one of those huge white cars. He looked half crazy and his clothes were rumpled, his, uh, zipper down. His pants were stained.”

“What happened?”

“All I wanted was out of there. I asked him if he’d kindly take a bag of fruits and veggies and a couple of prepared dinners into Patricia.”

“And?”

“He asked me if I was having a relationship with her – not using those terms. My mouth fell open and I told him no, of course not.”

“What happened from there, Mr Fossie?”

“He started laughing, a filthy, dirty sound, and said he could understand, because it was like…like fucking cold grits.”

I thanked Fossie and dropped him back on the corner. “Keep looking, Mr Fossie,” I said. “It’s what we need.”

“It makes me feel like a creep. A spy or something.”

“You’re working for the good guys. And by the way, I’m sleeping again.”

He smiled for the first time, flicked a wave, hustled back toward the Scaler edifice.

I got into the office to find Harry at the coffee urn and studying doughnuts. Though it was Sunday, half of the detective’s desks were occupied, the price of a murderous season.

“You should eat more oatmeal,” I advised. “A healthy mind and body and all that.”

Harry leaned low over the pastries to scrutinize a danish. “I’m sure these sprinkles are organic.”

“I just got some info from Fossie,” I said, digging in my pocket for the Post-it. “Probably nothing, but worth a try. I put him on scoping out the Scalers’ place, an inside man.”

Harry gave me a frown, like he did after I mentioned my little scam at the prison.

“How’d you pull that one off, Carson?”

“Fossie’s been giving me a little advice on a healthy diet. He prescribed some herbs to help me sleep. It’s working.”

Harry nodded. “My aunt takes that herbal stuff and it did miracles for her. What’s Fossie think this number means?”

“He’s got no idea, but he found it –”

“Harry! Carson!”

We turned to see Tom Mason leaning out his office door with phone in hand. “Got a body at 513 Broad Street,” he called. “The Hoople Hotel.”

I jammed the Post-it back in my pocket. “Ah, the Heroin Hilton. Let’s go dance with the roaches.”

We were at the Hoople five minutes later, Harry wheeling the big blue Crown Vic half on to the sidewalk and shutting down the screamer. Two radio cars were on scene, and a crowd was gathering, vacant-eyed homeless types shambling beside gum-chewing hookers dressed like Whore Barbie. Streetwise studs with white tees and sideslung caps watched from a distance, afraid of getting nailed on outstanding warrants. When I stepped from the car a crack vial crunched under my heel. The air smelled of stale beer from the bar across the street.

We ducked past a uniform and into the Hoople. It was a resident hotel mainly occupied by old-line junkies who worked sporadic, low-pay jobs and needed a place to crib and fix and stay out of the way of normal people.

I saw a young uniformed officer at the desk counter, keeping the clerk from bolting. The clerk was Hispanic, in his thirties, maybe four-foot-ten and ninety pounds. His anxious eyes told me his immigration status was nebulous. Harry asked for directions and the uniform turned to point at the rickety steps leading upstairs.

“Third floor, Detective, room 321, about midway down the ha—”

That was all the clerk needed. He dropped low and bolted, trying to squeeze past us and out the front door. Harry’s hand flashed out and grabbed the guy by the back of his collar. When Harry lifted, the clerk was suddenly in the air, feet still running as Harry whirled around and set him down in the opposite direction, where he ran into a wall, just like a cartoon.

Helping the guy up, dusting off his shoulder, Harry said a few words in Spanish, telling Mr Jaime Critizia we were not going to inform La Migre – Immigration – unless he repeated his attempt at running.

The guy nodded acceptance and collapsed into a metal chair. We headed upstairs to the third floor, saw an open door midway down a hall less than two shoulders wide, a uniformed cop leaning against the wall, Officer Jerry Gilmore. He looked up, shook his head.

“Add another one to the year’s growing list of corpses, guys. Someone called it in anonymously just a few minutes ago. Me and Ryan were down the street, ran over. Found the guy inside, still warm.”

We peeked into a linoleum-floored room scarcely larger than a parking space. Surprisingly, the room was clean and tidy and recently painted. Two large philodendrons perched atop a table by a window, probably the only window in the place that had ever been washed. I saw a painting on the wall, an inexpensive copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The place resembled the digs of a fastidious college student, not a room at a low-rent sleeper.

Across the room the view wasn’t so pleasant: a body on a single bed, a bronze-skinned male in his early forties or thereabouts, jeans, no shirt. His head was shaved. His eyes were open and so was his mouth, a strand of dried vomit tracing down his cheek and throat to the sheet. I figured he’d been a good-looking man in life, his body lean, his features strong and chiseled and exotic.

At the head of the bed, beside a grated window streaked with grime, Sergeant Orville Ryan stared down at the corpse while scribbling notes in a spiral-bound pad almost lost in his plate-sized paw. Somewhere in the room I discerned the dank scent of the sea.

“What is it, Orv?” Harry strode over and looked down at the corpse, said, “Oh,” like things were self-explanatory. I wandered in and saw the cheap plastic syringe on the floor beside the bed, the blackened spoon used to heat the drug, melt it into water or spit that would liquefy it for sucking it up the needle. I snapped on latex gloves as I crouched, lifted the body’s arm and looked at the inner section from bicep to wrist, saw a webworm of scabs and collapsed veins, the stigmata of a veteran junkie.

“Looks like a classic OD,” I said, trying to hide the hopeful note in my voice. If the death was accidental, it wouldn’t fall under our aegis.

“Dead on,” Ryan said, looking up over the reading glasses perched on the tip of a bulbous nose. “He was aimed this direction, just a matter of time.”

“You knew the guy, Orv?” Harry asked.

“Name’s LaPierre O’Fong, officially.”

“O’Fong?”

“To hear Red tell it, years back someone on the Irish side of his family married the Chinese side and somehow – as a joke or maybe meaning it for real – the family changed its name to O’Fong. It got into official records and stuck.”

“That’s some kind of family story,” Harry said.

“He came from some kind of family, to hear him tell it. He went by Chinese Red, or just Red. He’d been on and off smack for twenty-plus years; on, mainly, starting in his late teens.”

I studied the guy’s features closer, saw Asian genes in the delicate nose, almond eyes. He wasn’t Caucasian or African or Hispanic or Asian, but somehow he was all of them and more. His open eyes were staring at the ceiling, like watching a movie in a theater where only the dead got tickets.

“Chinese makes sense,” I said, looking at the face. “Where’s the Red come from?”

“Red’s natural hair was the color of rust. He’d started shaving his head because of me,” Ryan said. “When I’d see that red rug ducking down an alley I’d pull over and roust his junkie ass.”