Chapter 14

I took up a position at the end of the serving counter, leaning on it in fact, and Cecelia stepped out into the middle of the room. She turned in a circle, saying nothing, as people quieted down, and as she turned I saw a sudden quick flash of color from her nose – the overhead light refracting through the tiny diamond that she wears there. I supposed, standing there, that her being the mission's Boss Lady shouldn't be so surprising after all – this is a woman who in all the time I'd known her had never worn any jewelry besides her wedding ring and the ruby necklace I'd given her after she proposed to me, and then suddenly in 2006 had showed up with a piercing. If she'd bought rings or earrings or bracelets it would have been surprising enough, but a piercing had completely bamboozled me.

I didn't get to think on that for long, though, for when the room was as quiet as it was going to get she spoke. "Most of you know me – indeed, it seems that tonight almost all of you know me. You trust me. I have heard your secrets and never told them; I have given you advice privately; I have served you a fair share of the food and never played favorites. This man," she said pointing to me, "is my husband, of whom many of you have heard me speak. He and I are investigating a serial murderer, a man who is targeting you. This person – if I may so denominate him – is killing street people. We propose to find him, and stop him. But we need your help.

"If you have seen anything, or heard anything, which might be of help to us in this endeavor, we need to know it. Please allow us to judge the worth of the information you possess; we are investigators, my husband being an excellent specimen of the article, and we can better differentiate between wheat and chaff than you can. You can survive on the streets – indeed, you are doing so, many of you in spite of my earnest protestations – where we could not. But we are investigators, and discerning useful from worthless information is what we can do.

"I shall be serving for the remainder of the evening. My husband shall find some productive task – I do not know what, for I trust him to locate useful work on his own – and shall be engaged in that. If you know anything, or think you do, or even suspect that you might, please come to us. We will speak with you privately, we will maintain your privacy – and we will use what we learn to protect you from this barbarian."

And she turned and walked toward the counter – her notions of how to conclude a speech summarize in the dictum, "when you come to the end, stop." All around the room people resumed eating and talking, but eyes followed her as she stepped behind the counter, removed her trench coat and laid it on a shelf along the wall, and tied on an apron.

Meanwhile I'd seen that the cook had a whole pile of potatoes to peel and slice – somewhere they'd gotten a fryer with baskets, and were putting out French fries by the truckload – so I tilted my hat back on my head, took off my own jacket and stuck it with Cecelia's, grabbed a knife, and went to work. The one thing I know how to do in the kitchen is make fried potatoes, and so I would be competent to make the fries, though not to cook them – I'd stay far away from that.

There behind the counter, with the fryer going and heat from the kitchen coming out at us through the door, the heat of all the bodies in the place, and the heaters themselves, which worked well, I got to sweating. Finally I pulled off my hat and laid it, top down, on the shelf beside our coats. I was peeling and slicing at a great rate, and the pile of potatoes was diminishing with two of us working on it.

And then Cecelia was beside me. "Darvin, if I may interrupt, someone wishes to speak with us."

I nodded. I'd just picked a potato off the pile, and I put it back. There was a woman beside Cecelia – apparently a white woman, but so darkened by sun and weather and dirt that I wasn't sure. I couldn't see her hair – she was wearing a stocking cap down over her ears and either her hair was short under there, or she'd tucked it up inside the wool. She had the layered clothes of a street person, and odor of someone who lives in every stitch she's got too. I nodded at her, and she nodded back.