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“It’s his, sir.”

“Highway is about to bring you the man he wants to interview. What I want you to do, Summers, is handcuff him to the chair and leave him there until Washington shows up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When Lieutenant Natali returns, you tell him I’ll explain this to him later, and in the meantime, I want him to sit on it. Same thing if Captain Quaire shows up there. If Chief Lowenstein does, ask him to call me.”

“Yes, sir.”

The line went dead in Detective Summers’s ear.

Five minutes later, a Highway Patrol sergeant and a Highway Patrol officer appeared in the anteroom of the Homicide Unit, which is on the second floor of the Roundhouse. With them they had a very large, angry-appearing black man wearing a gray sweatshirt, baggy blue athletic trousers, bedroom slippers, a golden chain with a three-inch gold medallion, and handcuffs.

“What the fuck am I doing in here?” Mr. Marcus C. (aka Baby) Brownlee inquired.

“Put him in there,” Detective Summers said, pointing to the interview room.

“I want my fucking lawyer!” Brownlee announced.

The Highway Patrol sergeant, a slight, very intense black man, guided Mr. Brownlee into the interview room, indicated that he should take a seat in a metal captain’s chair bolted to the floor, and turned to Detective Summers.

“One wrist, or both?”

“Did you hear what I said?” Brownlee indignantly demanded.

The Highway Patrol sergeant put his index finger before his mouth and said, “Sssshhh!”

“He’s big, but one should hold him,” Detective Summers decided and announced.

Brownlee’s right wrist was placed in a handcuff, the other end of which passed through a hole in the seat of the steel captain’s chair.

The Highway Patrol sergeant left the interview room and closed the door after him.

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what the hell this is all about?” Detective Summers said.

“I can, if I want to go back to Traffic on the Last Out,” the Highway Patrol sergeant said. “The Black Buddha’s on his way. Maybe he’ll tell you.”

“You just going to take off?”

“We got three more to pick up,” the Highway Patrol sergeant announced, gestured to his partner—a Highway patrolman of Polish extraction even larger than Brownlee—to follow him, and walked out of the Homicide Unit.

Detective Summers went into the room adjacent to the interview room and looked through the one-way mirror at Brownlee.

Brownlee was testing the security of the handcuffs restraining him to the chair. Detective Summers wondered if he should have suggested to the Highway sergeant that both Brownlee’s wrists be manacled.

Five minutes later, Sergeant Jason Washington walked into the Homicide Unit. Despite the hour, he was the picture of sartorial elegance. He was wearing a double-breasted dark blue silk suit, a crisp white shirt with a flower-pattern silk necktie that matched the handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a gleaming pair of black Amos Archer wing-tip shoes.

“Welcome home, Jason,” Summers said.

“You would be ill-advised, Kenneth, to rub salt in my open wound at this hour of the morning.”

The open wound to which Washington referred was his involuntary transfer from Homicide to Special Operations.

“He’s in there,” Summers said, chuckling. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

Washington considered that a full thirty seconds.