Page 86 of A Fabulously Unfabulous Summer for Henry Milch

“But knowing what kind of pizza he liked—that means it’s someone who knew him,” she said, her voice darkening. I couldtell she hadn’t quite given up on it’s being a robbery or a hate crime. “You think it was Carl, don’t you?”

“He’d have known what kind of pizza his stepfather liked and about Dinah’s condition.”

“Wouldn’t that detective have checked his phone records?” she asked.

“Yes, but he could have used Opal’s phone. Maybe she went to the bathroom or something.”

“But why would Carl kill his stepfather?”

That was a little dicey. I didn’t want to tell her that Hessel had been PNPing with a guy Carl was in love with.

“Maybe he did it for his mother,” I suggested.

“Do you think they did it together?”

“I guess. I don’t know. She might have found out her husband was doing drugs.”

“I know women who’ve put up with worse,” she said.

Then Dinah was back with our order: a large, flat cardboard box and a big bag on top of it. To Nana Cole she said, “You know where the napkins and forks are.”

“Thank you, Dinah. And I’m sorry if Henry was rude.”

“I’m just asking the questions you want answers to,” I protested.

To Dinah, Nana Cole said, “Young people. They just don’t get it.”

Monday morning,I went to see Detective Lehmann. On the drive to the Municipal Center, I went over everything in my head again and again. I doubted Detective Lehmann would believe me. Not because what I had to say didn’t make sense,but because his default position where I was concerned was disbelief.

He was there in his office. I was beginning to suspect that he left it as little as possible.

“I broke their alibi. Ivy Greene and her son.”

“You ‘broke’ it? How did you do that?”

“My grandmother and I got a pizza from Little Italy.”

“Ah, well, that makes perfect sense,” he said with obvious sarcasm.

“Look, you’re not from here, so you probably didn’t know this. Dinah at Little Italy, she was in a car accident, went through the windshield. She has this kind of brain damage where she doesn’t recognize voices. She thought it was Reverend Hessel on the phone, but it wasn’t.”

It was starting to make sense to him, I could tell because he looked very unhappy. “You’re not from here, either. So how do you know?”

“My grandmother explained it to me.”

“It was Reverend Hessel’s credit card. And his credit card was still in his wallet when we found him.”

“Dinah can tell men from women, but that’s it. Did you get his phone records?”

“The phone records for the church should get here soon. It can take up to forty-five days. We just got the records for Ivy Greene, and they match up with what she told us.”

They got phone records all the time onLaw & Order. They usually arrived before anyone thought to ask for them. Apparently, things worked differently in real life.

“Which was?” I asked. “What did Ivy Greene tell you?”

He stared at me for a moment. “I thought you were finished with this. Didn’t you tell me that?”

“Yeah, then someone tried to poison us, me, whatever.”