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curses whenever they tried to climb into her lap or even touch her. The final brutal scene with the three of them, the last day of Inez’s life, rolled like videotape inside his head.
    He and Tuta were playing tag in their fourth-floor slum apartment. Inez was drinking whiskey and playing solitaire on a card table. Tuta bumped the table and overturned a water glass of whiskey. Inez knocked Tuta down with her fist and straddled her. “You stupid motherfucking bitch! I’ll kill you for that!” she shouted, as her hands were choking Tuta.
    He snatched up an empty whiskey bottle and struck her on the top of her head. While Inez lay stunned, he took Tuta to a hiding place in the basement of a tenement down the street. At twilight, he went back to the fourth floor of his building to find a chance to steal some food from his apartment. He waited in the shadows at the far end of the hallway until the last of Inez’s drunken girlfriends and five-dollar johns departed.
    He sneaked into the apartment, expecting to find Inez snoring in a drunken stupor as usual. Instead, she was leaning through an open front window, watching a street fight down the block.
    Festering hatred ruled him. He eased up behind her and pushed. She landed skull-first on a spike of a dilapidated wrought-iron fence. Her split head burst forth brain matter.
    Her death would be officially determined as an accidental fall by a notorious drunk and mental patient. He remembered that his loving and sensitive father, Oscar, had been driven to blow out his brains nearly a year to the day before Inez’s death by her craziness and relentless bitchery.
    Shetani thought about the succession of loveless, even hateful foster homes he suffered in. For six years, every day, he missed Tuta and ached to be reunited with her. At fourteen, he joined an army of Harlem street kids. He teamed up with the teenage mugger Big Cat to get a bankroll. He haunted every grammar school in several boroughs until he found Tuta, right in Harlem. She was in her recess period. She immediately left the school grounds with him and never returned to her foster home.
    Shetani remembered how joyfully they lived together in a Harlem kitchenette until she died the next year of leukemia. He’d gone totally berserk with grief and rage against all the doctors and nurses in the county hospital for failing to save Tuta. He grinned, remembering the bloody chaos of broken jaws, noses and lacerated faces before seven cops finally subdued him. He thought about his seemingly endless confinement in a state mental hospital, until he was released at the age of eighteen.
    Now Shetani felt suddenly very tired. He turned away from the window and went to the bathroom for a shower. After that, multiple images of himself animated on the walls and ceiling of the mirrored white-and-gold room as he put on gold satin pajamas. He got into bed. The only light was from an amber lamp on the carpet behind the bed.
    He took a dope kit from beneath a satin pillow. He prepared and injected a shot of China white into an arm. He lay back, admiring the gorgeous image of himself in the ceiling mirror. The horse kicked him into dreamy ecstasy.

Several days after Big Cat’s death, Rucker pulled his Lincoln into his space on the parking lot of the two-story brick police building. He entered and greeted a half-dozen police and civilian employee acquaintances. He was told at the sign-in desk that the lieutenant wanted to see him.
    He went to Lieutenant Bleeson’s office, at the rear of the building. Rucker’s massive, hard-faced boss smiled and greeted him with his booming voice. “Hello, Russell. Sit down for good news.”
    Rucker said, “Thanks, Lieutenant,” as he seated himself in front of Bleeson’s cluttered desk.
    Bleeson, in shirtsleeves, leaned back in his chair and studied Rucker for a moment. “Russell, I’ve cleared your vacation, and I’m glad for you, because you look frayed.”
    Rucker grinned. “Six weeks of