Shadow Roll Read Free

wiry; he looked smaller now.  None of us had ever known his first name.  We called him what Flo called him: Mister.  Which reminded me.
    “What’s your name, kid?”
    “Bonnie Jean.  I’m only eight so don’t go thinkin’ nothin’ funny.”
    That knocked me back on my heels.  First, because there wasn’t one thing funny about any of this.  Second, what put that in her head?  To the kid I was, “funny” meant sneaking a smoke in the store rooms behind the kitchen.  Funny could even mean hiding in the Zawadzki’s closet hoping to see something.  I don’t know about anybody else, but I never did.
    I looked at her straight.  “So far, I haven’t seen anything to laugh at around here.”
    A kid behind her, red hair stuck up like a whisk broom, said, “You got that right.  Who’s down there?  Is that Pamela?”
    I’d opened my mouth, was just about to ask who Pamela was, but Bonnie Jean’d reached out quick and pinched him—hard.  And someone else, I didn’t catch who, hissed, “Shaddup.”
    I asked anyway.  “Who’s Pamela?”
    Silence.  But a lot of movement.  A lot of looking at anything but me.  A little bit of shoe scraping.  If this was a Warner Brothers cartoon, at least one of ‘em would be whistling.
    Besides the pushy kid, there was always the smart kid, the one who’s got your number before you do.  Bonnie Jean was that kid too.  “You ain’t the cops.  Why you askin’?  And how come you’re up here anyways?”
    All good questions.
    “I’m a private detective.  I came with the cops.”
    For that I was rewarded with a lot of big eyes and some happy gratified oooohs.  Which is exactly how I would of reacted back when.
    Before Bonnie Jean could stop him, the redhead was tugging at my sleeve, saying, “You betcha that’s Pamela.  She was bad.  You gonna find out who kilt her?”
     “I’m here to try.  Bad?  Why was she bad?”
     Pushing him out of the way, Bonnie Jean was back in control.  “Tell you one thing, Mr. Privates Defective,” she said.  “Ain’t none of us gonna help you.  Are we?”  With that last crack, she gave the rest an eye as evil as Flo on her best day.
    I knew the answer, but I had to ask anyway.  “And why is that?”
    “Because we gotta live here, and if you ever really did, you don’t now.”
     

Chapter 4
     
    I’d guess most of the kids who’d ever lived in the Home knew how to get up on the roof.  I’d been out of this place since Bold Venture won the Kentucky Derby—when was that? fifteen, sixteen years?—but its secrets were still mine.  They had to be.  You spend your whole life in a neighborhood, a small town, a building big enough to house the New York Yankees, that place is yours.  You know it better than you know yourself.  Its secrets are your secrets.  Especially if you’re a kid like I was a kid, always poking around.  Except for the queasy stomach when it came to slaughter, I was born to be a gumshoe.  And one thing I knew now, knew as sure as I knew Mister had a recent hairpiece—the girl’s name was Pamela and every kid in the Staten Island Home for Children knew who killed her.  And why.  I also knew not one of them was going to tell me.
    All I had to do was know what they knew—which I was going to have to find out all by myself.
    The roof was exactly as I remembered it.  Aside from the towers, there was a whole lot of steeply angled tiled roofing a kid could kill himself sliding off.  Up here there were four small areas of flat tar paper, each section set beside the four huge cone topped turrets.  On these, in hot weather, you had to choose your way carefully or risk getting sticky black goo all over your shoes.
    Shoes were hard to come by, harder to keep.  A kid guarded his shoes.
    The weather wasn’t hot.  It was cool and the tar was firm.  But not all that firm.  Up here there were footprints dating back to the Pleistocene.  What I was looking for were footprints dating back a