“Is Moon Child dead?” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “She’s brave. So are you, Orchid. Who hurt your friend?”
“I didn’t see anything,” she replied.
“How about you, Lindsey Lou? Can you help Moon Child?”
“Is she gonna live?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She wants her father. That means she wants to live. You have to help her do that.”
“Nothing happened on the bus,” Lindsey Lou said. “Marvin says there was a little accident. I was asleep. That’s all I know.” She twisted her face away, her chin in the air.
“What kind of accident?” I asked.
“I just told you I don’t know,” she said.
“Y’all know who did this,” I said. “You have an obligation. Don’t let your friend down.”
Both of them stared at the floor. When they raised their faces again, their eyes looked like inkwells, and I was convinced no force on earth could pry the truth from them. But I tried. “Was it Marvin?”
“Marvin takes care of us,” Orchid said. “Unless we’re bad.”
“What does Marvin do when you’re bad?”
She folded her arms across her chest and lowered her eyes.
“Does Marvin punish you when you’re bad, Lindsey Lou?”
“We love Marvin,” she said.
“What about Jimmy Doyle?” I said. “Is he a grand fellow, too?”
“Don’t say any more,” Orchid said to Lindsey Lou. “He’s trying to trick us.”
“No matter how bad this seems, you can walk away from it,” I said. “You’ve committed no crime. You can be a friend to Moon Child. Just tell the truth.”
“Get away from us,” Lindsey Lou said.
I saw Orchid’s eyes take on the same hard look as her friend’s. “Lindsey Lou is right. You’re the enemy. You work for them.”
“Who’s ‘them’?”
“Them,” Lindsey Lou said. “Are you stupid? Them.”
* * *
WADE BENBOW AND I walked to the men’s holding tank at the far end of the corridor.
“What’s that about an accident?” I said.
“You got me,” he said. “None of what they say is reliable, even when they think they’re telling the truth. You know the real problem?” He waited until a trusty passed us with a food cart, then another with a mop and bucket on wheels. “The drug culture is just getting started. Middle-class kids are the target, and flatfeet like me are anachronisms.”
A uniformed deputy caught up with us. He was holding two pages taken off a teletype machin
e. “Your request from the feds came in,” he said. “Willie Sutton’s legacy is safe.”
Benbow skimmed over the pages. “I see Marvin Fogel here. There’s nothing criminal on Doyle?”