Read CONCOURSE (Bill Smith/Lydia Chin) for Free Online

Director of Helping Hands,” the tall blond woman informed me. “And I would appreciate it, Mr. Smith, if you wouldn’t socialize with the residents. I’m sure Dr. Reynolds would agree. You’re large and uniformed and you could easily frighten these people.”
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Ida.
    “Ida, please.” The blond woman smiled a closed-lipped smile. She wasn’t an unhandsome woman, but she somehow made me wish I were in Florida.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought the opposite. I was trying to put them at ease.”
    “I suggest you stick to guard patrols and let us look after the residents.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “But before you go about your business I’d like you to give back the money you took from Ida.”
    “He didn’t take it. I gave it to him.”
    “And why would you do that, Ida?” Mrs. Wyckoff asked.
    Ida’s eyes caught mine for a second, then flicked back to Mrs. Wyckoff. “He’s helping me out,” she said blandly. “He’s buying a present for one of my great-nephews. The one who flies planes.”
    “Don’t be foolish, Ida. A man you’ve barely met? If you need that sort of help, one of the social workers will be glad to provide it. That’s what we have them for.”
    Mrs. Wyckoff turned to inspect me. Behind her back, Ida Goldstein twisted her face into a mask of demented idiocy, including a tight-lipped smile, then was instantly demure and attentive as Mrs. Wyckoff looked back to her. I bit the inside of my lip to keep from cracking up.
    Mrs. Wyckoff surveyed us all. “No, I think something else is going on here.” The tight smile grew by a millimeter or so. I wondered if her lips cramped up by the end of the day.
    “I think we should tell the truth, Mrs. Goldstein,” I said. Ida started to say something. I addressed Mrs. Wyckoff over her words. “It was my fault. When I met Mrs. Goldstein this morning, we madea bet. She lost; she insisted I collect. I’m sorry. I should have known better.” I pressed the folded bill into Ida’s tiny hand, closed her fingers around it.
    “Is that so?” Mrs. Wyckoff tipped her head, looked from me to Ida. “What was this bet about, if I may ask?”
    “But now I’m not so sure I lost,” Ida said. “Except on a technicality.”
    “And what was the bet about?” Mrs. Wyckoff repeated.
    “I bet him,” Ida told her, “that he’d be in trouble with you before lunch.”
    Mrs. Wyckoff’s eyes flared, and she flushed a color which was not becoming with her shade of hair. She threw a poisonous glance at me; then she turned on her heel and stalked away.
    In his chair, Eddie Shawn was jiggling and squeezing his knee in wordless laughter.

S EVEN
    T he parking lot, like the garden and the building itself, was a rectangle running the length of the block, built up over the retaining wall. I walked the lot in the moving shadows of paper birches planted along the fence and in the small turnaround. Their leaning trunks and weeping branches gave them an old-fashioned, Victorian look. The turnaround had a stone bench on it, between two trees; I wondered how long it had been since anyone sat there, waiting for a car or a carriage or a visitor dropping by during a Sunday stroll.
    I walked to the edge, looked over the wall at Chester Avenue thirty feet below. Two young women wandered along, pushing carriages. A man worked on a car to the urgent rap beat of its radio. There was no sign that there’d been a fight down there earlier. There was no sign of the Cobras.
    I checked the side door on the south, found it well locked. Iambled back through the lot, tried the north side door. Locked, too. I went in, perched on Fuentes’s desk, took out a cigarette.
    “Hey, you better not,” he grinned at me. “Can’t smoke in here, man. Nowhere in the buildin’. An’ you better not get caught sittin’ around, too. La Gringa see you, she gonna get on you ass. She won’t care what kinda hero you are.” I had told him the story, minus the part