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her,” Tyrell said. “White woman. Everybody says girl, but she wasn’t. Everybody says beautiful. Did you ever notice that? When somebody—well, when one of theirs gets murdered, they always call her beautiful.”
    â€œYou want to speak well of the dead,” Claretta said.
    â€œYes, you do. But she wasn’t a girl, and she wasn’t beautiful. I could see that in spite of the, well, the distortions caused by the strangling and the cuts. She was a middle-aged woman and a little on the stocky side, and she’d bled all over everything. And her purse was missing. They didn’t know who she was because there wasn’t a wallet or anything with identification anywhere near her. I don’t think the Plate Glass Killer steals things. I think some of the punks came through after she was dead and stripped the body down. Do you know what I did last year?”
    â€œMade more money than me?” Claretta said.
    â€œI took a course over at Saint Joe’s. Nights. I got a couple of kids I could trust to take the store Tuesdays and Thursdays from seven to nine, and I took this course in the Adult Education Division. It was a course in the history ofphilosophy: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant. I can still remember the names. All these guys, hundreds of years, thousands of years, trying to figure out how people work and what makes them good or bad. None of them seems to have come to any conclusion.”
    â€œPeople are bad because they want to be bad,” Claretta said gently, “or because they’re angry or upset or something is messing with them.”
    â€œMaybe. But sometimes I think the whole world is crazy. People don’t make any sense. People spend most of their time doing things that are going to make them miserable and then complain about how miserable they are. People shoot themselves in the foot and then complain that they’ve been shot. I’m not making any sense.”
    â€œNot much,” Claretta said.
    Tyrell shook his head. “I’d better get back inside and make sure Charles hasn’t retreated to the television set. You have no idea how much I hate hiphop. And what kind of a name is that? Hip-hop.”
    â€œWhat kind of a name was doo-wop?”
    â€œDoo-wop was theirs. We had rhythm and blues. You sure you don’t want me to see you home?”
    â€œI’ll be fine. They’ve all gone underground. We going to see you in church on Sunday?”
    â€œProbably.”
    Claretta went on up the street, and Tyrell stood a little longer in the rain, watching her go, just in case. It wasn’t a good idea for anybody to be out alone at night in this neighborhood unless they were armed in one way or the other, and Claretta would never be armed. She didn’t understand guns, and she thought of knives as something that went along with forks. The street was so deserted, it felt like a scene in a movie: the end of the world was upon us, and nobody was left to mark its passage.
    Claretta disappeared into her building, and Tyrell turned back to the store and Charles Jellenmore. The odd thing was, he remembered the name of the woman in the alley, even though he hadn’t heard it until many long days after he’d been arrested and released. It was Faith Anne Fugate, and what made it stick in his head was the fact that it was so close to another name, Caril Ann Fugate, and that was the name of the girl who had been with Charles Starkweather on his killing spree through Nebraska. That had been in 1958, when Tyrell had been two years old. He hadn’t even heard about the case until he was in his twenties and on something of a true-crime reading jag. For all the yelling and screaming people did about it, he knew it was not about race. It wasn’t races that committed crimes, it was the people in them, and the most important thing about those people was not the color of their skins. The most important thing