The Fat Man wore a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up over the elbows and the fabric straining over the biceps. The top three buttons were undone, showing the neck of the sleeveless tee-shirt. He wore brown suit pants with a pleated front and his black hair was sparse. He said, “The principal thing that there is about this, that is bothering me basically, is the fuckin’ niggers.”

The other man was about forty. He was in reasonably good shape. He wore a lightweight blue madras sport coat and a light blue tie embroidered with white birds. His shirt was light blue and so were his slacks. He had grey-black curly hair, cut short. He said, “I don’t see what’s botherin’ you. What’s to bother? You got to get them out of there. There isn’t one goddamned other thing that you can do about it, because there isn’t anything that anybody else could do about it. Until you get those niggers out of there, nobody can do anything. You leave the boogies in, they are in and that is all there is to it. There’s no way anybody can do a fucking thing for you if those niggers’re still in it and something happens. The fuckin’ Globe’d go nuts if there was niggers in there and something happened. It’d be worse’n if the Cardinal was in there and something happened, for Christ sake. I told you that before and I’m telling you that now, and anybody who tells you different’s just blowing smoke up your ass and gonna get you in a whole mess of shit that you’ll never get out of. That’s the way it is.”

They sat in a booth at the Scandinavian Pastry Shop on Old Colony Boulevard in Dorchester. The fluorescent lights reflected on the fat man’s sweaty scalp and the white Formica tabletop. Large moths bumped the plate-glass window from the outside and the air conditioning droned on with the kind of noise that a motor makes when it is running short of oil and some system attached to it is making unusually heavy demands. “Twenny years ago,” the fat man said, “twenny years ago, nobody would’ve given a shit.” The fat man’s name was Leo Proctor.