"What?" Harald kneaded the elbow of his throwing arm.

"Nobody wants to help. But everybody wants the cops to do something."

"Yeah. I been thinking about taking up jogging. Getting out of shape. What do you think?"

"Annie grew up on this block. Says it's always been tough and anti-cop."

"She married one."

"Sometimes I think maybe one of us wasn't in their right mind."

The flats had been erected in the century's teen years, to house working-class families. The two- and four-family structures had not yet deteriorated, but the neighborhood was beginning to change. For two decades the young people had been fleeing to more modern housing outside the city. Now the core families had begun to retreat before an influx from the inner city. Soon the left-behinds would be people too poor to run. And landlords would give up trying to stave off the decay of properties whose values, they felt, were collapsing.

"I thought we'd get some cooperation 'cause they know us," said Harald, after having been cold-shouldered by a high-school classmate. Cash lived just two blocks away, on Flora; John had grown up in the neighborhood.

"Badge does something to people. Puts them on the defensive no matter how hard you try. Everybody's got something to feel guilty about."

The entire morning had been a no go. People had answered their questions only reluctantly, and had had nothing to tell. No one had seen or heard a thing.

Not that they cared, Cash thought. They just answered fast and true to get the cops off their doorsteps.

Cash had met a girl once, Australian he now suspected, who had had a strange accent. That had been a long time ago, college days, before he had married. He no longer remembered who had introduced them, nor what the girl had looked like, just her accent and the fact that he had mimicked it, thinking she had been putting him on. He still felt ashamed of the incident.