“I know that. We all know that. But this woman—anybody can see she’s trouble. Not all cops are corrupt, either. Heck, not even most of them.”
“They do not have to be corrupt. Sometimes they see bad things being done, they know it is bad, and many of them are not happy about it, but they allow it to happen.”
“Why would they let it happen?”
“Maybe they are afraid. Maybe unsure. Maybe they are concerned about losing their jobs. They have to obey their superiors.”
“What superiors?”
“The chief of police, the mayor, the governor, the president. They have many superiors.” He put the nail to one of the pencil marks he’d made on the door frame, lightly tapped the head of it with the hammer, pulled the nail loose, and explained, “Starter hole for the drill bit,” as though I had asked.
As I watched him make three more starter holes, I said, “Well, this doesn’t look good for me. How am I going to explain this to my mother?”
“You could simply not say anything about it. That approach has worked for you before.”
I thought there might be a little sarcasm in his voice, but I couldn’t be certain. “I’m going to have to say something when she asks who put in the security chain.”
“Maybe she will not ask.”
“Oh, she’ll ask, all right.”
“If she does not notice right away, she will not ask right away.”
He picked up the manual drill, which already had a bit in its jaws, and began to drill out one of the starter holes.
I didn’t have to raise my voice to be heard above the soft clicking of the crank handle turning the bevel gears. “How couldn’t she notice? It’s bright brass.”
“She will assume Mr. Smaller installed it.”
“What if she asks him about it?”
He moved the drill bit from the first to the second starter hole and turned the crank. “You worry about too many small details, Jonah Kirk. Save your worrying for big problems. Life will bring you enough of those.”
“But, see, I’ve tried to be the man of the house, and that means not bothering her about stuff I should be able to handle myself. So I didn’t bother her about this thing and then that thing and this other thing, until now it’s a giant mess, and she’s going to be mad at me for hiding things, which she has a right to be.”
Mr. Yoshioka stopped cranking the drill, looked at me, and said, “Now, there is a problem big enough to worry about.”
32
The funny thing was, nothing that happened next proved to be anything that I worried would happen.
Every night, my mother locked the apartment door, sometimes early in the evening and sometimes well after the witching hour on a singing night, after she first fetched me from Mrs. Lorenzo’s. She routinely engaged both deadbolts and the security chain without saying a word about the new addition. The fifth or sixth night following Mr. Yoshioka’s installation of the chain, at half past one in the morning, she seemed to realize for the first time that it hadn’t always been there.
“When did this happen?” she asked, holding the chain and slide bolt in one hand, jingling it slightly.
Half asleep, I might have inadvertently made a revelation that would have untangled the entire ball of deception. To my discredit, however, even semiconscious, I was guileful enough to mumble, “Don’t know. It’s been there a while.”
She frowned at it, shook her head, and said, “I just realized I’ve been using it for … days, I guess. Huh. Didn’t think the landlord would spend a buck to improve anything in this place.” Then she slid the bolt into the doorplate and walked me back to my room to tuck me into bed.
Never again did she mention the security chain.
I already thought Mr. Yoshioka was a cool guy in his own sort of buttoned-up way. Now I decided he was a genius, too.
Mother never asked Mr. Smaller about the chain. Later I realized that she pretty much always steered clear of him, most likely because when Tilton lived with us, he sometimes took a six-pack of beer to the superintendent and hung out with him. My father liked to hear Mr. Smaller’s wild conspiracy theories, which later he would repeat to my mother and me, making them sound even crazier, mocking Mr. Smaller. Often Tilton’s accounts of those theories were funny, but he was so mean in the way he portrayed the superintendent that I couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I figured Mom didn’t ask Mr. Smaller about the chain because she didn’t want him to ask her how Tilton was faring these days; Sylvia Kirk, soon to be Bledsoe again, didn’t believe in saying bad things about anyone, but she didn’t have a good word for the man who kept abandoning her.