We walked down two blocks from Crown Candy to my office on the corner of Fourteenth and Warren. I opened the door. The temperature in my office hadn’t changed since the day before. The air conditioner had not magically repaired itself during the night.
Sammy coughed. Her face curled back. “Kinda stuffy.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Can’t we open a window or something?”
“Wish it was that simple.” I turned on the lights. I looked around the sparsely decorated space and sighed. “Just stay here for a second.” I picked up the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door’s mail slot, then walked through the reception area to my office in the back. “I’ll check my messages, then we can go next door.”
I picked up the office phone and punched in the code to retrieve my voicemail, then set about sorting through the mail. Solicitations and credit card offers went into the garbage. The remainder went into my briefcase for later.
It took a few minutes to listen to all my messages.
There were six. Four were potential clients seeking legal representation. I wrote down their contact information and the crimes that they were accused of committing. I’d call them back once I got Sammy settled down, but I didn’t have much hope. Most people who called my office were only working their way down a long list of criminal defense attorneys that they had found on the Internet or in a phone book. By the time I got back to them, they had usually hired somebody else. If they hadn’t hired somebody else, that meant that they didn’t have any money.
The fifth message was from Cecil Bates, one of the public defender cases that I had handled this morning. He wanted me to call him back immediately to discuss his defense strategy. He had been doing research at the public library, and he wanted to share with me several United States Supreme Court cases that he had found.
Warning flags went up all around me.
I wrote down Cecil’s information and considered how quickly I should return his call. If I called him back too soon, he might come to expect that response every time he contacted me. If I waited too long, he’d sour on me. He’d make my life hell until his case was resolved. These were the kind of real-world problems that never get discussed in law school.
I pressed a button and moved on to the last message. It was my little brother, Lincoln.
“Listen, Justin, you gotta give me a call,” he said. “It’s important that we talk as soon as possible. Things are happening with Dad and you need to be a part of it.”
I shook my head. More political schemes. Then I deleted the message.
Most of the storefronts along Fourteenth where my office was located were empty, but there was some life. Ameren, the local electric utility, and a couple of nonprofit foundations had provided a combination of loans and grants to paint the facades, restore the interiors, and add new streetlights and benches.
The street looked nice for the first time in a quarter century. The beautification effort was intended to be a spark for renewal, but the spark had definitely not turned into a fire.
The lack of economic activity was likely caused by the lack of people. The city had lost 63 percent of its 1950 population. Hundreds of thousands of people gone. It’s hard to make money selling things when there aren’t people around to buy them.
I prayed nearly every day that it would happen. I wanted to believe that people would rediscover the Northside and move back, but my head told me that was near impossible. Saint Louis was a city built for a million, but it now had a population of just over 300,000. People had moved to the suburbs over sixty years ago, and it was crazy to think that they were going to come back now. They’d settled into pleasant lives far removed from the grit of city life, and every time the city got closer to them, they moved even farther away.
Sammy and I walked a half block down the street to the Northside Roastery. I opened the door, and a little bell rang. Hermes came out from behind a curtain separating the front and back of the shop. “Mr. Glass, I sensed you were coming.” Hermes spoke in a thick Bosnian accent, and he claimed to have some psychic abilities inherited from his mother’s side of the family.
He and his brother, Nikolas, were two of the thousands of refugees who had been relocated to Saint Louis from Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war in the 1990s. “Come over here. What I get for you?” Hermes walked to the counter. “I’ve got some wonderful pastries, very fresh, and my Tower Grove French Roast is near perfection.”
“I’ll have the French Roast, iced.” I looked over at Sammy. “Still full?”
Sammy nodded. “Maybe a juice for later?” She didn’t want to disappoint Hermes by failing to order anything.
Hermes looked from her to me, seeking confirmation.
I nodded. “And a juice.”
Hermes clapped his hands. “Yes. Perfect.” He turned with a flourish, bent down to a small refrigerator under a stainless steel table, and opened the door. “Orange, apple, strawberry-lemonade?”
“Apple.” Sammy looked at me and smiled. Hermes’s enthusiasm was contagious.
I liked it, too, but it was unclear to me how he stayed open. It was rare to see more than one or two other people in his coffee shop. My guess was that most of the money was earned by his brother, Nikolas. He stayed in the back whenever possible, and he wasn’t nearly as friendly.
Hermes had told me once that Nikolas was a computer genius. He purportedly bought, repaired, and resold computers on eBay and Craigslist. That was probably true, but I got the sense that Nikolas also did other things with computers that were far less legitimate.
Sammy and I got a table by the window that looked out at the street. Unlike the one in my office, the coffee shop’s air conditioner was working just fine. A luxury. We sat in the cool, surrounded by the smell of freshly roasted coffee beans.
The smell came from an antique roaster in the corner of the shop. It was a huge cast iron contraption. The body was painted dark blue. A metal arm swept underneath the roasting batch of green coffee beans like the second hand of an old pocket watch. It hummed and cranked. Every few minutes, Hermes wandered over to check the beans. He poked at them with a wooden spoon, ensuring that they were not being burned.
Sammy got out her thick book, and I got out the Devon Walker file.
It took me an hour and a half to carefully work through the entire file. From age ten until the time that he disappeared, Devon was in nearly constant contact with the police and juvenile probation. The older reports described a young kid on the periphery, surrounded by others who were dealing drugs and getting in fights. As the police reports became more current, Devon had moved from the periphery to the center.