"Give me a minute," he said, and went out into the hall.
Mrs. Vuong answered on the fourth ring, in the voice she used for customers. "Suds City."
"Mrs. Vuong, it's Lazaro. From the alley."
There was a pause on the line long enough that he thought she'd hung up. "I know who you are," she said. "Your carburetor is all over my back step. The wind blew your towel into the street. I picked up the little pieces and put them in a coffee cup. Where did you go? You never leave it like that."
So he told her. He stood in the hall of the emergency department of Arnot Ogden under a buzzing fluorescent light and told her everything, briefly: the boy, the bathroom, the pill, the hospital, the woman with the legal pad, the empty apartment. He did not tell her about the alley six years ago. That wasn't his to tell either.
When he finished, the line was silent again. He could hear the dryers turning in the background, that steady roar like surf.
"The boy in the green sweatshirt," Mrs. Vuong said at last. "With the hair. His mother does her wash here on Saturdays. Always Saturday, always seven in the morning, always the same two machines, numbers eleven and twelve. She folds very neatly. She makes him fold the towels."
"That's them."
Another pause. Then she said, in a different voice, "My husband, before he died, he told me you were a good man. He said you breathed for a girl in the alley for eleven minutes in the snow, and the police took you away for it. I told him he was a foolish old softhearted man who believed every sad story. I told him you were a criminal with a criminal's face." The dryers roared. "I have been wrong about you for six years, I think. I am closing early. Tell me what floor."
She came in her wool coat with the laundromat's keys still on a ring around her wrist and her purse held in front of her in both hands, and she sat down with Arliss Duchene in the consultation room and gave her name and date of birth and address and her late husband's name and the name of her church, and answered every question in the same exact, unhurried voice in which she answered questions about why the change machine didn't take wrinkled bills. She had a guest room, she said. Her son's old room. Her son was in Rochester now and did not visit enough. It had a bed with clean sheets on it always, because you never knew. Emi could stay tonight. And for the first days after his mother came home, Mrs. Vuong would stop at the apartment over the tire shop at seven in the morning on her way to open, and at seven at night after she closed, and Celestina could call her at the laundromat any time between.