"We always thought he had that shotgun for shooting, like, birds and shit," Edna explained to the two St. Paul police officers on her front step, one with a lazy eye and two extra chins and the other with a slim figure and dark brown eyes that looked black against his pale skin. Pi Eye had been missing since the night before, and she thought nothing of it until the cops knocked on the door with notepads and polite smiles at her middle-age handsomeness. She patted her brown hair, fluffing the curls around her ears. "You say Pi Eye has gone and shot somebody?" Her hands fell to the front of her apron, which she gripped with stout fingers, the sound of her voice ringing in the air as she realized she'd spoken too loud.

Pi Eye rented a room upstairs in Edna’s two story house behind Sears. He would sit at the breakfast table every morning trading off puffs of a cigar and mouthfuls of bacon and eggs, his shotgun lain across his lap, the barrel bouncing with his restless knee as he mumbled something about Harry Truman and the war. A little egg would usually fall out of his mouth. Sometimes in the afternoon, he would sit across from Edna’s two grandchildren, Halley and Brian, and laugh while he told stories about drinking kerosene and sugar down south during the Dust Bowl, the shotgun never leaving his lap, snug against his pelvis.

The officers stood on the front stoop looking down on Edna, whose eyes darted from the lazy eye to the skinny fingers jotting down notes, her ears strained on the little footsteps inside and Margaret's throat hacks as she cut out newspaper clippings about dead friends. "Pi Eye?" the officers asked, flipping back a few pages on the notepad. "Is that what you called him?"

Edna nodded. She never knew why he called himself Pi Eye, and never asked if it was his real name. There was nothing wrong with either of his eyes, but in looking at his face you’d notice something not right. Something familiar, but unfamiliar. Like seeing faces while falling asleep, and sometimes seeing faces you’ve never seen before but are still clear.

Pi Eye had a brown leather jacket that he wore every day except when it was being dry-cleaned. It was rustic and fringed and complemented his white tufts of hair, wrinkled skin, scuffed boots and the long double barrel that left a dip on the shoulder of the jacket anytime he walked someplace. And everyone simply assumed that when he went out, he’d go shooting after the birds and the squirrels. When he returned, the smell of gunpowder always led and followed him.

As she stared back into the unrevealing eyes of the skinny officer on the doorstep, the only break of the silence was a blue jay cackling in the treetops. "Well, we have one dead dry cleaner," he said as he pointed down the road through the mouth of naked trees that swallowed the street and its sputtering cars. "And right now this Pi Eye, as you call him, is our only suspect." He showed her the dry cleaning ticket. "Happened this morning. And any information you can give us would help." He paused. Smiled with closed lips, like a bellhop checking in a premier guest. "Can we have a look around?"

Edna let them in, but they found nothing in Pi Eye's room except empty whiskey bottles, clothing scattered on the floor and a book with some photos protruding from the pages. The cops sat in the living room for afternoon coffee, Margaret sitting at the table behind them with newspaper clippings in her lap and scissors between her finger and thumb. Her lower lip jutted out in a scowl and her eyes were narrow, almost shut.  

"Well, like I said, he didn't come back here last night. He doesn’t own a car," she emphasized with raised eyebrows and a quick shake of her head. She thought of Pi Eye. Her most reliable tenant when it came to money. Not always when it came to cleanliness. "You're sure it was Pi Eye who killed this dry cleaner?"

“The dry cleaner was shot in the chest by a double-barrel shot gun. Pi Eye’s jacket was on the floor and the ticket was right there. But the jacket was ruined. It looked like the dry cleaner had ruined it on accident. A possible motive." He sipped the coffee. Every time the officers said 'Pi Eye' they stressed every syllable of the name. "Did he have a history of violent behavior?"

"The dry cleaner?"

"Pi Eye, Ma'am."

Edna spotted the shadow of the children in the corner eavesdropping, and she scowled. “No, he just minds his business. Keeps to himself. Pats the kids on the head and nice things like that. Just always has that shotgun with him, but he’s never been a danger to anyone here."

The bellhop officer raised one eyebrow without allowing his grin to fade. He could see the two kids, prepubescent, poking their faces from behind the corner and thinking their whispers were too quiet for the adults to hear.

"You think he would shoot a dry cleaner because the jacket got ruined?" she said, incredulous. No one in the house had ever seen him angry, so when she pictured the murder, she could only see him with a vacant grin, yellow teeth peeping through his shriveled lips as the dry cleaner handed him the jacket, saying 'I'm sorry, sir, but…' and Pi Eye dropping the ticket on the floor, bouncing the barrel of the shotgun from his shoulder and toward the cleaner. Aiming the barrel of the gun, the buttstock in his armpit as he pulled the trigger and blew him away. Red splattering on his clothes and boots. Then leaving the ticket, the cleaner, his jacket, and St. Paul behind, still with a far off gaze and a half-smile, the way she'd always known him. Sometimes whistling and pointing out rare birds.

"That’s what it looks like at the moment. You're his landlady, the only connection we know of right now, so we thought we'd ask if that's the kind of thing he would do."

As the cops left the little house in the mid-winter dusk and ambled back to the squad with no more leads, she closed the door and jiggled the squeaky, rusted latch shut. “Go upstairs,” she said, and the kids darted to their rooms while Margaret shifted in her chair and pretended not to hear. But her chest spurted up and down as she chuckled. The footsteps of the kids upstairs ceased, and Edna turned back to shut every window, make a late supper, and write a new Room for Let ad.