Crimson Joy

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Sheridan Street in Jamaica Plain goes uphill from Center Street for about two hundred yards, crests, and heads down toward Chestnut Avenue.

It's a narrow street, lined with two- and three-family clapboard houses. Many of the houses had been broken up into apartments and a lot of the apartments were occupied by students and recent graduates.

The rest by people who worked without a tie.

On a bright, cold day in early March the last shame of winter lingered in the hard compounded mounds of snow and sand, blackened by exhaust and soot.

Frank Belson jammed his car up onto the ice-cluttered sidewalk and parked, the way cops like to, at an angle, with the rear end of the car sticking halfway out into the street. There were two squad cars already parked the same way.

The house in front of us had a small front porch and two front doors. It had been painted a weak green some time ago. The coroner's wagon was in the narrow driveway and yellow scene-of-the-crime tape was strung across the sidewalk on either side of the house. Some neighbors, mostly women with small children, stood around across the street. It was a neighborhood where men worked and women stayed home.

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