The floor tiles were brown and speckled.  I remember because I stared at them for the whole interview, my hands worring my keys, head down.

While the detective went over the time line with my brother and I, I realized that my brother found out about our father's murder by watching the news.  He was sitting down for dinner after work with his family when he noticed my father's car on the television.  

After calling the police station to confirm that it was our father, my brother and his wife tried to find me.  They didn't want to call me on the phone, knowing that I would hear it in their voices, so the suburbanites that they were they tried to navigate the city streets to my north side apartment.  It took them three hours.  

When we arrived at the police station, the detective that was assigned to my father's case brought us to a room to talk about my father's activites and behaviors up until the time he was shot.

I was supposed to meet my father early in the morning to go visit relatives out of state.  The detective said that from the phone records they had, they knew someone had called my father in the early evening and he left  in his car to go meet them at a restaurant around the corner from his office.  Witnesses said there was a fight, my father tried to run, and then he was shot by one of the two assailants present at the scene.  The detective asked us if we knew of anyone who wanted to hurt our father.

My brother and I giggled.  We actually laughed a bit.  Everyone wanted to hurt our father.  It was something we lived with, our father was a career criminal.  For as long as either of us remembered, there has been jail time, court cases, running from the cops, hiding money, violence, and fear when it came to what our father did for a living. 

But he was our dad.  This was the man that would hold my forehead when I had my frequent migranes because I told him it felt better that way.  He would spend every weekend with my brother and his new child, laughing and playing, not minding when the little bugger spit up on him.  He would take me on road trips to go see parts of the city I wanted to go to, but couldn't get to easily without a car.  He would call me everyday without fail to see how I was doing.  He was our Pops, our Dad, our Father.

I'm not sure how long the interview lasted, but it was still dark outside when we left.  The detectives didn't get much information out of us, as we were kept out of the things my father was involved in for the most part and being good children, we didn't offer up anything either. As we gathered ourselves together, the detective asked me one last thing.

"Do you know anything about these rings we found in his desk?"

It was the jewelry my father promised to give me if I ever got married.  I was starting to comprehend that my father was gone.