Bingo Barge Murder by Jessie Chandler.

buddy, it’s Coop. How about some Popeye’s?”
    Another long silence. Coop was about to knock again when the door swung open. Rocky stood before us, his green jacket drowning him, his aviator hat pulled low over his eyes. “I am ready for Popeye’s, Nick Coop and Shay O’Hanlon.”
    _____
    We sat down with our food as the lunch rush hit, and I ate my first real meal in two days. Rocky still had a pile of food on his plate long after Coop and I had depleted ours.
    Coop sighed the sigh of a man with a happy belly and said, “Shay and I have a couple things we’d like to ask you, Rocky.”
    His bushy eyebrows wiggled. “What kind of questions do you want to ask me, Nick Coop?”
    “You remember what happened to Mr. Stanley, right?”
    Rocky’s eyes got big, and the whites of his eyes gleamed. He nodded solemnly. “Yes, Nick Coop. I remember what happened to Mr. Stanley.”
    Coop looked at me again, calmer, and then returned his gaze to the rotund man. “We’re trying to figure out who would want to hurt Mr. Stanley.”
    Rocky stared benignly at Coop with those wide eyes.
    My turn. “Did you hear Mr. Stanley talking to anyone about some kind of, um, nuts?”
    One eyelid drooped slightly as Rocky’s eyes shifted to meet mine. I was trying to think of something else to ask that might actually elicit a response when he said, “Mr. Stanley was on the phone all the time.”
    We waited for him to say more, but nothing was forthcoming.
    Coop asked, “Did you hear Mr. Stanley on the phone talking about a shipment of nuts?”
    I sucked air through my straw as we waited for Rocky to chew twenty-six times. He really did, and I know because I counted. He swallowed and said, “Mr. Stanley told me to never repeat what I heard when he was on the phone talking about the nuts.”
    Whoa. He had heard of the nuts. Begin Project Information Extraction. Coop leaned forward. “What did you hear Mr. Stanley say about the nuts?”
    Rocky said very quietly, “Mr. Stanley told me to never say anything about the nuts to anyone or he’d knock my block off.”
    “Hey,” I said softly, “Mr. Stanley can’t hurt you now. Coop’s in trouble, and so is another friend of ours. We need to find out about these nuts so we can help both of them. Can you help us help them?”
    The muscles in Rocky’s cheeks bulged in and out as he rhythmically clenched his teeth. Then he rubbed his right eye and said, “I don’t want anything bad to happen to Nick Coop or your friend.”
    Lord, this was an exercise in patience. What I really wanted to do was grab the puffy lapels of Rocky’s jacket and shake some answers out of him. “You might be able to help both of them if you tell us what you heard about the nuts.”
    “Okay, Shay O’Hanlon. I will try. But I was not listening on purpose.”
    “That’s okay. Sometimes we just hear things. We want to make sure that the people who are innocent don’t get in trouble, too.”
    Coop added, “It’s really okay to tell us what you heard. Did you hear Mr. Stanley on the phone talking about the nuts more than once?”
    “I heard Mr. Stanley talk to someone exactly three times about the nuts, Nick Coop.”
    “What did you hear when Mr. Stanley talked about the nuts?” I asked.
    Rocky scrunched his eyes. Crow’s feet fanned out, reminding us that although Rocky sounded like a child, he wasn’t. “Mr. Stanley said, ‘Hello. Yeah, I know I owe you one. No, I’ll make good on my word. What do you want? When’s the truck rolling in? No, no—I—What’s it carrying? Nuts? What do you mean nuts? Almonds? What is that? Oh. No. How long? Okay. Bye’.”
    It took me a minute to realize Rocky was repeating verbatim what he’d heard Kinky say on the phone. The effect was unsettling.
    “Was that the end of the conversation?” Coop asked.
    “Yes, Nick Coop.”
    I figured that if he could pull a date out of that priceless brain of his, we’d be able to put together a timeline. “Do you remember when