The Hanged Man’s Song (6 page)

“He knew a bit. Not so much about the value as how they worked. ’Course, the value changes all over the place. I was up in Memphis last year and found out that I have a radio-this one, it’s a 1938 Stewart-Warner tombstone”-he pointed at a tabletop radio with a burnished red-colored wooden case-“that baby’s worth six hundred dollars now. In Memphis, anyway. Down here, it’s probably fifty bucks at a garage sale. But he knew how the radios worked, okay. We talked for a while, looked at them for an hour, and then he left.”

“You ever leave him alone in here?” I asked.

“Well…” He scratched his ear, then twisted it, thinking. “I went out to get the mail, talked to the mailman for a couple of minutes.”

“The mailbox is that communal center box,” John said.

“That’s right, just over there.” He looked at John and then at me, and after a few seconds of silence he said, sadly, “The guy stole Bobby’s name out of the house, while I was out talking to Carl, didn’t he?”

“If you were out there for a few minutes, he might have looked around. Or if you left your keys lying around, and he was ready to do it, he might have made a copy and come back some other time, when you were gone,” I said.

“He was just looking at the radios,” Baird said. He wiped the corners of his eyes with his index fingers. “We popped the back off a couple of them, so he could look at the tuning layout.”

“There’s no way to tell, really,” John said, trying to be kind. “Maybe he was really selling Bibles.”

“Just a minute,” Baird said, and heaved himself out of the chair. To John, he said, “Watch the white man while I’m gone.”

He went out the front door, and as soon as he was out, I stepped around the rest of the lower floor, as an intruder might have; John tagged along, the black-and-white cat watching us without an apparent concern in the world. Ten seconds after we started looking, we found a little parlor off the kitchen that had been turned into a home office with a two-drawer metal file cabinet. I pulled open a drawer, and the first file carried a tag in black felt-tip pen that said
Taxes and Job
.

Inside the file we found a sheath of tax bills and workman’s comp statements from the state. Two of them listed Robert Fields as Baird’s employer, and included Bobby’s address. “Goddamnit,” I said.

I pushed the drawer shut and we went back to the living room. I said, “I don’t think we should tell him.”

“He might already know,” he said. “About that cash we took out of Bobby’s…”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

Baird came back a minute later, shaking his head mournfully. “Neighbor was still up. Too hot to sleep. She says she never had a Bible salesman come by, white or black, either one.”

“Okay,” I said. “You wouldn’t still have the FedEx receipt for the package you sent, would you?”

“I do have that,” he said. He went back to the parlor office, looked in another file, and found the receipt. The package had been sent to a Rachel Willowby in New Orleans.

“You never heard anything more from her? No thank you?”

“No, but I think her and Bobby were chatting on the computer. One of those chatterbox places.”

We talked for a couple more minutes, then I went out to the car and got the sack with Bobby’s cash in it, brought it back in, and gave it to John. “This’ll seem a little funny,” John told Baird. “But this is the last of Bobby’s cash supply, as far as we know. Bobby wanted you to have it for… expenses, and transition and so on.”

“Bobby did?” He was suspicious, but not too-you tend not to be too suspicious when you need the money and somebody’s putting a brick of cash in your hand. “Where’d you get it, then?”

“Bobby kept some of his resources… outside,” John said. “Just in case. Anyway, he said to give it to you, and for you to do whatever you need to.”

“Better stick it somewhere out of sight,” I said. “You don’t want the feds to see it.”

He went to put it out of sight, and in the twenty seconds that he was gone, I wiped both John’s and my own beer bottle on my shirt. “Touch anything else?” I asked quietly.

“I’m trying to keep my hands in fists,” he said. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”

“Better safe,” I said.

When Baird returned, I asked him not to tell the feds about the Bible salesman or the laptop he’d sent to the little girl. “Listen, it’s this way. That laptop could kill Bobby’s friends, if we don’t find it first.”

“But what about catchin’ the guy who did Bobby?” he asked.

“We want him as bad as you do,” John said. “One way or the other, he’ll get taken care of. I promise you. If we can’t figure it out ourselves, we’ll give everything we have to the feds and let them try.”

I nodded, and Baird said, “Okay.”

THE
laptop delivery was the key.

Fifteen minutes after we finished with Baird, we were at a pay phone, and I was online with a friend who was a specialist in the National Crime Information Center, which is one of the more interesting branches of the FBI. He looked at Baird’s NCIC file, found that Baird had been convicted of misdemeanor theft in 1968 and a car-theft felony in 1970, served three months in a county jail, and had no record since. He also found that the last inquiry on Baird’s file had come ten days earlier, from the Slidell, Louisiana, police department. Slidell was somewhere outside New Orleans.

Then I went out on my own to accounts at the big-three credit services, and found recent checks on Baird from a credit-counseling firm in New Orleans.

“Bobby was mouse-trapped,” I told John, when we were headed back toward Longstreet. “I don’t know by who, but it wasn’t the feds. Whoever it was, did a pretty interesting job. Most people who’ve gone looking for the guy have been techies who tried to track him down online. This guy must of heard about Bobby’s kids.”

Over the years, I told John, I’d heard online rumors that Bobby had helped out more kids than the one we knew about in Longstreet. Some inner-city kid would get a new computer in the mail from an anonymous donor, along with certain kinds of software, or a kid in Tennessee would come up with an unexpected laptop, or maybe expensive software like AutoCAD or Mathematica. Bobby had become an urban legend among the people who made up the computer world; the stories were like those about a kid who hangs around the playground and one day Michael Jordan comes along for a few minutes of one-on-one.

“So somebody set up a fake kid, puts the fake where Bobby will hear about it, eventually gets a package, and tracks it back to Baird,” John said.

“And before he goes to Baird, he checks him on the NCIC and the credit services, and probably a few other ways, and finds out that whoever Baird is, he isn’t Bobby. Doesn’t have the background, doesn’t have the education. Too old, for one thing. So then he tracks him, somehow. He’s probably a hacker at some level, so maybe he looks at Baird’s phone bills.”

We both thought about it for a while, then John said, “If there were all these people looking for him over all those years, why didn’t somebody do this sooner?”

“Different kind of mentality at work,” I said. “This was really subtle. He floats a rumor, just a whisper out there, about this kid… puts it where Bobby will see it, but he can’t even really know that Bobby
will
see it. Then he lets Bobby do the investigation and make the approach.”

“And he’s so good that Bobby can’t see through the bullshit.”

I shook my head. “You know what? I bet there is a kid. I bet somebody went looking for a kid to use as bait. That the kid is real.”

“So what now?”

“New Orleans,” I said. “Talk to the kid. If there is a kid.”

“And if she knows…”

“She had to talk to somebody about the package and somebody had to see the return address. If she’s real, she knows the killer.”

LYMAN BOLE,
the President’s national security advisor, resigned that evening after conferring with the President. We listened to an all-news radio station as we whistled back through the dark to the river, and the general opinion seemed to be that Bole’s public life was over. So here’s a lesson for all you frat boys: At this point in the life of the Republic, you better pick your indiscretions carefully.

Back in Longstreet, we talked about New Orleans. I told LuEllen that there seemed to be no point in her coming along, but she insisted on it. She was bored, she said, and didn’t have any work shaping up. And she liked New Orleans -maybe we could spend some time looking for a new condo up on the lake. If she didn’t live where she did, she said, she might live there.

“Where do you live?” John asked.

“Up north,” she said, and smiled.

John thought he should go, because the computer girl was almost certainly black, and his being black might give him an edge in talking with her. Marvel didn’t like the idea of John going.

“Kidd could probably talk to her better, geek to geek.”

“I’m not a geek,” I said.

“You’re a cutie, but you have geek-like thoughts,” Marvel said. She reached out and pinched one of my cheeks and shook it. She went back to John. “You know what the cops are like down there. You can get picked up for walking around black. You don’t want to get picked up.”

“I won’t,” he said, with a little heat. “I’m tired of never going anywhere. And if we both go, I can talk to her black to black and Kidd can talk to her geek to geek.”

“Sounds like a fuckin’ dance,” said LuEllen. “Dancin’ geek to geek.”

They all laughed, and I said, “I’m getting pretty tired of this geek shit.”

AFTER
some more talk, we decided to head down to New Orleans the next day, and at least take a look around. LuEllen went off to the bathroom before we headed out to our motel, and John went to kiss the kids good night. They’d been asleep for hours, but Marvel believed that they subliminally knew when their father had tucked them in-and Marvel caught me alone in the kitchen.

“I’ve never said anything to anybody about this, Kidd, but when John was a young man he got into serious trouble,” she said. “He’d still be in prison if they’d caught him, but they didn’t-but they’ve got his fingerprints and his real name there with the FBI. If they catch him and get his fingerprints…”

“Okay,” I said.

“You take care of him,” she said, profoundly serious. “I’m putting it on you.”

WE WERE
out of Longstreet at eight o’clock the next morning, still yawning and sleepy, and rolled into New Orleans in the middle of a steamy afternoon, with rain clouds building in the west. The car thermometer said it was 92 degrees on the freeway, and in the blacktop of an E-Z Way convenience store, where we stopped for water and Cokes, it felt closer to 100. The air was absolutely still, and completely saturated.

In the same convenience store, I caught a few minutes of Fox News and what looked like a photograph of a man wearing desert camo and an American helmet pointing a pistol at the head of an Arab man in Middle Eastern robes. The Arab seemed to be reacting in shock, as though he’d just been shot-a photo something like the famous Viet Cong execution photo from the sixties. The sound was down, so I didn’t know what they were talking about.

A skinny white kid was standing there, probably a skater because, even in the heat, he was wearing a black wool watch cap pulled all the way over his head, and I asked, “What’s going on?”

“Shot that dude in the head, man,” he said. Then, “Guns are bad.” I left not knowing whether he meant that guns are evil or that guns are desirable-getting old, I guess.

WE DECIDED
to set up a base-a bolt-hole if we needed one-at the Baton Noir Motel in Metairie, a nice place with a good dining room and a friendly attitude toward multiracial convocations. I’d spent a month there before buying my New Orleans condo, and a couple of weeks while I sold the place.

After checking in, I went to a map program in my laptop and we pulled up the kid’s address and a map. As I was doing that, LuEllen clicked on the TV and a few minutes later, while I was writing down directions to the girl’s house, she said, “Hey! Hey! Look at this! Look at this!”

She was watching the same story I’d seen in the convenience store. The anchorwoman was saying, “… denies that any such execution took place and that the photo may be a composite. The person called Bobby says that the officer in the photograph is Captain Delton Polysemy of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces then stationed in Yemen. Fox News has learned that there is a Captain Polysemy, but his current assignment and whereabouts are not known. Presidential Press Secretary Anton Lazar said that the President is aware of the photograph but had not seen it, and said that further comment would have to come from the Department of Defense. Lazar said that the U.S. government does not support summary executions, but repeated that there is no evidence that any such execution had taken place and that the photograph may be a composite…”

“AH, MAN,”
John said. “He’s gonna have every fuckin’ federal agent in the country chasing him.”

“But they still don’t know it’s not Bobby,” LuEllen said.

“We might have to tell them,” I said. “They’ve got some ideas about Bobby, and people who might know about him. If this shit keeps up, they’ll start knocking down doors under some Homeland Security pretense. A lot of good guys could go down.”

“Maybe you,” LuEllen said, looking at me.

“I think I’m okay,” I said, but I was a lot more worried than that. I’d been working for a long time, and there were dozens of people who had ideas of what I’d been doing with my time, in addition to the painting. “We really gotta go see this Rachel Willowby.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” LuEllen said. “You said, tip them off on Bobby being dead. We gotta think about that. That might be an idea. If they believe he’s dead, they’ll look somewhere else. Problem solved. Mostly.”

“Maybe-but we don’t have to do it right now,” I said. “Let’s think about it.”

IF YOU
get off the main roads of Louisiana, back in the marshy ground, you find the worst poverty in America -worse than some of the South Dakota Indian reservations, which is saying a lot. Rachel Willowby’s address came down to a crumbling concrete-block-stucco triplex, painted a harsh limey green, a dusty place with sick-looking thorn bushes in front of the windows as burglary deterrents. The neighborhood was marked by oil-stained driveways and crumbly carports full of junk and junkers, old and fading gang symbols on the sides of stores and service shops. Black kids with tough, calculating eyes looked out of their cars at us as we drove through. They put us down as cops. “No car,” John said, as we drove past the Willowby place. “Her folks may be working.”

“If she’s got folks,” LuEllen said from the backseat. “The place looks deserted. And if she had to get a laptop from Bobby, there can’t be much money around-you can get a used one for almost nothing.”

“But it’d have to be a priority,” John said. “Might not be a priority with her folks.”

“We’re stalling,” I said. “What do we do?”

“What we do is, we go in. Right now. It’s our best shot,” John said. “We know she goes to school, but she should be home by now, and there’s no car.”

“All three of us?” I asked.

John said, “Really, the best combination would be me and LuEllen, ’cause I’m black and could be a cop and LuEllen could be a social worker-but you’re the one who knows the computer shit, so you gotta come.”

“Man, I love this. I could do this for a living,” I muttered. I made a U-turn, drove back past a kid in a striped shirt and shorts, who had a bicycle helmet on his head, and who shook a finger at us and then laughed.

“That kid worries me,” LuEllen said, looking back at the kid in the street. “Why’s he walking around in this sun with a helmet on? Why doesn’t he have a bicycle?”

WE ALL
went together to the Willowby apartment, a little cluster, a scrum, three sweating, cranky people in clothes that suddenly looked too good, knocked on the door and got nothing. We were standing there, listening for anything inside, and LuEllen said, “Now what?”

“Try again later,” I said, and stepped back. We were headed reluctantly back to the car when a woman pushed open a door on an adjoining apartment, sweeping dust out on the sidewalk. She fussed at it and then called, “You looking for somebody?” She wasn’t actually sweeping anything-the broom was an excuse to see what we were doing.

John stepped toward her and put out his best official vibration. He was wearing slacks and a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and looked like he might just have taken off a sport coat in the heat. He said, “We’re looking for Rachel Willowby.”

“She in trouble again?” The woman’s head was cocked away from us.

“No. Not exactly. But we would like to talk with her. Have you seen her?”

“Playing hooky again,” the woman speculated. Her eyes hit me, then went to LuEllen, and finally back to John. “Takes three of you, now.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re really not allowed to talk about it,” John said. “Do you know where she might be?”

Another long pause, but John’s official stare got on top of her. “She’s home. Probably hidin’ under the bed.”

“Where’s her mother?”

“Her mother took off. Two months ago. I wouldn’t tell you about the girl, ’cept I don’t know what she eats, and she ain’t gonna be let live there much longer. It’s been rented. She sneaks in now.”

“Thank you.” John walked straight back to the door and knocked on it, then tried the knob. The door was locked, but was so loose in its frame that he put a shoe against it, pushed, and it popped open. He called, “Rachel? We know you’re home.” A moment later, “There you are.” He stepped inside, out of sight, then stepped back to the door, looked at the woman, and said, “Thank you,” and to us, “Come on in.”

WE ALL
trooped inside and found ourselves looking at a skinny little girl in shorts and a tube top. She wore big unfashionable plastic-rimmed glasses and had a ferociously unhappy look on her face. The house was unlit, with most of the blinds pulled, so she was working in semidarkness. The place smelled of onions and sweat. I could see one piece of furniture in the front two rooms, and that was a kitchen table. A laptop sat on the table, with a wire leading to a telephone. The laptop screen showed three open windows; a digital counter blinked in the lower right corner. She said, “That ol’ bitch gonna get her snoopy nose cut off, one of these days.”

John shook his head and said, “We need to talk.”

“I’m sick.” A sick look slipped onto her face. “I really am.”

Fuck it: she was a hacker. I said, “We’re not from the schools. We’re not from the cops. I’m a hack and I want to know what you have to do with blowing Bobby out of the system.”

That stopped her. She looked at me, forgot the others. “Where’d he go?”

“We don’t know,” I lied. “We’re part of his backup group. He’s not at his house anymore, and something you did caused the trouble.”

“Not me,” she said shrilly. She stepped protectively toward her laptop, eyes wide. “I hardly even know the man.”

“He sent you the laptop,” I said. “You’re the only person who could’ve given anything away.”

“I did not.”

“You did something. You might not even know it.” I bent over the laptop, looking at the screen. “What’re you doing here, running a dictionary? What’re you trying to get into?”

She flinched, put a protective hand out toward her screen. “I didn’t give shit to nobody.” She was loud, defiant, and still pretty small; I loomed over her.

“Then somebody came over and got an address from you. Got it off the FedEx package. Who was that?”

Her tongue curled over her bottom lip and she glanced at LuEllen and John and saw nothing but more adults, all ganged up on her. So she just said it. “That was Jimmy James Carp. He said he was gonna get me a laptop from Bobby and he did.”

“Where does he live?”

She shrugged, and relaxed a notch: she felt the blame shifting. “I don’t know. He used to be a teacher up to Adams and then he moved to Washington, D.C., and I only saw him when he said he came back to visit his momma. He told me to call him if I got the computer. I called him when I got it and he came over.”

“Came over right away?”

“Next day.”

“White man or black man?” John asked.

“White man. Really white.”

“You know his phone number?”

“I got it on my machine. You gonna do something to Jimmy James?”

“Talk to him. We’re trying to find Bobby.”

She went to the machine and her fingers danced across it. She was a hack, all right; the best way to tell is to watch the hands. Hacks are so deep into it that they essentially
will
a computer to act, their thoughts appearing on the screen as if by magic, the fingers working by reflex and so quickly it’s like watching a spider’s spinners as it weaves a web. In a few seconds, she’d closed down her online connection so we wouldn’t see it, dumped whatever program she was using, called up the Address Book from the Windows accessories program, and located Carp’s number.

As she did it, I said, “If you call this Carp guy and tell him we’re coming over, he’s gonna hide out, and we’re not gonna find out what happened to Bobby. The only reason he got you the computer was so he could find Bobby. Carp might pretend, but he’s no friend of yours.”

“I know,” she said grudgingly. She poked one of the laptop keys and the address program vanished. She looked back up at me; her face was thin, hungry. “He’s a creep. I wondered why he helped me. He didn’t even know me when he worked at Adams and then I see him and he’s all, ‘Hey, Rachel, how are you doin’?’ I thought he wanted to fuck me or something and then he goes on about computing, you know?”

“He’s a hack?”

“He knows some shit,” she admitted.

“Jimmy James is a strange name,” LuEllen ventured. “Is that his real name?”