The Hanged Man’s Song

Chapter Seven

LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.

The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi -not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the river. The oldest part of town, closest to the river, is mostly red and yellow brick, with pastel colors popping up in residential areas farther from the river, along the narrow treelined tar streets.

“Maybe I’ll move here someday,” LuEllen said as we came over the last hill above the town.

“And every single person would know every single thing you did, every day,” I said.

“I’d call myself Daisy, and plant poppies in my backyard garden, and then invite the village women to come over and quilt, and drink my special tea,” she said. “When I died, everybody would say I was a witch.”

“I already say that,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with that Frank, the liquor dealer with the Porsche?”

She was prim. “No histories; that’s always been the agreement,” she said.

“That’s not history. I introduced you to the guy.”

“Try to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”

WHEN I concentrate on Longstreet, on the picture in my head, I see flop-eared yellow dogs snoozing on a summer sidewalk, pickup trucks and bumper stickers (“when it’s pried from my cold dead fingers”) and the bridge. The bridge is a white-concrete span, the concrete glowing with the colors of the sky and the Mississippi, as the river turns through a sweeping bend to the east. Across the water, you can see the yellow sand beaches along the water, and every night, wild turkeys come out to dance along the sand.

We came in from the Longstreet side of the river, so we didn’t actually cross the bridge. We dropped down from the high ground, stopped at an E-Z Way convenience store and got a Diet Coke and a box of Popsicles from the strange fat man who worked behind the counter, and threaded our way through town to John’s place, a tan rambler on the black side of town.

John and Marvel had kids bumping around the house. The kids stood with their mouths open when Mom, laughing, jumped on me and gave me a kiss, and LuEllen gave John a big hug. Black people didn’t kiss and hug white people in Longstreet, not in the kids’ experience, anyway. I found it pleasant enough. Marvel was beautiful, a woman with tilted black eyes and a perfect oval face, a woman who naturally moved like a dancer.

The kids were shy-they knew us a bit, from earlier visits-but loosened up when I produced the Popsicles. Marvel handed them out and told them to go outside so they wouldn’t drip on the furniture. In the resulting silence, after they went, slamming through the screen door, Marvel said, “You guys are looking great,” and John said, skipping the niceties, “You can stick a fork in Bole. He’s all done.”

“They fired him?”

“He’s gonna quit tonight,” John said. He had his hands in his pockets, almost apologetically. “He tried to say that it was all college high spirits, they had a couple of black guys in whiteface, but the media pack is howling after him, and the only thing you can actually see is that film loop. And we-you and me-probably are the ones that made it impossible for him to defend himself.”

“How?” LuEllen asked, looking from me to John.

“That burning cross,” John said. “We got the FBI into Jackson, all right, but then the Administration, the press secretary, made that big deal about how racism is indefensible in the New South and blah-blah-blah… and then the next day this comes along. Bole is toast. He’s gonna talk to the President tonight.”

“So he did it to himself,” LuEllen said. “He’s the one who did the blackface.”

“That’s what I say,” said Marvel.

John, the radical, said, “He was a college kid when he did it and it was a joke. And he doesn’t have anything to do with race. He had to do with missiles. There are a thousand guys we’d be better off without, before him.”

“So you get who you can,” Marvel said.

“Fuckin’ commie,” John said, shaking his head. “It’s not right and it’s not fair and we’ve got to start worrying about that.”

“You’re getting old and conservative,” Marvel said. “Your hair is gonna turn white and woolly and you’ll go on one of those religious shows and start talking about Jesus.”

“Not fair,” John said. He did sound a little like a preacher; and he had a point.

WHILE LuEllen and Marvel went off and caught up with each other, I showed John the FBI files on Thomas Baird, Bobby’s caretaker. John read them carefully, then made calls to two different people in Jackson. One of them knew Baird-knew who he was, anyway-but didn’t know anything of substance. He volunteered to ask around, but John declined the offer.

“I think we should go down and see him,” John said. “Tonight. Right now.” He looked at his watch. “If we go now, he’ll probably still be awake when we get there.”

THERE was more talk, and I took the time to do a few laps of the town park. At seven o’clock, we stopped at the E-Z Way for cheap premium gas and headed for Jackson, leaving LuEllen and Marvel with the kids. We talked about Bobby a bit, then about a sculpture series that John was working on.

John said that he had talked to a local woman, a quilter, about learning to quilt. “There’s something I can’t quite get with sculpture,” he said. “I need something that’s more… narrative, I guess. If I did it in 3-D, I’d need a sculpture garden.”

“So why don’t you learn to paint? Once you can see what you want to do, the techniques aren’t that hard.”

“Bullshit. I know about techniques, I’ve watched yours change. How long did it take before you got control? I remember that piece you did, that Sturgeon Rip Number 1. You couldn’t of done that when I first knew you.”

We talk like that, can’t help ourselves. We’d get intent on our work, and start laughing and chattering along, and then the whole Bobby topic would come up, and we’d go all glum again. Even with that, the time went quickly. Before we’d finished talking about the art stuff, we were nosing into Jackson. One good thing: we were under a cloud deck, but we hadn’t caught up with the rain.

THOMAS BAIRD lived in the left half of a duplex that might have been built as part of a low-income housing project: low-rent modern design, crappy materials, a lot of bright contrasting painted-plywood panels. Sidewalks already beginning to crumble. A light showed in the front-room window, and John said, “I’ll go. I’ll wave you in.”

We didn’t argue about it: the neighborhood was black and so was John. As he was getting out of the car, I said, “Don’t touch anything with your fingertips. If you do, wipe it.”

I went around the block. When I came by the first time, he ignored me: he was talking to somebody behind a door. When I came by the second time, he was standing on the porch, and he waved me into a puddle that marked a parking strip.

ON THE porch, John said, “He’s got our names.”

“What?”

“I told him my name was John and he asked me if I knew a Mr. Kidd.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I put my hands to my forehead: this was not good. An outsider knew who we were. What else did he know?

“Come on in,” John said. He pulled open the door and we stepped inside, John in the lead. A black guy, probably forty years old, was standing in the middle of a small, tidy living room. There was no television, but there were a dozen or so old-fashioned mahogany-cased radios, RCAs and Motorolas and other names I didn’t recognize, that must have come from the thirties and forties. They were all polished and neatly kept, and one showed glowing lights behind a wide glass face. Radios with tubes, for Christ’s sake. The place smelled of furniture polish.

John was saying, “Mr. Baird, this is Kidd.”

Baird looked at me doubtfully, then said to John, “He’s a white man.”

John looked at me carefully. “No shit? I just thought he was passing.”

Baird looked at me for a moment-my hair’s not quite blond-and then laughed, scratched his ass, and said, “You boys want some beer? It’s been a bad day.”

He got three bottles of Budweiser and a bag of nacho-cheese chips from the kitchen, passed them around, and dropped into a tattered but comfortable-looking green chair. John and I settled onto a sagging couch, facing him; the beer tasted good after the long ride. An overweight black-and-white cat came out of the kitchen, hopped up on the arm of Baird’s chair, stretched out, and looked at us.

“Bobby told me that if anything bad ever happened to him, that you two might come snooping around. I was supposed to tell you whatever I could and he told me not to mention you to anybody else. Like the police.”

“I hope to God…” John began.

“So I didn’t. I didn’t even remember that you was supposed to come snooping until you got on my door and said you was John,” he said. “So what can I do for you? You know anything about this mess?”

“You don’t have Bobby’s laptop, by any chance?” I asked.

“No. The FBIs said that the computer equipment was gone. You boys are computer experts, right?”

“I don’t know a disk drive from a joystick, but Kidd is pretty familiar with them,” John said.

Baird nodded and focused on me. “Okay. Well, Bobby had one IBM laptop and about a hundred DVDs hidden away somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“A hundred?” I asked. “You know that the number was a hundred?”

Baird’s forehead wrinkled. “No, I don’t know the real number. He had a whole shitload of them, though.”

“You know what was on them?”

“He called them his archives. He had his active things on the computer and his archives on the disks.”

“So there was stuff on the computer that wasn’t on the disks,” I said.

“Yeah, and vice versa. As I understood it. The FBIs went all through his house yesterday and today, they took every scrap of paper. They found a safe-deposit-box key and had to get me to okay that they open it-I’m Bobby’s executor for his will-but all they found in the box was old pictures and his mama’s diaries from when she moved down here from Nashville, and two old gold chains.”

“So what, uh, is gonna happen to the house?” John asked.

“I sell it. After funeral expenses and bills, the money goes to the United Negro College Fund. He told me I could keep the money from the yard sale, the furniture and all, and said I could keep any cash I find, but he was just jokin’. The FBIs said there weren’t no cash, but that’s all right with me. I’m just sad to see him go. He was the smartest man I ever met.”

“He might’ve been the smartest man, period,” I said. “Do you have any idea of what might have happened?”

He started shaking his head halfway through the question. “If the FBIs are right about the time he was killed, then I saw him two hours before that and he was happy as a clam.”

“Bobby had good security,” I said. “People have been looking for him for a long time. The question is, how did they find him now? Did he change anything recently? Get any phone calls or talk to anyone in person?”

Again, he started shaking his head early. “He didn’t get around much, anymore. I’d take him around to the stores when he wanted to go, but he got tired real easy. He had his computers and his movies and his music. He played the piano, some blues and some fancy stuff. He was a good piano player one time, but he was starting to lose the coordination in his left hand, and it made him sad. I saw him crying about it, once. He didn’t go out much. He never talked to anyone, ’cept maybe a neighbor or on the computer. ’Course, I wasn’t there to see if he used the phone.”

“Goddamnit,” I said to John.

John said to Baird, “If you have a few minutes, let’s go back through the last month or so…”

John talked him through the past two months. Two weeks in, Baird remembered one anomaly in Bobby’s behavior, a tiny thing. Bobby had been interested in helping smart, underprivileged black schoolkids get involved with computers. I knew for sure of one case-the case that had brought John, LuEllen, and me to Longstreet for the first time, when John had met Marvel. There had been other instances that I’d heard about, as rumor, anyway, from friends on the ’net.

The latest case, Baird said, came when Bobby heard of a kid in New Orleans, a hot little code writer who had actually broken into her grade school to get machine time, because she didn’t have a machine of her own. Bobby had talked to her online a few times, Baird said, and then had sent her a laptop.

Or, Baird said, what Bobby had actually done was send Baird to the local CompUSA to buy a laptop with cash. He then put some additional software on it and had Baird FedEx it to the girl. Baird paid cash at FedEx. Bobby always had Baird front for him when physical packages had to be sent somewhere, so there’d be no deliveries-no invoices-that would tie to him.

“When you FedEx’ed it, whose return address did you put on it?” I asked.

Baird looked at me for a moment, then said, “Mine. The computer was worth two thousand dollars, and if it got lost… the insurance, you know.”

“You didn’t see anybody around, there was no chance you were followed? Nobody came to talk to you?”

Baird said, “Nobody talked to me. I didn’t see nobody. But I… wasn’t looking. You think somebody followed me?”

“How often did you go to Bobby’s?”

“Every day. I mean, I was his caregiver. I did the shopping and cut the grass.”

We went forward day by day, and a week or maybe ten days after he sent the laptop-Baird didn’t have a good grip on the relative time, but didn’t think it was too long-we tumbled over another anomaly.

“White boy came by selling Bibles and it turned out he liked old radios, too,” Baird said. “I been collecting these for years. I didn’t want no Bibles, but he asked if he could look at the radios and I let him in. That was pretty unusual.”

“Did he seem to know about the radios? Really know about them?”

“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.”