that.”
“Do we just go in and get her?” Brett asked.
“I don’t think that’d work so good,” I said. “Posing as a customer is probably the best way to go.”
“And you’ll have to be the customer,” Leonard said.
“You think they’ll know you’re gay?” Brett asked.
Leonard laughed. “No, but they’ll know I’m black.”
“Oh,” Brett said.
“Black or white may not matter,” Leonard said, “but this is a little burg in Oklahoma. I was in Maine, I’d be thinking the same thing. It might not matter, but on the other hand it might. My guess is this is a redneck operation.”
“Remember what Wilber said about Big Jim being nice to niggers,” I said. “That doesn’t bode well for Brother Leonard here.”
“No use getting the rednecks stirred we don’t have to,” Leonard said.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said.
“Older and wiser,” Leonard said.
“So you’ll go in?” Brett asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thing we got to do next is find the whorehouse, and, as Leonard pointed out, maybe I ought to do the investigation work on that instead of him. They might not take kindly to a brother askin’ where the white women are.”
“Couldn’t some of the women be black?” Brett asked.
“They could,” I said, “but in redneck mentality it’s okay to screw a black woman, but it isn’t okay to have a relationship with her.”
“And it isn’t okay at all a black man screws a white woman,” Leonard said. “Weird territorial stuff.”
“And there’s another thing,” I said. “We don’t even know there’s a house of ill repute here.”
“Ill repute?” Leonard said. “Man, you been reading those Victorian novels again?”
“Red could have lied,” I said. “In fact, this is all starting to look like a big joke on us. He might not even have worked for any Big Jim. There might only be one grain of truth to the story. He knows your daughter works as a prostitute, and maybe he knows that because he was a customer.”
“The old postmarks on Till’s letters were out of Oklahoma City,” Brett said.
“Yeah,” I said, “a card mailed from here, most likely that’s where it would get stamped. But it’s all iffy.”
“I’m prepared for it not to work out,” Brett said. “But I’m more prepared to do something. It makes me feel like I’m trying.”
“I’ll start now,” I said.
11
By the time I drove Brett’s car back to Hootie Hoot, the rain had slacked and the little town looked better than before. It hadn’t suddenly grown in size and had a Wal-Mart SuperCenter built out to the side, but it was shiny and nostalgic-looking.
It made me think of one of the cozy little towns my mom and dad had lived in briefly while my father worked as a mechanic for an oil and gas company. It was very Andy of Mayberry. Clean and simple, where everyone knew one another, and maybe minded each other’s business too much, but where most of that business would be about little more than a secret apple pie recipe. And, of course, the location of the local whorehouse.
I pulled in at the taxi stand and got out. The stand wasn’t much of a place. A little building made of brick that might at one time have been some sort of store, or maybe even an old jail.
Inside, slouched down in a plastic chair next to a card table, was an older man with a three-day growth of tobacco-specked gray beard. His feet were stretched out, resting in another chair. A TV, festooned with rabbit ears wearing aluminum foil accessories, was perched on a little stand next to the wall. The TV was playing only static. But that was all right, the man in the chair was asleep.
There was a dusty calendar on the wall above the TV. It bore a winter scene with snow-covered trees and a sled and two kids in coats, wool hats, and fat mittens. The calendar read December 1988.
There was a small refrigerator in one corner of the room, and I could hear it humming, as if to entertain itself. It was a sound that made you sleepy.
There was a stack of worn paperback Westerns on one corner of the card table. One of them was open and turned facedown.
Next to the book was a cold-drink bottle full of tobacco spit with a fly on the bottle lip and one inside too stupid to find its way out. It kept buzzing around, hitting the glass, but it never went up to the opening. The sky was the limit, but it was too dumb to know.
Finally the fly, pissed off, flew down and sat on a tobacco chunk in the bottom of the bottle, floated there on its nasty little island amidst an ocean of brown spit. It beat its wings a moment, as if to pass the time. Eventually, it stopped doing even that. Just sat there, confused, surprised, a real loser.
I sympathized.
The fly on the bottle lip, fed up with the ignorance of its comrade, flew off.
