“Lots. The others were just too nice to mention it.”
“Why do I know your name?”
“It?s fairly common.”
“Hmm. And you?re a cop,” she said.
“Kind of.”
“How can you be kind of a cop?”
“Well, you know, I do statistical profiles, demographic studies, that kind of thing.”
“You?re much too cute to be that dull.”
“Thanks. You?re pretty nifty too.”
“You?re also an outrageous flirt.”
“I am?” I said. “Nobody?s ever complained about that before.”
“Who?s complaining?” she said, dipping her head again and staring at me with eyes as gray as a rainy
day. I passed.
“So tell me who makes Dunetown click,” I said.
“Persistent too,” she said, then shrugged. “Why not, but it?ll cost you a drink at the end of the day.”
“Done.”
She knew it all. Every pedigree, every scallywag, every bad leaf on every family tree in town. She
talked about great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers who came over in the early l800s and
made a fortune in privateering, cotton, land, and shipping; who rose to become robber barons and
worse, what Babs called varmints,” a word that seemed harmless somehow, the way she used it, but
which I took to mean tough men who destroyed each other in power brawls. She talked about a
onetime Irish highwayman named Larkin who escaped the noose by becoming an indentured servant
to a Virginia tobacco man and then ran off, arriving in Dunetown, where, fifteen years later, he
became its first banker; about Tim Clarke, the stevedore from Dublin who stowed away to Dunetown
and ended up owning the shipyard; and an Irish collier named Findley who once killed a man in a duel
over a runaway pig, and who went on to make a fortune in cotton and converted his millions to land
before the bottom dropped out, and was the man who talked Sherman out of burning Dune-town
because he owned most of the town and didn?t want to see it torched like Atlanta. Doe?s greatgrandfather.
Hooligans, the bunch of them, the Findleys, Larkins, Clarkes, and the second generation, with names
like Colonel and Chief, the ones who said yes, no, and maybe to every decision that affected the city
for two centuries. And finally the third generation, the Bubbas and Chips and Juniors, so intimidated
by their fathers that they were reduced to panderers, more interested in golf than empires.
Once she started, it was like turning on a tape recorder with no stop button. A twenty-minute
