hated it that a lot of the time her husband would have horse shit on his boots at supper.”
“That’s genteel,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s hard to describe. But she was always like someone who thought she should have been living in Paris, reading whoever they read in Paris.”
“Proust,” I said.
“Sure.”
“What happened to her?” I said.
“Committed suicide.”
“When?”
“I investigated it. Lemme see, nineteen… and eighty-seven, late in the year. Almost Christmas. I remember we were working overtime on the sucker just before the holidays.”
“1987,” I said.
“Yeah. That mean something to you?”
“Year the market crashed,” I said. “October 1987.”
“You think she killed herself ‘cause the stock market crashed?”
I shook my head.
“Doesn’t sound the type,” I said. “Know why she did it?”
“No. Went in her room, took enough sleeping pills to do the trick, and drank white wine until they worked. Didn’t leave a note, but there was no reason to think that it wasn’t what it looked like.”
She got up and got two cups of coffee from the automatic maker on the file cabinet. She added some Cremora and sugar, asked me what I took, and put some of the same in mine. Then she brought the cups back to her desk and handed me one. The gray slacks fit very smoothly when she walked.
“How about Cheryl Anne Rankin?” I said.
“Your Lieutenant, what’s his name?”
“Quirk.”
“Yeah, your Lieutenant Quirk asked around about her. I don’t remember her.”
“He talk with you?”
“Nope. Sheriff said we was to stay away from him. Nobody would much talk with him.”
“How come you’re talking to me?”
“Sheriff didn’t say nothing about you. Probably didn’t think you’d have the balls to come back.”
“There was a picture on the wall of the track kitchen,” I said. “Looked like Olivia Nelson. Woman who worked there said it was Cheryl Anne Rankin, and she was her mother. Now the picture’s gone, and the woman’s gone.”
“Don’t know much about that,” Felicia said. “People work at the track kitchen come and go. They get paid by the hour, no real job record, nobody keeps track. If you can fry stuff in grease, you’re hired.”
“If you were trying to find out things in this town, who would you go to?”
“About this Cheryl Anne?”
“About anything, Cheryl Anne, Olivia, Jack, his wife, Bob Stratton, anything. The only thing I know for sure down here is that you get your hair done in Batesburg.”
“And it looks great,” she said.
“And it looks great.”
We both drank a little of the coffee, which was brutally bad.
“Friend of mine said I might talk to the household help,” I said. “They’re in all the houses, all the offices. They’re cleaning up just outside of all the doors, and they tell each other.”
Felicia took another drink of the wretched coffee and made a face.
“I’ve tried,” she said. “No point to it, they wouldn’t tell me anything, just like they won’t tell you. They’ll listen politely and say `yassah‘ and nod and smile and tell you nothing.”
“I’m used to it,” I said. “All races, creeds, and colors refuse to tell me stuff.”
“And when they do, it’s a lie,” she said.
“That especially,” I said.
chapter thirty-eight
THERE WAS NO picture of Cheryl Anne Rankin in the track kitchen. The white woman who’d claimed her wasn’t there either, though the black woman I’d seen before was still there. She didn’t know where the white woman was. Nawsir, she didn’t know her name. Never did know it. She didn’t know nothing about no picture. Yessir. Sorry, sir. Take a walk, sir.
I went back to the Alton Arms and sat on the front steps. The Blue Tick hound that I’d seen on my last visit was stretched out in the sun on the front walk. He rolled his eyes back toward me, and looked at me silently as I
