'Young boys?'
'Misunderstandings, really. At least one clear case of entrapment, in Augusta.'
'Don't you hate when that happens,' I said. 'Delroy took care of it?'
'Yes. I assume acting on orders from Walter.'
'Bribery?' I said. 'Intimidation?'
'Both, I assume.'
'And why don't you like him?'
'He was always so superior, so contemptuous. He's a classic homophobe.'
'Aw hell, lotta people don't like homos,' Pud said. 'Don't make them fascists, for crissake.'
Cord nibbled on his toast.
'Any other thoughts on Delroy?' I said.
'I think he's been humping Penny,' Pud said.
I felt a little shock of anger, as if someone had said something insulting about Susan, though lower- voltage.
'Oh for God sakes, Pud, you always think everyone is humping everyone.'
Pud shrugged.
'You out of the apartment for a while?' he said to Cord.
'Yes.'
'Good. I gotta go clean up, I got a job interview.'
'Where?' Cord said.
'Package delivery service. One of us gotta work.'
'Good luck,' Cord said.
'I get a job, maybe we can move out of the fucking phone booth we're in now,' Pud said.
'I hope so,' Cord said.
'See you around,' Pud said to me. 'Hope you make some progress.'
I gave him my card.
'You think of anything,' I said, 'I'm at the Holiday Inn, right now, or you can call my office in Boston. I check my machine every day.'
Pud took the card, gave me a thumbs-up, and left the sandwich shop.
'Did you know he's stopped drinking?' Cord said.
'No.'
'Hasn't had a drink since this happened.'
'Amazing.'
'He's coarse and dreadfully incorrect, and not, I'm afraid, terribly bright,' Cord said. 'But my God, I don't know what I'd have done without him.'
'People are often better sober,' I said. 'Do you think Delroy is humping Penny?'
'Well, I hadn't really thought about that, but she's known him so long. I mean, what was she when Delroy came upon the scene, maybe fifteen?'
I waited while Cord tried to think about Delroy and Penny. This was hard for Cord. I was pretty sure he'd spent most of his life considering himself, and very little of his life considering anything else.
'I don't know,' he said. 'The idea seems sort of natural to me. I guess I'd have to say that if it proved so, I wouldn't be surprised by it.'
'How about Stonie?' I said. 'Do you think she was unfaithful?'
I knew the answer to that, though 'unfaithful' didn't seem to quite fully cover truck-stop fellatio. I wanted to know if Cord knew.
'I would have understood,' he said, 'and I would have forgiven her, given how things were, and of course it's possible that she did things I don't know about. But no, I don't believe she was ever unfaithful.'
'Hard to imagine,' I said.
THIRTY-FOUR
THE LAMARR TOWN library was a two-and-a-half-block walk through the dense Georgia heat from the sandwich shop. By the time I got there my shirt was stuck to my back. The library was a white clapboard building, one story, with a long porch across the front. The porch roof was supported with some disproportionate white pillars. I went in. It was air-conditioned. I breathed for a while and then found an Atlanta phone book and looked up Security South. It had an address on Piedmont Road in Buckhead. Good neighborhood.
It took me two and a half hours to get to Atlanta and another twenty minutes to locate the Security South
