“Don’t you like that car with a siren?” I asked.
“You don’t even have uniforms,” she said.
I looked over to Black. “I hate wearing those duds they left at the office.”
“No rule you got to.”
“You know when you’re headed back to Birmingham?”
Black chewed some gum and leaned back a bit. “Thought I might stay around here. You know, if there’s a job.”
“You know it doesn’t pay much.”
“My other job ain’t exactly making me rich. Besides, General Hanna thinks it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to have an adviser.”
“Advise away, Major.”
We shook hands, and Black walked back to the jeep. Before he crawled back under the wheel, he yelled: “You ever hear of a place called the Rabbit Farm?”
I shook my head.
“A girl called the office this morning and said her friend was being held at the Rabbit Farm. When I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, she acted like I was crazy. Said she wanted to talk to the sheriff, that he would know.”
“You ask Fuller about it?”
“Of course.”
“Play dumb?”
“Well, he’s so damn good at it. You know that sonofabitch is giving sermons to the inmates? He wrapped a bedsheet around him like it was a robe.”
“I think the only soul he’s thinking about saving is his own.”
“You coming in?”
“Let me drop off Anne. The woman leave a number?”
“She said she would call back.”
“HER NAME IS SHEILA,” THE GIRL, LORELEI, SAID. “I haven’t heard from her since Mr. Patterson was shot.”
“Where was she working?”
“Last I heard was a place called the Rabbit Farm.”
“You know where that is?”
“No, sir. I don’t know the way back. They’d blindfold you when they’d take you there. That’s why I came here. I thought you would know.”
The girl looked down at her hands. She looked like a girl today, not like when I’d seen her at the Hill Top. She wore a flowered shirt that showed off her long teenage arms and blue jeans and saddle oxford shoes. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she didn’t wear a trace of makeup. It was hard to think this was the same girl that I’d talked to at Choppy’s.
“You doin’ all right?”
She looked to the floor in the office. I sat next to her in another hard wooden chair but not behind the desk. It seemed to go easier that way.
“I’m fine.”
“How’d she get into this mess?”
“She was doing some B-girl work with her mother,” Lorelei said. She chewed gum while we talked and then dropped the gum into her hand and then into the wastebasket.
“Where?”
“Bamboo Club. The Silver Slipper. She worked for a while at Ma Beachie’s.”
I nodded. Beachie’s was a high-end place, mostly stage shows, with the best girls in Phenix City. The clientele was high-dollar, with fraternity boys from Auburn and businessmen in Atlanta. The girls would work out backroom deals only if they liked the offer.
“But she met up with some fella and she fell in love, but it turned out he wasn’t doing nothin’ but tryin’ to turn her out. I heard he worked her out of some motels over on Crawford Road, and when he’d gotten what he wanted he cut her loose, sold her off to this Rabbit Farm, and then left town.”
I put up a hand.
“What do you mean ‘sold’?”
Lorelei didn’t change expression, just looked at me level with her clear blue eyes and said, “Sold. Just like I said.”
“Who was the man?”
“That fella who was in the papers. The one who got killed, Ernest Youngblood.”
I looked over to Jack Black and he adjusted the blinds, letting in a sliver of light and causing Lorelei to put a hand up over her eyes with the flat of her hand.
“Deputy Fuller knowed the place,” she said. “Sheila should be sixteen now.”
Black was smoking, and his exhaling breath and the light behind him obscured his face.
JACK BLACK DROVE AND FULLER SAT IN BACK, TALKING about what he’d learned in his years of police work and how it all had brought him to God. He said he’d been offered five hundred dollars to tell his story to the
“I told them I seen a blue light that day in church. You were there, Lamar. You know it.”
“You mind turning up the radio?” I asked Jack.
Black turned on a Montgomery station and I hung my arm out the window. We drove a brand-new Chevy, flat black, with no official markings. That’s the way I wanted it, and figured on keeping it that way for some time.
Still not out on bond – we heard Papa Clark and Godwin Davis were out collecting signatures and cash – Fuller was dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe. He smoked cigarettes and talked a little about his aching back and shifted in his seat, looking to find some comfort. He said he had broken two vertebrae.
I pointed out a country crossroads store and Jack slowed down and stopped while I asked a man about a place called the Rabbit Farm. He looked at us and then Fuller in the backseat. The man took a breath, nervous, and shook his head.
“Who would know?” I asked.
He shrugged, from where he sat atop of an old bucket. He scratched his neck and spit.
I got out and showed him my badge. It was the first time I’d done it.
Black drove the car out of earshot, and I spoke to the man a little about the weather and the heat and how we expected a bad cotton harvest. I then looked over at the car and back at the man and told him that Fuller didn’t work for me and didn’t have a clue what we were talking about.
The man muttered the name Clanton and wandered off. I got back in the car and told Black to keep driving.
Jack rolled on, the countryside dry, yellow, and harsh. It hadn’t rained in weeks, not since the night the Guard took over. As we drove, the radio station broadcasted the latest news:
“Gosh dang,” Fuller said. “I love the
We bought a Coca-Cola at another filling station down the road, and the woman who worked there knew me and she told me that she knew Clanton. She said he had a farm five miles down the road we just crossed. I thanked her, and brought Coca-Colas out to Jack and Fuller, and Jack doubled back.
“Your memory coming back to you, Bert?”
“No, sir.”
But as I pointed out the turn and Black hit a straightaway bordered by a long barbed-wire fence on cedar
