Baker opened a drawer. “Looky here.” Holding up a sheet of lined paper with crenellated edges that said it had been torn from a spiral notebook.

Verses in black pen filled the sheet. Block-printed lettering but with flourishes on the capitals.

Thought my songs would carry me far

Thought I’d float on my guitar

But The Man says you’re no good for us

Might as well catch that Greyhound Bus

Refrain: Music City Breakdown,

It’s a Music City Breakdown

Just a Music City Shakedown,

A real Music City Takedown

Thought they cared about Mournful Hank

Thought I’d come and break the bank

Then they made me walk the plank

Now I’m here all dark and dank

(Refrain)

“So much for creative output,” Baker said. “This is pretty juvenile.”

The tall man took the sheet, scanned. “Maybe it’s a first draft.”

Baker didn’t answer.

Lamar said, “Guess the guy didn’t figure on getting his throat cut and us archaeologizing all over his shit.” Slapping the paper down on the nightstand.

“We should take it,” said Baker.

“So take it.”

“Someone’s cranky.”

“Hey,” said Lamar, “I’m just feeling for the guy. He beats his fear, manages to fly over here on his own dime just to do some good, and ends up like we just saw him. That’s a rotten deal any way you shake it, El Bee.”

“I’m not denying that.” Baker placed the sheet in an evidence bag. The two of them continued to toss the suite. Going over every square inch and finding nothing interesting except a note on a message pad that seemed to bear out Delaware ’s story: BBQ Jacks B’Way bet 4 &5 Call AD or solo?

The note was in a completely different handwriting from the song lyrics.

“The directions have to be Jack’s handwriting,” Baker said. “So where’d the lyrics come from?”

“Maybe he had a visitor,” Lamar said. “You know, some wannabe using a ruse like room service, then dropping his bad poetry on him.”

“So why didn’t Jack throw it away?”

Lamar said, “Maybe the guy was dry and he was searching for inspiration.”

Baker stared at him. “He musta been desperate to steal from the likes of this.”

“Well, he hadn’t had a hit in a long time.”

“That’s thin, Stretch.”

“Agreed, El Bee, but it’s all I can think of. Let’s see if we can’t get prints off it anyway, run an AFIS.”

Baker jiggled the bag. “What we need to do is bring in the CSers and have ’em print the whole damn pigsty. I’ll take the pictures and then we can book.”

Lamar stood back as Baker walked around snapping Polaroids. Both of them careful not to disturb easily printable surfaces.

Baker said, “You wanna call Melinda Raven tomorrow morning? Find out if Owen is her kid and ask what his relationship was with his daddy.”

“I can do that. Alternatively, we can go to the library and read old People magazines. Why play our ace card?”

Baker nodded and continued to snap Polaroids. When he was done, he stowed his camera and headed for the door. Lamar, still gloved, hesitated, then placed Jeffries’s guitar on the bed before he closed the door.

5

Baker dropped Lamar off at his condo at nine AM. They’d made a short stopover at the lab to run an AFIS fingerprint check on the note. The system was down, try again later.

“I’m going to catch a couple hours of shut-eye,” said Lamar. “Okay with you?”

“Better than okay.” Baker drove off.

Sue Van Gundy was up, at the dinette table, eating her Special K with sliced banana, decaf on the side. Planning, as was her habit, to leave in twenty for the beginning of her eleven-to-seven shift.

She lit up when she saw her husband, got up, wrapped her arms around his waist, rested her cheek on his flat, hard chest.

“That,” he said, “feels nice.”

“How’d it go on Jeffries, honey?”

Lamar kissed her hair, they both sat down and he pilfered her decaf. “It went nowhere, babe. We’re starting from nothing. And Baker’s in one of those snits.”

“Because it’s music-related.” Statement, not a question.

“Three years we’ve been working together and he still won’t tell me why he hates anything to do with tone and rhythm.”

“Lamar,” said Sue, “I’m sure it’s something to do with his folks. Just like that nickname you gave him. He really was a lost little boy, growing up on the road, it couldn’t have been anything like a normal childhood. Then they up and die on him, Lamar? And he’s all alone?”

“I know,” he said. Thinking: But there’s got to be more. One time, right after he and Baker had started as a team and he’d learned of his partner’s quirk, he’d done some sniffing around, found out Baker’s parents had been a pair of singers.

Danny and Dixie, traveling the back roads doing honky-tonk, county fairs, roadhouse one-nighters. Danny on guitar, Dixie on the mandolin.

The mandolin.

A long way from stars, nothing on Google. Lamar dug some more, found the obit in an old newspaper file.

Sue was insightful, but still, there had to be more to it than longtime grief.

She said, “Let me make you some eggs.”

“No, thanks, baby. I just need to sleep.”

“Then I’ll tuck you in.”

Baker went home, stripped naked, fell into bed, was asleep before his face hit the sheet.

Much of the afternoon was spent with the two of them sitting at the center table in the pale purple Murder Squad detectives’ room, working the phone and sifting through the slew of tips that had poured in after Jack Jeffries’s murder hit the news.

TV, broadcast, radio, the final edition of The Tennessean. By evening, it would be the national entertainment shows.

Fondebernardi and Lieutenant Jones stopped in to see how everything was going. Both of them too experienced and smart to push because that would accomplish nothing other than make their detectives nervous. But they were edgy, all that media attention.

Baker and Lamar had a data flood on their hands from the blitz of phone tips. Sometimes too much information was worse than none at all. Like a room with fifty different fingerprint patterns. Every call they fielded was from a nut, a psychic or just a well-meaning citizen imagining or exaggerating. Two dozen people claiming to have seen Jeffries in two dozen unfeasible places at impossible times.

A few informants were certain he’d been accompanied by a dangerous-looking person. Half of those described a woman, the other half a man. Details as to height, weight, clothing and demeanor were cloudy to the point of uselessness, but everyone agreed on one thing: a dangerous-looking black person. And that included black informants.

The detectives had seen that before, called it The Color Kneejerk, but given a 911 caller who sounded African-American, it couldn’t be dismissed.

Then the 911 caller showed up at headquarters, a former merchant marine, now homeless, named Horace Watson, who lived in an eastside shelter and liked to take long walks by the river. The man was seventy-three, wizened and toothless. He was also as white as Al Gore; his southern Louisiana accent misconstrued as black patois.

Lamar and Baker took him into a room and started in on developing a relationship by giving him a Danish and coffee. Watson was already tipsy but outgoing, a nice drunk and eager to help. Volunteering about how he always walked by that area- that particular piece of land because sometimes you could find aluminum cans for the Redemption Center and one time he’d found a watch. Too bad it didn’t work.

This time, he’d found more than he was looking for. Freaking out when he saw the dead man, he’d hurried back to the shelter to tell someone. Found a pay phone along the way and made the call.