Del nodded. "Got him."

8

MARGERY SINGLETON LOOKED like a green heron-a sharp-billed stalking bird with a mouth like a rip in a piece of rawhide, an arrowhead nose, rattlesnake eyes; her eyebrows plucked naked and redrawn with a green pencil. She worked the first shift at Elysian Manor, pushing patients to and fro, cleaning up after them, rolling pills when a registered nurse wasn't available. Her best friend, Flo Anderson, was a registered nurse, having put in her two years at Fargo, and they'd worked out a system where, if somebody needed a shot or to get blood taken, Margery could do it and Flo could sign. The patients, most of whom had Alzheimer's, didn't know one way or the other.

Margery heard about the hanging of Warr and Cash from a breathless young nurse's aide who came back from lunch bright eyed with a tale she'd heard from a sheriff's deputy at the minimart.

"They're hanging down there, naked as jaybirds, all purple and frozen. The woman's tongue was sticking out like this:" She tilted her head, hung her tongue out of the side of her mouth and crossed her eyes. Straightening, she added in a lower voice, "They said that the black guy had a penis that was about ten inches long."

"That's bullshit," Margery said, her rattlesnake eyes fixing the young woman. "I seen two thousand dicks since I been in this place and there ain't been one of them more than seven."

"How many black men have been in here?" the nurse asked, an eyebrow going up. Had the old bat there.

"Hanged in a tree?"

"That's what they say. Do you think Loren might know more about it?"

"I'll find out," Margery said. She looked at her watch. She had another two hours before she could get off.

A supervisor named Burt stuck his head into the station where they were talking. "Old man Barrows got shit all over the couch. Clean it up, okay?"

Burt continued down the hall and Margery muttered, "Clean it up yourself, asshole." But she went to get her spray bottle and sponge, and the nurse's aide said, as she left, "If you hear anything from Loren, let me know. I mean, jeez."

LOREN SINGLETON FINALLY rolled out of bed at two o'clock. He'd been unable to sleep much, dozing off only to see, in his dreams, Deon and Jane hanging from a tree. He stretched, scratched, went into the bathroom. As he shaved, looking in the mirror, he started thinking about his latest Cadillac restoration. The car was at Calb's, and that could be inconvenient. The more he shaved, the more inconvenient it seemed. He finished shaving, showered, brushed his teeth, got dressed, and called Gene Calb.

Calb came on the phone and said, "Katina said you'd heard."

"Woke me up on the clock radio this morning," Singleton said. "I thought it might be a good idea to move the Caddy outa there, you know, until things quiet down."

Calb nodded. "Yes. Right away. Where do you want it?"

"My garage. You got somebody who could drive it down for me? I'll drive them back."

"I'll get Sherm, he isn't doing anything. So-what do you think?"

Singleton shook his head. "I don't know. I wonder if it has anything to do with Joe? You think they were fighting? I mean, Deon never said anything."

"I'm completely confused," Calb said. "If you told me shit was Shinola, I'd just nod my head and agree."

"Same with me. When can you move the car?"

"Right now. We're closing everything down, moving everything out. Sherm'll be there in fifteen minutes."

"I'll be outside waiting."

"Listen, Loren-we're really counting on you. You gotta keep an eye out. This is why you got the job."

"I understand. You can count on me."

THE CAR SHUFFLE took forty minutes. When it was done, Singleton went downtown, probed for information, got small pieces, and one essential fact: nobody knew anything. He called Calb, told him that. At three-thirty, he was back home. As he always did, when he first got home, he checked his money. He kept it in the basement, inside the holes in a row of concrete blocks. Maybe, he thought, he ought to move it. Get a bank box far away, maybe in Minot, or somewhere. If anybody looked at him seriously, the BCA people, they'd find the money and then the cat would be out of the bag.

The money. He didn't know what to do with it. He'd bought some expensive boots, another old Caddy, some good breather gear for painting his cars.

When he got his first lump-sum payment from Calb, he'd made the mistake of showing it to his mom. She'd claimed it, most of it, and had come back every week since, demanding more. Then he'd introduced her to Jane, and they'd gotten their heads together, and when the big money came in, she'd taken most of that.

Singleton had stood up to her-a little bit, anyway-and claimed fifty thousand. Fifty thousand would almost get him a small shop somewhere. A Morton building, maybe, with space to work on a couple of Caddys at once, and maybe even space to rig up a paint booth.

Big dreams…

WHAM!

The back door banged open. Only one person entered like that, without warning. Singleton had a few hundred dollars in his hand, and he hastily shoved it into his pocket, pulled the string on the overhead light, and headed up the stairs.

Margery was waiting in the kitchen. She was a small, thin, wrinkled woman; a woman who was to other women what a raisin was to a grape. Her eyes were pale blue, and her hair, once blond, looked gray at first glance, but was actually almost colorless, translucent, like ice on a window. Her lips were thin, her chin was pointed; Katina called her the Witch.

"What the hell have you been doing?" she demanded. "Why'n the hell didn't you call me about Deon and Jane?" She turned her nose up, sniffed, stepped close to him. "You've had that whore in here, haven't you? I can smell her juice."

"Not a whore, Mom… "

She slapped him, hard, a full-handed slap. "She's a whore if I say she's a whore," she shouted. "She's a whore."

Singleton stepped away from her, a hand to his face, furiously angry. His mom had a thin neck, and sometimes he thought about snapping it. Take that goddamn little cornstalk neck and snap it off. He bared his teeth at her, ground them, felt his heart pumping.

Margery hadn't forgotten about the bathtub. She stepped farther away, took the tone down. "Whoever did this, they might be coming for us," she said. "That fuckin' nigger would sell us for a quarter, and you know it."

"Mom, what can I do?" He heard the plaintive whine in his voice. He didn't hate the whine, only because it had always been there when he was dealing with Mom and he didn't recognize it.

"You coulda called me," she shouted. "But you were up here with your whore when you coulda been callin' me. I gotta think about this." She looked around, eyes narrowing. "What're you doing here, anyway? You oughta be downtown, seeing what you can see."

"I was already down there for a while, and I didn't hear hardly anything. The cops found Deon's money. It was stuffed away in his house, somewhere. They got it all."

"Goddamnit,"Margery said. "They got it all? Goddamnit."

"That's what I heard. There're state cops in town, and they're supposed to be really good. I think we better lie low."

"Nothing they can connect to us."

"Not unless… I mean, what if they've got Joe?"

"Joe's dead," Margery said. "We all agree."

"But what if he's not?"

"Then we are," she said. She pointed a trembling finger at him. "You get back down there, you find out what's going on. And you call me. Dumb shit."

They both turned to the sound of a car in the driveway. Singleton looked. "Katina," he said.

"I'm getting out of here," Margery said. "I'm not talking to that whore."