I followed my Google map down a gravel road that passed beside a rusty water tower. I bumped over a railroad crossing, pulled into the dirt drive of a doublewide modular, a decade-old Buick Skylark in the drive. Walking past it I saw half the back seat was burned away on the driver’s side, generally caused by the driver flipping a cigarette out the window and the wind blowing it back inside, landing in the back seat.

There were a dozen other doubles and singles in the area, scattered willy-nilly through the fallow, sun-parched fields, a fistful of dice on a dirt-brown table.

I knocked, waited. Knocked harder. The door opened a hair. I saw an eye caked with make-up and shadow. Then I saw blonde hair, lacquered stiff as stalactites, scarlet lips, a penciled-on mole.

“Ms Jett? I’m a Mobile detective. I want to ask some questions. There’s no problem, no trouble.”

“Questions about what?” the lips said. I smelled beer.

“Patricia Scaler. Patti Selmot.”

“You called earlier.” The door started to close. “I don’t know a thing. I barely remember her.”

My toes stopped the door. “You were in the same class at a small school. You were in band together. Hard not to know at least a bit about her.”

The eye squeezed to a frown. “Why you asking about Patti? Is it cuz her husband went crazy and took up with a fag nigra?”

“If you believe what you read in the papers.”

She sighed. “I used to think Reverend Scaler was like Jesus’ brother here on earth. He was for us white Christian people. We don’t get no respect any more. We used to own everything, but now Mexicans is everywhere. I work housekeeping at the Ramada and I’m the last white lady left. It’s all nigras and Mexicans.”

I didn’t point out that her sentence didn’t make a lot of sense. Beer does that, in quantity. It helps when you’re trying to establish rapport, though.

“They started letting Mexicans in the Mobile Police,” I said, lowering my voice to secret-telling size. “They cook their tacos on the departmental hotplate. And every day after lunch they sleep on their desks.”

She nodded. “It’s that fiesta they all gotta have.”

I sighed. “The department makes me work with a black guy, too.”

She looked past me at the empty Crown Vic. “Why ain’t he here?”

“I could tell this was a good white neighborhood. I figured you’d feel better if it was just you and me.”

She gave me gratitude. “No one ever thinks a us any more. It’s like white people are a dying breed. Come in.”

I followed her into a tired little space stacked with cast-off magazines bought for a dime at a charity store: People, Us, Entertainment Weekly – the lives of others to distract her from her own. I figured she cheered for people on reality shows.

“Wanna beer?” Jett said, opening the door and nodding toward the fridge. “I’m gettin’ me one.”

I was on duty, but this was pure business. I dug in my wallet, liberated a fifty, handed it to her like I grew fifties in my garden.

“Tellya what, Nona, lemme buy a couple six-packs. You can get ’em later.”

Warming to me fast, Nona Jett brought cheap canned beer in foam cup holders emblazoned with the logo of a local liquor store.

“So what can you tell me about Patti Selmot, Nona?”

She fired up a cigarette, blew a cone of smoke toward the ceiling. “None a this ever gonna come back on me?”

“Here’s my official interview notebook…” I slipped a little red notebook from my pocket, opened to a page, drew a horizontal line at the top. “That’s the space for the name of the person I’m interviewing. That’s all anyone knows about where this comes from. What name do you want me to make up for you?”

She thought a long time, said, “Britney Hilton.”

I wrote B. Hilton in the space. “There,” I said. “No one will ever know where I got my information.”

“That’s good,” Ms Jett said. “Tell this kind of thing and you could get messed up bad.”

Chapter 45

I’d choked down one cheap beer, poured most of the other down the toilet when I’d used the bathroom. In the same span of time, fifteen minutes, Nona Jett knocked back four of them atop whatever she’d had before I’d arrived. I’d not gone the direct-question route, but opted for conversational, asking about high-school activities and so forth, settling in on the personalities of the kids in her class.

“I’m figuring Patti as one of the shy kids in your class, right? Quiet and solitary and –”

Ms Jett laughed, a hard, metallic sound. “Patti shy? Patti wasn’t nothing near shy. Least not with the boys.”

“She was social?”

Nona Jett circled her left thumb and forefinger, then one by one waggled her right fingers in the circle.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Patti Selmot would fuck anything with a dick. She was plain as Hellman’s with that pasty face and big buck teeth…but when you’re dealing with teenage boys and they know sometime during the night the lid’s coming off the honey-pot, you’re gonna have boyfriends.”

I pictured a homely little girl trying to be popular by letting high school guys feel her up in the backseats of ragged cars.

“That’s sad,” I said.

A harsh laugh. “You’re thinking Patti was like this little curl of fluff being taken advantage of? She busted balls. If a boy was gonna dip his wick, he was gonna pay.”

“Money?”

“Whores take money. Patti liked to take something outta people.”

“Could you explain, please?”

“She might make a guy steal something. Stuff that didn’t mean a thing, like ‘Go get me a gold-colored picture frame.’ The guy’d sneak in a store and come out with a picture frame jammed down his pants. She’d look at it and laugh, then smash it in the gutter.”

“This was in high school?”

“Yep. Then she moved on to the sex stuff. She liked to do things that made people feel bad about themselves later. There was this gross fat girl in class and Patti said she’d give a handjob to any guy who asked the fat girl out then stood her up. Another time she made some boys line up and whack each other off. Said she’d make it with the first guy who came.”

I pictured a motley crew of acne-riddled slackers and dopers sniffing at Patricia Selmot’s heels like dogs round a bitch in heat. It was sad and ugly and all too common.

“Were these guys the, uh, class losers?”

“Hah! A guy could be captain of the football team, but she’d get him under her thumb and twist him down. It was that hot little bod of hers.”

“You mean she’s shapely?”

“She wears them old-timey sacky dresses on the tee-vee, but she’s packing heat. Got little tits, but they’re perkers, nips like gumdrops. Little butt as round as a sugar-baby melon. Long pretty legs…”

She seemed to realize something. Stopped short. She shook her head and blew out a plume of blue smoke. “She did that stuff for a while then moved up and on.”

“She moved out of town?”

“No. She learned what got favors from the boys in school worked even better on older guys with jobs and money and good cars. The last I saw of her, she was with one of the usual groups in a convertible, the guys in their twenties, one guy driving, the others acting like fools to get her to pay attention to them.”

“Always groups?”

“I never saw Patti with one guy, it was always three or four. She liked to walk around with them, showing off at us other girls. Them older boys always had their tongues hanging down, hoping she’d put out. She did. But only on her terms, buddy. They also had this cruel game they played.”

“Which was?”

“They’d drive into a town and Patti would hang around a Dairy Queen or a bowling alley lounge or drugstore place where guys didn’t know her. She’d tease them boys with her eyes and wiggle that round butt in them tight shorts. Walk past them and rub on the front of their pants. They’d forget that pasty face and want what all boys want.”