“My goodness,” B.B. said. “Those are the prettiest green eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. What’s going on with you and these boys?”

“I was asking them to play quietly,” B.B. said, “so they wouldn’t bother you anymore.”

“And ice cream,” the little one said. “Don’t forget the ice cream.”

B.B. went pink as he looked at the woman. “I thought that if I bribed them with a little ice cream, they might leave you alone.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. “Now why don’t you get out of here before I call the cops?”

B.B. took off his sunglasses entirely and met her gaze. “Lady,” he said, “I am the cops.” He’d tried this one before. Always worked like a charm. Better than telling someone he ran a charity that helped young men.

She wasn’t going for it, though. “Let’s see some ID.”

“I’m off duty. I don’t have it on me.”

“Well, if you go and get it now,” she said, “you’ll have it ready by the time your fellow officers get here.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be right back. See you in a minute, boys.”

B.B. walked breezily toward his room, where he would have no choice but to hole up until the cow finished baking.

Chapter 26

MELFORD HAD BEEN DRIVING in silence, and I was paying him very little attention. Mostly I was trying to come up with ways to convince myself that my run-in with Bobby wouldn’t end in disaster. It was only once we’d pulled into Meadowbrook Grove that I snapped out of my fog.

I stared at the trailers, the ragged lawns, the empty lots. “What the hell are you thinking? We need to stay away from this place, not go back to it.”

“Your plan of avoidance sounds fine in theory, but the truth is that we need to figure out what is going on. And to do that, we have to learn who that third body in the trailer was. As near as I can tell, the only lead we have is going to be what the neighbors can tell us. So you’re going to go into salesman mode, only instead of selling worthless encyclopedias, you’re going to ask about Bastard and Karen and who might have been by to see them last night.”

“Should I also ask them if they’ve seen anyone who looks exactly like me fleeing the scene of the crime?”

“Relax, Lemuel. No one saw you.”

“If it’s so relaxing, why don’t you do it?”

He shook his head. “Me? I stand out too much. Dig my crazy hair. You’ve been in this neighborhood before. Besides, you’re the salesman. This is your territory.”

There was no way to fully express the degree to which I did not want to do this thing. “What if that cop drives by and notices me? Should I explain to him that it’s my territory while he punches me in the stomach?”

“It won’t happen. I’ll be keeping a lookout. If anything goes wrong, I’ll grab you and we’ll take off. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

I then leveled my most compelling argument. At least most compelling to me. “But I don’t want to do it.”

“And I don’t want us to get fucked, Lemuel, but we very well may if we don’t take charge of the situation. Believe me, I don’t like this any better than you do, but Jim Doe is now on to you. And whoever sent that woman we saw at lunch is on to you. We’ve got to take action instead of sitting around and waiting for everything to catch up to us.”

I knew he was right. I hated it, but Melford was right. There was no getting around this. I couldn’t simply recede and think that, well, maybe things might have been different if I hadn’t gone to jail for multiple homicides. I had to do this.

“So what do I tell people?”

“I don’t know. But if you can convince people to spend a ton of cash on books they don’t need or want, how hard can it be to get them to gossip?”

He had a point.

“One more thing,” he told me. “It’s not going to happen, but let’s just say things go totally haywire.”

“Shit,” I began.

“Let’s say things go completely nuts,” he continued, “and you end up with Doe again.”

“Screw this,” I said. “I’m not going.”

“It’ll be fine. I’m just giving you worst-case scenario advice. If you end up with him, and you’re in some kind of danger, hit him in the balls.”

“You think that’ll hurt?”

“Trust me, smarty pants. He’s had some testicular distress recently, so he’s going to be extra sensitive. Give him, you know, a good smack to the nuts. It should make all the difference.”

“And you know this how?”

He smiled. “Because a friend of mine recently had cause to smash him in the nuts,” he told me. “Now enough with the questions. Get going.”

It all felt too familiar. Hot, covered with a slick of sweat, the plankton coating of grime on my tongue, standing at a door, ready to knock, the sickly smell of pig shit wafting through the air. Only this time I wasn’t trying to make money, I was trying to get information- information wanted by an assassin, not me.

I stood on the stoop of the trailer several doors down from Bastard and Karen’s. I’d already had one no-answer, two suspicious doors closed hastily in my face, and one veiled threat from an exceptionally short and obese man in boxers and a sleeveless T-shirt. Then there was number five. The day before, it had been dark and empty when I’d passed by. This afternoon, I could see lights on in the living room and hear the hum of the window-unit air conditioners. A woman in her sixties opened the front door but refused to open the screen, as though that would somehow protect her. Her hair, dyed to the color of yellow grapefruit, was cut short and permed into a dense jungle of cheerlessly fisted loops. She wore thin sea green sweatpants and a University of Florida T-shirt on which a saucily agitated gator charged forward.

“Hi. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about your neighbor over there, Karen.”

“I don’t want to buy nothing,” the woman told me.

“I’m not selling anything, ma’am.” I said, noting how odd it felt to mean it this time. “I was hoping you could answer a couple of questions for me. You’d be willing to do that, wouldn’t you?”

“I told you, I ain’t buying,” she said, and began to shut the door.

Part of me was content. I might go back to Melford and say that no one would talk to me, then we’d get into the Datsun and cruise out of Meadowbrook Grove forever. But that other part of me, that niggling part, knew that Melford would send me right back out, to another part of the trailer park, this one maybe closer to where Doe kept his police station.

So I said, “Hold on.” A clever little lie occurred to me, and I figured I had nothing to lose. “Ma’am, I’m really not selling anything. I’m a private detective.” Private detectives were on the brain, after all, following my conversation with Chris Denton. So why not?

She looked at me, this time more kindly. “Really?” Her eyes were wide with wonder.

“Yes, ma’am.” It was incredible to me. This being assertive business actually paid off.

“Like Cannon?” she asked.

I nodded solemnly. “Exactly like Cannon.”

“Not exactly. We’ll have to fatten you up first.” She opened wide the screen door.

Her name was Vivian, and she sat me at a padded card table in her kitchen and served me a can of Tab and supermarket-brand frosted oatmeal cookies that she daintily placed on a layer of paper towels.

There were pictures of poodles everywhere- on the walls, in frames on the counter. I counted at least a dozen. But there didn’t seem to be a dog around, though the place had the wet smell of dog hair.

“Oh, that girl was always a slut,” Vivian said thoughtfully. “Just like her mother. Whores, the two of them. And into drugs, too.”

“What sort of drugs?” I asked.