The Hanged Man's Song

age.
    “Ah, shit,” I said.
    “I would have liked to have met him,” John said softly.
    I moved closer, saw the gun in the corner, and said, “There’s a gun,” and then stepped over the body and saw the misshapen skull and the blood. “Somebody killed him.”
    “Somebody . . .” John stepped over, saw the blood. “Oh, boy.”
    “Let’s check around,” I said. I glanced at the wheelchair, noticed the tray with a series of clamps. “John, look at this.”
    “What?”
    “Looks like a laptop setup.”
    “No laptop.”
    We both knew that was bad. We did a quick run-through of the house and found a wi-fi router in a back closet, plugged into a cable modem. “No servers,” I said. “I wondered about that.”
    “What?”
    “He seemed to have servers, but that would have made him vulnerable. So he has virtual servers. All of his stuff is . . . out there, somewhere. What wasn’t on the laptop.”
    John said, “Let’s see if we can find some gloves, so we don’t leave fingerprints all over the place.”
    >>> BOBBY’S house was a mix of old and new. The entire house had wooden floors—board floors as in old southern farmhouses—covered in the dining room by a semi-threadbare oriental carpet that looked as though it came from the turn of the twentieth century. But it wasn’t cheap; it fit the room well and looked inherited. A dozen plants were scattered through the half-dozen rooms, including five or six orchids, one blooming with gorgeous white flowers like a spray of silvery moons. An upright piano sat in one corner of the living room, the keyboard cover up, sheet music for Cole Porter’s “ I Get a Kick Out of You ” perched on the music stand. There was all the usual stuff—a big TV, game cartridges, a stereo system with a CD player and maybe a thousand jazz and classical CDs, a modern turntable for vinyl records,and three or four hundred records to go with it. He liked Elvis Presley, I noticed, along with all the big blues masters.
    There were photographs. Framed photos of single faces, and groups of people gathered around cars or standing in front of houses, black people, all, smiling at the camera, dressed in suits and dresses as if they’d just gotten back from church, maybe a wedding; and the style of the photos, and the contents, judging from the cars that were visible, went back to the 1930s, and came forward, perhaps, to the eighties.
    And there were books. Big piles of computer stuff, but also detective and thriller novels, and general fiction. A copy of Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole was split open over a chair that faced a wide-screen television. A comfortable house, a comfortable home, all come to a pile of laundry in a corner, with a starved-bony face and a pool of blood.
    We found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer, and a box of vinyl gloves: actually, three boxes of vinyl gloves, which suggested that Bobby had had allergies, as well as the problem that had been killing him, whatever it was.
    We spent an hour going through the house, working quickly, trying to cover everything. For practical purposes, the house was one-story—no basement, and while there was an attic space, access was through a ceiling hatch, and Bobby couldn’t have gotten to it. Anything important, we thought, would be on the main floor. We wanted computer disks, written files, anything that might involve Bobby’s complicated computer relationships.
    I spent a half hour going through two file cabinets, mostly income tax and investment records. Nothing, as far as I could see, that related to his computer work except for computer purchaserecords from Dell and IBM. I took those, dropping them in an empty Harry and David fruit-delivery box.
    Every time we went in the front room, we curled our faces away from the bundle in the corner—I saw John do it, and I felt myself do it. But there was the curiosity . . . what did the mysterious Bobby really look like? I couldn’t touch him, didn’t want to move him, but looking down at him once, forcing myself, I decided that he looked a little like photos I’d seen of Somalis on the ragged edge of hunger. He had been nice-looking, but there was not much left of him; and now he looked deflated, sad, unready to be dead. He gave us a sense of silence and gloom.
    Under some shoes in the bedroom closet, John spotted a board that looked out of place. When he rattled it, and then lifted it, he found a green metal box, and inside that, an expired U.S.