The Hanged Man's Song

passport with the photo of a teenaged Bobby inside, a small amount of inexpensive, old-fashioned women’s jewelry—his mother’s?—and $16,000 in twenties and fifties.
    “Take the money?” I asked John.
    “If we don’t, the cops might,” John said, looking at me over the cash. “I don’t need it.”
    “What if, uh, he has a will, and wants it to go to somebody?”
    “We find that out and send it to them,” John said. “But I’m afraid that if we don’t take it, it’s gonna disappear.”
    We put the money in the Harry and David box.
    The biggest find came in the front room, in a built-in book cabinet not far from Bobby’s outstretched hand. It was hard to see—it had been designed that way—but the cabinet was deeper from the side than it was from the front. In other words, if youlooked at it from the side, it was a full fifteen inches deep. If you looked at it from the front, it was barely deep enough for a full-sized novel. Some of the novels that had been in the shelves had been pulled out and were scattered around the floor by the body.
    I turned and said, “Come look at this.”
    John stepped carefully past the body and I pointed out the depth discrepancy. It took a minute to figure out, but if you pressed on one corner of the back of each shelf, a board simply popped loose. When you removed the board, you found a narrow little space behind the books. It was convenient, simple, and mostly effective.
    Inside were seventy DVD disks: Bobby’s files. We put them in the Harry and David box. Working around the body, John said, morosely, “That smell—Jesus, Kidd, I feel like it’s getting into me.”
    “Keep working. Don’t look.”
    When we were done, we put our raincoats back on, put the Harry and David box in a garbage bag, and toted it out to the car. The rain was constant, but not cold, and I could hear it gurgling down drainpipes off the tin roof—a sound that was sometimes light and musical, but tonight sounded like Wagner. Before we finally closed the door and wiped the doorknobs, John said, “I hate to leave him like this.”
    I looked back at the crumpled body on the floor and said, “You know, we really can’t. Somebody killed him and the sooner the cops get here, the more likely they are to catch the guy.”
    “So we call the cops?” John didn’t like cops.
    “We call somebody,” I said. “We’ve got to think about it. The thing is, we didn’t find a computer, and it looks like whoever camein, took it. That means that Bobby’s main machine is floating around out there.”
    “You think . . . no.” John shook his head at his own thought.
    “What?”
    “Wishful thinking. I was gonna say, maybe this was neighborhood thieves, and he caught them at it, and they killed him. But then, if it was just a burglary, they would have taken other stuff. There was all kinds of stuff that thieves would take, just sitting around.”
    “Yeah. But they only took the laptop. That means that they came for it. And were willing to kill for it,” I said.
    “Shit.”
    “If we’re lucky, he encrypted the sensitive stuff. Every time he wanted to send me something serious, I’d get the key, and then after I acknowledged it, the file would come in. If he whipped some encryption on it, we’re okay.”
    “But if we’re not lucky and he didn’t encrypt . . .”
    “Then we could be in trouble,” I said.

Chapter Four
    >>> WE WERE AN ODD COUPLE, wandering around in the middle of the night, in a monsoon. If we’d been noticed at Bobby’s house by an insomniac neighbor, and if the cops later said something in the newspaper about looking for a white guy and a black guy seen together in the rain, I didn’t want the desk clerk at the La Quinta to have that memory.
    Instead of going back to the motel to talk, we drove a loop through Jackson, windshield wipers whacking away, windows steaming up, talking about what to do. We had two problems:getting some kind of justice for Bobby, and finding the laptop. The lives of a lot of us could be on that thing. Events, dates, times, places. Bobby knew way too much—it was as if the legendary J. Edgar Hoover files were out wandering around the country on their own.
    “It’s gonna be tricky,” I said. We drove past an open space with orange security lights inside, and a chain-link fence around the perimeter. We couldn’t see much of the buildings, which were huddled low and gray, as if depressed by the rain. “If we call the Jackson police,