The Hanged Man's Song

scratched his ass, and said, “You boys want some beer? It’s been a bad day.”
    He got three bottles of Budweiser and a bag of nacho-cheese chips from the kitchen, passed them around, and dropped into a tattered but comfortable-looking green chair. John and I settled onto a sagging couch, facing him; the beer tasted good after the long ride. An overweight black-and-white cat came out of the kitchen, hopped up on the arm of Baird’s chair, stretched out, and looked at us.
    “Bobby told me that if anything bad ever happened to him, that you two might come snooping around. I was supposed to tell you whatever I could and he told me not to mention you to anybody else. Like the police.”
    “I hope to God . . .” John began.
    “So I didn’t. I didn’t even remember that you was supposed to come snooping until you got on my door and said you was John,” he said. “So what can I do for you? You know anything about this mess?”
    “You don’t have Bobby’s laptop, by any chance?” I asked.
    “No. The FBIs said that the computer equipment was gone. You boys are computer experts, right?”
    “I don’t know a disk drive from a joystick, but Kidd is pretty familiar with them,” John said.
    Baird nodded and focused on me. “Okay. Well, Bobby had one IBM laptop and about a hundred DVDs hidden away somewhere, but I don’t know where.”
    “A hundred?” I asked. “You know that the number was a hundred?”
    Baird’s forehead wrinkled. “No, I don’t know the real number. He had a whole shitload of them, though.”
    “You know what was on them?”
    “He called them his archives. He had his active things on the computer and his archives on the disks.”
    “So there was stuff on the computer that wasn’t on the disks,” I said.
    “Yeah, and vice versa. As I understood it. The FBIs went all through his house yesterday and today, they took every scrap of paper. They found a safe-deposit-box key and had to get me to okay that they open it—I’m Bobby’s executor for his will—but all they found in the box was old pictures and his mama’s diaries from when she moved down here from Nashville, and two old gold chains.”
    “So what, uh, is gonna happen to the house?” John asked.
    “I sell it. After funeral expenses and bills, the money goes to the United Negro College Fund. He told me I could keep the money from the yard sale, the furniture and all, and said I could keep any cash I find, but he was just jokin’. The FBIs said there weren’t no cash, but that’s all right with me. I’m just sad to see him go. He was the smartest man I ever met.”
    “He might’ve been the smartest man, period,” I said. “Do you have any idea of what might have happened?”
    He started shaking his head halfway through the question. “If the FBIs are right about the time he was killed, then I saw him two hours before that and he was happy as a clam.”
    “Bobby had good security,” I said. “People have been looking for him for a long time. The question is, how did they find him now? Did he change anything recently? Get any phone calls or talk to anyone in person?”
    Again, he started shaking his head early. “He didn’t get around much, anymore. I’d take him around to the stores when he wanted to go, but he got tired real easy. He had his computers and his movies and his music. He played the piano, some blues and some fancy stuff. He was a good piano player one time, but he was starting to lose the coordination in his left hand, and it made him sad. I saw him crying about it, once. He didn’t go out much. He never talked to anyone, ’cept maybe a neighbor or on the computer. ’Course, I wasn’t there to see if he used the phone.”
    “Goddamnit,” I said to John.
    John said to Baird, “If you have a few minutes, let’s go back through the last month or so . . .”
    John talked him through the past two months. Two weeks in, Baird remembered one anomaly in Bobby’s behavior, a tiny thing. Bobby had been interested in helping smart, underprivileged black schoolkids get involved with computers. I knew for sure of one case—the case that had brought John, LuEllen, and me to Longstreet for the first time, when John had met Marvel. There had been other instances that I’d heard about, as rumor, anyway, from friends on the ’net.
    The latest case, Baird said, came when Bobby heard of a kid inNew Orleans, a hot little code writer who had actually broken into her grade school to get machine