The Hanged Man's Song

time, because she didn’t have a machine of her own. Bobby had talked to her online a few times, Baird said, and then had sent her a laptop.
    Or, Baird said, what Bobby had actually done was send Baird to the local CompUSA to buy a laptop with cash. He then put some additional software on it and had Baird FedEx it to the girl. Baird paid cash at FedEx. Bobby always had Baird front for him when physical packages had to be sent somewhere, so there’d be no deliveries—no invoices—that would tie to him.
    “When you FedEx’ed it, whose return address did you put on it?” I asked.
    Baird looked at me for a moment, then said, “Mine. The computer was worth two thousand dollars, and if it got lost . . . the insurance, you know.”
    “You didn’t see anybody around, there was no chance you were followed? Nobody came to talk to you?”
    Baird said, “Nobody talked to me. I didn’t see nobody. But I . . . wasn’t looking. You think somebody followed me?”
    “How often did you go to Bobby’s?”
    “Every day. I mean, I was his caregiver. I did the shopping and cut the grass.”
    We went forward day by day, and a week or maybe ten days after he sent the laptop—Baird didn’t have a good grip on the relative time, but didn’t think it was too long—we tumbled over another anomaly.
    “White boy came by selling Bibles and it turned out he liked old radios, too,” Baird said. “I been collecting these for years. Ididn’t want no Bibles, but he asked if he could look at the radios and I let him in. That was pretty unusual.”
    “Did he seem to know about the radios? Really know about them?”
    “He knew a bit. Not so much about the value as how they worked. ’Course, the value changes all over the place. I was up in Memphis last year and found out that I have a radio—this one, it’s a 1938 Stewart-Warner tombstone”—he pointed at a tabletop radio with a burnished red-colored wooden case—“that baby’s worth six hundred dollars now. In Memphis, anyway. Down here, it’s probably fifty bucks at a garage sale. But he knew how the radios worked, okay. We talked for a while, looked at them for an hour, and then he left.”
    “You ever leave him alone in here?” I asked.
    “Well . . .” He scratched his ear, then twisted it, thinking. “I went out to get the mail, talked to the mailman for a couple of minutes.”
    “The mailbox is that communal center box,” John said.
    “That’s right, just over there.” He looked at John and then at me, and after a few seconds of silence he said, sadly, “The guy stole Bobby’s name out of the house, while I was out talking to Carl, didn’t he?”
    “If you were out there for a few minutes, he might have looked around. Or if you left your keys lying around, and he was ready to do it, he might have made a copy and come back some other time, when you were gone,” I said.
    “He was just looking at the radios,” Baird said. He wiped the corners of his eyes with his index fingers. “We popped the back off a couple of them, so he could look at the tuning layout.”
    “There’s no way to tell, really,” John said, trying to be kind. “Maybe he was really selling Bibles.”
    “Just a minute,” Baird said, and heaved himself out of the chair. To John, he said, “Watch the white man while I’m gone.”
    He went out the front door, and as soon as he was out, I stepped around the rest of the lower floor, as an intruder might have; John tagged along, the black-and-white cat watching us without an apparent concern in the world. Ten seconds after we started looking, we found a little parlor off the kitchen that had been turned into a home office with a two-drawer metal file cabinet. I pulled open a drawer, and the first file carried a tag in black felt-tip pen that said Taxes and Job.
    Inside the file we found a sheath of tax bills and workman’s comp statements from the state. Two of them listed Robert Fields as Baird’s employer, and included Bobby’s address. “Goddamnit,” I said.
    I pushed the drawer shut and we went back to the living room. I said, “I don’t think we should tell him.”
    “He might already know,” he said. “About that cash we took out of Bobby’s . . .”
    “I was thinking the same thing.”
    Baird came back a minute later, shaking his head mournfully. “Neighbor was still up. Too hot to sleep. She says she never had a Bible salesman come by, white or black, either one.”
    “Okay,” I said. “You