The Hanged Man's Song

They’ll want witnesses, and people saw us.”
    >>> WE CROSSED Fourteenth, got into my car, and carefully drove away, going north. A few blocks up, I turned over to Fifteenth and followed it down past Meridian Park. We could look down the hill toward Carp’s, where two white District squad cars were jamming up the street. No sign of an ambulance, although there were more sirens in the air.
    LuEllen said, “If we keep doing this, I might have to go out for some Hamburger Helper.”
    “Naw. C’mon, goddamnit.” Hamburger Helper was her euphemism for cocaine. She’d had her nose into the stuff since I’d known her, and I’d given up trying to wean her off of it. But Ihate that shit. If American civilization falls, it’ll happen because of the drug monkey on our backs.
    “Might need to,” she said.
    “Then why don’t you go home,” I said. “Better to have you out of it than sticking that shit up your nose.”
    “Really?”
    “It’s gonna kill you,” I said, avoiding the question. I really wanted her to stick around.
    She was silent for a while, and then, a mile out of the motel, her voice morose, shaky, she said, “Raisinet.”
    “What?” I was still irritated.
    “Eight letters. Old grape’s reason for being.”

Chapter Eleven
    >>> FEAR AND TREMBLING and a sickness unto death. We held everything together until the execution began to sink in. LuEllen started with, “That motherfucker. That motherfucker. He just killed the guy. The guy was laying in the street, and he just shot him, the motherfucker. . . .”
    I kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”
    “He was helpless. Did you see that? He was facedown in the street. I mean, Carp already shot him, he was hurt and Carp just walks up and blows him away. Bam.”
    With this stunned, incoherent rambling, we drove out of theDistrict back to the hotel, where we sat around looking at CNN and every once in a while breaking out with another motherfucker.
    That evening, still in shock, we went looking for another wi-fi connection. We didn’t have to go far: the Washington area is what you call a target-rich environment. We found a new brick office building not far from the hotel in Rosslyn, got a strong signal, parked in the street beside it, hooked up, went out to the FBI, and popped the Jackson file.
    The feds were looking at a guy named Stanley Clanton, who’d been kicked out of the local KKK for being crazy. He’d told friends around the time that Bobby was murdered that he’d been out “rolling a tire,” which was apparently nut-group slang for assault on a black man.
    “She didn’t tell them,” LuEllen said, flabbergasted. “Welsh didn’t tell them that he’s Bobby. They’re chasing some fuckin’ cracker.”
    “Ah, man,” I said. “If they get on this guy, I’m gonna have to tell somebody that we did the cross.”
    LuEllen shrugged. She was leaning over into my half of the seat, her face next to mine, looking at the tiny screen. “Why? He might not have killed Bobby, but he sounds like the kind of asshole who’s just looking for the opportunity.”
    “LuEllen, for Christ’s sake, I’m not letting some guy I don’t know go to prison for something I did, and he didn’t.”
    “Whatever,” she said. She was glum, bitter, still reacting to the killing.
    >>> DURING the trip north from Mississippi, I’d laboriously gone through the list in the DDC Working Group—Bobby file,searching the names on the Internet, and eventually nailed most of them down. The names belonged to government employees, a few of whom were identified in their credit reports as working for the Justice Department. Three were members of the Senate staff. The computer numbers went into a Justice Department system somewhere in northern Virginia. When I called them, I got a log-in screen, and nothing more: no way to pry up the edges.
    Eventually, I wrote a memo, and e-mailed it to the staffers on the Deep Data Correlation working group list in Carp’s laptop:
Senator Krause’s senior staff will begin next week to compile a daily log of the senator’s activities and positions which may be of interest to key persons working with the senator and the DDCWG. This will be a continuing commentary, somewhat like the web-logs now popular on the Internet. The log will allow space for questions to the senator, and internal arguments concerning positions on the issues of the day. If you would like key-person access to the log, please supply us with a user