“You think he was lying about selling the marker to Golightly?” I asked.

“Who cares?”

“Bix Golightly is psychotic,” I said.

“They all are.”

“Put away the booze, Clete, at least until afternoon.”

“When you were on the hooch, did you ever stop drinking because somebody told you to?”

It was Indian summer outside, and the sunlight looked like gold smoke in the live oaks. At the base of the tree trunks, the petals of the four-o’clocks were open in the shade, and a cluster of fat-breasted robins were pecking in the grass. It was a fine morning, not one to compromise and surrender to the meretricious world in which Clete Purcel and I had spent most of our adult lives. “Let it go,” I said.

“Let what go?” he asked.

“The sewer that people like Frankie Giacano and Bix Golightly thrive in.”

“Only dead people get to think like that. The rest of us have to deal with it.”

When I didn’t answer, he picked up the iPod and clicked it on. He held one side of the headset close to his ear and listened, then smiled in recognition. “That’s Will Bradley and Freddie Slack. Where’d you get this?”

“From Tee Jolie Melton.”

“I heard she disappeared or went off someplace. She was here?”

“It was about two in the morning, and I turned on the pillow and she was sitting right there, in the same chair you’re sitting in.”

“She works here?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“After ten P.M. this place is locked up like a convent.”

“Help me into the bathroom, will you?” I said.

He set the iPod back on the nightstand and stared at it, the driving rhythms of “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar” still rising from the foam-rubber pads on the earphones. “Don’t be telling me stuff like this, Streak,” he said. “I’m not up to it. I won’t listen anymore to that kind of talk.”