"It's not for sale," the owner said.

"I'm going to give it to Ida as a present. Now, how much is it?" Jimmie said.

"What do you think you're gonna get out of this, son?" he said.

"Get out of what?"

The owner clicked his fingers on the glass display case. "It's thirty-five dollars on the loan, two dollars for the closing charge."

Jimmie counted out the money from his billfold. The owner placed the mandolin in a double paper sack and set it on the display case.

"Can you tell me where she works or lives?" Jimmie asked.

The owner looked at him as though a lunatic had walked into his shop.

"Thought you were a put-on, boy, but I guess you're for real. She lives and works in the same place. On Post Office Street. You figured it out by now?"

The paint on the two-story houses was blistered, the dirt yards weedless and hard-packed, the bedsheets on the clotheslines flapping in a hot wind. Jimmie parked the convertible and looked uncertainly at the houses, the neck of the mandolin clutched in one hand. A city police car passed by, with two uniformed officers in the front seat. They were talking to one another and neither paid attention to his presence on the street. "I'm looking for Ida Durbin," Jimmie said to a black girl who was hanging wash in a side yard.

The girl was frail and wore a dusty yellow blouse with loops of sweat in the armpits. Her forearms were wrapped with a mottled pink and white discoloration, as though her natural color had been leached out of the skin. She shook her head.

"She has freckles and sandy red hair. Her name is Ida," Jimmie said.

"This is a colored house. White mens don't come in the daytime," she said. The wind flapped a sheet that was gray from washing across her face, but she seemed not to notice.

Jimmie stepped closer to her. "Listen, if this girl works in a place for white people, where would I -" he began.

Then Jimmie felt rather than saw a presence at the window behind him. The black girl picked up her basket of wash and walked quickly away. "You don't look like the gas man," the man in the window said.