“Monday.”

“I want you to ride up to Memphis and find out what you can about Clyde.”

“Clyde’s dead.”

She looked at me and patted my face as if I were a child with only a child’s understanding. “We always thought he was dead. In the end he turned us all away. His family. His friends. Only thing he wanted was that hurt he carried ’round with him. When we lost track of him, I had to say good-bye. I had to pray for his soul.”

I placed the money back in her purse and shook my head when she opened her mouth to speak. Her eyes closed and a single tear ran in a twisted pattern down her powdered face.

“You never told me what happened to him,” I said, finishing the cigarette and tossing it to the flagstone pavement. A young couple walked past, drunk and kissing madly. They tripped over a curb as they turned into Pirate’s Alley.

A gas lamp burned at the end of the alley by a house once rented by Faulkner. It was one of the loneliest sights I’d ever known but wasn’t sure why.

“Somebody killed a man in his band,” Loretta said. “And Clyde’s wife. She was pregnant, Nick. Woman was six-months pregnant.”

Chapter 3

Perfect Leigh didn’t like cartoons with talking animals, men who wore aftershave or Italian suits, self-appointed faith healers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, songs on the Waffle House jukebox, soap opera divas, collard greens, or sex of any type. She liked herself and that was enough for her. She liked the way she smelled like butterscotch candy. She liked the way she looked, with a mane of platinum blond hair and thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six measurements. She liked the way she appreciated the way Nancy Sinatra used to dance, the smell of new leather in her Mustang convertible, cheese sauce served in bad Mexican restaurants, and the way her Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album skipped because it warped during a hot day at the beach in Panama City, Florida.