ALIAS wasn’t listening to me. He’d busied himself by flipping through some blues CDs in my toolbox as we headed to the office where he’d had most of his business meetings. “Who the fuck is Super Chikan?”

“A guy I once got drunk with in Clarksdale. Can make his guitar talk like a chicken.”

“Man, that’s country-ass.”

More and more abandoned brick warehouses sported new rental and sale signs for the district. One showed a mural on an old cotton warehouse advertising white couples playing tennis, swimming, and drinking foaming coffees.

“How did you meet this guy?” I asked again.

“Through this woman I knew,” ALIAS said. He’d moved from the blues CDs to a cardboard box holding articles on Guitar Slim. I watched in the rearview as he scanned the articles and moved his lips.

“Who was she?”

“She came up to me when we was at Atlanta Nites,” he said. “Don’t remember her name. But man, she was fine.”

“That doesn’t help much.”

“She just gave me his card and was sayin’ that he worked with Mystikal and shit.”

“Where did you first meet him?”

“At my lake house. Dude just knock on the door like we old friends. Knew my name. Started to talkin’ to me right off about my Bentley. Knew all about my ride.”

“Who else was there?”

“That fine-ass woman.”

“You know anything else about her?”

“She smelled real nice.”

“Stinky ones don’t get much work.”

I downshifted, rain against my windshield, and saw a parking spot by the Circle Bar. The bar made me think of cigarettes and Dixies and Jack Daniel’s and me about five years ago.

Robert E. Lee stood tall on his pillar at Lee Circle, where streetcars made wide turns around its grassy mound and headed uptown.