" 'Cept for Penny."
"Except for her," I said.
"Old man's calmed down some, since Dolly came aboard."
"But before that?"
"Well. For a while he was married
to the girls' mother. Don't remember her name right this minute. But she was a hippie."
"Lot of hippies around thirty years ago," I said.
"Yep, and that's when they got married. But times changed and she didn't. 'Bout ten years ago she ran off with a guy played in a rock band."
"So Penny would have been about fifteen."
"Yep. The other girls were a little older."
"They're two years apart," I said. "So they'd have been seventeen and nineteen."
"See that," Becker said. "You been detecting more than you pretend."
"I'm a modest guy," I said. "How was the divorce?"
"Don't know nothing about the divorce."
"Was there a divorce?"
"Don't know. Not my department."
"So what was Clive doing between the hippie and Dolly?"
"Everything he could," Becker said.
There was a two-wheeled horse-drawn piece of farm machinery inching along in our lane. I didn't know anything about farm machinery, but this looked as if it had something to do with hay. A black man in overalls and a felt hat was sitting up on the rig, though he didn't seem to be paying much attention. The horse appeared to be the one on duty. Becker slowed as we approached it and swerved carefully out to pass.
"Booze, women, that sort of thing?"
"A lot of both," Becker said.
"Ah, sweet bird of youth," I said.
Becker grinned without looking at me.
"You hang around those Clive girls, you might get younger yourself," he said.
"While Clive's living the male fantasy life," I said, "who's looking after the girls?"
"Don't know," Becker said.
"Is there anything in this for me?" I said. "Clive screw somebody's wife, and somebody wants to get even? He sleep with some woman and ditch her and she wants to get even?"
"I don't pay attention to shit like that," Becker said. "Do I look like Ann Landers?"
"You look sort of like Archie Moore," I said. "And you sound like a guy who knows things he's not saying."
"It's a special talent," Becker said.
"The real talent is sounding like you don't know anything you're not telling," I said.
"I can do that," Becker said.
"If you want to," I said.
Becker watched the road.
"So why don't you want to?"
We passed a sign that read, "Welcome to Alton."
"Because you want me to wonder."
Becker slowed and turned into a narrow dirt road that went under high pines, limbless the first thirty feet or so up. I remembered it from my last visit, eight years ago.
"You want me to look into them, but you don't want it to have come from you, because it could come back and bite you in the ass."
"Clives the most powerful family in Columbia County," Becker said, and turned off the dirt road into a wide clearing and parked near a white rail fence near the Canterbury Farms training track.
FOURTEEN
WE DIDN'T LEARN much in Alton. An Alton County Sheriff's detective named Felicia Boudreau was on the case. I knew her from eight years earlier, and Becker and I talked with her sitting in her car at the stable site.
Carolina Moon, she told us, had been a filly of modest promise. Her groom had found her dead in her stall when he went to feed her in the morning. She'd been shot once in the neck with a.22 long bullet, which had punctured her aorta, and the horse had bled to death.
"We have the bullet," Felicia said. "Vet took it out of the horse."
"We'd like to see if we can match it against ours," Becker said.
Felicia said, "Sure."
"Nothing else?" I said.
"Well, it's nice to see you again," she said.
"You too," I said. "Got any clues?"
"None."
"Lot of that going around," I said.
"What's it been, eight years?"
"Yep. Still getting your hair done in Batesburg?" I said.
"Yes, I am."
"Still looks great," I said.
"Yes, it does."
We talked with Frank Ferguson, who owned the horse. He didn't have any idea why someone would shoot his horse. I remembered him from the last time I was in Alton, but he didn't remember me. He had been smoking a meerschaum pipe when I talked with him eight years before. I thought of saying something about it, but decided it would be showing off, especially after my hair-done-in-Batesburg triumph.
We headed back toward Lamarr in the late afternoon with neither information nor lunch. I didn't mind about the lunch. The sausage biscuits from breakfast were still sticking to my ribs. In fact, I was considering the possibility that I might never have to eat again.
"That didn't help much," Becker said.
"No," I said, "just widened the focus a little."
We were heading west now and the afternoon sun was coming straight in at us. Becker put
down his sun visor.
"Maybe it was supposed to," Becker said.
"So we wouldn't concentrate entirely on the Clives?" I said.
Becker shrugged.
"What is this, you give me an answer and I try to think up the question?"
Becker grinned, squinting into the sun.
"Like that game show," he said. "On TV."
"Swell," I said.
We kept driving straight into the sun. The landscape along the highway was red clay and pines and fields in which nothing much seemed to be growing.