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bottle in front of him and asked how he found me.
    “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
    Later, I’d learn about Hosie Straughter. How he came down from Oxford, Mississippi, at age seventeen, self-taught and dressed in hand-me-downs, and ten years later won a Pulitzer. How he got fired from The Times-Picayune for writing a series on race relations in the city (only a part of the first installment ever saw print) and, on a wing and a prayer and small donations from middle-class black families, began publishing his own weekly, The Griot. Over the years he had become a voice not only for blacks, but for all the city’s eternal outsiders, all its dispossessed. A voice that was listened to.
    “No matter,” he said. “I’m a journalist: you know that. So I have my own ways of finding out things I need to know.”
    I nodded, took a draw off my beer.
    “Not two minutes after I heard Ez was dead—I’d barely hung up the phone—your friend Frankie DeNoux called.”
    I hadn’t ever thought of him as my friend, but I guessed now that he must be.
    “He told me you’d been taken to the police station and were being held there. By that time it was, I don’t know, maybe four in the morning. Frankie was concerned and wanted to know if I could do anything, find out anything.”
    “So Mr. Frankie knows about you and Miss Dupuy.”
    “Mr. Frankie. I don’t think I’ve heard that since I left Mississippi. No, he doesn’t know. He only wanted to try to keep you from getting in any deeper, maybe get yourself seriously hurt. He called me because I’m someone who can usually find out what’s going on and sometimes even get things done.”
    “You two are tight?”
    “There’s history between us.”
    “So then what did you do, threaten a front-page exposé? Unfair treatment of blacks? Hardly news in this city. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.”
    “Nothing quite that histrionic. I simply picked up the phone and called a judge I know. I explained my concern. He said he’d look into it right away.”
    “And an hour later I’m out of there.”
    “More or less.”
    “Then I owe you my thanks.”
    “Any debt you might have owed me—had there been one—you’d have repaid this morning.”
    We finished our beers and walked back up to Louisiana and across. Straughter had parked his blue Falcon a couple of blocks from the house, before a combined laundromat and cleaners. People sat in plastic chairs on the sidewalk out front talking. Steam rose in thick clouds from vents at the back.
    “Do you know?” I said. “Do the police have any leads, anything at all?”
    “Hard to say. Things are shut up tight on this. But I don’t think so.”
    “Man seems to know what he’s doing.”
    “And he does appear intent upon going ahead with it.”
    “Do me a favor. Let me know if you hear something?”
    Straughter tilted his head to the side and forward, peering at me over rimless glasses. With his chin out like that, I saw how perfectly egg-shaped his head was.
    “You wouldn’t be taking this personally, would you, Griffin?”
    “I don’t know how I’m taking it, not yet.”
    “Just be careful. Don’t let it take you instead.” He looked up at squirrels chasing one another along a stretch of powerline, chattering furiously. “You read Ez’s column yet this morning?”
    I nodded. They’d run it on the front page, with her usual picture, alongside the story of her murder and a nighttime shot of the street outside the club where B.R. was playing.
    “I still don’t understand it, but sometimes that woman knew things nobody else does, things she didn’t even know she knew. She’d sit down at the typewriter, describe someone, set a scene, and it would all just start coming. She was an uptown girl: Newcomb, sorority, the whole works. What did she know about the life of a black man in prison for murder? But you read the piece. I think the liquor helped make the connections for her at first, whatever the connections