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walking up Boulevard, just past Buzz and Ned’s. I manage to pull over and park a block ahead of him and intercept him as he’s walking past, that 500-yard stare telling me he thinks he’s late for the game. I notice the first few snowflakes. Les has on a light sweater.
    “Hey, Les,” I ask him, like I’d just happened to bump into him there, “where you going?”
    He doesn’t seem to recognize me for about five seconds. Then he wakes up and looks around him.
    “I did it again, didn’t I?” he asks me. He looks as abashed as a kid who’s just wet the bed.
    “Big game today?” I asked him. He looks down at the mitt he’s carrying in his right hand, and we both laugh.
    He looks around and figures out where he is.
    “Can we get in the car?” he says finally. “It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
    I bring him home. I can see Peggy’s neighbor, Jerry Cannady, looking at us out his front window. Jerry no doubt knows what’s happened. He’s always complaining about something Les has done, none of which has ever harmed another human being, to my knowledge. I give Jerry the finger, and the blinds snap shut.
    Peggy calls Les an old fool, asks rhetorically what she’s going to do with him, then hugs him.
    I stay around for a few minutes and let Peggy fix me a baloney sandwich.
    I ask her about her erstwhile tenant, the redoubtable Awesome Dude.
    “Oh,” she says, “he went walking a couple of days ago. He’ll be back.”
    The Dude, saved by Peggy from a life of homeless shelters, park benches and lean-to’s by the river, occasionally still hears the call of the wild.
    I note that her men seem to be prone to running away.
    “Go fuck yourself,” she explains. In Peggy-speak, “Go fuck yourself’ translates as “Let’s change the subject.”
    I ask her if that’s the same mouth she used to kiss me goodnight with.
    “I never kissed you goodnight,” she says, laughing. “You were too ugly.”
    “Did you hear about that Windsor Farms girl?” she asks me. I’m thinking, shit, the TV guys have got it, too. Usually, it would take a nuclear blast to wake them up on Saturdays, when the whole crew of most of our local stations seems to consist of VCU mass com students with good hair and empty heads. They probably got it from my blog. Talk about red meat for the on-the-airheads: Rich, blonde former debutante shot to death at a stoplight five days after the man she accused of raping her gets his “writ of actual innocence.”
    I tell Peggy about my day so far.
    “I guess it isn’t going to be hard to come up with a suspect,” Peggy says. “That poor boy. After all he’s been through.”
    Well, I suggest, it does seem as if Richard Slade might be a logical choice. If I’d just gotten back from twenty-eight years in the big house for a crime I apparently didn’t commit, I might have built up a slight case of resentment. I mean, just how many people in the city of Richmond did have a reason to shoot Alicia Parker Simpson twice in the face on her way to her morning workout?
    Peggy shakes her head.
    “That whole thing, even back then, seemed so bogus. I never did believe Philomena’s boy would’ve done that.”
    I have half a sandwich in my mouth and have trouble speaking until I wash it down.
    “Wait. What? You know Philomena Slade?”
    Peggy wipes her hands on a paper napkin.
    “Well, she was Philomena Lee back then.”
    I implore Peggy to tell me more. She has to circle around it. Eventually, though, I find out that Richard Slade is probably my second cousin.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Sunday
    T here’s about an inch of snow on the ground, but the sun’s out now. Andi and I are headed down to Millie’s for brunch. I haven’t seen my daughter since Christmas. She gave me a tie and a fifth of Jack Black, which she probably got for next to nothing at her most recent stop in her apparent quest to wait tables at every restaurant and bar in the city limits. I gave her cash. That’s what she said she