“We had probable cause to believe that he was,” Steiner replied.
“Can you tell me what that was?” I asked.
“No, I really can’t. It will come out in the court proceeding, if there ever is one,” he said as he wiped his hands on a wad of tissues.
“Can you tell me if it was an informant?” I asked, hoping for some type of indication that it was, even if he wouldn’t tell me whom.
“I really can’t say one way or the other,” he replied evenly. If he gave some hint as to the answer, I didn’t pick it up.
“Do you have any ideas where he might be?” I asked. “I mean in general.”
“I couldn’t tell you if I did,” he replied. “I tell you what I think, and you tell his mother, and she tells him, and he goes somewhere else. Then I’m the dumbass.”
“You think that’s why she hired me?” I asked. His statement implied that I was the dumbass, and he didn’t want me to pass it on.
“Probably not. It’s a lot of trouble for a little bit of information, but you never know.”
“Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for talking to me.”
“Are you licensed to carry?” he asked, as he stood up, too.
“Yes,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because looking for a crack dealer can be dangerous work. He’s not going to stop and let you explain that you’re not a cop, that his momma just wants him to call home. He’s going to shoot you dead. If you’re licensed to carry, do it. Better yet, forget the whole thing and let us find him.”
“I’ve never heard of a cop telling a private citizen to carry a weapon,” I said.
“You’re a PI, so you cross the line. If you’re going to persist in acting like a cop, you’d better be ready to defend yourself. If you do get a line on Thomas, the best thing you can do is call me.”
“Even if he can’t shoot straight?” I asked.
He gave me the same disturbing grin. “He doesn’t have to shoot straight if he puts the muzzle against the back of your head.”
As I drove back downtown, I tried to figure out if I had learned anything. It was pretty easy to decide that I hadn’t. I then tried to decide if Steiner had learned anything from me that would be useful to him in finding Thomas. Other than the fact that I was looking for him, too, I couldn’t think of anything I had said that would help him. I didn’t figure the police would have the resources to follow me around just on the off chance it might help them catch one accused crack dealer. I also figured that they weren’t doing much proactively to find him in the first place. They probably assumed that he had blown town and that their best chance of getting him back would be when he got arrested the next time in another city and the outstanding warrant showed up on the computer. Call it a wash.
I had thought about asking Steiner what he knew about Thomas’s wholesale to the consumer business, but, even though I assumed he knew about it, I concluded that it was probably not a good idea. Amanda was going to be pissed anyway if she found out I had talked to the cops at all, much less suggested to them that Thomas was engaged in a lucrative criminal enterprise.
I got back to the office around five, and found a note from Mary saying to call her if I wanted to go out for dinner. I checked my voice mail and flipped through the bills and offers for credit cards that the mailman had left me, then went into my apartment for a beer.
I sat on the balcony facing west, and watched the earth spin me away from the sun. Cicadas hummed from the stand of magnolias beneath my window, and the direct sunlight on my face was still hot but not as heavy as August. It was barely fall by the calendar, but during the day it was still more summer than autumn.
I was going nowhere fast on the Tuggle investigation, and I wasn’t sure how to pick up the pace. I would talk to Amanda tomorrow about her trying to get information on the police’s case against Thomas, especially the identity of an informant, but I thought there should be something else I could do.
I finished my beer and went inside and called Mary. I told her to be ready in ten minutes and dress casual. When I stopped by to get her, she was dressed in sandals, blue jeans and a white t-shirt that almost came down to her navel. It was obvious she was not wearing a bra.
“Am I okay for where we are going?” she asked. I loved it when she didn’t use contractions.
“If you were any more okay you’d cause a riot,” I said. I saw from the look in her eyes that she was trying to understand this remark, so I quickly added, “You look perfect, great.”
She smiled, gave me a quick kiss and picked up her purse and a margarita in a plastic cup. I declined a drink for the road, and we went down to the garage where I kept my pickup.
We headed out of downtown on Third Street just as full dark came on. As we got further into south Memphis, knots of young black men stood on street corners, talking and jiving and listening to boom boxes. Hookers cruised the sidewalks, and cop cars cruised the streets, but both groups looked like it was still too early to really get down to business.
Then the road ran under an Illinois Central railroad overpass, and dropped down off the last Chickasaw Bluff onto the Mississippi Delta. In daytime, the levee that snaked down the side of the river for hundreds of miles would have been visible on our right, and we could have seen the end of the hills from the east on our left. Even at night, though, and in a vehicle going sixty-five miles per hour, there was a strong sense of utter flatness, of uninterrupted space. Of no place to hide.
Casino gambling had come to northwest Mississippi in the 1990s in a big way, and now ranked behind only Vegas and Atlantic City as a gaming destination. We were soon in the midst of thousands of other people from the city who were making the short trip down the highway to try their luck. Billboards and gas stations appeared in the cotton and soybean fields that lined the road, and then we could see the casinos on our right along the river. By law, they had to be on the water, but the requirement was interpreted very loosely, and a small canal that ran around the casino and connected to the river was enough. The fields along the river had been owned by large farmers who already had plenty of money, but who had sold or leased parts of their land to the gambling interests and suddenly climbed several more notches on the wealth scale.
The casinos had brought jobs and money to Tunica County, one of the poorest in the country, and offered another form of entertainment to the region, gaming and Vegas type shows. They had also provided some people with the opportunity to discover they could not resist the temptation to bet, even if losing the money meant their children would go hungry.
Mary hadn’t said a word since we crossed into Mississippi, but had sat with her window wide open and her legs pulled up under her, breathing in the cool night air and the smells of the drying vegetation in the fields. Despite several months off and on in Memphis, it still had the newness and excitement of a foreign country to her. This sense was heightened by the vast differences between her urbanized, sophisticated country, and a place like Memphis that was set down in the middle of vast stretches of forest and farmland, and held areas within the city limits that it was worth your life to drive into at night. The Netherlands were already old and settled when Chickasaws were the only human residents in what is now Memphis. In the town’s early days, bears had roamed the streets at night, picking off free-ranging pigs and stray dogs. The nighttime predators were still there, but they weren’t just looking for a meal anymore.
Mary felt me looking at her, and turned and smiled at me. “I like this,” she said.
“I like you,” I said.
She put her hand on my thigh and turned back to the window. She still hadn’t asked where we were going, and made no comment as we rode past the last turn off for the casinos.
The