“That she was,” I said. I took a sip of tea: some sort of lavender-mint concoction with a touch of ginger. Not bad.

“Sorry to hear about Tomás,” she said.

“You heard?”

“Baby boy, ain’t much I don’t hear,” she said. “Been steppin’ and stompin’ these parts since before they paved over Black Bottom.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Here’s what’s syncopating, vibrating and oscillating in the air these days in your neck of the woods: Some third-party deep pockets mystery man named Sloane wants to buy up some almost-freed-up real estate in Mexicantown. All cash. Word is he’s using Vic Bronson as a cutout. But since when do some billionaire real estate mogul need a one-man front on the down low? And what does an all-cash transaction say to you, young Snow?”

“Dirty money looking for a wash and wear.”

“But let’s suppose that money’s already been laundered two, three times. Let’s say that money’s as clean as a wealthy white baby’s fresh cotton nappy? Then what?”

“Dirty hands holding a stack of clean bills.”

“And what them hands want to latch on to?”

I thought for a moment. “A way to churn money through a property investment. Real estate used as clean gears in a dirty machine.”

“You halfway there, son.”

“Halfway?” I said. “You mean I’m not as smart as I think I am?”

“Hardly anybody is, boy.” Miss Jesse smiled at me, perhaps the same way she had smiled at King Menes of the first Egyptian dynasty. She took a sip of tea, long, elegant pinky-finger out. “Rumor has it the Purple Gang owned themselves a thirty-acre cemetery just outside of Lansing, ninety miles northwest of where you sittin’. Paid some toothless, one-mule cracka whiskey and cash to groom the grounds, wash the bird shit off the headstones. You think the Purple Gang owned that graveyard and paid a drunk, dirt-farmin’ peck-a-wood in order to make a dollar? Or maybe they knew—just knew!—the last place on God’s green earth the po-lice would look for a body was in the one place that had a whole mess of ’em?”

Staring into the fire, I slowly turned her words over in my mind.

“Of course, you know you’re freaking me out, right?” I said to Miss Jesse.

“Oh, son, I don’t mean to.” She laughed. “Give it another twenty years. Hardly anything will freak you out. You’ll have seen nearly all the really weird shit twice, three times by then. Especially the electoral damn college.”

10

10

I wasn’t quite sure if it was the beginning of evening or if the sun had just given up after a valiant midafternoon fight to break through Michigan’s undulating grey blanket of snow clouds. Whatever time it was when I left the warmth of Miss Jesse’s Indian Village home, the remains of the day were cold, damp and monochromatic.