“Oh, don’t take these things so personally, William. You’re too thin-skinned, always have been. Now, what’s your name again, young woman?”

I repeated my name and handed cards around the room.

“Investigator? Investigator? How in hell did Billy get involved with a detective? You and Annie Lisa ever talk to the boy?” Roger demanded.

William ignored him, and said to me, “What are you doing with my son? And don’t try shuffling around with lies about girls’ basketball.”

“I have only the truth to tell about girls’ basketball,” I said. “I met your son for the first time last Thursday, when I went to the warehouse to talk to Pat Grobian about getting By-Smart to back the team. Billy was enthusiastic, as you know, and sent me up here.”

Buffalo Bill stared at me under his heavy brows, then turned to the man he’d called Linus. “Get someone on this, see who she is and what she’s doing there. And while you’re calling around, we’ll all just go into the conference room and talk this over. Mildred, put through those calls to Birmingham for me, I’ll take ’em in there.”

12

Company Practice

In the conference room, the party was essentially configured the way it had been for prayers, with Bysen at the head of the table and Mildred on his right. The sons and Linus Rankin sat along the sides. Mildred’s assistant, the nervous woman in the corner of the front room, came in with a stack of phone messages, which Mildred distributed to the men.

I handed Mildred the report I’d created for my meeting at the warehouse; when I told her I’d only brought two copies, she sent her assistant scurrying to photocopy it. The assistant came back in short order, somehow juggling a stack of copies and a tray holding coffee, soda cans, and water.

While we’d been waiting, the men had all whipped out cell phones. Linus was asking someone to find out about me, and William was working his way through his share of the messages, calling board members to reassure them that By-Smart was not budging on unions. Roger was dealing with a vendor who didn’t think he could meet By-Smart’s price demands. Gary held an animated conversation about a problem with a store where the overnight crew had been locked in: someone had had an epileptic seizure, as nearly as I could gather from my frank eavesdropping, and bitten off her tongue because no one could get the door open to admit the EMTs.

“Locked in?” I blurted out, when he hung up, forgetting I was trying to be supersaccharine to all these Bysen men.