“Yes,” Tammy said, taking a big drag on her cigarette. I was afraid I was going to start coughing. “He came over about four. Give or take fifteen minutes. It might have been as late as four fifteen, four twenty-five, but it wasn’t any later than that, because the TV show I was watching was over at four thirty, and he was at our house by then and in the pool room with Renaldo. They were playing a game. We had a nicer house.” She looked around the tiny room. “Bigger. I told the police, I think he was here by a few minutes after four. But I wasn’t paying too much attention until my program ended, and they called to me to bring them a beer.”

Renaldo laughed, an eerie huh-huh-huh sound. “We drank us some beer,” he said. “I won the game. We swapped some pills, made a deal. That was a good time.”

“And he stayed here until he got a phone call?”

“Yeah, he had a cell phone, you know, for business,” Tammy said. “That guy who lived next door to you-all, he was calling to tell Matthew to get his ass home, the cops were all over the place.”

“Was he surprised?”

“Yeah,” Tammy said, somewhat to my surprise. “He thought they were there about the drugs, and he flipped out. But he figured he’d better go home rather than run, because he knew your mama couldn’t stand up to being questioned.”

“He did?” I was really astonished.

“Oh, yeah,” Tammy said. “He had big love for Laurel, you know, girl.”

Tolliver and I exchanged glances. If Renaldo and Tammy were right, Matthew hadn’t known anything about Cameron’s disappearance. Or could he have been acting, to establish an alibi?

“He had a fit,” Renaldo mumbled. “He didn’t want that girl gone. I visited him at the jail. He told me he was sure she run away.”

“Did you believe him?” I leaned forward and looked at Renaldo, which was painful but necessary.

“Yes,” Renaldo said clearly. “I believed him.”

There wasn’t much point staying after that, and we were glad to get out of the reeking little house and away from its hopeless inhabitants.

I could hardly wait for Tolliver to buckle his seat belt. I backed out of the yard without having any idea where we were going. I began to drive back to Texas Boulevard, just to have a direction. “So, what do you think?” I asked.

“I think Tammy is repeating what my dad told her,” Tolliver said. “Whether or not he was telling the truth, that’s another thing.”

“She believed him.”