Rose Hebert certainly wasn’t young. Maybe she never had been. I could see her, nineteen years old, sitting in the shadows outside the Waltz Right Inn, wanting to be part of the group having fun, longing for love. And spending the rest of her life with Daddy, who beat her purple when he thought she was sinning. She never mentioned her mother. When had Pastor Hebert’s wife stopped being part of the equation?

The bigger question, at least for the job I’d agreed to do, dealt with Johnny the Hammer. Lamont Gadsden, last seen entering a blues bar in Johnny’s company the night of January 25. Had he crossed Johnny on some drug deal? A fight, a death—killed by Johnny or some hand-picked Anaconda deputy—and then the blizzard, a wonderful cover for any traces of where Lamont had been shot or stabbed.

“Curtis Rivers was at that bar, too,” I told Peppy. “Why did he stiff me today?”

She thumped her tail softly. I sifted her silky ears with my fingers.

“You never knew Johnny Merton, which makes you a lucky girl. He’d have cut off your beautiful tail for earmuffs as soon as look at you. But could he scare Curtis Rivers so badly that the man won’t talk to me forty years later?”

I could imagine the Waltz Right Inn that January night. Open-mike night, local blues greats stopping by, hilarity running high because of the boon of summer in January, everyone happy but the preacher’s daughter, sweating in her heavy wool coat. And Lamont Gadsden, who’d left his mother’s dinner table to talk to the Hammer.

Over the sound of Alberta Hunter at the piano, Rivers overhears Lamont and Merton. The phone call later that night, or week, the Hammer to Rivers: If you say word one about what you know, you’ll follow Lamont into the river, or quarry, or wherever Lamont Gadsden’s body has landed.

I could imagine it, but that didn’t mean it happened. And, anyway, what hold could Merton have on Curtis Rivers that would keep Rivers silent after all this time? Besides, Rivers didn’t strike me as a guy who would faint just because the bogeyman was rattling a chain.

I made a face. Pastor Hebert, Hammer Merton, the enforcers of West Englewood. Both of them beat their followers for infractions against a code only they were entitled to define.