“Then it’ll be orange waters, and two weeks from now you’ll be shooting black tar heroin into your carotid,” I said. We talked about the state income tax for a while, and then I asked him about corrupt towns.

“They’re all corrupt,” he said glumly, scrawling wet rings on the bar with the bottom of his bottle. With his lined and wrinkled face, he looked like an aging English setter. “But they don’t think of themselves that way. That’s why the politicians get so mad when a reporter goes after them. They convince themselves that the payoffs were really campaign contributions and if they used the money to buy a hat, well, that was just an accounting error. There’s nobody more righteous than a guilty Lutheran with a reasonable excuse.”

“Have you ever heard of a place down the Mississippi called Longstreet?”

We both looked into the mirror behind the bar. Through the bottles, my hair was looking grayer, and the crow’s-feet at the corners of my eyes were cutting deeper. Too much sun probably. Too much time on the river.

“Longstreet,” he said, nodding. “Yeah. Don’t know much about it. You got something going down there?”

“No, no. I went through there my last time down to New Orleans,” I lied. “The place looked kind of

funky. Good light, for one thing. Interesting people. I thought I might stop off the next time I go down. Do some painting. But there’s an air of violence about the place.”

“Hmph.” He was looking at me. I don’t know how much he knew or suspected about my sidelines, but it may be too much. “There’s violence in all the river towns. But the southern ones are the worst. Jim Bowie and the duel of Natchez, shootin’ and cuttin’ on the levee. Or maybe it was a sandbar.” He took another hit on his lime water. “Stay away from the dogcatcher.”

“What?”

“The only thing I remember anybody ever told me about Longstreet is, stay away from the dogcatcher. I took his advice. I stayed away from the whole fuckin’ town.” He raised a finger to the bartender and pointed at his empty lime water bottle.

Late at night, after the days on the river and the evenings in the bars, I sat in front of a computer and went back and forth with Bobby. Bobby’s strong on data bases, and there was no shortage of material.

From the federal government he got military and tax records, Small Business Administration loan reports, and criminal rap sheets. All of those are closed, of course, but with the right computer keys, anything is available.