When she left, Milo said, “Progress.”

“We can place Janie with Willie Burns and Caroline Cossack the night of the murder. You don’t have doubts she was the dumpy girl, do you?”

He shook his head.

I said, “Melinda’s story also supplies a possible motive: jealousy. Caroline had a thing for Burns, thought Janie was moving in on her territory.”

“The eternal triangle leading to that?”

“The eternal triangle combined with dope and psychopathology and a low-inhibition party scene and Janie’s racism. No shortage of triggers. And something else fits: Janie’s murder presented as a sadistic sex killing and we’ve been wondering why other victims haven’t shown up. Because cold, sexual sadists don’t quit. But if the murder resulted from a passion-of-the-moment flare-up, a sole victim would make sense.”

“Janie in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Melinda’s description of Janie makes her the perfect victim: drugged-out, not too bright, prone to fantasy, a tendency to irritate people, a history of sexual abuse. Throw enough ingredients into the stew, toss in a few careless ‘niggers,’ and who knows.”

“What do you think about Janie’s blasé reaction to the downtown rape?”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “People expect rape victims to react the way they do on TV. And sometimes that happens. But pseudocalm is pretty common. Protective numbness. Given Janie’s victimization by her father, it makes perfect sense.”

“For her it woulda been more of the same,” he said. “Poor kid.”

He picked at his food, slid his plate away. “There’s a discrepancy between Janie’s description of the rape as Melinda remembers it and what Schwinn told me. According to Melinda, the rapist dropped Janie off a couple of miles from her home. Schwinn’s informant told him Janie’d been dumped in an alley and found unconscious by some wino.”

“That could’ve been Janie prettying up the picture,” I said. “Grasping for a shred of dignity.”

“Pathetic,” he said.

“Any idea who Schwinn’s informant was?”

“Nope. He never gave me a single bit of insider info. I kept waiting for him to clue me in, to help me learn the ropes, but we just went from call to call and when the time came for paperwork, he went home. And now here he is, pulling strings from the grave. . . . If Janie made up the part about walking home, maybe the young guy in a Jag was bogus, too. Her not wanting to admit he was a drooling, scabby hunchback in a jalopy? The alleged wino.”

“Could be. But if she was being truthful, the Jag story’s interesting. A young guy with hot wheels checking into a fleabag hotel wouldn’t be safe. Unless he had connections. As in Daddy owns the place. And Janie told Melinda the clerk seemed to know the guy. It might be interesting to know who held the deed on fleabag hotels twenty years ago.”