The light turned red and my car as it stopped spat gravel from the street. Two black girls watched me from the doorway of a dingy corner grocery. Near them, three youths on stripped-down bicycles leaned next to a rusted rain barrel, drinking RC from bottles and ignoring the heat and the girls. The tallest wore sunglasses and an Army jacket, the other two, pea hats, and they stared wistfully at the impossible red curves of the nude woman painted on the cinder-block walls of the “Night Time Cafe,” across the street. Above the woman the block letters of a loan company billboard spelled out “Easy Street” below a row of green dollar signs. The air smelled of dirt and gasoline.

When the light changed I drove on toward Etta Parsons’. On my radio Linda Ronstadt gave way to a newsman reading in a tremor of spurious excitement: “Police continue to investigate the bizarre ritual murder of Birmingham socialite Lydia Cantwell. At a press conference this morning, Lieutenant Frank Rayfield outlined the investigation.”

I found her address and pulled to the curb. Rayfield’s radio voice was a monotone. “Since Mrs. Cantwell was found,” he was saying, “we’ve reviewed evidence suggesting a possible psychopathic killer as well as questioned members of the family in hope of preventing any further incident. We now believe that the murderer was known to Mrs. Cantwell and that his motive was personal.”

“They’re already questioning relatives,” Cade had told me a half hour before. “I don’t know what you expect to add.”

We sat drinking coffee in Cade’s office amidst the Sunday quiet of a law firm on its day off. Manila folders for the Cantwell estate were spread on the desk in front of him. The dark hollows beneath his eyes became bruises as he leaned back to await my answer, tenting his fingers in an appraising gesture reminiscent of the three years as an associate I had spent in the same armless chair, responding on cue. The window behind him framed the cement tower of the Cantwells’ bank, and from over his shoulder stared an iron-faced photograph of Henry Cantwell’s father. On a mahogany bookshelf was the portrait of a dark young woman with melancholy gray eyes, Kris Ann’s mother. Next to that Kris Ann smiled down at the traces on Cade’s desk of his taste for money: a jade vase, a Wedgwood teacup, an antique paperweight of hand-blown glass. Beside that was a morning paper headlined SOCIALITE SLAIN above an old picture of Lydia and a bad one of Henry recoiling from the flashbulbs as he left the police station. “They talk to Jason?” I parried.