“Well, she had, and that’s why the cops came after you. I thought maybe now you could tell me who else might have killed her.”

He gave me a sharp look. “I don’t see how it much matters.”

“Yeah, I noticed you missed the funeral.”

The girl had left the kitchen and moved to the corner of the couch, watching Jason. His eyes turned bright and violent. “So what? I’m sure you being there was enough for Henry.”

I shrugged. “Another man might have come, for his father’s sake.”

Jason’s chest rose. “You feel real sentimental about him, don’t you, Shaw?”

“We’ve spent some pleasant evenings. He’s a sensitive, intelligent man. People could have worse fathers and generally do.”

“Well, I’m just fucking thrilled you’ve gotten so much out of him. Let me tell you, man, I used to get a handshake when they sent me off to prep school. Old Henry, the walking secret.”

“None of which explains who killed your mother.”

“I already told that pig lieutenant I was right here with Terry.” He wheeled on her for confirmation. She nodded and Jason turned back with dark satisfaction, as if he’d scored some point about the girl. “But the pigs wanted to push me around. They asked how I liked Lydia, looked for pieces of her skin under my fingernails—” His throat began working.

“They were horrible,” the girl broke in.

Her words seemed to draw out his poison. Jason’s face relaxed and his breathing eased. “Maybe they’d heard you’d quarreled,” I said.

“I just reminded her,” he said in a succinct voice, “that her family were corrupt fascists who got rich exploiting miners. That her father murdered two black men for racist votes. That her little civic works were one pathetic daisy on the family pile of shit.”

It was clear that Jason Cantwell was a wounded man. But he made it hard to care. “Perhaps your mother was trying, in her own way.”

“Yeah, by taking a busload of black kids to the symphony. Poor Lydia, she had the soul of a fucking Barbie doll—‘Give the niggers presents, make them feel better.’ She didn’t like me saying that. I told her whites covered the brown man like thin scum on the surface of the world. You could see her get scared. Hell, she was so paranoid about blacks that the last time I saw her she was all uptight that the fucking yardman was watching her. I said, ‘Sure, in your dreams.’ She got pissed and said she’d cut me off, she always did.” Jason kept saying more than he needed, as if he cared more than he wished. He caught himself. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t need money or anything else. From her or Henry.”