Page 76 of Hanging and Burning

“And you—you say she wasn’t murdered?”

“No. I don’t even think she’s dead.”

Minnie began to tremble. Tears sprouted from her eyes. A sense of desperation took control of her face. She looked from left to right, up and down. She shook her head so slightly that it was more like a shiver, trying to shake off something that might destroy her.

“But, I mean. But—but you say that Arman didn’t kill her?” she said as a last resort.

“No. He almost definitely did not.”

“How do you know that?”

“I have it on very good authority that she’s still alive.”

“Whose authority?”

“I can’t really say. It’s a little early in my investigation—”

“Are you a cop?” She almost moved to rise but realized that her legs were too weak to run.

“No. I’m private.”

“And Dalia’s alive?”

“Yeah. As I said, I have that from a very reliable source.”

“You’re not tryin’ to fool me? You’re not tryin’ to turn me over?”

“No.”

“That don’t make any sense. No damn sense at all. How can you expect me to believe anything you’re saying?”

“I get that. But all I can do is tell you what I know and what I suspect.”

Minnie Fulton looked down at her pasta, slowly moving her head from side to side. The date was over.

“And what is that?” she asked. “What do you know?”

“Thirty-five years ago—I don’t know why, exactly—the cops decided that you were a person of interest in the bodyless murder of a singer named Dalia Shorts. I expect that Melton somehow used you to set Dalia up for a hit. But there was no hit. She was tipped off and ran far away. That’s why nobody ever found a body or any evidence of foul play. Malto asked Arman to do the killing and Babylon must have told old Malto that he’d disposed of the body.”

Minnie’s fists were clenched, the sides of her jaw bulging with muscle. Then she lowered her face into upturned hands and sobbed loudly. It was a lament that had been bundled away for so long that, once loosed, it was irrepressible.

Karen hurried over to our table.

“Is there something wrong?” he asked me.

“She just found out that somebody didn’t die.”

It took a while for my date to work her way back to civility. I’d hit a few nerves, and she was a wreck.

“I feel like I’m gonna die,” she said at last.

“But what you thought happened never did.”

“Even if it didn’t, I did something terrible.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“How the fuck can you say that? You don’t know what happened. You don’t know me.”