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face-to-face with Kwame Jamal, née Jerome. Since he and his law-professor attorney have gone to the trouble of setting up the meeting, I have no doubt what Hale is going to say. He’s going to tell me what really happened that day at the Sunshine Grocery, and we are going to have to deal with it. Carl’s going to be all right, I realize. He’s retiring, which will get him out of the limelight. He’s indestructible, anyway. Rayburn, I’m not so sure about. He’s ambitious, not in an ugly way, but he has plans. He’s kept his nose clean, done a decent job, and carried the mail for the Republican party since he was in college. That means being staunchly, uncompromisingly, for the death penalty. He’s about two elections away from collecting the rewards, and if Kwame Jamal Hale is the real killer of Steven Davidson and Lucinda Williams, David Rayburn can kiss the last ten years or so of bricklaying good-bye. Tennessee isn’t very forgiving of politicians who fall from grace. We’ve got an ex-mayor in Nashville who currently sells aluminum siding.
    I look up at the inside rearview mirror and scan my face. I’m thirty-six, but I’ve always looked younger than my age. I have my father’s eyes—brown, wide-open. I’m less rugged, probably because for every hour he worked on jet engines at McConnell Air Force Base, I spent the same hour poring over legal briefs and drinking coffee with lawyers. But I can still feel him inside me, receding year by year. I don’t like this gradual erosion of his clear-eyed optimism, and that, maybe, is why I catch my fingers strumming or a leg bouncing sometimes, as Rayburn did in the office.
    The rush-hour traffic is picking up, and I need to get my daughter a birthday present. In a way, I’m relieved to have something to do other than think about what has just gone haywire. Jasmine lives with her mother and her stepfather, a Greek plastic surgeon named Michael Sarandokos. Although Michael is a doctor, the decisions he faces are a long ways from life and death. Mostly, he spends his days giving the wealthiest 10 percent of Nashville liposuction and implants and tucks and dermal abrasions and any of the other techniques he’s mastered to help the affluent give nature and age the finger. The fact that my daughter lives with him in his six-thousand-square-foot house in a subdivision for rich people called President’s Club makes buying her a birthday present a complicated process. Anxious to supplant my place in her life—even at the expense of ruining her character—he denies her nothing.
    I pull out onto Second Avenue, a crowded street the town hoped would become a tourist mecca, but which ended up an iffy street bookended with a defunct Planet Hollywood and a dying Hard Rock Café. I lean back in my seat, unbuttoning my collar and loosening my tie while the truck cools.
    Birthday present for the girl who has everything. Jasmine is ten years old. She’s got an iPod and a computer in her room. Her clothes cost more than mine, and last time we were together I could have sworn she had a professional pedicure. She is also living proof that the genetic browning of the human race scientists are always braying about—the melting together of ethnic groups into one mocha milkshake—has at least as much upside as down. I’m watered-down Irish, with black hair, blue eyes, and the frame of a basketball player. Rebecca Obregon, the woman I married in San Antonio while stationed at Kelly Air Force Base, is mother-country Andalusian, with the kind of olive skin that doesn’t get a tan line. The baby we made was so beautiful it made my eyes hurt. Jazz’s eyes are brown, like her mother’s, her skin is light olive, and she is probably going to be six feet tall. She is going to break hearts all over Nashville, at least until she leaves, which she’ll start wanting to do about fifteen seconds after she