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Toni.’
    ‘With an “i”.’ She nodded. ‘Mr Holden said you missed the repast because you had urgent business back home. You didn’t go?’
    ‘I did go, yes.’ I told the lie I’d been rehearsing all morning: ‘But I had to come back to see your mother. To offer her the personal condolences I should have offered her – and you – last week.’
    She smiled again, surprised. ‘That really wasn’t necessary.’
    ‘I think it was. Business or no business, as close as R.J. and I once were, it was wrong of me to run off the way I did, without paying my proper respects, and it seems I won’t rest easy until I do. Is your mother in, by any chance?’
    She hesitated. ‘She is, but I’m afraid she isn’t up to seeing visitors. Daddy’s death has hit her quite hard, as I’m sure you can imagine, and she spends most of her time these days in bed. I’m sorry.’
    ‘I understand,’ I said, nodding as if I did. ‘The way R.J. died, from what I heard at the funeral, it all must have come as a great shock to her.’
    ‘It did.’ She was biting her lower lip to steady herself.
    ‘Do you mind if I ask a question?’
    ‘Not at all.’
    ‘How did you and your mother find me? I haven’t talked or written to your father in almost 30 years, and all my contact info’s unlisted.’
    ‘Oh. I’m afraid I took the liberty of looking you up on a few private databases I have access to at work. I wouldn’t have done it, but you and Daddy had once been so close, mother was convinced you’d want to know about his passing.’
    ‘What kind of databases?’
    ‘The kind the police use,’ someone behind me said.
    Toni and I turned to see Frances Burrow standing in the archway between alcove and living room, a faded yellow bathrobe tied loosely around her waist. She was a powerfully built, steel-eyed Latina who had mourned at R.J.’s funeral with a dignity that approached surrealism, but only a fraction of that dignity was in evidence today. Today, she just looked tired and angry, braced by R.J.’s sudden death for years of potential loneliness.
    ‘This is Errol White, Momma. Daddy’s old friend from high school,’ Toni said, both of us quickly rising to our feet.
    ‘Handy White?’ R.J.’s widow shuffled into the room to get a better look. ‘We were told you went back home to Minnesota.’
    ‘I did. But—’
    ‘You’re curious too. Of course you are. Bobby didn’t die the way they say, and we all know it.’ She smiled at her daughter. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’
    ‘Mother . . .’
    ‘My daughter actually believes there could be some truth to what the police say about what happened to her father, Mr White. That he stole a car and drove it down to that beach to make some kind of drug deal that “went wrong”. Can you imagine?’
    ‘I never said I believed it, Mother. I only said it’s doubtful that the whole thing is a lie.’ Toni turned to me. ‘He was shot two times in the back, and twice more in the head, and his fingerprints and cocaine residue were found all over the car’s interior. What does that sound like to you, Mr White?’
    I hadn’t seen much of R.J.’s spirit in her up to now, but this was it all over: Her glare could have sliced cast iron into ribbons.
    ‘Well,’ I said, feeling like a man about to step on to a minefield, ‘it sounds like a drug-related homicide, I suppose. But that could be only because somebody wanted it to look that way.’
    ‘Exactly!’ Frances Burrow said. She took a seat at the end of the couch I’d been sitting on and gestured for Toni and me to return to our own. ‘Toni, have you offered our guest something to drink? What can we get you, Mr White?’
    I told her I wanted for nothing, and it was just as well that I did, because Toni Burrow didn’t look like she had any interest in serving me anything. I’d been drafted by her mother as an ally into whatever feud it was they were engaged in, and the young woman now clearly viewed me as a member of the