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my pole dance on the lamppost.”
    I couldn’t tell from Thom’s expression whether that intrigued or shocked her.
    It seemed strange to not seem strange that we were working where a man had died a little more than an hour before. But then, it no longer looked like a crime scene. The coroner’s team had arrived early in the questioning. Save for the occasional burst of a camera flash, you wouldn’t have known they were there. At about the same time I sat down for my interview, they escorted Hoppy Hopewell out the side door, leaving behind the puddle of gravy with its dusty white coat and now-congealed heel-print.
    “That’s almost as disgustin’ as blood,” Thom remarked as we scanned the kitchen to see if we’d missed anything.
    “It doesn’t look like they show in the cartoons,” Luke said.
    I admitted to him I had no idea what he was talking about.
    “The hole,” Luke said, jerking a thumb toward the ceiling. “It’s not his outline. It’s just—a hole.”
    Thom snorted. “That’s exactly the man’s outline. Like I said before, he was an a-hole.”
    “Well, he got what he deserved,” Luke said. “A bonbon voyage.”
    I scowled and hushed them both. There were still cops in the house, downstairs, upstairs, and on the grounds.
    “That was a joke,” Luke protested.
    “I don’t think the police would see it that way,” I said. “Mr. Whitman will be under a lot of pressure to find a person of interest right-quick. We don’t want it to be you.”
    Luke made a motion of zipping his mouth as he grabbed his guitar from a corner and did a vintage Prince-move pirouette out the door.
    I decided not to brave the inconstant blue line to say good night to Lolo. She probably wouldn’t remember whether I did or didn’t. She still looked proper and all, only now it had the added appearance of being in a stupor. Which brings me back to what I said before about the rich getting better treatment. The Deputy Chief had poured her tea and sent Officer Clampett—whose name, as it turned out, unfortunately was Jed—to get her a shawl from the hall closet. Even if Lolo herself had beaten Hoppy to death with a hammer, in front of thirtysix witnesses, she still would have gotten the whiteglove treatment. In Nashville, while individual Bakers might turn out to be embarrassments, the Baker name was inviolable. Smearing that was like peeing on the holy red brick of Ryman Auditorium, the former house of worship that once housed the Grand Old Opry. It just wasn’t done.
    “There is one saving grace in all this,” Thom said as our little band of cater-waiter warriors clopped along the stone steps to the driveway.
    Luke and I both waited for the pearl to come, the observation that would chase away the gummy aftertaste of death, lying cartoons, and Jed Clampett.
    “Having leeches on the side of the van didn’t matter worth a damn,” she said.
    I smiled.
    For once, we all agreed.

Chapter 3
    I slept pretty well for someone who had witnessed a man’s death and the grim launch of her own catering business. The alarm was set for seven, but I beat it by ten minutes thanks to the bright Nashville sunshine pushing through a crack in the drapes. I bopped the switch off, showered—still unused to the hard water here and the extra soap and shampoo it took to get clean—then hobbled into my work clothes and shoes. Now my feet weren’t just sore, they were swollen; I opted for loosely laced tennis shoes instead of my regular black swivel shoes, since my toes really needed to breathe.
    While I waited for my mail-ordered-from-New-York coffee to brew—McNulty Chocolate Cherry, something I was not about to give up, especially for the mass-produced mud preferred by the deli crowd—I searched Hapford Hopewell Jr. on the Web. After getting the basics—His Entitledness graduated with a master’s in business from the University of Virginia, he was forty-eight years old, twice married, with no children—I went right to the images,