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earlier life.
    “Why couldn’t he come himself?” Lou asked. His suit was loose and also gray but darker and more solid than his skin and eyes. This brought to Xavier’s mind a ghost trying hard to pass for human.
    “Can I sit?”
    “You plan to stay awhile?”
    “Benol Richards,” Xavier said, positioning the visitor’s chair.
    The seat was made from curved chrome piping around a stained red cushion. Rule was wearing a light lime suit and a chocolate brown shirt. He worried that the chair might impart some of its soil to his trousers but sat anyway.
    “That’s over,” Lou Baer-Bond said, maybe just a bit too quickly.
    Looking around the desktop, Xavier noted a pink ashtray in the form of a nude woman with its six crushed-out cigarette butts and a burned-out book of matches, a paper plate with a half-eaten chili-cheese dog, fries, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol standing guard from the rear.
    “She didn’t believe that you gave her absolutely everything you had and wanted me to come by and get it.”
    “Get what?”
    “Benol said that you told her that you didn’t find anything about Brayton.”
    “Yes. That’s what I said. That’s the truth.”
    The discreet truth
, Xavier thought.
    “Understand me,” the Parishioner said. “I’m not blaming you. Maybe Bennie wasn’t completely truthful for her part.”
    “What’s your name?” the detective asked.
    “Noland.”
    “Noland what?”
    “Egbert Noland, but I go by my last name.”
    “And you say you’re Miss Richards’s cousin?”
    “Second cousin, once removed.”
    “How’d you get that crack under your eye, Noland?” Baer-Bond asked.
    Xavier wondered whether he was trying to show that he was a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a scary-looking black man crowded into the janitor’s closet—with the door closed.
    “Brayton stole Benol’s car,” Xavier said. “She’s kind of a free spirit, you know. Moves around a lot. So the car is sometimes her bedroom, sometimes her safe-deposit box.”
    Xavier didn’t think that Lou meant to raise his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. He might not even have been aware that he had done so.
    “She looked pretty solid,” the detective said.
    “Her car looks like a car.”
    “What are we talking about here, Egbert?”
    “I don’t know, Lou. That depends on what you got to say.”
    “Maybe,” the detective said. “Maybe Brayton has disposed of the vehicle. Maybe he’s cracked the safe.”
    “There’s a trick to the hiding place,” Xavier said, “and if he got rid of the car we’d like to know where he did that, and to whom it went.”
    “Whom? You’ve read a book, Mr. Noland.”
    “Yeah. Studied my letters in downtime. Now … do you have anything to say to me?”
    “I’ve already told your cousin …”
    Xavier stood up, pushing the red chair away with the backs of his knees.
    “But …” Baer-Bond said hastily. “But I might have abbreviated my report. Who’s to say that I didn’t come across a guy who knew a guy who heard something somewhere? Not enough to give as fact but more like a whisper or a hint.”
    “And why would you keep Benol in the dark when she was paying you?”
    “The lead didn’t go anywhere. I told your cousin that if she wanted to put me on a retainer I’d nose around. But I think she thought I was trying to play her. So she paid me my three hundred and I put the whole thing out of my mind.”
    Xavier was beginning to have fun. He liked sparring with the gray man behind the dentedpine desk. It almost felt social.
    The Parishioner repositioned the chair, sat down again.
    “Okay, Lou, here’s what it is. Benol has had her car stolen by this Brayton guy. There’s some money involved.”
    “I don’t remember the particulars of the case off the top of my head,” the fleshy detective said. “There’s not much room in here, and so when I finish with a job I file it in my garage.”
    “You could look it over after work,” Ecks suggested.
    “And why would I