“Did he seem to know about the radios? Really know about them?”
“He knew a bit. Not so much about the value as how they worked. ’Course, the value changes all over the place. I was up in Memphis last year and found out that I have a radio-this one, it’s a 1938 Stewart-Warner tombstone”-he pointed at a tabletop radio with a burnished red-colored wooden case-“that baby’s worth six hundred dollars now. In Memphis, anyway. Down here, it’s probably fifty bucks at a garage sale. But he knew how the radios worked, okay. We talked for a while, looked at them for an hour, and then he left.”
“You ever leave him alone in here?” I asked.
“Well…” He scratched his ear, then twisted it, thinking. “I went out to get the mail, talked to the mailman for a couple of minutes.”
“The mailbox is that communal center box,” John said.
“That’s right, just over there.” He looked at John and then at me, and after a few seconds of silence he said, sadly, “The guy stole Bobby’s name out of the house, while I was out talking to Carl, didn’t he?”
“If you were out there for a few minutes, he might have looked around. Or if you left your keys lying around, and he was ready to do it, he might have made a copy and come back some other time, when you were gone,” I said.
“He was just looking at the radios,” Baird said. He wiped the corners of his eyes with his index fingers. “We popped the back off a couple of them, so he could look at the tuning layout.”
“There’s no way to tell, really,” John said, trying to be kind. “Maybe he was really selling Bibles.”
“Just a minute,” Baird said, and heaved himself out of the chair. To John, he said, “Watch the white man while I’m gone.”
He went out the front door, and as soon as he was out, I stepped around the rest of the lower floor, as an intruder might have; John tagged along, the black-and-white cat watching us without an apparent concern in the world. Ten seconds after we started looking, we found a little parlor off the kitchen that had been turned into a home office with a two-drawer metal file cabinet. I pulled open a drawer, and the first file carried a tag in black felt-tip pen that said Taxes and Job.
Inside the file we found a sheath of tax bills and workman’s comp statements from the state. Two of them listed Robert Fields as Baird’s employer, and included Bobby’s address. “Goddamnit,” I said.
I pushed the drawer shut and we went back to the living room. I said, “I don’t think we should tell him.”
“He might already know,” he said. “About that cash we took out of Bobby’s…”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
Baird came back a minute later, shaking his head mournfully. “Neighbor was still up. Too hot to sleep. She says she never had a Bible salesman come by, white or black, either one.”
“Okay,” I said. “You wouldn’t still have the FedEx receipt for the package you sent, would you?”
“I do have that,” he said. He went back to the parlor office, looked in another file, and found the receipt. The package had been sent to a Rachel Willowby in New Orleans.
“You never heard anything more from her? No thank you?”
“No, but I think her and Bobby were chatting on the computer. One of those chatterbox places.”
We talked for a couple more minutes, then I went out to the car and got the sack with Bobby’s cash in it, brought it back in, and gave it to John. “This’ll seem a little funny,” John told Baird. “But this is the last of Bobby’s cash supply, as far as we know. Bobby wanted you to have it for… expenses, and transition and so on.”
“Bobby did?” He was suspicious, but not too-you tend not to be too suspicious when you need the money and somebody’s putting a brick of cash in your hand. “Where’d you get it, then?”
“Bobby kept some of his resources… outside,” John said. “Just in case. Anyway, he said to give it to you, and for you to do whatever you need to.”
“Better stick it somewhere out of sight,” I said. “You don’t want the feds to see it.”
He went to put it out of sight, and in the twenty seconds that he was gone, I wiped both John’s and my own beer bottle on my shirt. “Touch anything else?” I asked quietly.
“I’m trying to keep my hands in fists,” he said. “I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“Better safe,” I said.
When Baird returned, I asked him not to tell the feds about the Bible salesman or the laptop he’d sent to the little girl. “Listen, it’s this way. That laptop could kill Bobby’s friends, if we don’t find it first.”
“But what about catchin’ the guy who did Bobby?” he asked.
“We want him as bad as you do,” John said. “One way or the other, he’ll get taken care of. I promise you. If we can’t figure it out ourselves, we’ll give everything we have to the feds and let them try.”
I nodded, and Baird said, “Okay.”
THE laptop delivery was the key.
Fifteen minutes after we finished with Baird, we were at a pay phone, and I was online with a friend who was a specialist in the National Crime Information Center, which is one of the more interesting branches of the FBI. He looked at Baird’s NCIC file, found that Baird had been convicted of misdemeanor theft in 1968 and a car-theft felony in 1970, served three months in a county jail, and had no record since. He also found that the last inquiry on Baird’s file had come ten days earlier, from the Slidell, Louisiana, police department. Slidell was somewhere outside New Orleans.
Then I went out on my own to accounts at the big-three credit services, and found recent checks on Baird from a credit-counseling firm in New Orleans.
“Bobby was mouse-trapped,” I told John, when we were headed back toward Longstreet. “I don’t know by who, but it wasn’t the feds. Whoever it was, did a pretty interesting job. Most people who’ve gone looking for the guy have been techies who tried to track him down online. This guy must of heard about Bobby’s kids.”
Over the years, I told John, I’d heard online rumors that Bobby had helped out more kids than the one we knew about in Longstreet. Some inner-city kid would get a new computer in the mail from an anonymous donor, along with certain kinds of software, or a kid in Tennessee would come up with an unexpected laptop, or maybe expensive software like AutoCAD or Mathematica. Bobby had become an urban legend among the people who made up the computer world; the stories were like those about a kid who hangs around the playground and one day Michael Jordan comes along for a few minutes of one-on-one.
“So somebody set up a fake kid, puts the fake where Bobby will hear about it, eventually gets a package, and tracks it back to Baird,” John said.
“And before he goes to Baird, he checks him on the NCIC and the credit services, and probably a few other ways, and finds out that whoever Baird is, he isn’t Bobby. Doesn’t have the background, doesn’t have the education. Too old, for one thing. So then he tracks him, somehow. He’s probably a hacker at some level, so maybe he looks at Baird’s phone bills.”
We both thought about it for a while, then John said, “If there were all these people looking for him over all those years, why didn’t somebody do this sooner?”
“Different kind of mentality at work,” I said. “This was really subtle. He floats a rumor, just a whisper out there, about this kid… puts it where Bobby will see it, but he can’t even really know that Bobby will see it. Then he lets Bobby do the investigation and make the approach.”
“And he’s so good that Bobby can’t see through the bullshit.”
I shook my head. “You know what? I bet there is a kid. I bet somebody went looking for a kid to use as bait. That the kid is real.”
“So what now?”
“New Orleans,” I said. “Talk to the kid. If there is a kid.”