The Hanged Man's Song Read Free

adjectives based on that root word. The day before, in the Wisteria’ s fine-dining restaurant (“The best surf-and-turf between New Orleans and Tallahassee”), she’d held up a glob of deepfried potato and said, “Now there’s one boobilicious Tater Tot.”
    “You give me any more shit, I’m gonna stick a Tater Tot in one of your crevices,” I said, with more snarl than I’d intended.
    “You’re not man enough,” she said, unimpressed. “I’ve been working out three hours a day. I can kick your ass now.”
    “Working out with what? Golf? You’re gonna putt me to death?”
    She pointed a Tater Tot at me, a little edge in her voice. “You may speak lightly of my crevices, but do not say bad things about golf.”
    >>> THE JOB: Miss Young Republican Anita Nosere—who was, from the pictures I’d seen of her, fairly boobilicious herself—gother money from her mother. Her mother was managing director of a syndicate that owned the Wisteria. Congressman Bob had been told that the casino was skimming the take, thus shorting both the U.S. government and the state of Mississippi on taxes. The skim was one of those simple-minded things that are almost impossible to spot if the casino does it carefully enough.
    It works like this: the casino advertises (and reports to the tax authorities) a given return on the slot machines. If that return is even a little lower than the rate reported, the income increases sharply. That is, if you report that your machines will return 95 percent to the players, but you really only return 94 percent, and a million bucks a night goes through the slots, you’re skimming $10,000 a night. In a few months, that adds up to real money.
    Of course, you have to be careful about state auditors. For a politically well-connected company, in Mississippi, that wasn’t a major problem: “Them boys is crookeder than a bucket of cottonmouths,” Bob said.
    The congressman could have hired one of the big independent auditing companies to do his research, but that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Me, he could get for free, and get a good idea if the charges were true. If they were, then he’d hire the big auditing company, do the research, and hang the Noseres, momma and daughter together, all in the name of truth, justice, and the American Way.
    >>> EXACTLY what we did was, we dropped dollars—and quarters and nickels—into slot machines and counted the return, and then ran the results through a statistics package. We wanted 98percent confidence that we were less than half of a percent off the true return. We therefore needed to take a large random sample of machines and had to run enough coins through each machine that we’d get a statistically accurate return on each.
    I’d chosen the target machines the first night, using a random numbers program in the laptop I carried. We’d been at it ever since, dropping the dollars, quarters, and nickels, doing the numbers at night, avoiding crackers with bent noses, and generally dancing around the possibility of acts of unfaithfulness, if that’s what it would have been.
    Can you be unfaithful to a mood, to a sense of guilt? I mean, the woman was gone. . . .
    But Marcy’s departure had driven me into an emotional hole. A number of good women have walked out on me, and there’s no way that I can claim it was always, or even usually, their fault. When the first bloom of romance fades away, they begin to pay attention to my priorities. Sooner or later, they conclude that they’ll always be number three, behind painting and maybe computers.
    They might be right, though I still hate to think so. There was no question that as I got older, I’d become more and more involved in the work. I’d sometimes go days without talking to anyone, and become impatient when a woman wanted to do something ordinary, like go out to dinner.
    That was not a problem with LuEllen. I’d known her for a decade, spent hours rolling around in various beds with