THE DEVIL'S RED NICKEL

If he hadn't been cleaned out by a bail-jumping client and his own taste for high living, bondsman CJ Floyd never would've looked twice at Clothilde Polk's check—though he might've taken his time looking over Clothilde herself. It isn't that his new client is wrong about her father's heart attack being murder- -LeRoy Polk, a.k.a. deejay Daddy Doo-Wop, was the victim of a fatal overdose of Nicoderm patches, all right—but that the list of possible killers goes on as far as the Colorado Rockies. His old partner Roland Jefferson thinks Daddy D may have been continuing the romance with Jefferson's wife Willette; transsexual singer Juney-boy Stokes claims that Daddy D stole his songs; and Pueblo wiseguy Lawrence Hampoli, a bad man to cross, is convinced that Daddy D took off from Chicago years ago with a crateload of R&B tapes pirated from Hampoli's payola machine that would be worth a fortune now. Against a Denver background as charged as the murder plot—the black mayor's task force is battling over a monorail that would split CJ's neighborhood of Five Points in two for the convenience of white commuters, and his lady Mavis Sundee's restaurant is bombed at the height of the annual Juneteenth celebration—CJ risks death and exhaustion by running down every single lead. As in his striking, overstuffed debut, The Devil's Hatband (1996), Greer provides enough motives, subplots, and walk-ons for a Ken Burns documentary.