I don't play anything except maybe the horses, but I have been around here for some time. Name's Madison, Blake Madison. No ear for music either, except that I can tell from the whine what make of gun the bullet passing my ear came from; and I can also tell when someone is lying. Part of the trade.

It was a hot day in late July, one of those dry runs for what Christmas was going to be like if Congress continued to be in hock to the carbon cartel, but that wasn't my business at the moment. My business was sitting in front of me, an older extremely thin woman with long blonde hair who looked like Mary Travers xeroxed about twelve times too many. She was carrying a guitar, and I could spot a tambourine edging out of her macrame bag, and all in all I wouldn't have been surprised if she had broken out into song, which was a good thing, because she did.

"Anyway, Mr. Blake, I was on stage singing a song from my forthcoming comeback album, "Ms. Tambourine Person", which goes something like this:

"You were my first love,
But not the first person I ever loved,
Which was maybe my mother, but anyway,
The thought is there, as were our bodies,
I said that your body was like one of those Chianti bottles
with a dripping candle sticking out of it,
And we drank each other like empurpled wine,
In the days of splendorous grass,
In the days of our glorious flower!"

I interrupted at this point, partly based on my fear that the Aesthetic Police from the International Court of Justice at the Hague were about to break the door down, and partly to get a bit more meat on this story.

"So, Ms. Schwartz --"

"Condolezza, please!"

"Condolezza. So you were in the middle of singing this song, and very lovely it is too" -- (client, client) -- "and then what happened?"

She thrust the guitar forward. "AT that moment, a large knife came hurtling at me out of the audience, and embedded itself in the body of my guitar -- HERE!!" And she pointed at a broken section of her instrument.

"Hmm, " I said, which was about as snappy a riposte as I could muster at the moment.

"And, and --" she continued, "and there was this note wrapped around the handle!"

She handed me a wrinkled note. I read:

"NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY SEES, NOBODY KNOWS BUT ME. YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE VERY DEAD. YOURS, A MUSIC LOVER."

"Which means?" I asked.

"I think it is a joke, or someone is threatening me."

"Or both."

"The truth is, Mr. Madison, I am booked to appear at the "Just Do It" Pepsi Winston AT&T "Fresh Folk Natural" Festival this weekend, as part of my comeback tour, and I am worried."

"Why?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Madison -- how can I put this? Do you know anything about folk music?"

"Only what I read in the funny papers."

She shrugged, and leant forward, her hair falling in her face, which she then swooped back, and gave me a big stare with her pale eyes. I think this was supposed to be the moment when the American flag dropped and the cheerleaders popped out of their tights, but it did nothing for me.

Mildly disappointed, she pressed on. "Anyway, Mr, Madison, the essence of the folk music community is that we are bound to each other by deep bonds of love and mutual understanding, sharing our dreams and our stories through our mystic ecological connection to traditional music and the heritage of compassion and healing that it embodies."

"Yes," I said, "go on."

"We are all together searching for honesty and mutual respect and nonviolence."

I said: "So what you are telling me is that everyone hates everyone else."

She looked at me plaintively.

I said, "What I mean, Ms. Schwartz, is that it would be hard to work out which one of the many beloved members of your community hates you enough to actually kill you."

"More or less, yes. You see, Mr. Madison, we have all known each other so long, that everyone has gone to bed with everyone else two or three times, and there are all kinds of unexplained children, and people were put lower on advertising than other people, and there are immense backlogs of grudges stretching back at least to Newport 64."

"Sounds complicated, Ms. Schwartz," I said. "What do you want me for?"

"I think it may be a prank, of some kind, But I was wondering if you would be my bodyguard for the evening, not of course in the Whitney Houston sort of way, I don't want to have to sing over your dead body, that isn't really what I meant to say, but well, you know, to calm me down. It is a very stressful time for me, as you can imagine. "

They all sounded to me like a bunch of fruitcakes, and I was reluctant, but she pulled a capo out of her guitar case that had some hundreds rolled up in it. We were on for Saturday. I arranged to come there early and check out the Morris dancing or whatever it was she said was racked up before her show.

She put her guitar away, got up and went to the door. She turned back.

"Just out of interest, Mr. Madison, what kind of music do you like?"

"Fusion jazz."

"Oh," she said, and went out.

I sat for awhile, trying to remember the words to "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain" and got to the part about the garterbelt, and gave up.