"No, ma'am," I said to the lady in red, "the tipper is just a clue. The tippler is gonna solve this case, and that's me...soon's I get sumpin to drink. Make my head work right: For some folks it's coffee; for me it's booze. Rot gut. White lightnin'. The hair of the dog..."

"Okay, okay, I get it. Ya don't hafta draw me a picture, no siree," she said in an accent I placed somewhere between Fargo and Spokane. "But what's the tipper got to do with it?" I pinpointed her accent: drive east to Oklahoma and make a left turn. Keep goin' 'til just before Canada. That's where I heard that accent. I was doing an FBI undercover in a militia compound outside of Butte. They were makin' plans to assassinate the Supremes, all nine of them--and I don't mean Diana Ross's old partners. I'd managed to get an invite to join when I sang "There Ain't No Flies on Me" in a bar in Butte called the Bar in Butte. They liked the song, particularly the verse that ends, "Daddy's in the Ku-Klux, and there ain't no flies on me."