Bright Futures

15

"I’m not an unreasonable man,” Horvecki said, professionally looking at the camera and away from the SNN interviewer.

He was looking directly at me as I sat in my room with Ames, Darrell, Victor, and Ronnie watching the DVD Greg Legerman had given me.

Horvecki had the raspy voice of a smoker and a haunted look. He was slightly frail and definitely on the verge of being old. He had a well-trimmed, close-cropped head of dyed black hair and the slightly blotched skin of a man who had spent too many hours outside without benefit of sunblock.

“I pay taxes-a hell of a lot of taxes to this country, this state, and this county,” he said, looking back at the interviewer, a pretty young brunette who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two and who was definitely uncomfortable as she tried to control the interview. “So do thousands of other people who don’t have children in school, don’t have grandchildren in school. We pay to give a third-rate education to kids who aren’t even ours, and no one gives us a choice. Well, I’m fighting for that choice.”

“But this is a matter of funding a much-needed program for gifted students,” the young woman tried.

“So all students aren’t created equal?” he said. “Some get a better education. No one asked me what I thought about that. Did they ask you? Your parents? Did you go to Pine View?”

“No,” the girl said protectively, “I went to Riverview.”

“Education should be paid for by parents and anyone who wants to give money,” Horvecki said. “I don’t want to give money for the children of the people who should be paying.”

“And Bright Futures?” she asked.

“Same thing,” he said. “A big, phony boondoggle. Take lottery money and tax money and give it to smart kids instead of distributing it evenly among all the kids who want to go to college.”

“That’s what you believe, that the money that-?”

“I don’t think there should be any Bright Futures program or any Pine View School funded by my BLEEP money.”

“So?” she asked.

He turned again to face the camera and said, “Vote no on the funding referendum.”

Cut to a silver-haired man behind a desk with sheets of paper in his hand.

“Philip Horvecki,” he said. “Man on a mission with a gift for making political enemies and a record of convincing voters in the past fifteen years to vote for his self-named Self Interest Initiative Voters Alliance.”

The television screen went gray with thin white fizzling lines.

Darrell reached over, ejected the disk and turned off the television.

“See,” said Torcelli. “That man was a monster.”

“Your father-in-law,” said Ames. “Your wife’s father.”

“Yes,” Torcelli said, touching the bandage on his nose to be sure it was still there.

“So you went to see him because of your commitment to Bright Futures,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Nothing to do with your wanting to be his true son and heir?” said Ames.

“A little, maybe, but does that negate what I was trying to do?”

“A little, maybe,” Ames said.

“I’m a con man, a fraud, an opportunist, a-”

“Asshole,” said Darrell.

“All right,” Torcelli conceded, “but if you came from the background I had-”

“Wrong road to go down with me,” said Darrell. “I’ll take you home for the night, and we’ll tour my neighborhood. We’ll play Mr. Rogers. And check out Fonesca’s tale. His-”

“Where is your wife?” I interrupted.

Torcelli shook his head to show that none of us understood the weight of his life or the toll it had taken.

“She’s not well,” he said.

“Sorry to hear that. Where is she?” I asked again.

He looked past us out the window at the slightly fluttering leaves of the tree outside.

“Want to have Viviase ask the same question?” I said. “He might add a few questions about your friendship with his daughter.”

“She’s a kid,” he said.

“Your wife or Viviase’s daughter?”

“My wife is staying at the Ocean Terrace Resort Hotel on Siesta Key,” he said. “Waiting for her father’s lawyer to tell us what she’s inherited.”

“You told us you didn’t know where she was,” I said.

“You said you wanted us to find her to give you an alibi,” Ames said.

“I did. I did, but I wanted to protect her. I was confused and you were…” He put his head in his hands.

“She’s registered under the name Olin. I’ll call her and tell her to talk to you.”

“Don’t call,” said Ames.

“You got anything to eat in the refrigerator?” asked Darrell.

“You just had breakfast,” said Ames.

“I’m still growing and I need food to keep me going. I was shot and almost dead. Remember that?”

“You plan on letting us forget it some time?” asked Ames.

“Hell no,” said Darrell.

“Go look in the refrigerator,” I said. And he went off to do just that.

“You believe me about what happened?” said Torcelli. “You believe I’m innocent?”

“Greg Legerman thinks you’re innocent,” I said, “but then, he doesn’t know about you and his mother.”

“Don’t tell him,” Torcelli pleaded.

“You were using Alana Legerman as backup in case your wife didn’t get Horvecki’s money?” I said.

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said, touching his bandaged nose again.

“Course not,” said Ames.

Darrell came back into the room with a bowl of Publix sugar-frosted wheat and milk.

“What’d I miss?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said Torcelli sullenly.

Victor got up and left the room, brushing past Darrell who crunched away at the cereal.

“The State of Florida is going to try to kill me when they find out I’m an adult, but my wife will get me a great lawyer and you’ll keep looking for whoever killed Horvecki, right?”

“Your wife know you’re not really married?” Ames asked.

“We’ll get married again,” he said.

I thought of him with Sally, overworked Sally, caring Sally, Sally with a deep laugh and a soft smile when she looked at her children. I tried to conjure up the other side of Sally I’d glimpsed a few times, the Sally who had no compassion for the parents who took drugs or were religious lunatics or just plain lunatics. She was calm and determined with such people. She was relentless and willing to fight the courts and the law to see to it that they couldn’t destroy their children. She lost more often than she won, but she kept fighting. I thought about these two Sallys, and I tried not to imagine her with the man who sat across from me, the man whose nose I had broken, the man who wanted Ames and me to save his life.

Victor came back into the room. He had another bowl of cereal and milk. Less than an hour after breakfast Darrell and Victor were hungry. So was I.

Someone was knocking outside the door in the other room.

“I’ll get it,” said Ames, moving out and closing the door behind him.

Then we heard a voice, a familiar voice. I got up and went out to meet our visitor.

“He’s here, isn’t he?” said Ettiene Viviase.

“He’s here,” I said.

It wasn’t rage in his eyes exactly, but personal determination. The source, I was sure, was his daughter’s involvement with the man he still thought of as Ronnie Gerall.

“Haul him out,” he said.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“Just came from my third visit to his apartment,” he said. “This time I found something new, found it under a bookcase. I turned it over to the lab about ten minutes ago.”

“What?” I asked.

“The weapon that was used to kill Blue Berrigan.”

Ames went in to get Torcelli who came out black-eyed and slightly bewildered. The confident and angry young man of a few days ago had been replaced by this pained creature with a swollen and bandaged nose and black and blue eyes.

“What happened?” Viviase asked.

“I hit him,” I said.

“You?”

“Yes.”

“There’s hope for you, Fonesca,” he said. Then he looked at Torcelli and said, “Back to a cell. We’ve got lots to talk about.”

“Fonesca, tell…” Torcelli began, but he was no longer sure about who he might call for help.

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Torcelli insisted as Viviase put handcuffs on him behind his back. “Fonesca, we’re both Italians, Catholics. I swear to Jesus. I swear on the life of the Pope. I didn’t kill Philip Horvecki.”

“He’s Italian?” said Viviase.

I didn’t bother to tell Torcelli that I wasn’t a Catholic and that some of my best enemies were Italian.

Victor and Darrell came out of my room, bowls in hand, still eating their cereal.

“You make an interesting quartet,” Viviase said. “One more thing. What did your two middle-of-the-night visitors want?”

I didn’t answer, so he added, “We had a man watching last night. Thinks he recognized Essau Williams, a Venice police officer. Who was the other man?”

“It was personal,” I said.

“The other man,” Viviase insisted.

“Jack Pepper, a radio evangelist from Cortez,” I said.

“Mind telling me what they wanted, or did they just drop by to give you legal and spiritual counseling and a cup of tea?”

“They wanted me to find a way to get Dwight Torcelli free of the murder charge.”

“Dwight Torcelli?”

“Ronnie’s real name, but we can still call him Ronald. It’s his middle name. He’s twenty-seven years old today.”

“You can prove that?”

“Listen…” Torcelli started to say, but Viviase was in no mood to listen to him.

“You can prove it,” I said, and told him how to do it.

“No point in my telling you not to do anything dumb,” he said. “You’re going to do it anyway.”

When Viviase and his prisoner were gone and Darrell and Victor had finished their second breakfast, we all got into Victor’s car, Ames in front, Darrell and I in the rear.

“How come you’re not telling me to go home?” Darrell asked.

“Because,” I said, “you’d remind me that I’m responsible for you all day. You’d tell me that being with me when I’m working is the most important thing in your life.”

“I’m into girls now,” he said. “Don’t overestimate your charisma.” He hit each syllable in the word.

“I’m impressed.”

“You’re learning,” Darrell said as Victor drove to Siesta Key.

“I’m entering a new phase,” I said.

And I was pretty sure I was.

The Ocean Terrace Resort Hotel was on Siesta Beach. It had a swimming pool, but it was no resort. It was a one-story dirty green stucco line of thirty-five rooms and a slightly moldy-smelling carpet in the hallway. The Ocean Terrace lived on the spillover from the bigger, fancier, more up-to-date and upscale motels that called themselves resorts and sold postcards proclaiming that they were the place for Northerners, Canadians, Frenchmen, Germans, Norwegians, and Japanese to spend a week, or the whole winter. The Ocean Terrace offered nothing but its own existence.

The desk clerk, a woman with an unruly pile of papers in front of her and a head of equally unruly dyed red hair looked up at us as we entered the lobby. She was maybe in her fifties, clear-skinned, buxom, and looking as if she had suffered a few setbacks in the last ten minutes.

“What have we here, the road company of the Village People? A baseball player, a cowboy, a Chinese guy, and a black kid,” she said.

We didn’t answer her.

“Sorry. That was uncalled for,” she said. “We have no vacancies and you appear to have no luggage. Would you like a bottle of water?”

“Sure,” said Darrell.

“Rachel Olin,” I said.

The woman bent down out of sight and then came up with a bottle of water which she handed to Darrell, who said, “Thanks.”

“A guest,” I said. “Rachel Olin.”

“Checked out about an hour ago,” the woman said.

“She pay with a credit card?” I asked.

“Cash. Who are you?”

“Her husband is looking for her,” Ames said.

“He’s pining for her,” said Darrell.

She looked at Victor but he had nothing to add.

“Left with a man,” she said.

“She call him anything?” Ames asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“Who are you?” she asked.

I produced my process server license card and handed it to her.

“You look different in that baseball cap,” she said, handing the card back. “These gentlemen are your backup?”

“Ames is my partner,” I said. “I look after Darrell on Saturdays.”

“And I killed his wife,” Victor said.

She turned her attention to Victor, who was definitely not smiling.

“The guy she went with was a little older than you maybe,” she said. “Good shape. Nice looking.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” she said. “He had a patch over his left eye.”

“Thought he left town,” Ames said from the front seat as Victor drove through Siesta Key Village, avoiding collision with shopping bag-laden tourists.

“So did I,” I said.

“Who?” asked Darrell.

“His name is Jeff Augustine,” I said.

“He kidnapped her?” asked Darrell.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Doesn’t look that way,” I said.

“He’s not the upchuck who shot me, is he?”

“Someone shot him, too,” Ames said.

“Fonesca, what is going on?” Darrell asked, turning in his seat to face me as fully as he could.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Can’t do no better than that?” he asked.

“Can’t do any better than that,” I said. “I’m not sure, but I’m getting some ideas.”

“Good ones?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the home of D. Elliot Corkle,” said Ames.

“Why?”

“So he can give you a handy dandy super automatic CD sorter which normally sells for nineteen ninety-five,” I said.

“I don’t need a CD sorter,” Darrell said.

We were crossing the bridge off the Key.

“Don’t worry,” said Ames, “he’s got lots of things he likes to give away.”

Ames told Victor how to get to Corkle’s. When we hit the mainland, Victor turned north on Tamiami Trail.

“Victor,” I said. “Would you do me a favor?”

“Yes.”

“Stop telling people you killed my wife.”

“But I did.”

“You may want to hear it, but other people don’t.”

“You don’t want me to say it, I won’t.”

“I don’t want you to say it to anyone but me when you feel you have to.”

“I’ll remember,” he said.

There were no cars parked in front of Corkle’s or in his driveway, but that didn’t mean no one was home. If he had told me the truth, Corkle didn’t leave his house. Doctors, barbers, dentists, I’m sure, came to him. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had an operating room somewhere behind the walls.

The last time I was in Corkle’s home, Ames stole the Ronnie documents, and I won a few dollars playing poker. This was not a place I wanted to be.

“Ames, find a way in the back,” I said. “See if you can find her.”

Ames looked straight ahead. Victor looked at the steering wheel and Darrell said, “No way. You said he’ll give us something?”

“We’ll come up with something,” said Ames.

Ames stayed seated while I went up the path to the front door. A tiny lizard skittered in front of me. I pulled my foot back to keep from stepping on it. A flock of screaming gulls spun over the Gulf of Mexico about forty yards down the street to my right.

I took off my cap, put it in my back pocket and rang the bell. It didn’t take long, maybe forty seconds. Corkle opened the door.

“Ah, the thief in the baseball cap. Come in.”

He stepped back and looked over my shoulder at Victor’s parked car. Corkle was wearing blue slacks and an orange shirt with the words corkle’s radio to outer space. Under the lightning black letters was a picture of a plastic radio the size of a cigar box.

“You like the shirt?” he asked, leading me toward the office Ames had broken into. “On the way out, remind me and I’ll give you and your friends in the car one each.”

“Could you really hear outer space?” I asked as he opened the door to his office and let me pass.

“I’ll give you one. You try it. Let me know. Truth is, you can tune in outer space on any radio. You just won’t hear much of anything. But the CROS is perfect for AM and FM and has an alarm clock that plays ‘So in Love With You Am I.’ Have a seat.”

I sat, not across from him at his desk but at a table in the corner near a window.

Corkle picked up a glass sphere about the size of a softball. He shook it gently and held it up so I could see the snow under the glass gently falling on…

“Rosebud,” he said. “This is an exact replica of the one in Citizen Kane.”

He handed it to me.

“See the sled?”

“Yes,” I said handing it back. “You sold them for nine ninety-five?”

“No, I didn’t sell them. I had this one made to remind me not to go looking for other people’s Rosebuds. Are you looking for someone’s Rosebud, Lewis Fonesca?”

“My own maybe,” I said.

He made a sound I took as a sign of sympathy or understanding. Then he put the glass ball gently atop a dark wood holder on the table and began rummaging through the drawers of his desk.

“I don’t stay in this house because of any phobia,” he said. “I just don’t find things out there very interesting anymore. You know what I mean.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t asking a question,” he said, bouncing from the chair and looking at his shelves for something else to play with. “I know the answer.”

“What’s the answer?” I asked.

“Catherine,” he said. “Am I right or am I right?”

“You’re right,” I said. “Now I’ve got a question.”

“Want a drink? You drink Diet Coke, right? Or how about lemonade?”

“Not now, thanks. The Kitchen Master Block Set.”

“A good seller, not great, but good. Sold seventy-four thousand in 1981.”

“There was a meat pounder in the set,” I said.

“Meat tenderizer,” he corrected.

“A big wooden mallet with ridges on the head.”

“Yes. You want one?”

“My sister has one.”

“Nice to know it’s still in service,” he said. “Sturdy. Made in the Philippines.”

“I think one of them was used to murder Blue Berrigan,” I said. “I saw the postmortem photographs. They left a dent in his skull like a fingerprint.”

“Could be a different manufacturer’s,” he said.

Corkle found what he was looking for in the deep file drawer in the desk. It was a jar full of what looked like pennies. He rolled the jar in his hands. The coins made the sound of falling rain as it turned.

“You give away a lot of Kitchen Master Block Sets here in Sarasota?”

“I give my Corkle Enterprises helpful house, car, and kitchen aids to anyone who comes in this house. I give them for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and birthdays.”

The rolling coins in the jar grew louder as he moved toward me.

“You’re a generous man,” I said.

“I like to think so.”

“You haven’t asked me about Ronnie Gerall.”

“I assume that you’ll tell me if you have anything to say that will help him.”

“His name isn’t Ronnie Gerall, but you already know that.”

“Do I?”

He was behind me now. I didn’t turn my head, just listened to the coins.

If I were ever to really believe in God, a primary reason would be the existence of irony in my life. There had to be some irony in the possibility of my getting killed with a jar full of pennies.

There is a mischief in me, even with the coins of death over my head. Death wish? Maybe. Ann Hurwitz thought so. Now she thinks I may be getting over it. If so, why did I then say, “Jeff Augustine.”

The coin rattling turned to the sound of a thunderstorm in the Amazon and then suddenly stopped.

“He didn’t leave town,” I said.

Corkle moved back to the wall, deposited the jar, and sat behind his desk.

“He convinced you he was going, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good actor. C-plus real-life tough guy.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Corkle said, “but I do know where your cowboy friend is.”

“Where?”

“Searching the rooms upstairs for Rachel Horvecki.”

He pushed a button under the desk and a section of the bookcase popped open to reveal a bank of eight full color television screens. They were all numbered. On number three Ames was talking to a young woman sitting on a bed.

“Why did you take her?”

“Protect her,” he said. “My daughter and grandson believe in Ronnie’s… What’s his real name?”

“Dwight Ronald Torcelli. He’s still Ronnie.”

“I don’t want her threatened to the point where he feels he can’t proclaim his innocence.”

“You think he’d do the noble thing?”

“No,” said Corkle, swiveling his leather chair so that it faced the window and presented me with the back of his head. He had a little monk’s bald pate you couldn’t see unless he was seated like this and leaning back.

“Don’t ask me why my daughter and grandson believe in him.”

“Their belief may be eroding.”

“I wouldn’t try to talk them out of it,” he said. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t say a word against…”

“Dwight Torcelli,” I said. “You let us steal those documents about Ronnie Gerall while we played poker the other night,” I said. “You dropped a hint about them and left them on your desk. You had a pretty good idea we would come the night I bought into your poker game.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To give us reasons to believe that he was guilty without handing us evidence.”

“You think I’m that devious?”

“You’re that devious,” I said.

He swiveled back to face me and looked up at the television monitors.

“Persuasive,” he said.

I looked at the monitors. Ames and the young woman were coming out of the bedroom. He led the way to some narrow steep stairs just off the kitchen. The young woman followed him.

“Augustine?” I asked.

“You think he killed Horvecki and Berrigan?”

“The thought had entered my mind.”

“Anything else?”

“Are you paying me to clear Torcelli or to find something against him?”

“Given his relationship with your friend Sally Pierogi…”

“Porovsky.”

“Porovsky,” he amended. “Given that, I think you might have an interest in proving Torcelli is not a nice person. There, they’ve left the house.”

I looked up at a screen in the lower left-hand monitor to see Ames and the young woman hurrying across the back lawn.

“You’re good at all this,” I said.

“Couldn’t have sold forty-eight thousand copies of the Guitar Master 12-Lesson Plan and almost twenty thousand guitars to go with it if I weren’t good at sizing up the potential customers.”

“What are you trying to sell me?” I asked.

“I’m buying,” he said.

“What?”

“The truth,” he said. “Not the big truth. Just a small one about who killed Horvecki. If it clears the dago weasel, so be it. You don’t believe me?”

“No. Police will be coming to talk to you about what they found in Torcelli’s apartment.”

“The meat tenderizer?”

“The meat tenderizer.”

“They’re waiting for you in your car,” he said.

He got up and so did I.

“You get your choice of items in the closet,” he said.

“Some other time,” I said, going to the office door.

“D. Elliot Corkle has irritated you,” he said following me. “The dago remark? I was just pulling your chain.” He reached up and pulled once on an invisible chain.

“I know,” I said.

He grinned and pointed a finger at me to show I had hit the mark.

“Answer four questions and we’re friends again,” I said.

“Ask.”

We crossed the foyer to the front door.

“You know a policeman named Essau Williams and an Evangelist named Jack Pepper?”

“D. Elliot Corkle knows who they are,” he said. “Wait a moment.”

He hurried to the closet off the front hall, opened it and disappeared for no more than a few seconds before coming out with a white cardboard box and handing it to me. Second question?”

“Have you given money to either one of them?” I asked as we went out onto the redbrick path.

“Nothing to Williams but I did volunteer to put up a suitable headstone of his choice for his mother when they die. Five thousand dollars to Pepper to help support his ministry.”

“In exchange for?”

“Nothing, but I did indicate to both of them that I appreciated their efforts to bring Philip Horvecki to justice.”

“Blue Berrigan?” I asked.

“Unfortunate. No, tragic. No, shocking. A terrible coincidence. If you see my daughter…”

“Yes?”

“Nothing,” he said. “She’ll come back here. She always does when her funds get down to the level of the gross national product of Poland. Another question.”

“Does Jeff Augustine play golf?”

“Why? Do you want him to join you on the links at the Ben Hogan Gulf Club? I don’t know if he plays golf. I do know that if he does it will be a bit difficult for him now with but one eye.”

He closed the door and I carried my prize to the car, where Rachel was sitting in the front passenger seat. I got in beside Ames and Darrell.

“Where are you taking me?” Rachel Gerall said.

“Wherever you want to go,” I said.

“To see Ronnie,” she said, her voice in twang from the center of the State of Florida.

She was frail and pale, red of hair and green of eyes. She should have been Irish. She had a pinched face and thin lips. She could have been cast as a tubercular resident of an Irish mining town a century ago. Either that or a hardcore drug user.

“Who are you people?” she said, half turning to look at me.

“People trying to help the police find whoever killed your father,” I said.

“I don’t trust you,” she said, giving me the evil eye.

“Trust him,” Darrell said. “He ain’t lying.”

“Ronnie’s in jail,” I said.

“Big boy jail,” said Ames.

“And his name ain’t Ronnie,” Darrell added.

“That’s no never mind to me,” she said. “I want to see him.”

“Do you know what happened to the one-eyed man who took you from the motel?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“Of what?”

“Whatever you want to drink,” I said.

“I’d like an iced tea with lemon,” she said.

“We’ll stop,” said Ames.

Victor drove to the Hob Nob on the corner of Seventeenth and Washington. The Hob Nob isn’t trying to look like a fifties diner. It is a fifties diner. It hasn’t changed in half a century. It’s open air with a low roof, picnic tables, a counter with high stools and bustling waitresses who call you “honey.” Smoking is permitted. You could be sitting next to two local landscape truckers, a couple who’ve just escaped from a drug bust, or a retired stockbroker from Chicago and his wife. There’s not much privacy at the Hob Nob, but the food is good and the service is fast.

Darrell lived within walking distance of the Hob Nob, passed it almost every day, ate at it almost never. He ordered a burger and a Coke.

“I know what you want,” Rachel said after I ordered her an iced tea with lemon.

Ames, Victor, Darrell, and I all wanted different things, none of which we could imagine Rachel providing.

“You want me to tell you that Ronnie killed my father.”

“Did he?” Ames asked.

“No, he did not,” she said, raising her head in indignation. “It was that other man.”

“What other man?” asked Ames.

“The one who went out the window. I heard the noise, my father shouting. I was in my room. I opened the door and saw this man climbing out the window and Ronnie, all bloody, kneeling next to my father.”

“What can you tell us about the man who went through the window?” I asked. “White, black, tall, short, young, old?”

“He was white and he had an orange aura,” she said with confidence.

“Orange aura?” asked Darrell.

She turned to Darrell and said, “Orange is anger. Yours is green, nervous.”

Connecting thoughts did not seem to be a strong element of Rachel’s being.

“You watchin’ too much TV,” said Darrell. “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband, but if she wants to nail his ass, it’s party time. If you want to help him, you’d be best off sticking with the guy through the window and forgetting auras. Tell her, Fonesca.”

“He’s right,” I said.

Her iced tea had arrived. She slowly removed the straw from its wrapper, dropped the wrapper in the black plastic ashtray on the table, and inserted the straw into her drink.

Rachel was a little slow in everything she did-thinking, talking, moving. My first thought was drugs, but my second thought was that heredity had not been kind. Or maybe it had. There was an almost somnambulatory calmness to the young woman. Daddy had bullied his way through life. His daughter was sleepwalking through it.

She sipped her drink loudly with sunken cheeks.

“Could your husband have killed your father, maybe with the other man’s help?” I asked.

“You’re trying to trick me, like the one-eyed man,” she said coming up for air.

“The one-eyed man tried to trick you into saying Ronnie killed your father?”

“He did,” she said emphatically. “But I told him no such thing. He was on television.”

“The one-eyed man?”

“Yes. I watch television,” she said. “Good, clean entertainment if you are discerning. Rockford Files on the old TV channel.”

“He was on the Rockford Files?” Ames asked.

“What’s the Rockford Files?” asked Darrell.

The marriage of Torcelli and Rachel had been made in heaven or in hell. He exhaled a slick veneer of deception and she floated on a vapor of ethereal innocence.

“Did he kill your father?” Ames asked.

“The one-eyed man?” she asked, bubbling the last of her iced tea through the straw.

“Your husband,” I said.

She thought, looked down at her drink, and said, “May I have another one?”

I ordered her another iced tea. Rachel wasn’t brilliant, but she wasn’t a fool. If she was playing with us, we were losing.

“Ronnie,” I repeated. “Did he kill your father?”

She sucked on her lower lip for a few seconds as she considered her answer and said, “I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did. My father was not a good man. He never hurt me, but he wasn’t a good man. No, he was definitely a bad man. Ronnie saved me from him. When I finish my second iced tea, I’d like to see him.”

“You’re very rich now,” I tried.

“Lawyer said. Policeman said. Man with one eye said,” she said. “Ronnie married me for the money.”

“He did?” I asked.

“He did,” she said as she worked on her drink. “He never denied it. He said when my father died we would be rich and he would be a good husband. Ronnie’s a looker and though I am somewhat plain and wistful, he treats me nicely and I tell him he is smart and beautiful which he delights in hearing provided I don’t overdo it, and he pleases me in bed or on the floor. He likes sex.”

“More than I need to know,” said Darrell with a mouthful of hamburger.

“Did Ronnie kill your father?” I tried once more.

“No. I saw the other man do it.”

“You actually saw him do it?” asked Ames.

“Yes. He was all bloody. He was there earlier. Had words with my father, who called him a ‘shit-bastard-cocksucker.’ ”

“And you didn’t recognize the killer?” I asked.

“I had a little dog and his name was…?” she said with a smile.

“Blue,” said Ames.

“Yes,” she said.

“Old song,” said Ames.

“New suspect,” I said.

“Please take me to Ronnie now, after I pee,” Rachel said.

Victor got the washroom key and walked with her to the rear of the Hob Nob, where he waited outside the door.

“Lady’s on a cloud,” said Darrell finishing off his burger. “What time’s the next cloud? I might want to hitch a ride.”

“Believe her?” Ames asked.

“You?” I answered.

“She didn’t see Berrigan kill her father, just heard it,” said Ames.

“Or maybe didn’t hear it. Or maybe just wants to get her husband off the hook and the murder of her father blamed on a dead man.”

“She’s just acting?” asked Ames.

“If she is, she’s really good.”

“Ain’t nobody that good,” said Darrell.

“Yes,” I said. “There is.”