Beauty and the Beast

8

I did not arrive in Calusa — via Houston — until two o’clock the next day, Tuesday, December 1. I went directly to the office, talked briefly with my partner Frank (who told me the worst move I’d ever made in my life was to start any sort of relationship with Detective Morris Bloom), and then buzzed Cynthia and asked her if I could see Karl Jennings for a minute.

I had still not called Susan to tell her that Joanna had gone on to Mexico City alone with Dale; I wasn’t sure I planned to tell her at all. But Calusa was a small town, and if I ran into her in a restaurant or a supermarket, she’d surely want to know what I was doing back here and where the hell our daughter was, and I would only have to explain then how it had been my idea for Joanna and Dale to continue the vacation without me. Better to do it on the telephone. But not just yet.

Karl Jennings was ready to report.

“Not that it’s going to make much difference,” he said. “Now that he’s killed another person.”

“That’s only the police allegation,” I said.

“It’s also the line the papers and television stations are taking,” Karl said. “You should’ve seen this morning’s headlines. Made it sound like we’ve got our own Jack the Ripper down here. Anyway, I talked to this guy Harry Loomis yesterday, got there at the crack of dawn — are you aware that Frank doesn’t appreciate the way our firm is spending nonproductive time on—”

“Yes, I’m aware of it. What’d Loomis have to say?”

“He showed me this little room where they sell automobile accessories, you know? Windshield wipers, jacks, those little ashtrays with the beanbags under them, key rings with the emblem of your car on a little leather fob — and five-gallon gasoline cans. Half a dozen of them still on the shelf there, all of them exactly the same.”

“Like the one he sold Harper?”

“Identical to the one he sold Harper. The brand name is Reddi-Jiff, the can is manufactured by a company in Ohio. I have the name here if you need it.”

“Okay, go ahead. What happened on the morning Harper went in?”

“Loomis was filling Harper’s tank when Harper said, ‘Think I could use a gas can. You got any gas cans?’ or words to that effect. Loomis took him back to this little room, and said, ‘Pick one out, man,’ or words to that effect.”

“Pick one out.”

“Right.”

“Were those his exact words?”

“More or less. The point is he left Harper alone in there to make his own selection while he went out to get the reading on the pump.”

“Then it was Harper himself who took the can from the shelf, is that it?”

“That’s what Loomis says. Harper personally took the can from the shelf and carried it out to where Loomis was at the gas pump.”

“Then what?”

“Harper asked him to fill it for him.”

“And?”

“Loomis unscrewed the cap and—”

“Loomis did?”

“Yeah.”

“Then what?”

“He filled the can,” Karl said, and shrugged.

“Who screwed the cap back on?”

“Loomis.”

“Did he touch the handle?”

“No, just the cap.”

“Who picked up the can when it was full?”

“Harper, and put it in the back of the truck.”

“Which means Loomis’s prints were still on the cap.”

“No.”

“No? If he screwed the cap back on—”

“Yes, but his hands were greasy, he’d just been changing some spark plugs when Harper came in. He noticed he’d got the cap all greasy, and he wiped it off with a rag.”

“Harper told me he didn’t remember Loomis wiping off that can.”

“Harper was in the cab of the truck already — starting it up, in fact. Loomis yelled for him to hold it a minute. He wiped off the cap, said, ‘Okay, that’s got it,’ or words to that effect, and waved him off.”

“Good,” I said. “That accounts for Loomis’s missing prints. If whoever murdered Michelle was wearing gloves...”

“Well, gloves, yeah,” Karl said dubiously.

“Then only Harper’s prints would be on the can.”

“The hammer, too,” Karl said.

“What?”

“They found Harper’s prints on the hammer, too. His and his alone. It was in the papers this morning.” Karl hesitated. “Matthew,” he said, “this may be out of line, I’m low man on the totem pole here. But it looks to me as if Harper really did do it. Twice.” He hesitated again. “Maybe when they find him, you ought to start considering a plea of guilty.”

I called Bloom the moment Karl left my office.

“I’m here,” I said.

“I figured you would be,” Bloom said. “I appreciate it, Matthew. This is getting to look worse and worse for Harper. I hope you’ll agree to go on—”

“Worse and worse how?”

“Well, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt now that the hammer’s actually his. Guy who lives next door to Harper, bright young guy who knew him well—”

“What’s his name?” I asked, and pulled a pad into position before me.

“Roger Hawkes, 1126 Wingdale Way.”

“White or black?”

“Black. You can talk to him, Matthew, but he’ll only tell you what he told us.”

“And what’s that?”

“He recognized the hammer as the same one he borrowed from Harper a couple of weeks ago. Had some work to do around the house, knew Harper had good tools, went over to borrow the hammer from him. Same hammer, he’s identified it for us. G.N.H. on the handle, burned into the wood.”

“When did he return it to Harper?”

“Same afternoon.”

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s not all of it, I told you it’s getting worse and worse.”

“How much worse can it get?” I said.

“Harper’s garage has a good lock on it, no Mickey Mouse stuff. Front door, too. No way to get into that garage except through the garage door itself or through a door leading from the house into the garage. The place is locked up tight, Matthew, and there are no signs of forcible entry.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning Harper went into his own garage and took his own hammer from—”

“Or anyone else who had a key,” I said.

“Well, who else would have a key, Matthew? Michelle’s dead...”

“Did Harper stop to pick up his personal possessions when he broke jail?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Don’t you normally confiscate a man’s wallet, and his keys, and his—”

“Well, yes.”

“If Harper didn’t have his keys, how could he have unlocked either the garage door or the—”

“People sometimes leave a spare outside. In one of those little magnetic cases you hide under something.”

“An invitation to burglars, am I right?”

“Well, yes, Matthew, but—”

“Even if there was a spare someplace outside the house, anyone could have found it, isn’t that true?”

“Yes, but—”

“So it wasn’t necessarily Harper who—”

“Matthew, this isn’t a court of law. I’m only trying to tell you how this thing looks to us, okay? I admit I hadn’t thought of him not having a key, a man breaks out of jail, he doesn’t have his house keys with him, that’s true, Matthew. But if there was a spare key someplace outside the house, and if Harper did use it to get into his own garage, then that would explain his fingerprints on the hammer we found next to the body of the dead woman. Now that is an incontrovertible fact, Matthew, the fact that Harper’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon — both murder weapons, in fact. The gasoline can and the hammer. What I’m asking you to do is go on television tonight. I’ve already called the local station here in Calusa and the one in Tampa that covers a wider area. They’ve agreed to put you on if you want to go on. It’s up to you. I’ve got to tell you something else that may influence your decision, Matthew.”

“What’s that?”

“We found the sheriff’s car Harper swiped when he broke out. Located it near the Chickasee River Lookout. There used to be a shotgun on the back shelf of that car, Matthew. There isn’t anymore. Harper took it with him when he ditched the car. That means the BOLO now reads ‘armed and dangerous.’ Are you following me, Matthew?”

“I’m following you.”

“We’ve got a list of all the cars reported stolen in the area since Harper broke jail last Thursday. Sizable list; you wouldn’t think there was so much auto theft in a nice place like Calusa, would you? Oh, well. Anyway, we’ve tacked that list to the BOLO, too, just in case Harper decided to swipe himself another car after he ditched the sheriff’s. So what we’ve got now is a fugitive from justice, charged with first-degree murder, possibly driving a stolen vehicle, and armed with a shotgun. Are you beginning to get the picture, Matthew?”

“Yes, Morrie.”

“I’ll spell it out, anyway. Some of the redneck law-enforcement officers in this state aren’t going to ask polite questions if they spot a coal-black ‘nigra’ who maybe committed two murders in a row and is now armed with a loaded shotgun. I’m trying to tell you the knife cuts both ways. I want Harper to come in before he hurts somebody else. You should want him to come in before somebody hurts him.”

“Okay,” I said, “arrange the television stuff.”

“Thank you,” Bloom said.

“Couple of things I’d like,” I said.

“Name them.”

“I’d like to take a look at the scene.”

“Which one?”

“Sally Owen’s house.”

“We’ve still got a man posted at the door there. I’ll pass your name on, and he’ll let you in. My men and the lab techs are finished inside and out, there’s nothing you can foul up for us.”

“And I want to see Harper’s garage.”

“I’ll see if I can get his keys from the county jail.”

“Will you call me back?”

“Soon as I can,” Bloom said. “I’ll check with the television people, they’ll probably want to put you on live here in Calusa for the six o’clock news, and tape you in Tampa for the eleven o’clock segment there. I’ll get somebody to drive you up there, if you like. I know it’s going to be a long day for you.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“I’ll get back to you,” Bloom said, and hung up.

Susan was her usual sweet charming self when I called.

“What do you mean, she went on to Mexico City with Dale?” she shouted.

“Yes,” I said. “At my suggestion. I had to come back here, but I saw no sense in Joanna cutting her vacation short just because I had to.”

“Without consulting me, right?” Susan said.

“I was not aware that consultation was necessary,” I said.

“You’d better read our separation agreement, Buster,” Susan said.

She had never in all the time I’d known her called me “Buster.”

“I am familiar with the terms of our agreement,” I said calmly. “It does not call for consultation with you while Joanna is enjoying visitation privileges with her own goddamn father!” I said, not so calmly.

“I’m going to call Eliot McLaughlin,” Susan said.

“What for? Do you want him to extradite Joanna from Mexico? For Christ’s sake, Susan, she’ll be home on Saturday, that’s only four days from now. I can assure you Dale—”

“I don’t want to hear about Dale,” Susan said.

“I can assure you she’s a responsible adult,” I said, calmly again, “who will be taking excellent care of Joanna for the remaining length of their stay in Mexico.”

“Where they fertilize their crops with human excrement!” Susan shouted.

“Dale is not a farmer,” I said.

“If anything happens to my daughter—”

“Our daughter,” I suggested.

“A fine father you are,” Susan said, “leaving her alone with a stranger—”

“Dale isn’t a stranger.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Susan said.

“Susan,” I said, my voice rising, “I called to tell you that I’m home and Joanna is still in Mexico. She’ll be back this Saturday, and that’s all I have to say to you.”

“That’s not all Eliot will have to say to you.”

“I welcome a call from that mealymouthed shit,” I said, and hung up, trembling.

There are people in Calusa who are quick to remind anyone that the blacks here have it much better than the blacks living in big cities like New York and Detroit. They will point out with pride that many of the houses in New Town are in the forty-to fifty-thousand-dollar price range, the equivalent of what a lower-middle-class white might own in any big-city suburb. They do not notice, perhaps, that at Count Basie’s recent personal appearance at the Helen Gottlieb Memorial Auditorium, a hall that seats two thousand people, there were only eight blacks in the audience. I notice such things. So does my partner Frank.

I had not slept much the night before in Puerto Vallarta; Bloom’s call, the knowledge that I would have to begin coping with a travel agent in the morning, and the mariachi band blasting till 2:00 A.M. had combined to render me limp by the time Sam dropped me off at the airport. Neither had the two hours I’d spent on the ground in Houston, or the subsequent bad news from Bloom, or the unsatisfying conversation I’d had with Susan helped much to lift my spirits. As I started up the walk to Sally Owen’s house, three doors up from the Harper house, I was feeling an odd blend of irritability and lightheadedness, rather like what a pugnacious drunk might feel while picking an argument with a benign bartender and simultaneously giggling at his own aggressiveness.

The house was a white clapboard building surrounded by a white picket fence. The police officer standing at the door was also white. Big, burly man wearing a blue uniform, a .357 Magnum holstered at his waist, sweat-stained armpits, fat red face sprinkled with freckles, red hair showing at the sideburns and tufting onto his forehead from under his peaked cap. He watched me suspiciously as I came up the front walk. A Crime Scene sign was tacked to the front door, and a huge padlock hung from a hasp undoubtedly fastened to the door and frame by the police.

“Off limits, buddy,” the cop said, waving me off with his stick.

“I’m Matthew Hope,” I said. “Detective Bloom promised he’d—”

“Oh, yeah, right,” the cop said. “You want to look the place over, right?”

“Right.”

“You from the State’s Attorney’s Office?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then what?”

I didn’t feel like presenting credentials; I sidestepped the question. “Bloom called, didn’t he?”

“Radioed it to the motor patrolman on the beat.”

“Then it’s okay to go in,” I said.

“Sure,” the cop said, and fished a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock. “Better not touch anything, though.”

I did not bother mentioning that Bloom had told me the police were already finished here, inside and out. For some odd reason, the man’s presence rankled, perhaps because Bloom had said there were redneck law-enforcement officers out there who would as soon shoot a black man dead as give him the right time of day.

I felt the presence of death in that house the moment I stepped through the front door. Something terrible had happened here; the sense of it hung on the pale afternoon light that filtered into the hallway through a small arched window at the far end of it. There was a standing grandfather’s clock in the entry hall, but it had stopped ticking. There was unopened mail on the entry-hall floor, dropped through the door slot by a letter carrier making his appointed rounds come snow, come sleet, come hail — come murder. Through the open kitchen doorway, I could see chalk outlines on the linoleum floor covering. The unmistakable outline of a body. A smaller outline that was clearly meant to represent a hammer, some three feet from the other outline and in a red chalk as opposed to the white that had outlined Sally Owen’s body as she lay in death.

I went into the kitchen, stepping carefully around both outlines.

I tried to visualize George Harper entering this house, surprising Sally as she stood at the kitchen sink, raising the hammer above his head, bringing it down repeatedly on her skull, crushing her skull, and then dropping the hammer before he fled into the night. Why? I wondered. Why kill her? Why leave behind the murder weapon with his initials burned into it and his fingerprints all over it? People panic, Bloom had told me. Even the pros panic. Harper wasn’t a pro, although according to the police he was well on the way to becoming one, two murders in as many weeks, practice makes perfect. And apparently he had panicked twice, leaving behind a gasoline can with his prints on it the first time around, and then a similarly incriminating hammer after the commission of the second murder. Why? I wondered. Had it been panic or sheer stupidity? Was the man careless? Reckless? Suicidal? All three of the above? None of the above?

I moved out of the kitchen and into the entry hall again.

The mail, a dozen envelopes or so, still lay on the floor, touched by a slanting beam of sunlight swimming with dust motes. I moved down the hallway and into a small living room on the left. A sofa and two easy chairs. A green carpet. The drapes open to let in more sunlight than had been in the hallway, the same silent dust motes. Over the sofa, a framed oil painting of a pair of Scottish terriers like the ones in the Black & White whiskey ads, heads cocked, quizzical looks on their alert little faces. I leaned over the sofa and looked for a signature. None. The painting looked like the sort of badly executed representational art one could buy for five dollars or so at any of Calusa’s street fairs during the months of March and April, when the tourists were thickest and the suckers were born one to the minute. Had Sally Owen been an art lover with poor taste? An animal lover who favored dogs? An animal hater who preferred even a lousy representational painting to the real live objects scurrying underfoot and shitting around the house? Or was she a Scotch drinker, and did the painting of the two adorable mutts, one white, one black, serve to remind her that Happy Hour came to Calusa at four-thirty each and every afternoon, rain or shine?

The bedroom was just across the hall.

An unmade water bed. At the foot of the bed, a mattress covered with a rumpled sheet. On the walls, more paintings, undoubtedly by the same untalented artist in the same distinctive style. All of them unsigned. Some of them unframed. Canvases varying in size from what appeared to be three-foot squares to several smaller and several larger rectangles, all of them oils. The subject matter was as banal as the style. Hanging over the water bed was an unframed canvas I estimated to be some four feet wide by six feet long and depicting, of all things, a salt shaker and a pepper shaker standing side by side and magnified a hundred times life-size. To the left of the window on the wall adjacent to the bed was a smaller painting of a pair of chess pieces, one white, one black, intended as the king and queen, if the badly executed crowns were any clue. To the right of the window was another masterpiece by the same artist, this one showing a pair of penguins on an ice floe. On the wall opposite the water bed was another painting executed in the same larger-than-life style as the salt and pepper shakers, this one depicting a pair of dice standing side by side and blown up to some three feet in height. Several unframed canvases were leaning against the wall just inside the entrance door. The top one showed a pair of birds, one presumably a crow, the other a dove. The one under that was a badly rendered painting of a pair of zebras. Over the dresser on that same wall, there was a mirror in a black frame and — just alongside it — a framed and glass-covered copy of the front page of the Calusa Herald-Tribune, the bold headline announcing BLACK BUSINESSMAN SLAIN. I leaned over the dresser and read the story under the headline.

Early in August last year, a cruising Calusa cop had noticed a car parked on the access road to the airport. The time was 6:00 A.M. The cop made a pass at the car, noting the license-plate number, and then radioed in for a check with Tampa. The message came back to him that the car was a stolen one. He drove around past the airport and then back onto the access road again, where the reportedly stolen car was still parked, the driver slumped over the wheel, his head on his folded arms. The cop drew his gun, rapped on the window, and asked the driver for his license and identification. The driver rolled down the window, said, “Leave me alone,” and then — as an apparent afterthought — reached over to thumb open the glove compartment. The cop shot him twice in the head.

The rest of the story, as it was later revealed — and as I recalled it now because the subsequent hearing caused quite a stir in Calusa’s legal community — was that the slain man was the owner of a carpet-cleaning business on US 41, and that he’d been informed the night before of his sister’s death. The sister lived in Chicago; he was driving to the airport to catch an early-morning flight out. But, apparently grief stricken, he had pulled over to the side of the airport access road, and was weeping, slumped over the wheel, when the cop approached. The stolen-car report from Tampa had been erroneous; the car belonged to the man driving it. But the cop, believing he was dealing with a criminal, automatically assumed the man was reaching into the glove compartment for a weapon. The story had an unhappy ending: the cop was exonerated of all charges against him. But the front page of a sixteen-month-old newspaper was framed and hanging behind glass on Sally Owen’s bedroom wall, together with her priceless collection of representational art.

I did not know what I’d expected to find here. Perhaps proof that George Harper couldn’t possibly have killed her. It seemed to me that I hadn’t found very much. The cop outside was smoking a cigarette when I came out of the house. Apparently, he still believed I was from the State’s Attorney’s Office; he ground out the butt the moment he saw me.

“Get what you need?” he asked.

“Thanks,” I said.

Bloom was waiting for me at the Harper house down the street, sitting in a Calusa Police Department car, a white Calusa cop at the wheel. He opened the door on the curb side as he saw me coming down the street, and then extended his hand as I approached.

“See the house?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “thanks.”

“What’d you make of the paintings?”

“Lousy,” I said.

“For sure. Sally did them herself.”

“How do you know?”

“Didn’t you go in the garage?”

“No.”

“Easel set up in there, unfinished painting on it, long table with tubes of paint and a palette. Neighbor on the left — the woman who found the body — says Sally was all the time painting up a storm.”

“What’d the painting in the garage look like?”

“Same as the others. Terrible.”

“I mean the subject matter.”

“A pair of Dalmatians. The dogs you see around all the firehouses. Had her inspiration on the worktable, a photograph clipped from a newspaper. By the way, what’d you think of that newspaper on her bedroom wall?”

“I don’t know. I guess the incident meant a lot to her.”

“Oh, sure. Son of a bitch shoots and kills a guy headed for a funeral, if I was a black man in this town I’d have burned down the police station. Had it framed, huh?” Bloom said. “Nice piece of glass over it. To remind her, I guess. Everything there in black-and-white where she could read it whenever she put on her lipstick. Why do you suppose she kept that mattress on the floor?”

“Why are you asking me all these questions?”

“Thought you might have some insights.”

“Not a one.”

“King-sized water bed could sleep the Russian army. So why did she need a mattress on the floor?”

“I have no idea.”

“Me neither. Things like that bother me. Don’t they bother you?”

“What bothers me is that black businessman who was killed by a trigger-happy cop. That’s what bothers me.”

“Bothered her, too, apparently.”

“Sally Owen didn’t have a client on the run out there.”

“Well, maybe that’ll change after you go on television. I set it all up, by the way. You have to be at WSWF at five-thirty, you know where it is?”

WSWF was Calusa’s own Channel 36, the “SWF” in the call letters standing for Southwest Florida. I did not know where the station was; I told Bloom I did not know where it was. I was still feeling rotten, only now the lightheadedness had dissipated and only the crankiness remained.

“Two miles east of Spinnaker, on Old Redford,” Bloom said. “Immediately on your left, you’ll see a white building with a dish antenna on top of it. You’ll be going to Tampa right after you do your number here, so maybe I ought to have somebody drive you both places, wait for you outside, is that all right with you?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“You seem very perturbed today,” Bloom said.

“I am.”

“So am I. There’s a lot I don’t like about this case, Matthew, I’ll be honest with you. That’s one of the reasons I’m eager to get Harper back in, few more questions I’d like to ask him. Like, for example, how could he have been so fucking stupid? I mean, once okay, I can accept that. You kill somebody, you forget to wipe your fingerprints off the murder weapon, okay. But twice? Even a trained flea knows enough to wipe off his fingerprints. Doesn’t that bother you, Matthew?”

“It bothers me.”

“Me, too.”

“We’re on opposite sides of this one, Morrie.”

“Who says? I want to make sure we’ve got the right customer. I don’t like shooting fish in a barrel, and I don’t like frying innocent people in the electric chair, either.”

“So now you think he’s innocent, huh?”

“I’m not saying that. On the evidence, we had to arrest him and charge him. But he’s not guilty until a jury says he is. That’s the way it works, right, Matthew?”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”

“That’s the way I’d like it to work,” Bloom said. “Otherwise I picked the wrong job. I’m not eager to pin a rose on your man unless he actually killed those two people. There are things that bother me, like I said. I want some answers from him. Do your best tonight, will you? Convince him to come in.”

“I’ll try.”

“Okay. You want to see this garage, or not?”

We walked up toward the Harper house. It was similar to Sally Owen’s house down the street, obviously built by the same contractor, but it was painted gray rather than white and there was no fence around it, a low line of shrubs defining the property instead. Bloom pulled a key ring from his pocket. “Had to sign a receipt for these, can you imagine? A police officer,” he said, and shook his head. “I had to take the whole ring ’cause I don’t know which of these is for the house. Guy’s got more keys than a jailer.” He tried several keys on the garage-door lock, finally found the one that fit, unlocked the door, and then reached down to yank on the handle. The door rattled up over our heads.

The garage, in contrast to Lloyd Davis’s in Miami, and considering the fact that he and Harper were in virtually the same business, was a model of neatness. Here, too, every inch of floor and wall space was covered with merchandise Harper presumably hoped to sell, but whereas Davis’s garage and its adjacent lawn and driveway areas had been a cluttered, jumbled mess, Harper’s garage gave the impression of a carefully catalogued storeroom. Radios were with radios, picture frames with picture frames, plumbing fixtures with plumbing fixtures, everything with its mate or mates, a veritable Noah’s ark of organization. Alongside one wall was a rack hung with women’s dresses and topcoats on wire hangers. Adjacent to it, on the same wall, was a rack bearing men’s suits and sports jackets. Used books were arranged in alphabetical order, by title, in a corner bookcase. Old magazines were stored in cardboard cartons onto which Harper had hand-lettered (and often misspelled) their different names: NEW YORKER, NATIONAL GRAPHIC, LADY’S HOME JOURNAL, HARPER’S BAZAR, TIME, PLAYBOY. Even Harper’s personal workbench was backed by a large piece of pegboard fastened to the wall and painted with the outline of each tool hanging on it, undoubtedly his personal possessions and not for sale. Conspicuously absent was the hammer that should have been hanging over the painted outline on the board.

“Neat person,” Bloom said.

“Yes,” I said.

“So why does he go around leaving his fingerprints all over the place?”

On a shelf over the workbench was an assortment of lidded jars in various sizes, separately containing nails of different weights, screws of different lengths, washers, nuts, bolts, latches, and hinges. A second shelf contained a can of turpentine, several cans of paint and varnish — and an empty space that could have accommodated a five-gallon can of gasoline. A power lawn mower, looking oiled and spotlessly clean, not a blade of grass clinging to its cutting edges, stood against the wall near the workbench. And alongside that, a tarpaulin covered something angled in against the wall. Bloom lifted the tarpaulin.

We were looking at a stack of oil paintings. The one in the forefront of the stack was a Sally Owen original, unmistakable in style. The content, however, was somewhat startling. The painting depicted a black man and a white woman in passionate embrace. Bloom and I looked at each other. The unframed canvas behind it was another oil, a crude portrait copied from Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet. Behind that was a painting of a fishing skiff. And behind that what was supposed to be a glorious sunset. Only the first canvas seemed to have been painted by Sally; the others were in varying, equally lousy styles, but definitely not hers, not from her distinctive hand.

“Think it’s supposed to be Harper and his wife?” Bloom asked.

“Doesn’t look much like them.”

“Doesn’t look much like anyone,” Bloom said. “Just a black guy kissing a white woman.”

“Maybe he bought it for her,” I said.

“Or maybe it was a gift from the artist,” Bloom said, emphasizing the word so that it became a critical judgment.

He replaced the tarpaulin, and we went out of the garage and into the backyard. Lumber piled in orderly stacks, by length and width. Three chairs painted green, standing side by side against the back wall of the garage. A pair of stripped-down chairs beside them. Four ladders leaning against the wall, one against the other. A bathtub, and alongside it a ceramic washbasin in a matching shade of blue.

“You sometimes get these big guys,” Bloom said, “they’re very neat people, like fat guys who are light on their feet, you know? My uncle Max, may he rest in peace, he must’ve weighed three hundred pounds, but he was as delicate as a butterfly, I mean it. Organized? Like a clock. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Gentle, too. A very gentle person.”

“Harper’s been described that way to me.”

“By who?”

“A friend of his. Sally’s former husband.”

“Oh?”

“Said it would pain Harper to take a hook out of a fish’s mouth.”

“But not to set fire to somebody, huh? Or to bash in somebody else’s skull.”

“You’re changing your tune again,” I said.

“I’m only trying to understand it,” Bloom said gently. “Are we finished here?”

“One thing,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Will you have your people look for a spare key outside the house someplace?”

“First thing in the morning,” Bloom said.

A police car picked me up at the office at a quarter past five, and we drove over to Channel 36, Calusa’s own WSWF. The news team’s anchorman told me I would have to be made up before I went on. I told him I had once read an interview with Alfred Hitchcock in which the master, in talking about actors, had said something like, “How can anyone respect a person who makes a living by putting makeup on his face?” The anchorman did not find this amusing or informative. He said I would have to wear makeup because if I didn’t then the rest of the team would, by comparison, look as if they were wearing makeup. I failed to understand his logic, but I followed him nonetheless into a small room where a rotund little lady wearing a smeared blue smock was standing behind a seated blonde, whom I recognized as WSWF’s Weather Lady, brushing out her hair.

“Are you the guest?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll need a little touch-up around the eyes and beard line,” she said, judging me from where she stood.

I had not shaved since seven that morning, Puerto Vallarta time. In the mirror lined with small electric light bulbs, I looked like Richard Nixon about to face the nation.

“Okay, dearie,” the makeup woman said to the blonde, who leaned forward closer to the mirror, touched her forefinger to the corner of her mouth, delicately dabbed at something invisible there, and then got out of the chair. She smiled at me as she went out of the room; I guessed there would be blue skies tomorrow. I took her vacant chair.

“This is pancake,” the makeup lady said. “It’ll wash right off later.” I went on the air at 6:21 P.M. after the Weather Lady reported that tomorrow would be rainy and cold, and before the sportscaster, waiting in the wings, gave the news on Calusa’s local teams. The anchorman introduced me. I looked directly into the camera and said, “I’m addressing this to George Harper. George, this is Matthew Hope. If you’re watching this somewhere, I want you to listen very carefully. I still believe strongly in your innocence, and I’ll do everything I possibly can to prove that to a jury when the time comes. I want you to call me, George. I’m in the Calusa phone book, call me either at home or at my office, that’s Summerville and Hope on Heron Street. I want to talk to you, George. It’s important that we talk. Please call me. Thank you.”

I felt like a horse’s ass.

I did not get home from Tampa, where I’d taped essentially the same message for a potentially wider audience, until almost 10:00 P.M. I was exhausted. I mixed myself a very strong Beefeater martini, dropped two olives into the glass, and walked into the study, where I turned on my answering machine. The first message was from Jim Willoughby.

“Matthew,” he said, “I don’t know why the hell you went on television, but I hope the state’s attorney doesn’t ask for a change of venue after hearing you proclaim Harper’s innocence to any listening prospective juror. That was a dumb thing to do, Matthew. You’d better call me as soon as you can. Anyway, I thought you were in Mexico.”

The next dozen messages were from lunatics.

“Mr. Hope,” the first caller said, “I caught your little speech on television, Mr. Hope, and I’d like you to know just how I feel about your defendin that murderin nigger. Serve him right if he gets the chair. And you, too!”

The man hung up. There was a hum on the tape, and then the next caller, a woman, said, “I know where he is, Mr. Hope. He’s in Niggertown is where he is, gettin drunk enough so’s he can go out and kill somebody else. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

A click. Another hum. Then another woman’s voice:

“You looked cute on TV, Mr. Hope. Anytime you feel like partyin, you just give me a call, hear? Ask for Lucille, but call me at work, ’cause I’m married and all. I’m a waitress at the Loftside Restaurant, down on the South Trail. Or maybe you can just drop in sometime, look over the goods ’fore you commit yourself. You’re awful cute, honey.”

A click. A hum. A man’s voice on the tape:

“I wish that Harper nigger not only calls you but actually comes to see you, Mr. Hope. ’Cause I’ll be parked outside your house with a sawed-off shotgun, an’ I’ll blow that fucker’s brains out the minute I see him. Sleep tight, Mr. Hope.”

The next voice, a man’s, said only, “God will strike you dead, Mr. Hope, for taking up with niggers.”

And then a woman: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

Click.

Another woman: “If God intended niggers to be masters, then Harper’d be defendin you ’stead of the other way around. He’s already raised his hand against one white person, an’ I hope he comes to see you an’ uses the same hammer on you that he used on that nigger trash he killed next. Good riddance to her and you, too, Mr. Hope. Say hello to the devil for me.”

A man: “Well, Mr. Hope, you got yourself a real good one this time, dinn you? You do your best on this one, Mr. Hope, and every nigger in town’ll be runnin over to your office so’s you can get him offa whatever he done — be it murder, be it armed robbery, be it rapin white women. Congratulations, Mr. Hope, you’re a real credit to the community.”

And a woman: “I told my husband you’re the scum of the earth. He said you should be shot in public.”

Another woman: “Why don’t you move to Africa, Mr. Hope? Plenty of people there who’d love you to death, maybe even make you chief of they tribe, so’s you can get to wear beads and paint and all. Think it over.”

A man: “I’m calling on behalf of the CCAC, Mr. Hope. I don’t know if you’re familiar with our organization, the letters stand for Concerned Citizens Against Crime. We’ve been working hard to see that people like your client Mr. Harper are punished adequately for the crimes they commit against our community. I want you to know, Mr. Hope, that we’re adding your name to the list of people we feel are working against that goal. I doubt you’ll see too many honest and law-abiding clients in your office after that little speech you made tonight. I hope you know how to shine shoes, Mr. Hope. Or maybe cleaning toilets is more in your style.”

And lastly: “Mr. Hope, this is Lucille again. You might like to know I’m five feet eight inches tall, and I weigh a very curvy hundred and fifteen pounds. A lot of people think I look like Jacqueline Bisset, if you’re familiar with her. You may have seen her wearing that wet T-shirt in The Deep, the movie The Deep. My husband calls me ‘Bullets,’ if you take my meaning. Call me or come see me, hear?”

After Lucille’s voice, there was only a long hum on the tape. I switched off the machine, and went back into the living room, stunned. I had not until that moment fully believed the accounts I’d read of crank calls and letters from the public in cases involving any major crime. And whereas I knew that black-white relations were as strained in Calusa as they were anyplace else in the nation, I had until now entertained the perhaps naïve hope that things could only get better; now I knew exactly how deep the hatred ran. I sat sipping at my martini and wondering if I should call Bloom. A man had threatened to park outside my house with a sawed-off shotgun, hadn’t he? Should I ask for police protection? Should I have my telephone number—

The phone rang.

I suddenly regretted having turned off the answering machine. I did not want to talk personally with anyone spouting abuse or making threats. The phone kept ringing. I put down the martini glass, and went to answer it.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Hope?”

“Yes?”

“This is Kitty Reynolds.”

“Yes, Miss Reynolds?”

“I’m sorry to be bothering you so late at night, but I wonder if... Mr. Hope, do you think you could come here for a few minutes? There’s... something I’d like to discuss with you.”

“What is it, Miss Reynolds?”

“Well, not on the phone. I’m on Flamingo Key, the address is 204 Crane Way, just past the yacht club and over the bridge. I know it’s late, but if you could come here, I’d appreciate it.”

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eleven.

“Give me twenty minutes,” I said.