Goldilocks

11

The party was being held on the twelfth floor of an oceanfront condominium on Stone Crab. The moment we stepped off the elevator, we were greeted by the sound of music and laughter coming from beyond the open door to the apartment on the left. Inside the apartment, some fifty or more people milled about against an extraordinary backdrop of sky and sea; the entire western wall of the apartment was open to the Gulf of Mexico. Lights on the beach below illuminated an irregular white curving line where the surf broke. The sky above was black, sprinkled with stars, hung with a full moon shimmering in halo. On the wall opposite the windows, running the entire length of the room and broken only by a pair of open arches at either end, was a wall alive with a magnificent collection of paintings.

The guest of honor was a painter himself, an Italian whose show had opened earlier in the evening at a downtown gallery. His host and hostess had been collecting his work for years, and had invited us to the gallery opening as well as to this private party following it. But the invitation to the opening had read 5:00 to 7:00 P.M., and Susan hadn’t come home till a quarter to; there was no way we could possibly have got there on time. I suggested that we skip the party, too, but Susan wisely offered the advice that it would do no good to mope around waiting for Sebastian to come padding around every corner of the house.

As we made our way toward the bar set up just past the distant arch, I heard a woman mention Emily Purchase’s name, heard her telling another woman that her daughter was in the same first-grade class at school. At the bar, two men were talking about the confession Michael Purchase had made. It seemed that while Joanna and I were out burying Sebastian, the State’s Attorney was making a brief television appearance on the six o’clock news, reiterating much of what had already been printed in the afternoon paper. He told the assembled reporters that Michael Allen Purchase, the twenty-year-old son of the man whose wife and daughters had been slain, was being held for first-degree murder on an arrest warrant issued by a circuit judge. Detective Ehrenberg, the police officer conducting the investigation, had obtained a confession from the youth — one of the men at the bar now demanded to know from the other why the State’s Attorney referred to a twenty-year-old man as a youth! — and when the grand jury was called to render a decision on the facts of the case, hopefully by Friday at the latest, the State’s Attorney was certain they would indict for first-degree murder. When asked by one of the reporters whether the murder weapon had yet been found, he replied at once, “The boy threw the knife in the Gulf, from what I understand.”

“Did he say why he killed them?” another reporter asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t comment on that at this time.”

“Is rape a consideration in this case, sir?”

“No comment.”

“Does that mean yes?”

“It means no comment.”

I turned away from the bar. Susan was already moving into the crowd, drink in hand, toward where Leona and Frank were standing near the buffet table. Leona was wearing a black pants suit, the jacket of which was slashed to her navel. Frank referred to her somewhat exuberant breasts as “the family jewels,” and maintained that Leona’s penchant for wearing revealing garments at every Calusa social event was akin to tossing “pearls before swine.” Frank himself was wearing a brightly colored long-sleeved sports shirt, and what I recognized at once as his Italian pants. He had bought them in Milan two years ago, and wore them so often that I once accused him of having only two pair of pants — the ones he wore to the office with a ratty sports jacket, and the Italian pair he wore to parties. The Italian pair had only one pocket, on the right hip. As a result, Frank wore a little leather purse, which he’d also bought in Milan, attached to his belt. I signaled to him, and started across the room. Susan had already reached them. She was hugging Leona now, kissing Frank on the cheek at the same time.

Someone stopped me, a man I’d met casually at another party, I couldn’t remember his name. He asked if I knew I’d been mentioned on television tonight in connection with the Purchase murder case. Said one of the reporters asked who the boy’s lawyer was, and the State’s Attorney said he believed it was Matthew Hope. He began giving me his own ideas on the case then, constantly referring to it as The Purchase Murder Case, capitalizing it like the title of a novel or a film — THE PURCHASE MURDER CASE — and I realized all at once that he was treating it like a suspense story, which it certainly was not. Not to the victims. Not to Jamie or his son. Not even to me. But to this man, the tragedy was only a murder mystery, and he recounted it to me as such now, reducing it to the level of a whodunit.

This is the cast of characters: a father, a son, a stepmother, and two half sisters. This is the plot: the father comes home from a poker game to find his wife and daughters slain. The son later confesses to the crime. Open and shut, the State’s Attorney says. Next case, the judge says. But, ah, that wasn’t enough. The man who had hold of my elbow and my ear, the man sipping champagne here from a stemmed plastic glass, needed something more. I could not imagine what essential ingredient was missing. Perhaps he only wanted another body to float up from the bayou behind Jamie’s house, which the State’s Attorney had mentioned by name, I was now informed, and which name — Fairy Bayou — caused my unknown friend here to comment that it was undoubtedly named after a closet queen up the street. He guffawed at this, and I seized the opportunity to drift away from him on the crest of my own mirthless laughter.

The talk everywhere around me was of the murders on Jacaranda. Lacking another body, or another spate of bodies, lacking even another suspect — no butler to cast long menacing looks, no lady in a black raincoat running for the misty heath, no crazy old uncle in the tower room babbling about what he’d seen — why then the obvious questions had to be asked about the facts that existed. And the people here at the party seemed to find the facts questionable at best. I heard someone ask whether Jamie Purchase was really at a poker game the night before, as had been mentioned in the newspapers, though not in the State’s Attorney’s interview. Or had he possibly left the poker game early, and gone back home to kill his own wife and children? This particular cynic, of course, did not know that Jamie had indeed left the poker game early, or that he’d gone not home but to the bed of his loving surgeon’s wife. Or so Jamie claimed, an alibi that Catherine Brenet had already effectively demolished, dear loyal Kate. The Calusans gathered here to honor the Italian painter knew nothing of Jamie’s love life, however, and so they only guessed he might have been somewhere else, the parlor game of murder becoming pallid if one could not speculate on intrigue and romance, poison rings and stilettos.

Which brought the partygoers to the matter of the murder weapon itself, the very same weapon the State’s Attorney had described on television as having been thrown in the Gulf. Well, no one here expected the police to drag an ocean in search of a bread knife, or whatever kind of knife it was — the newspapers simply described the murder weapon as “a big kitchen knife,” information presumably given to them by the Police Department, or the State’s Attorney’s office, or both. But it seemed to almost everyone present, judging from what I could overhear, that a knife of that size and weight, even if it sank to the bottom when it was first thrown in the water, would by this time have been washed ashore, the tide having come in — as one expert sport fisherman was quick to ascertain — at 12:59 P.M. this afternoon.

I heard the Italian artist telling someone in broken English that he had been flown from Naples, Italy, to Rome and then New York and Miami, and had been driven from there to Naples, Florida, because the big promotional idea was “Da Napoli a Napoli, from Nepples to Nepples, you unnerstan?” But the gallery opening there had been a huge disappointment, largely due to the fact that his work was far too young and vigorous for the Florida Neopolitans — “gli anziani,” he called them. So he’d come up here to Calusa, there had been a nice crowd at the show tonight, nice-dressed people, plenty of money, and what did they talk about? They talked about murder! His host assured him that this was an unusual circumstance, there were hardly ever any murders in Calusa. The Italian rolled his eyes and said, “Allora, perche me? Why he dinna wait some other time?”

Susan looked spectacular.

She was wearing a white silk jersey tunic, belted at the waist with a golden rope and draped over a long white matching skirt. Gold sandals and gold hoop earrings, a hammered-gold cuff-bracelet on her right wrist. Her hair was pulled tightly to the back of her head, held there with a golden comb. She looked altogether sleek and sinuous, somewhat Grecian, her mouth slightly pouting as always, that spoiled sullen cast to her face, the brown eyes challenging falsely.

The glances she flashed about the room were only distant relatives of what had been her mother’s direct and honest look, Susan took the legacy and wasted it. The look became calculated, she used it to foster an aura of boldness, lips slightly parted to simulate surprise or anticipation, a breathlessness accompanying the direct eye contact. She flirted outrageously, my darling wife, and later denied it, outraged. Over Leona’s shoulder, she met the Italian painter’s eyes now, and when his own eyes sparked with interest, she cut him dead with a sudden lowering of long lashes and a faint superior smile. The first time I’d seen her years ago I especially wanted to take her to bed because she looked so damn superior. I wanted her to groan beneath me. I wanted her to whisper gutter talk in my ear. She could still excite me, I realized. She was wearing no bra, her gown clung to her breasts; as I approached her I actually found myself trying to peek into its low-cut front.

I shook hands with Frank, and a pair of cross-conversations immediately developed, Frank filling me in on what had happened at the office after I left today, Susan telling Leona about Sebastian’s accident. True, most everything she said or did managed to annoy me lately, but this annoyed me particularly. It seemed to me that she was using the death of the cat to solicit sympathy and solace or — even more unforgivable — to call attention to herself as someone grieving and bereft. So I listened partially to what Frank was saying, and partially to what Susan was saying, and I heard Leona’s clucking little sounds of condolence, and then somewhere on my left I heard a woman talking about the murders. It was the woman’s question that captured my full attention.

She was asking the man at her side whether he thought Maureen and the two girls had been raped. I suspected she was deliberately leading the conversation into sexual channels, but the man missed his cue and responded with a long discourse on the sex offender in America, lacing it with statistics on how many homicides and aggravated assaults had been committed in conjunction with the crime of rape. Benny Freid, the criminal lawyer I’d tried to convince Michael to retain, once told me, “Matt, there are no mysteries. There are only crimes with motives for them.” The one thing Michael Purchase did not seem to have was a motive. I tried to remember now what he had told me this afternoon. While the buzz of homicidal cocktail chatter swelled around me, while Frank told me about a visit from an Internal Revenue agent questioning the valuation of a decedent’s estate, while Susan tried to explain the extent of the injuries that had caused Sebastian’s death, I tried to reconstruct sentence by sentence the conversation I’d had with Michael. I could recall the gist and many of the details, but for the most part I could remember verbatim only snatches of what he’d said — and I had the certain feeling it was important to remember exactly what he’d said if I was to know exactly what had happened.

He’d told me that Maureen was the woman who’d called him, said she wanted to see him, asked him to come to the house. She’d referred to his sisters as the little girls, yes, I was sure that’s what he’d said, the little girls were there, the three of them were there, Maureen and the little girls. But why had she given him this information? Was it to reassure him that she was alone except for the children? Had she further told him Emily and Eve were already asleep? Was she advising him the coast was clear?

She was scared.

Why?

Of... she didn’t know what to do.

About what?

I don’t know.

Michael Purchase had a way of not knowing, of not remembering. He could describe in detail the rosette on the low neck of a nightgown, but he could not recall why he had reached for a kitchen knife and chased his stepmother into the bedroom. Kissed her on the mouth. I took her in my arms. I kissed her on the mouth. Was he trying to tell me he’d raped her? Was this what he was conveniently forgetting — that he’d been forced to kill her because first he’d raped her? But he’d earlier told me he hadn’t raped her, and he seemed genuinely shaken when he confessed to kissing her. She was my father’s wife, I’d kissed her. He’d told Ehrenberg he’d only hugged her, though, so maybe he was leading up to the whole truth in gradual steps, I hugged her, I kissed her, I raped her, yes!

You kissed her after she was dead?

Yes.

In which case, and assuming kissing was a euphemism for something more sordid, Michael Purchase hadn’t gone immediately to the police only because he knew what their reaction would be to necrophilia. Maybe he was what his father had called him this morning — a monster.

Did you kiss Emily, too?

No, just my mother.

Your mother?

Maureen.

There were darknesses here I no longer cared to explore. I closed my mind to what Michael had told me, closed it as well to the talk of murder everywhere around me. Our host was standing with the Italian artist, placating him, telling him the turnout at the gallery tonight had been truly remarkable.

Our hostess was calling us to dinner.

We got home at twenty to twelve. I checked on Joanna, who was sound asleep, and then went into the study to switch on the telephone-answering machine. The first message was from a client for whom I’d recently drawn a will. He said his son had been arrested driving a motorcycle at ninety miles an hour in a forty-mile zone. I made a note to call him in the morning, and then switched on the machine again. The next message was from Karin Purchase, leaving a phone number, and asking that I return her call. Jamie’s daughter, according to what he’d told Ehrenberg, had been living in New York City for the past three years, but the number she’d left began with a 366 — a Calusa prefix. I dialed it at once.

“Calusa Bay Hotel, good evening,” a voice said, “May I help you?”

“Miss Karin Purchase, please,” I said.

“Thank you, sir.”

I waited. I could hear the phone ringing on the other end. I began counting the rings. I was about to hang up when a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

“Miss Purchase?”

“Yes?”

“Matthew Hope.”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Hope, I was hoping you’d call, what time is it? I’m sorry, I was in the shower, where did I put my watch? A quarter to twelve, is that too late? I’d like to see you, do you think you can come here now, it’s very important that we talk.”

“Well...”

“It’s room 401,” she said, “can you get here in ten minutes or so, I’ll be expecting you,” she said, and hung up.