Goldilocks

9

From a phone booth in the marina restaurant, I called Ehrenberg and told him I’d like to talk to Michael Purchase as soon as possible. He said the boy was still being processed and asked if I could make it a little later in the afternoon.

“What do you mean by ‘processed’?” I said.

“Putting him through the booking facility. Photographing him, printing him, taking hair clippings, blood samples — we’re allowed to do that, counselor, he’s been charged with Murder One. We’ll be sending everything up to the state lab in Tallahassee. I don’t know how long it’ll take for them to compare the boy’s hair with what we vacuumed off the woman and the two girls. Might be nothing there at all, who knows? I’m betting the blood on his clothes is theirs, though.” He sounded glum. He paused, and then said, “What did you think of his statement?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Neither do I.”

“When can I see him?”

“Can you give us till four-thirty?”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up. I took another dime from my pocket, inserted it into the coin slot, and dialed Aggie’s number. She was breathless when she answered the phone.

“I was on the beach,” she said. “I came running up to the house. Where are you, Matt?”

“The restaurant at Pirate’s Cove. Are you still alone?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come there?”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated. Then she said, “All right. Park at the public beach, and come up on the ocean side.”

“I’ll be there by three,” I said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

We both knew it was reckless; we didn’t give a damn. Calusa in season is not designed for lovers. Aggie and I had first begun seeing each other in May, almost a year ago. The tourists had left shortly after Easter, and we’d had no difficulty finding places where we could be alone together. But just before Christmas the shrill cry of the snowbird was heard upon the air again — and from Tampa south to Fort Myers the neon NO VACANCY signs crackled and sputtered like a single unbroken electrified fence. In January, we stole a weekend together in Tarpon Springs, and then returned to a city still overrun with tourists; everytime I saw a CALUSA LOVES TOURISTS bumper sticker, I wanted to honk for Jesus. I went to Aggie’s house for the first time that month, and I’d been going there at least once a week since, sometimes more often. It was at the beginning of February that we decided we would ask for separate divorces. We made the decision because we weren’t true adulterers. We were, instead, people who’d happened to fall in love with each other while we were married to...

Ah, yes, the judge would say, you’re just a pair of decent souls, poor innocent babes in the woods who’ve been humping your brains out for the past ten months in this or that motel and even in the lady’s own house, lying and cheating and stealing, yes, stealing! That’s exactly what you’ve been doing, you cannot look me in the eye and pretend you’ve not been stealing. And I’m not referring only to the time you steal in this or that trysting place, those steamy hours you spend together in embrace, oh no. I’m referring as well to the intangibles you swipe from your separate spouses: the trust, the love, the honor you granted them by contract and which you now burglarize as unconscionably as thieves in the night. You are all those things, the both of you; you are liars, cheats, and thieves.

And I would say, Yes, your Honor, you’re right.

But you see, that’s exactly the point.

I folded my jacket on the back seat of the Ghia and then took off my tie and unbuttoned the two top buttons of my shirt. I left my shoes and socks on the passenger seat up front, locked the car, and crossed the parking lot to the beach. There were bathers in the water despite the shark scare on the east coast. Sandpipers skirted the shoreline, gulls shrieked overhead. Out on the Gulf, a Hobie cat with a red-and-white striped sail glided soundlessly over the waves.

Aggie’s house on Whisper Key was built some two hundred yards back from the water’s edge, powdery white sand turning coarser as the beach vaguely became the western approach, tall grass springing out of the sand, palm trees in clusters, a path of round irregularly spaced stepping stones leading to the rear wall of the house. The house stood on stilts, a contemporary two-story structure of weathered gray cypress and large glass areas that now reflected the midafternoon sun. An old lady in a flowered housedress was shelling just at the shoreline. Her head was bent, she did not look up as I veered off the beach, and walked through the palms toward the screened pool area on the lower level.

I was always glad to see her. I told her once that this was how I knew I loved her; I was always very glad to see her. An almost boyish gladness. A grin I could not suppress. An irresistible desire to hug her. I did that now, the moment I stepped into the tiled and shaded corridor where she waited for me. Grinning, I hugged her, and kissed her closed eyes and kissed her mouth briefly and held her away from me and looked at her.

She was wearing a white bikini, her skin tan against it, except for a narrow line of paler flesh just above the bra top. Long black hair combed as sleekly straight as Cleopatra’s, gray eyes, a mouth perhaps too generous for her face, an almost perfect nose, tiny white scar above the bridge. Sometimes, away from her, I conjured images I thought were surely false — her hair couldn’t possibly be as black as I imagined it, her eyes so pale, her smile so radiant. And then I’d be with her again, and my pleasure at simply seeing her would give way in an instant to the shock of recognizing once again how extraordinarily beautiful she truly was.

I put my arm around her waist, resting my spread hand on her hip, and we walked together through the familiar tiled hallway, past tall potted ferns in white tubs, and up a circular staircase set with dark wooden pie-shaped steps in black wrought iron. A window here leaped vertically tall and narrow to the west, ablaze with orange now as the sun hovered midway between ocean and universe. The guest room was on the topmost level of the house, one windowed wall angled somewhat less than due west to catch the sunset and at the same time lessen the glare. The other wall faced an inland lagoon crowded with marsh grass, a sandy beach coming to the eastern side of the house where sea grape fanned out over a slatted wooden wall.

We had come long past examining what we did here in this house together while her husband and children were away from it. Aggie took off her bikini the moment we were in the room, and I undressed swiftly and then we lay side by side on the bed and shamelessly made love. The orange glow on the vertical stairwell window carried through the open doorway where we’d left the door purposely ajar in order to hear any unexpected sounds from below. Her mouth tasted of salt.

We talked afterwards in whispers, exchanging at first bedroom banalities, assuring and reassuring, the universal clichés — Was it good? Yes, was it good for you, too? Aggie lit a cigarette and sat in the middle of the bed cross-legged, smoking, a small ashtray cupped in her left hand. I do not smoke; I haven’t smoked for seven years. I watched her. The pink flush of sex was fading across the wings of her collarbones and the sloping tops of her breasts. A fine sheen of perspiration was on her face, the hair at her temples was damp. She asked me if the tennis elbow was giving me trouble again and I told her it was, and asked how she knew. She immediately described in detail an acrobatic maneuver we’d performed not three minutes before, and mimicked the way I’d winced while shifting my weight. I began to chuckle. She told me she loved the way I laughed, and then bent from the waist and impulsively kissed me. The clock on the dresser was ticking away the afternoon.

We were acutely aware of the time. There was so much to say to each other, but the clock read 3:47 and each tick brought us closer to that dangerous uncertain area of surprise discovery. Monday was Julie’s day for guitar. Her father would be picking her up at four-thirty, by which time I would have left his house and his wife. Gerald Jr. was on his school’s basketball team, and would be driven home from practice by one of the mothers in the car pool. He was not expected till just before dusk. We seemed to be safe. But there was a knife-edged tension in the air.

Aggie was thirty-four years old. She complained constantly about the waste of her education and her training — she’d graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe and was doing psychiatric social work in Boston when she met her husband. She was twenty-three at the time. She married him a year later and quit working when she was six months pregnant with Julie. So now she railed against dishwashers and car pools, dealing with three-day-a-week help, the long empty hours of wife and mother. But at the same time, she was cruel in examining her own hedonistic life, and was the first to admit that she adored the luxury of being able to play tennis when the kids were at school, or take long walks on the beach, or simply sit in the sun and read. Yes, Aggie loved the laziness and the freedom, she admitted that, yes. But if I tried to suggest that she enjoyed it, she immediately accused me of holding sexist views.

I once told her a long story about this North Vietnamese pilot who was flying a Russian-made airplane painted gray. He was possibly the best pilot the North Vietnamese had, but when it was rumored that the Americans might be putting women pilots into their warplanes and sending them up against him, he absolutely refused to fly any more combat missions. His gray Russian-made airplane was grounded for the rest of the war, and whenever American pilots flew over it, they pointed it out to each other.

“And do you know what they called it, Aggie?”

“I don’t know. What did they call it?”

“The Pale Chauvinist MIG.”

“Very funny, ha-ha.”

She took her role as a woman seriously. Whenever I suggested to her that perhaps she’d begun this affair with me only because she was restless, she told me not to cheapen what we shared, and then immediately said, “Of course, I’m restless. You’d be restless, too, if you had nothing to do but enjoy yourself all day long!”

She told me now of the play she’d been rehearsing with the Whisper Key Players, an amateur dramatics group. She was having difficulty with the director. At rehearsal this morning, he’d shrieked at her to please, for the love of God, speak up! She was hoarse with shouting by that point; she glared at him across the rows of empty seats and advised him to go buy a hearing aid. The rest of the cast began laughing, and the director said, “Cute, Aggie, very cute,” and stormed out of the theater. She felt awful about it now, and wanted to know what I thought she should do. The man simply did not come back. He walked out of the theater and did not return. Should she call him to apologize? The play had been in rehearsal for three weeks, it was scheduled to open this Saturday night — would I come to the opening?

I told her I didn’t see how I possibly could; what plausible reason could I give Susan for wanting to see a play done by an amateur group? Aggie laughed and said, “You mean The Plough and the Stars isn’t your favorite play in the entire world?” Her laughter was a bit forced, I couldn’t at first understand why. She’d never taken the group seriously, and her role in the play was a minor one. We had, in fact, joked about her finally accepting the part.

“I play a prostitute,” she’d said. “Do you think that’s typecasting?”

“Why’d you take it?”

“Nancy kept bugging me. Besides, I’ll get to show a lot of leg and garter,” she’d said, and winked.

But now she was silent, her eyes brooding, her mouth set. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me again what I’d heard at least a dozen times before. The thrust of her argument (it was really a plea) was that I did not value her highly enough. It was Susan I cared about, Susan who rated my concern — what plausible reason could I give Susan for wanting to see a play done by a bunch of amateurs, right?

“The hell with Susan,” she said, “what about me? What plausible reason can you give me for not coming to see a play I’m in?”

“I didn’t know the play was that important to you.”

“It isn’t. Why didn’t you tell her last night?”

“What?”

“When I spoke to you on the phone this morning—”

“Oh, I see, this goes all the way back to this morning.”

“Yes, all the way back. You said—”

“I know what I said.”

“You said you’d almost told her last night. Why almost, Matt?”

“Because the phone rang and it was—”

“If it hadn’t been the phone...”

“It was the phone. It was, in fact—”

“Matt, you’ve been on the verge of telling her for the past month now. Each time, something stops you. The phone rings, the cat pees on the kitchen floor, it’s always — now what the hell’s so funny, would you mind telling me?”

“The cat peeing on the kitchen floor.”

“I don’t find any of this funny, I’m sorry. I’m beginning to think you enjoy having a wife and a whore you can fuck every Wednesday!”

“This is Monday.”

“Matt, this isn’t funny. If you don’t want to tell Susan about us, I wish you’d—”

“I do want to tell her.”

“Then why haven’t you already... oh the hell with it!” she said, and pushed herself off the bed, and stalked angrily across the room, her bare feet slapping against the tiled floor. I looked at the clock. The minute hand visibly lurched another minute past the hour, startling me. The clock was ticking furiously, the afternoon was sliding downhill. I wanted to settle this with her, I loved her too much to leave her in an agitated state. But I wanted to get back to the mainland before Ehrenberg left for the day, and I was also — I admitted this to myself with a faint pang — afraid that Gerald Hemmings would walk into his house and find me naked with his naked wife. I went to Aggie where she was standing at the window, her arms crossed over her waist, her hands cupping opposite elbows. I took her in my arms.

“Aggie, I don’t know why we’re fighting.”

“I think you know why.”

“Tell me.”

“For a simple reason. You don’t love me. That’s why we’re fighting.”

“I love you.”

“Get dressed,” she said. “It’s late, Matt.”

I dressed silently. She watched from the window as I buttoned my shirt. Then she said, “I won’t ask you again, Matt. You’ll tell her when you want to. If you want to.”

“I’ll tell her tonight.”

“Sure,” she said, and smiled wanly. The smile frightened me more than anything she’d said. I had the feeling that something was about to end without warning. “A long time ago, I asked you if you were sure,” she said. “That first time in the motel. Do you remember?”

“Yes. And I told you I was.”

“Be sure this time, too, Matt.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, darling,” she said, and looked suddenly exhausted. I pulled her to me and held her very tight.

“You’d better go,” she said. “It’s very late.”

“I’ll tell her tonight.”

“Don’t promise.”

“I promise.”

We kissed. I moved my face back from hers and looked at her again. She seemed about to speak, and hesitated, and then at last said, “Every time you leave me to go back to her, I think it’ll be forever. I’m always surprised when you’re here the next time. I’m even surprised when you call again.”

“I love you, Aggie.”

“Do you?”

She smiled again. The smile suddenly appeared and faded at once. Her pale gray eyes searched my face. I kissed her once more and then turned away and started for the door. In the hallway outside, the vertical window had become a column of blood.

The second-floor corridor was long and narrow, constructed of cinderblock painted a yellowish beige. An overhead water pipe ran arrow-straight down one side of the corridor, and an overhead duct hung from the ceiling on the opposite side. The corridor was lighted artificially, the plastic-covered ceiling fixtures spaced regularly along its length between the exposed water pipe and the duct. A water cooler bisected the corridor on the right-hand side. There were open doors on that same wall, casting a greenish light into the otherwise mustard gloom.

Ehrenberg had met me ten minutes ago on the first floor of the building, and then walked me around to a flight of steps that led upstairs to the holding cells. A jailer let us onto the second floor, and then disappeared into his office to answer a ringing telephone. The door at the far end of the corridor was made of metal; I could make that out even from this distance. A small rectangular glass panel was set into the door at eye level. The metal plate surrounding the keyway was painted a bright red. It seemed the only patch of color in the corridor. There was a sense here of stone and steel, an architecture of necessity. This was a jail. It looked like a jail, even though I had not yet seen a cell.

We were waiting outside the room used for photographing and fingerprinting prisoners. I could see inside to where a camera was mounted on a makeshift wooden frame to which a spotlight was fastened above. On the wall opposite the camera, there was a chair and above the chair there was a combination electric clock and digital day-date indicator. The hands of the clock read 4:38. The date read MAR 1, the day read MON. Presumably Michael had been sitting in that chair just a short while ago, his picture being taken below a pair of instruments that recorded the day, the time, and the place, and assigned to him a number besides.

“Detective Di Luca had a chance to talk to a Miss Louise Verhaagen, if that’s how she pronounces it,” Ehrenberg said. “She’s one of the nurses working for Dr. Purchase. I’ll tell you what I was doing, Mr. Hope. I was operating on the theory that a man who lies about why he left a poker game and where he went afterwards is a man who’s got a little bimbo he’s keeping someplace. Do you remember when I asked Dr. Purchase was he fooling around outside the marriage? Well, he told me he was very happily married but he didn’t exactly answer my question. So Di Luca talked to Miss Verhaagen this afternoon, shortly after you left here, and whereas she didn’t precisely confirm my suspicion that the doctor was playing around, she didn’t deny it either. In fact, she stated right out that there were a great many phone calls from a woman named Catherine Brenet, who it happens is not a patient, and who it further happens is a married lady who herself has a doctor for a husband. Well, okay, that doesn’t mean Dr. Purchase went home and killed his wife and two daughters, it doesn’t necessarily mean that at all. It could only mean he was out fooling around with this Mrs. Brenet while the murders were taking place, in which case I’m going to have to talk to the lady herself to find out if he was.”

“Why?” I said.

“Why? What do you mean ‘why’?”

“You’ve got a confession from the boy.”

“Yes, I have, that’s true. But there’re some blanks in it that don’t sit right with me. Whether you believe this or not, Mr. Hope, I’m not eager to send that young boy to the electric chair just on his say-so. Not with his mother and father both giving me alibis I can drive a truck through. We canvassed the mother’s neighborhood like exterminators looking for bugs. House across the street from her is up for sale, no one there to see her coming or going. None of the neighbors saw any lights on that night, but she says she was watching television at the back of the house, so okay. But most of them seem to think the garage door was closed the whole day long. So I’ve got to ask was she home all day or was she out all day? I’m only speculating, Mr. Hope, but let’s say she had it in her head to do murder, couldn’t she have left the house five, six in the morning, spent the day doing God knows what, and then gone home two, three the next morning, without anyone being the wiser? I just don’t know. I’m not finished with her yet, not by a long shot. Nor with the doctor, either. As for the boy... there’re things make it sound like he did it, and things make it sound like he didn’t. I still don’t know why he suddenly reached up for that knife, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Sitting there at the kitchen table, having a nice chat, when all of a sudden he grabs a knife and chases her in the bedroom. Can’t give a reason for it.” Ehrenberg shook his head, “That sounds peculiar to me, doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes.”

“At the same time, he starts stammering and stuttering about why he’s afraid to go to the police, afraid of what they might think. Well, that makes me wonder did he sexually abuse that woman, and those two girls. Which might explain why he killed them. He’s got no explanation for why he did it, you see. Now, there’s plenty of cases where somebody blanks out, they just kill in a rage, they don’t know why afterwards. But I still think this is peculiar, I really do. Unless he, you know, raped them. Or tried to rape them. He says he embraced the woman and the older daughter both, I just don’t know what that means in terms of this case. You got any ideas?”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. I did not tell him that Michael had received a phone call at eleven-thirty last night, just before he’d gone to his father’s house. That was what I was here to talk to Michael about.

“Because if he didn’t sexually abuse them, why was he afraid the police would think so? I mean, if he’d killed somebody, for Christ’s sake, why would he be worried about hugging them? You think he’d be more worried the police would say he’d done murder, am I right? I just don’t understand it.” Ehrenberg sighed heavily. “I’m going to have a talk with this Brenet woman — she owns and operates a flower shop here on South Bayview. See if the doctor really was with her last night. If he was, I can understand why he lied to me. Be some can of worms to open, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would.”

“But it still wouldn’t explain why the boy is lying. Well, I don’t mean lying, I mean withholding the complete truth. There’s a difference. Don’t you get the feeling he’s not telling the whole truth?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Ehrenberg said, and looked at his watch. “They’re doing the autopsies now at Calusa Memorial, we’ll know in a little while whether there was any injury to the genital organs, or any sperm inside the woman or the girls. The clothes we sent to Tallahassee’ll be checked for vaginal stains might’ve come from the woman, I just don’t know about this damn case. There’re too many things—”

The jailer reappeared just then, apologizing for having kept us waiting so long. As he went down the corridor, he explained that his wife had called with a washing-machine problem. When we got to the steel door at the end of the corridor, he lifted a ring of keys from his belt, and fitted a key that was color-coded red into the keyway. He twisted it, and swung open the heavy door. There were suddenly bars. Bars multiplying one beyond the next, as in the mirrors of a funhouse. I was looking at a large cage with dividing bars that formed a series of cages within, each equipped with cots, sinks, and toilets.

“This’s the bull pen,” the jailer said. “For the trusties.”

We walked parallel to the bars, down a narrow corridor, made an abrupt right turn and came into a cul-de-sac at the end of which was a pair of cells. Michael was in the cell closest to the bend in the hallway. The jailer used the same color-coded key to open the door, red into red the color of blood. Michael was wearing prison clothing. Dark blue trousers, pale blue denim shirt, black shoes and socks. He was sitting on the single cot in the cell, his hands between his knees, just as he’d been sitting when first I saw him in his blood-stained garments in the captain’s office. On the wall just inside the barred door, there was a white porcelain sink with two push-button faucets. Just beyond that was the toilet bowl, no seat on it, just the white porcelain bowl and a roll of toilet paper sitting on the neck of the bowl where it was fastened to the wall. On the mustard-colored wall to the right, a prisoner had penciled the words I NEED MENTAL REHABILATATION, misspelling the last word. Another prisoner had scratched his name onto the wall and alongside it had drawn a rectangle divided down the middle with a single line, perhaps as an intended replica of the twin cells here at the end of the hall. There was only an uncovered and extremely dirty foam rubber mattress on the wall-fastened cot. I stepped into the cell and felt immediately confined when the jailer locked the door behind me.

“Just yell when you want out,” he said, and he and Ehrenberg went down the corridor, turned the corner of the L, and vanished. I heard the tumblers falling in the heavy steel door. The door squeaked open and clanged shut. The sound of the tumblers again. And then silence.

“How are you doing, Michael?” I said.

“Okay,” he said.

“Are they treating you all right?”

“Fine. They cut off some of my hair, are they allowed to do that?”

“Yes.”

“From around my cock, too. Why’d they do that?”

“Why do you think, Michael?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’ll be making comparison tests.”

“Of what?”

“Any hairs found on the bodies. They’ll compare your hair against whatever they found.”

“Why?”

“Michael, they want to know whether rape was a part of this.”

“I told them it wasn’t. I told them exactly what happened last night. What more do they—”

“You didn’t tell them about the phone call.”

“What phone call?”

“I went to the boat this afternoon. I spoke to Lisa Schellmann, she told me—”

“Lisa’s a birdbrain.”

“She said there was a phone call last night.”

“There wasn’t.”

“Michael, the dockmaster took the call, he’s already confirmed it. He went down to the boat to get you, and you went back with him to the office, and talked to the woman who—”

“I didn’t talk to any woman.”

“Are you telling me you did not get a phone call from a woman at eleven-thirty last night?”

“I didn’t get a call from anybody anytime last night.”

“Michael, that’s a lie,” I said.

He turned his head away.

“Why are you lying?”

“I’m not lying.”

“A woman called you last night, the dockmaster’ll swear to it. Now who was she?”

“Nobody.”

“Michael, the dockmaster heard you saying you’d be right there. Where was right there, can you tell me that?”

“No place. The dockmaster heard wrong. Are you talking about Mr. Wicherly?”

“Yes.”

“He’s deaf. He’s a deaf old man. How would he know what—”

“He’s not deaf, Michael, he hears perfectly well. Where was right there?”

He hesitated.

“Michael?”

“The house,” he said.

“Your father’s house?”

“Yes.”

“Who called you, Michael?”

He hesitated again.

“Michael, who...?”

“Maureen. Maureen called me.”

“What did she want?”

“She said she wanted to see me.”

“What about?”

“She said to come over.”

“Why?”

“She wanted to talk.”

“Did she tell you your father was out?”

“She said there was... she said... the three of them were there.”

“Maureen and your sisters?”

“The little girls.”

“And she wanted you to come over?”

“Yes. She said she was... she was... she’d be waiting for me.”

“All right, Michael, what happened when you got there? What did you talk about? You told Detective Ehrenberg you went into the kitchen—”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What did you talk about?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try to remember. Did she tell you why she wanted to see you?”

“She was scared.”

“Why?”

“Of... she didn’t know what to do.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.”

“But she told you she was scared?”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did Maureen say something to anger you?”

“No, we... we always... we always got along fine. We... no.”

“You just suddenly reached up for the knife and began chasing her through the house, is that it?”

“In the bedroom, I...”

“Yes, what happened in the bedroom?”

“I took her in my arms,” he said. “I kissed her on the mouth.”

“Yes, then what?”

“I didn’t want the police to know I’d... I didn’t want them to know I’d kissed... my father’s wife. She was my father’s wife, I’d kissed her.”

“And you didn’t want the police to know that?”

“No, I... they’d tell my father.”

“Is that why you stabbed her?”

“No.” He shook his head. “That was afterwards.”

“Michael, I’m not following you.”

“After she was dead.”

“You kissed her after she was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you didn’t want the police to know?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did you kiss Emily, too?”

“No, just my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Maureen.”

It was a little past five when I parked outside the flower shop. Ehrenberg hadn’t given me the name of the place, but there was only one on South Bayview, and I had to assume this was the one Catherine Brenet owned and operated. I was aware of the fact that Susan and I were supposed to attend a gallery opening sometime between five and seven, but it seemed to me more important to talk to Mrs. Brenet before Ehrenberg got to her.

The shop was in a row of stores on the same side of the street as the Royal Palms Hotel. Turreted and balconied, shuttered and terraced, the hotel created for the entire street an aura of graciousness, reminiscent of what Calusa must have been like in the 1920s. All was quiet in the late afternoon sunlight. I could visualize horses and buggies coming down a palm-shaded esplanade, could imagine luxurious gardens stretching clear to the bay. The sidewalk in front of the flower shop was a miniature garden in itself. A potted umbrella tree stood side by side with a dragon tree and a corn plant, all arranged around a flower cart massed with purple, white and pink gloxinias, mums in yellow and lavender, spinning wheels with bright yellow centers and white petals. The plate glass window of the shop was lettered with the words LE FLEUR DE LIS over a heraldic crest showing a pair of stylized three-petaled irises. The name of the shop, coupled with the knowledge that it was owned by Jamie’s mistress, whose name in turn was Catherine Brenet, somehow conspired to create the expectation of a French poule licking her lips seductively and asking, “Desirez, monsieur?”

There was only one person in the shop, a somewhat dumpy, middle-aged woman, blonde hair pulled into a severe bun at the back of her head, wearing oversized glasses with tortoise-shell frames, soil-stained green smock, the handles of a pruning shears sticking out of her pocket, scuffed sandals. She was holding an asparagus fern she had probably just brought in from the sidewalk outside; it was past closing time. She turned to look at me. Behind her was a display-cooler riotously packed with red long-stemmed roses and bright purple tulips, baby’s breath and orchids, marguerite daisies and irises that echoed again the words LE FLEUR DE LIS elongated at the woman’s feet in sunlit silhouette on the floor of the shop. To her left and right on shelves and hanging from the ceiling were kangaroo vines and snakeskin plants, cactus and Boston ivy, spider plants, flame violets, angel-wing begonias. A calico-cat flowerpot stood empty beside an arrangement of dried flowers.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs. Brenet.”

“I’m Mrs. Brenet,” she said. The blonde eyebrows arched a trifle, the brown eyes widened expectantly in the plump face.

“Catherine Brenet?” I said. I could not believe this was the woman Jamie had described as “startlingly beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m Catherine Brenet.”

“How do you do?” I said. “I’m Matthew Hope.” I paused. “Jamie Purchase’s attorney.”

“Yes?” she said. She put down the asparagus fern, and made a small puzzled gesture with head and hands.

“I’d like to ask you some questions about last night,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?” The look of bewilderment was turning to something else.

“Mrs. Brenet, I’m Jamie’s attorney. I’m sure you know what happened last night—”

“Yes?” Again the single word as a question. But the eyebrows were no longer arched. They were puckering into a frown above the thick-rimmed glasses.

“Jamie says he was with you last night between—”

“With me?” she said.

“Yes, between eleven and—”

“Me? Are you sure you’ve got the right person?”

“You are Catherine Brenet?”

“Yes.”

“And you do know Jamie Purchase?”

“Yes. But I don’t know what you mean about last night.”

“His wife and children were—”

“Yes, I heard that on the radio. But when you say Dr. Purchase—”

“Mrs. Brenet, he told us that—”

“Was with me—”

“Between eleven and—”

“I don’t understand.”

We both stopped talking at the same time. She looked at me, waiting for an explanation. I looked at her, waiting for the same thing.

“Mr. Hope,” she said at last, “my husband and I knew the Purchases only casually. I was, of course, distressed to learn of the terrible tragedy that had—”

“Mrs. Brenet, you’re going to be visited shortly by a Detective Ehrenberg of the Calusa Pol—”

“What on earth for?”

“Because Jamie Purchase says he was with you last night between the hours of eleven and twelve-thirty.”

“He wasn’t.”

“You didn’t see him last night?”

“I haven’t seen him since... I can’t even remember. I believe I met him and his wife at a charity ball, oh, more than a year ago. And I think we saw each other once after that, at a dinner party someplace.”

“Jamie said—”

“I don’t care what—”

“He said you’ve been lovers for—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m repeating what he told us this morning.”

“Told who?”

“My partner and me. In our offices this morning.”

“Well, he was obviously... I can’t imagine why he said anything like that. I don’t know whether to be offended or flattered. I’m hardly the type of woman—”

“Mrs. Brenet, if Jamie wasn’t with you last night, then he was somewhere else. And the police will want to know where.”

“I’m sure that’s his problem, not mine.”

“I don’t think you understand me.”

“I understand you completely. You’re asking me to provide an alibi for Dr. Purchase.”

“I’m asking you to verify his story.”

“How can I possibly do that?”

“Mrs. Brenet, Jamie told us that you and he have been renting a cottage on Whisper...”

“This is really too ridiculous.”

“That you’d decided to seek divorces...”

“I’m a happily married woman. I would no more consider divorcing my husband than... I simply would never consider it.”

“Then Jamie was lying.”

“If he said he was with me last night, why yes. Of course he was lying.”

“Where were you last night, Mrs. Brenet?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” She looked up at the wall clock. “I was just closing the shop when you got here. My husband and I have a dinner date, so if you don’t mind—”

“Was your husband home last night?”

“Again, that’s none of—”

“Are you asking me to believe that Jamie picked your name out of the air? Made up a long story about you on the spur of the moment—”

“I don’t know why he told you what he did. If, indeed, he told you anything at all.”

“He did.”

“I’ll accept your word for that. In which case, all I can say — again, and for the last time — is that he was lying.”

“Will you tell that to the police when they get here?”

“What have you told them, Mr. Hope?”

“Nothing. They found out about you on their own.”

“There was nothing to find out, so I can’t imagine—”

“They talked to one of Jamie’s nurses this afternoon. They know all about your frequent phone calls to his office.”

“I’m sure I’m being confused with someone else.”

“I don’t think so.”

“When the police get here, if they get here, I’ll tell them I went to a movie last night. My husband, as it happens, was in Tampa visiting his mother — he goes to see her two or three times a month. She doesn’t particularly like me, we try to avoid each other. When I got back to the house, my husband was already home. I asked him how his mother was. He said she was fine. We both went to sleep.”

“Is that what you told your husband? That you’d gone to a movie?”

“I generally go to a movie when he’s in Tampa with his mother. He stays with her most of the day and doesn’t get home till quite late. There’s nothing unusual about my having gone to a movie.”

“So let me understand this...”

“I’m terribly pressed for—”

“Even if Jamie’s in danger—”

“Really, Mr. Hope—”

“You won’t admit he was with you last night. Because such an admission—”

“Mr. Hope, I read in this afternoon’s News that his son has already confessed to the murders. Is that true?”

“It’s true.”

“Then good day, Mr. Hope.”

So there we were.

There was Jamie Purchase’s “startlingly beautiful” mistress, who had worn a black raincoat and a green hat that first day they met secretly. There had been rain in Calusa, so unusual for February. He had put his hand on her thigh the moment she’d entered the car, “the touch was electric,” he’d told us. There had been the aroma of wet and steamy garments in that small contained space, the windshield wipers had snicked at the rain, snick, snick, snick — ah, l’amour. And ah, how that love had blossomed over the space of a year and a little bit more, till last night in a cottage by the sea, they had both sworn fealty, fealty forever, and had discussed the imminent demise of their respective mates — yes, that was the word Jamie had used. Mates. Not demise, oh no. The demise, presumably, was metaphoric, they had only talked of leaving their spouses. The waves had crashed in cinematically against the shore, Soon, my darling, soon, Burt and Deborah, Kim and Kirk, Elizabeth and Richard, and now, for the first time together in embrace on a beach, spume flying, JAMIE and CATHERINE, he kisses her face, he kisses her throat, he kisses her eyes — I wanted to vomit.

A memorable moment, to be sure. So memorable that the dumpy little lady in the green smock seemed to have forgotten it completely less than seventeen hours later. Give her twenty-four and she’d forget her own name. But for now, at five-fifteen on a lovely Calusa afternoon, it was enough to have forgotten Jamie Purchase. Because remembering him would be endangering her marriage. Catherine was simply protecting her turf, that was all. She may have sworn to the stars and the sea that together she and Jamie would wend their way down life’s thorny path; she may even have meant it. But the chips were down now, as surely as they’d been down in that poker game Jamie had tried to lose and could only succeed in winning. Her hand was being called. She could declare the pair of deuces or bluff a royal flush.

Jamie was safe, she thought. His son had confessed to the crime, there was no way Jamie could become involved, even if she denied having been with him last night. So Catherine was taking the odds on today, never mind the long shot on eternity; eternity was for graveyards. Catherine was opting for the good life she had with the surgeon; love and marriage, so to speak, house and garden, seashells arranged in an orderly row on a Lucite shelf, another charity ball next year, and the year after that, and the year after that after that. If she and Jamie ever got past this one — and she had to admit it looked a bit dicey just how — they might be able to pick up right where they’d left off before all the unpleasantness, same old stand next Wednesday or next Sunday, business as usual.

I suddenly wondered what Aggie would do in a similar situation.

Worse, I wondered what I myself would do.

There was a metallic taste in my mouth when I left the flower shop. As I drove away from the curb, Catherine Brenet was putting in the last of her plants, a heavy weeping fig that she struggled to carry to the open door of the shop.