Rumpelstiltskin

5

Wednesday morning dawned cold and gray and bleak. The temperature on the thermometer outside my kitchen window hovered at the thirty-one-degree mark, which meant it was one degree below freezing — point five below zero on the Celsius scale. The cable-television forecast from the National Weather Service in Ruskin, Florida, reported winds from the southwest at twenty-seven knots, seas to twelve feet, and a zero possibility of precipitation. Temperatures in the Tricity Area (which included Tampa, Sarasota, and Calusa) were expected to rise no higher than the mid to upper forties. It was altogether a rotten day for a funeral.

There were seventy churches of varying denominations in Calusa, ranging from Catholic to Baptist to Jewish (Orthodox and Reform) to Presbyterian to Lutheran to Seventh Day Adventist and including two for the Mennonite sect, its followers identified by the black clothing and beards worn by the men, and the plain dresses and simple white caps worn by the women. The services for Victoria Miller, born and raised in the South’s Bible Belt, were held at the Bay Ridge Baptist Chapel on Bay Ridge Road and Williamdale Avenue. There were perhaps three dozen people listening to the memorial service that day, among them reporters from Calusa’s morning and afternoon newspapers, and a man sent up from Time’s regional office in Miami. It was perhaps a comment on the impermanency of fame that the Time reporter was not accompanied by a photographer; neither were the pair from the Calusa Herald-Tribune and the Calusa Journal.

The service was brief. The mourners filed out of the low white building afterward, following the coffin, wearing an odd assortment of outer garments. When the temperatures dropped in this part of Florida, no one seemed prepared for the sudden cold, even though it had in recent years become the rule rather than the exception. Winter overcoats stored in mothballs were pulled out of dusty trunks, mackinaws made reluctant appearances, but for the most part the citizens were underdressed, wearing raincoats that served them well during the months of July, August, and September but did little to protect them in the frequently harsh winter months. The mourners walked briskly to their automobiles, coat collars raised, hands thrust into their pockets, faces raw and red from the wind. Overhead, a gray canopy of clouds moved restlessly across the sky. There was only one limousine — for Anthony Konig and a man I assumed to be Vicky’s father, Dwayne Miller. Although Konig had earlier described him as a “crazy old bastard,” he seemed to be no older than fifty-five or-six — a bit younger than Konig, in fact — a tall, powerfully built man who hurled his enormous bulk into the waiting car as if it were a side of beef. The hearse moved out. We began following it to the cemetery.

I was surprised to see a police car parked just outside the cemetery gates. As the cortege approached, the door on the passenger side — distinctively marked with the City of Calusa’s gold seal and the word POLICE in blue against the white background — opened, and Detective Morris Bloom stepped out. He was wearing a heavy black overcoat, a gray fedora, a maroon muffler, and black leather gloves, as though he were still dressed for the wilds of Nassau County up there in New York State. It occurred to me as I pulled the Ghia in alongside the wrought-iron fence that he was the only one here today who was properly dressed for the bitter cold and the biting wind. He spotted me as I got out of my car, and immediately walked over.

“I owe you an apology,” he said.

“What for?”

“The private eye shit.”

“You already said you were sorry. On the phone.”

“It’s always better in person,” he said, and smiled unexpectedly. “I apologize.”

“I accept,” I said, and returned the smile.

“I’ve got the FBI crawling all over my office,” he said, “giving me orders like I’m a Meter Maid. If there’s anything I hate worse ’n the narcs, it’s the feds.”

“Any word from him yet?”

“Not a peep. It doesn’t make sense, does it? This is Wednesday, he took that little girl on Sunday night, but no ransom demand yet. No sense at all.”

“Nobody says a murderer has to make sense.”

“Ah, but they do,” Bloom said morosely. “They do, Mr. Hope. You get the craziest fucking bedbugs—” He glanced around quickly, fearful his obscenity might have been overheard, especially here in so sacrosanct a place as a cemetery. But we were walking several yards behind the rest of the mourners, trailing them on a gravel path that ran straight as an arrow through rows and rows of grave markers. He lowered his voice nonetheless. “You get these lunatics, they’re raving about God knows what, but at the same time they know exactly why they committed bloody murder. They’ve got the grievances all ready to spill out, chapter and verse, in detail you could set your watch by. Whyever this guy did it — if he is a guy — he can tell us all about it, all his grievances, didn’t like the kind of songs she sang, didn’t like the way she did her hair, who the hell knows with these fucking lunatics?” he said, and this time he did not check to see if he’d been overheard.

“I’ll tell you what bothers me,” he said. “She divorces her husband, but he comes all the way from New Orleans to see her perform here. That bothers the hell out of me, I’ve got to tell you. When he came to see me Monday, he told me he’d been in town since late Saturday. That puts him here a day before the murder. I don’t like that.”

“Well, he had a legitimate reason for being here,” I said.

“Yeah, what? To see his wife do her act? They’ve been divorced for, what is it, five years? Why such loyalty?”

“She wrote to him last week...”

“Oh?”

“Said she wanted him to have custody of the child in case anything happened to her. He may’ve wanted to discuss that in person.”

“Where’s that letter?”

“I have it at the office. I’ll send it over by messenger if you like.”

“Yeah, do that. Custody of the little girl, huh? That’s interesting. I’ll tell you, Mr. Hope—”

“Make it Matthew,” I said. “Or Matt if you prefer.”

“I prefer Matthew,” Bloom said. “He was one of the good guys.”

“Good guys?”

“In the Bible.”

“So was Matt.”

“In the Bible?”

“On Gunsmoke.”

“I still prefer Matthew. You call me Morrie, okay? Except when we’re downtown and there’s brass around. Then it might be better to go with the Detective Bloom shit, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

When we reached the end of the path, the coffin had already been lifted over the open grave, and the hydraulic equipment was ready to lower it into the earth. The minister stood with a Bible in his hands, squinting into the wind, facing the assembled mourners who had taken seats on folding chairs set up before a white lattice bower. The bower covered the poised coffin and the open waiting grave. Baskets of flowers carried from the funeral home had been placed on either side of the grave. Some of them had been blown over by the wind, strewing blossoms onto the ground. There were no folding chairs left when Bloom and I approached the bower. We stood off to one side as the minister opened his Bible.

“O sing unto the Lord a new song,” he read, “for he hath done marvellous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory. The Lord hath made known his salvation...”

His words carried on the wind, blowing over the heads of the mourners and northward toward the Trail. Konig and Miller were sitting on chairs in the first row; whatever their differences, they seemed united now in grief. Sitting to Konig’s right, also in the first row, were Jim Sherman and his partner at the Greenery, Brad Atherton.

“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm. With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord...”

The girl sitting at the end of the first row, just alongside Brad, looked familiar. She was perhaps twenty-two or — three, a slight girl with enormous brown eyes and dark hair blowing in the wind now, wearing a wrinkled black overcoat that looked as though it had been rescued from the bottom of a cardboard valise carried south in the year nineteen aught two when Calusa — by approval of its fifty-seven voters — first incorporated as a town. She sensed my eyes upon her, jerked her attention sharply from the minister, turned to the left where I was standing alongside Bloom, and suddenly nodded. I must have expressed surprise. She nodded again, her dark eyes beseeching response. Puzzled, I nodded back. Apparently satisfied, she turned again to where the minister was concluding his recitation.

“Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together before the Lord; for he cometh to judge the earth: with righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equity. Amen.”

“Amen,” the mourners repeated in ragged unison.

“Oh, God, Jesus, no!” someone shouted. “Not yet!”

The words hung on the air like an exhalation of vapor, drifting up and beyond the man who had spoken them. He alone was standing now in the midst of the seated mourners, a man of about thirty-eight or — nine, I guessed, some six feet tall and weighing at least a hundred and eighty pounds, his face twisted in torment, blue eyes streaming tears, long black hair worn the way hippies used to wear theirs in the sixties and early seventies. His clothes, too, seemed the attire of someone from a bygone time, threadbare blue jeans and a faded denim jacket, beads hanging on his blue T-shirted chest, a beaded Indian band across his forehead — Woodstock reincarnate here and now in Calusa, Florida. Almost before the gathering had located him, almost before they had pinpointed the source of the vocal explosion, he was in motion, moving past the others in the second row of folded chairs and walking swiftly to the coffin where it was poised for imminent descent now that the minister had finished.

“Don’t do this yet,” he said to no one. “Please don’t put her in the ground yet,” and he moved toward the suspended coffin as though wanting to throw himself across it protectively, a maneuver that might have sent both him and it tumbling together to the ground. Anthony Konig was on his feet at once, moving surprisingly fast for such a big man, stepping between the outmoded hippie and the shining black coffin, seizing his left arm, swinging him around and saying in a hoarse sharp voice that knifed through the keening of the wind, “Eddie, get hold of yourself!” Vicky’s father followed not a beat behind, coming around on the other side of the man and grabbing his right arm as he was preparing to swing it at Konig. “Calm down,” he said. “Now jess calm down, boy!”

“Who the hell is that?” Bloom whispered beside me. Together, Vicky’s father and her former husband began walking the man away from the grave and up the path toward the parked automobiles. “Better see what that was all about,” Bloom said, and lifted the collar of his coat, and began walking after them.

The other mourners were rising. There was the clatter of wooden chair legs scraping against the gravel. The wind persisted. Beneath the wind I heard the murmuring hum of the hydraulic mechanism as it began lowering the coffin into the grave. The dark-haired girl in the wrinkled black overcoat suddenly materialized at my side.

“I have to talk to you,” she said.

The wind tossed her hair across her forehead and across her wet brown eyes. Behind her, Jim Sherman was shaking the minister’s hand, and his partner Brad was telling him what a fine service it had been earlier in church and how appropriate had been the psalm here at graveside. I kept searching the girl’s face, trying to place her.

“I’m Melanie Simms,” she said, “I work at the Greenery. I waited on you the night you came to hear her sing. Do you remember?”

I remembered only vaguely, but I nodded, anyway.

“I saw you with her later, I know you were a friend of hers, Mr. Hope. There’s something you’ve got to know.”

She was talking in a whisper, I could barely hear her under the louder sound of the wind. I leaned closer to her. In the distance, up near the black limo, I could see Bloom in conversation with the man who’d almost jumped on the coffin.

“Just before she was killed...” Melanie said, and suddenly cut herself off, and turned sharply to look over her shoulder. Jim and his partner were approaching, Jim’s white hair blowing in the wind, Brad wearing a green felt hat that hid his balding pate, their footfalls crunching on the gravel path. “I’ll call you,” she said, and turned away, and began walking swiftly toward the parked cars.

“It was a nice service, don’t you think?” Jim asked.

“Yes,” I said. I was still watching Melanie. She turned once to look at me, nodded again as she’d done while the minister was speaking, and then opened the door of a yellow Mustang and climbed in behind the wheel. The engine caught. She looked at me again through the closed window and then backed the car out of its space and nosed it toward the cemetery gates. Together, the three of us began walking up the gravel path.

“Did you locate that attorney?” Jim asked.

“Yes, I did, thank you, Jim.”

“What attorney?” Brad asked.

“Vicky’s attorney. The one who looked over the contract we made with her.”

“Why?” Brad said, looking suddenly worried. “Was there something wrong with that contract?”

“No, no, everything in order,” I said.

At the end of the path we shook hands, and Jim and Brad went to the car they’d come in together. The black limo was gone now, and so were Konig and Miller. But Bloom was still standing alongside the wrought-iron fence, talking to the man who’d tried to jump on the coffin. I walked over to them and caught him mid-sentence.

“... should have been notified is all I’m saying.”

He stopped talking, looked at me, and then looked at Bloom questioningly.

“It’s all right,” Bloom said, “this is Vicky’s attorney, Matthew Hope.” Bloom knew this was a lie, and I knew it was a lie, but I recognized why he felt it was necessary. “This is Eddie Marshall, used to be Vicky’s producer when she was with Regal.”

Marshall looked at me again, appraisingly this time. “Oh, right,” he said, “they mentioned your name in the paper. You were the last one to see her alive.”

“Yes,” I said.

He studied me more closely, nodded, apparently decided it was okay to include me in the conversation, and then said to Bloom, “They may not even know she was killed is what I mean. They were the group, they should’ve been notified.”

“He’s talking about the band,” Bloom said to me.

“Wheat,” Marshall said, nodding again, “the group that backed her. Did anybody even think of contacting them? I mean, they were the ones who were closest to her. So where are they today when we’re putting her in the ground? Vicky was saying good-bye to this fuckin apple, and Wheat wasn’t here to send her off. That wasn’t right. I just couldn’t help myself, I had to say something.”

“Well, I’m sure the band must’ve heard about it,” Bloom said gently. “It was on network television Monday night.”

“Sure, if they were watching.”

“It’s in all the newspapers, too, Mr. Marshall. If they’d wanted to be here, they’d have been here.” He paused, and then said, “How’d you hear about it?”

“The newspapers.”

“When?”

“Late last night. I’m on vacation, I work in Georgia, I’m a DJ at a radio station up there. Left last Friday to go fishing on the Keys, didn’t learn about Vicky till I read the story last night, big follow-up story on her career. Are you familiar with the Keys?”

He was referring, of course, not to Calusa’s less celebrated keys, but to the Keys, the ones that meandered westward from Florida’s southernmost tip, leisurely sprawling into the Gulf of Mexico from Key Largo to Key West, where Ernest Hemingway once made his home, and where Tennessee Williams still does.

“Yes,” Bloom said, “it’s nice down there.”

“Borrowed a boat from a friend of mine in Islamorada Sunday, when I got there. Stopped off at Disneyworld first — have you ever been to Disneyworld in Orlando? — drove right on down afterward and went out on the water.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Jerry Cooper.”

“Is that a man or a woman?”

“A man.”

“So you left Georgia last weekend, is that it?”

“Yes, on the eleventh, last Friday.”

“And got to Islamorada when?”

“Sunday afternoon.”

“And went right out on the boat.”

“Yes. Didn’t come back in till last night. Didn’t even know Vicky was planning a comeback, learned all about it in the paper. I’d have been down here in a flash if I’d known, fuck Disneyworld, fuck the Keys, I’d have come straight to Calusa to catch her opening.”

“When did you get here?”

“Early this morning. Hopped right in the station wagon last night and started driving.”

“These other guys in the band...”

“The group.”

“Yeah, Wheat,” Bloom said. “Can you tell me their names?”

“The way I can tell you my own. Geoff Hamilton on lead guitar, Georgie Krantz on bass, and Neil Sadowsky on drums.”

“Got any idea where I can find them?”

“Geoff runs a music school in El Dorado, Arkansas. Teaches guitar mostly, but I think he gives mandolin and uke lessons, too.”

“How about the others, whatever their names are?”

“Georgie’s a piano tuner up in Falmouth, on the Cape. Cape Cod. Got a wife and three kids. Plays a gig every now and then, locally or in Boston, but what he really makes his living at is the tuning.”

“And the last one, what’s his name?”

“Neil Sadowsky, drummer with the group. I don’t know where he is now. He was living in New York last time we talked, oh, six months ago.”

“Spell those names for me, will you?” Bloom said, and took out his notebook. Marshall spelled all the names for him, and Bloom wrote them down in a neat, precise hand.

“Where are you staying here in Calusa?” he asked.

“No place yet, I just got here this morning.”

“Here’s my card,” Bloom said. “If you remember anything about where this Sadowsky guy might be, give me a call.”

“If I’m still here,” Marshall said. “I’m not due back till Monday morning, but after what happened...” He shook his head.

“Cutting the vacation short, huh?”

“Maybe.”

“Yeah,” Bloom said, and nodded. “Terrible thing. Well, I got to go,” he said. “Keep in touch, Matthew.”

“I will,” I said.

He spread his hand in a farewell fan, smiled over it, and then walked quickly to where the police car was parked.

“Have you got a minute, Mr. Hope?” Marshall asked. “Or are you in a hurry?”

“No hurry,” I said.

“I’ll walk you to your car.”

We began walking. The wind howled around us.

“I wanted to ask you...” Marshall said, and hesitated. “The newspaper suggested you’d been seeing Vicky regularly...”

“Well, not really.”

“Well, whatever,” Marshall said, “that’s none of my business. I’m saying — in light of what happened afterward — it’s good to know she might have had someone she could trust. Were you there at the opening?”

“No, I didn’t get to see her till Sunday night.”

“At Greensleeves, is that the name of the place?”

“The Greenery.”

“How’d she sound?”

“Not very good.”

The Ghia was where I’d parked it against the wrought-iron fence, its nose facing us. In the State of Florida you get only one license plate when you register your automobile and you affix this to the rear holder. This saves the state a lot of money each year, but it leaves the motorists with an empty holder at the front of the car. I had filled the emptiness on the Ghia with a metal plate that read: I’D RATHER BE SAILING. Marshall stopped at the car, glanced at the front plate, and said, “You’re a sailor, huh?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Me, too. Loved those couple of days I spent out on the water.” He shook his head. “So she was bad that night, huh?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Yeah, well, that was Vicky, all right. I loved her to death, but she had a voice like a nasal drip, monotonous, persistent, annoying as hell. It took every ounce of musical knowledge I possessed to make those albums sound like money, you know what I mean? Her looks didn’t hurt, either, she was really gorgeous back then. The picture I used on the ‘Frenzy’ sleeve — that was the first album — I poured her into this red sequined gown slit down to her navel and halfway up the leg. She had magnificent breasts and we showed everything but the nipples, believe me, great legs too, it was a stunning picture, we had it taken by a guy in New Orleans who used to work for Life magazine back in the forties and early fifties. What we were trying to sell, Mr. Hope, was youth and sex and a feeling of wildness, do you know, frenzy, Vicky in that red gown with her head thrown back and a wide smile on her face, one hand on her hip, lots of breast and leg and thigh showing. We were trying to make her a symbol for the sound I’d manufactured in the studio, beefed up her voice, used every trick I knew, made Wheat sound like the Beatles and the Stones all rolled together and blowing at the same time! They ate it up, wanted to eat her up as well, believe me, we had more damn calls — television shows, nightclubs, Vegas, New York, concert tours, everybody wanting her to make personal appearances, fat chance. That would’ve been the end of Victoria Miller, dead on the spot, the end of Wheat, too, the end of the whole big dazzling ball of wax.” He shook his head. He had delivered all this with such speed and intensity that, paradoxically, it left me feeling somewhat breathless.

“Poor darlin,” he said. “What’d she sing that night?”

“All the golden oldies.”

“Wrong choice. What was she wearing?”

“A white gown.”

“Slinky?”

“Slinky.”

“Low cut?”

“Not very.”

“But I’ll bet she looked terrific, didn’t she?”

“Yes, she looked beautiful.”

“What’d the critics have to say? Were there any reviews?”

“One, but I haven’t seen it yet.”

Marshall shook his head again. “She never should have tried it,” he said. “Not that way. If she’d wanted to make a comeback, all she had to do was pick up the phone, let me know what she wanted, I’d have dropped everything and come running. But the way she—”

“Did she know where to find you?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Then you’ve been in touch over the years?”

“Christmas cards. With little notes scribbled on them, how are you, what’re you doing, like that.”

“Did she send you one this past Christmas?”

“Never missed a Christmas.”

“But she didn’t mention the opening.”

“No, I only learned about that last night. God, if I’d known, I’d have been here in a minute! Me miss her opening? After all we’d been through together? No way. Did she seem worried that night? When you went to see her, I mean?”

“I didn’t think so at the time, but later, yes, it seemed to me she was troubled about something.”

“Did she say what?”

“Not really. We talked mostly about how it had gone that night, the show. She wanted to know if there’d been an unusual amount of chatter in the audience, thought she’d detected...”

“Yeah, that can be death, people talking during a performance, poor darlin.”

“I told her I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

“Well, good for you, I thank you for that.”

“By the way, she mentioned that you were the one who hadn’t allowed her to make any public appearances. In the past, I mean. When you were working together.”

“Ah, then she did mention me, huh?”

“Yes. She said — well, I really can’t remember her exact words, but it was something about Eddie not letting her perform live, and when I asked her who Eddie was, she said you’d been her producer at Regal.”

“That’s what I was, all right,” he said. “And a lot more, I guess.”

“Like what?”

“Mentor, adviser...” he said, and let the words trail.

“This must be hitting you pretty hard.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded bleakly, and then took from his pocket one of those leather cigarette cases with a lift-off top. I thought he was lighting a cigarette at first — until I caught a whiff of the smoke drifting on the air.

“Is that dope?” I asked.

“Little bit of grass,” he said. “Want a stick?”

“No, thanks.”

“Don’t you smoke?”

“I smoke.”

“What is it then? Are they tough on pot down here?”

“Let’s say they frown upon smoking it in public.”

“Who cares?” he said, and shrugged. “You sure you don’t want one? I’ve got a dozen more in the wagon, you won’t be depriving me.”

“No, thanks,” I said, “that’s okay.”

He sucked on the joint, let out a slow stream of smoke, and said, “You were telling me she seemed worried about something.”

“Yes.”

“Did she say what?”

“No.”

“Had someone threatened her, do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, did she mention any threats?”

“No.”

“A threatening letter maybe?”

“Nothing. Although...”

“Yes?”

“Someone did call Vicky on the night she was murdered.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, the sitter took the calls. The man wouldn’t leave his name.”

“It was a man then?”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“Well, nothing the first two times.”

“How many times did he call?”

“Three. And all he said the last time was ‘Tell Vicky I’ll be stopping by to collect.’ ”

“Collect what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well... did Vicky owe him something? Money or... I don’t know... what does a person come by to collect?”

The name leaped into my mind without warning, “Allison,” and came from my mouth before I even realized I’d thought it, “Allison,” and hung on the air to bring her to vivid recall for only a moment, a six-year-old darling in a granny nightgown, showing me her finger paintings and later sitting at my feet while she scribbled with her crayons — Allison.

“No, I don’t think so,” Marshall said, shaking his head. “People don’t say they’ll be coming by to collect a child. They’ll pick up a child, or...”

“I’ve heard the expression,” I said. “To collect someone. Especially when it’s a child.”

“Well... who would have been coming by to collect Allison? Was Tony Konig in town?”

“Yes, but...”

“He wouldn’t have been coming by for a six-year-old child at that hour of the night, would he?”

“No, that doesn’t sound likely.”

“Maybe Vicky arranged to have... I don’t know... something picked up. A rug to be cleaned, a vacuum to be repaired, a toaster, a lamp, who knows? And this was the serviceman calling to say he’d be stopping by to collect it.”

“At night?”

“No, the next day, whenever. Got the message on his answering service, called her back to let her know he’d be stopping by for whatever it was.”

“Maybe,” I said, and looked at my watch. “Mr. Marshall... I really have to get back to the office.”

“I’m sure that’s what it must have been,” Marshall said.

“Most likely,” I said. We shook hands. “It was nice meeting you,” I said. “Good-bye, Mr. Marshall.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Hope,” he said, and smiled forlornly.

All the way back to the office, I kept marveling at Bloom’s interrogatory technique. He had listened sympathetically while Marshall had rattled on about the injustice of no one having notified Vicky’s backup group that the funeral would be taking place today, and then, quietly and unobtrusively, had gone about the very important business of establishing just where some of the people who’d figured most importantly in her life might have been on the night she was killed. Marshall himself had been out on a boat down near the Keys, borrowed from a friend in Islamorada. I had no doubt that Bloom would be calling the friend to verify this. Geoff Hamilton, the group’s lead guitarist, was living in El Dorado, and George Krantz, the bass player, was up on the Cape, in Falmouth. If I knew Bloom, he would call Information to get telephone numbers for both these men, and then would follow up with full-scale, long-distance interviews. As for Neil Sadowsky, the group’s drummer, I had no idea how Bloom might go about tracking him down in New York, but I was certain he would figure out some way; the next time I saw him, I fully expected him to tell me he’d found out not only where Sadowsky was living, but also his shoe size.

It was almost ten-thirty when I entered the parking lot outside our offices, and pulled into the space marked MATTHEW HOPE, just alongside the one marked FRANK SUMMERVILLE. A yellow Mustang was parked in one of the RESERVED FOR CLIENTS spaces, and Melanie Simms was sitting behind the wheel. She was reading a magazine, but she looked up the moment I pulled in, and she had already opened the door of her car by the time I cut the engine. The wind caught her hair again, blowing it across her eyes. She brushed the hair away from her face with the back of one hand and waited for me to get out of the Ghia.

“Hello,” I said.

“I got your address from the phone book,” she said, and looked over her shoulder as though afraid we were being observed. “I was hoping you’d come straight here.”

“Come on in,” I said.

There was something essentially birdlike about Melanie Simms, a combination of nervous mannerisms that, I realized now, added up to what could have been mistaken for fear. Lacking the calm, unruffled grace of the bigger wading birds on Calusa’s shores, she moved instead with the quick, erratic energy of a tiny creature poised for flight, her head bobbing, her eyes darting, her arms held close to her body like folded wings. She was, I noticed, nibbling at her lower lip. Suddenly she glanced over her shoulder again, and I knew this was not part of the avian syndrome — she was genuinely afraid of something or someone.

“Cold enough for you?” Cynthia asked the moment we stepped into the reception area.

“Thought I’d go to the beach this afternoon,” I said.

“Ha! Anthony Konig called, wants you to call him back right away. Ditto Mr. Carlisle at Tricity, and Mr. Loeb at Pierson, Smith.”

“Get me Konig, the others can wait. Miss Simms, would you mind taking a seat, please? I won’t be a moment.”

“Thank you,” she said. She looked around, discovered with a start the bank of leather chairs facing Cynthia’s desk, and sat awkwardly, first crossing her legs, and then uncrossing them, and then making certain her skirt and black overcoat were firmly tucked under her. I went into my office just as Cynthia was dialing. She buzzed me an instant later.

“I’ve got Mr. Konig for you, on three.”

“Thank you,” I said, and stabbed at the lighted button in the base of my phone. “Mr. Konig,” I said, “it’s Matthew Hope.”

“Yes, how are you, thanks for calling back so soon. What’d you find out?”

“Her attorney knew nothing about a will.”

“Who’s that?”

“A woman named Dale O’Brien. That doesn’t preclude the existence of one, you understand. It simply means...”

“Yes, that her attorney didn’t draw it. Have the police found one? At the house, I mean.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Would you ask Bloom? I’d ask him myself, but that man really irritates me.”

“Yes, next time we talk.”

“What’s the next step? How do we find out for sure if there was one?”

“Well, if an attorney drew one and has the original in his possession, he’ll be filing it in Probate. Our own firm, for example, checks the obituary notices every day, and then cross-checks those against our list of clients. If Vicky drew the will herself, that’s another matter. But she’d have needed witnesses, and usually a person will call in friends or neighbors to do the witnessing. So if anyone has knowledge of the will, maybe he’ll come forward.”

“And maybe not. What do we do then?”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where she banked, would you?”

“No. Why?”

“Because people usually keep their wills in safe-deposit boxes. That could be a problem. We’d have to petition the court to appoint a temporary personal representative who’d then have the power to open the box.”

“Can you find out whether or not she had one?”

“I’ll have someone start checking the local banks, yes.”

“What if she didn’t?”

“We’ll worry about that when we come to it. There’s no great rush. If anyone has custody of a will, he’s required to deposit it with the clerk of the court within ten days after receiving information of a death. I’ll keep checking Probate. If nothing turns up, we’ll figure out our next move then.”

“Well, it would set my mind at ease,” Konig said. “If I knew whether or not there was a will.”

“I understand.”

“Don’t go away yet. Main reason I called is to tell you what Dwayne Miller said to me in the limo this morning.” He hesitated and then said, “I think he killed Vicky. I think he killed his own daughter and then stole my little girl afterward.”

“Mr. Konig,” I said, “this really is something you should be telling Detective Bloom.”

“No, I don’t want to be telling this to him, he’s got his thumb up his ass, he’ll never find who done this.”

“I really think...”

“You’re my lawyer, Mr. Hope, it’s you I want to talk to. This was on the way back from the cemetery,” he said, lowering his voice. “We were dropping me off first, I’m staying at the Breakwater Inn, I’m sure I told you that. Up to then the old bastard was sweet as mother’s milk, all condolences and grief. But all at once he started ranting and raving about the mistake Vicky’d made. Said he’d told her she was making a mistake, said there was nothing to gain by her making her comeback at a little restaurant out on Stone Crab. Told her...”

“Mr. Konig, how does any of this indicate that Mr. Miller...”

“Just hold on a minute,” Konig said. “He was getting more and more riled as we got closer to the hotel. He told me he’d seen Vicky Thursday night, night before she opened out there at the restaurant there. Told me they had a big argument about her trying to make her comeback this way, said he told her she shoulda tried to contact Eddie Marshall instead, wherever he was, get him to supervise her career the way he did last time around. Told her that singing at that shitty little restaurant wasn’t the way to do it. Wouldn’t get her any notice, would immediately class her with all the other piss-poor performers down here ’stead of the star she was and the star she could be again if only she got Eddie to work for her again.”

“I still don’t understand why you feel this would cast suspicion...”

“Told her if she went ahead with it, he’d disown her.”

“He said that?”

“God’s truth.”

“That if she opened at the Greenery, he’d disown her?”

“Her and Allison both.”

“Well... did the threat have any substance?”

“What do you mean, Mr. Hope?”

“Has he got anything that would have made a disinheritance meaningful?”

“Only four hundred acres of orange groves in Manakawa County is all. Plus half a dozen motels on the Tamiami Trail, between here and Fort Myers, and God knows how much in securities. Let me tell you something, Mr. Hope. Until I married Vicky, it wasn’t her making any money out of her records, it was her father. He was the one socking it into his bank account, he was the one came out of the whole thing with millions to spare.”

“So — from what you’re telling me, if I’ve got it straight — he warned that he would disinherit Vicky...”

“That’s right.”

“... if she opened at the Greenery as scheduled.”

“That’s absolutely right.”

“So why do you feel a threat of disinher—”

“Because of what he said next.”

“And what was that?”

“This is still Thursday night, mind you, this is him telling me what he was feeling the night before Vicky opened. And these are his exact words, Mr. Hope, may I drop dead on the spot here if this isn’t what he said to me just as the car was pulling up to my hotel.”

“What were those words, Mr. Konig?”

“The words were, ‘She refused flat out, the ungrateful little bitch. I shoulda killed her then and there.’ That’s what he said, Mr. Hope, may I be struck by lightning if those weren’t his precise words.”

“And you feel... ?”

“Well, how else can you take something like that? A man says he shoulda killed her then and there, that can only mean instead of later, am I right? He shoulda killed her then and there, when she refused to listen to him, instead of waiting till after she opened there at the restaurant against his will.”

“I don’t think his words necessarily meant...”

“I’m telling you that’s what they meant, Mr. Hope.”

I was silent for a moment.

“Well?” Konig said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Thanks for telling me, I’ll pass it on to Bloom.”

“Don’t pass anything on to that asshole, he doesn’t know how to do his damn job. Just go straight to the FBI with it, that’s what you should do, Mr. Hope.”

“Well, I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Let me know what you decide, will you? I’ll be here at the hotel till two, two-thirty.”

“I’ll call you,” I promised, and we both hung up. I sat looking at the phone for several moments, and then I buzzed Cynthia and asked her to send in Melanie Simms. She came into the office in her birdlike manner, stopping just inside the door to look around, and then turning to make certain she had closed the door behind her, and then taking a tentative step forward, and stopping, and then moving forward again to the chair before my desk.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” I said.

“No, no,” she said, “that’s perfectly all right.” She had begun nibbling at her lower lip again. She sat, and then blinked owlishly at me, and said, “Mr. Hope, I think I know who killed Vicky.”

She blinked again, and I blinked back at her. It was not usual for anyone in these offices to be discussing homicide; it was even less usual to have two different people in the space of ten minutes tell me they knew the identity of a murderer.

“Have you gone to the police with this?” I asked.

“I don’t want to get involved,” she said.

“I think the police...”

“Mr. Hope,” she said, “I know you were a friend of hers, I think you were, anyway, and I’m just wishing with all my heart that you’ll take this information I’m about to give you and do with it what needs to be done. My brother said I should stay out of it, just forget what I heard and let things take their natural course. But I liked Vicky a lot, Mr. Hope, she always had a kind word for everybody at the Greenery, even when she was busy rehearsing and trying to get the songs right. So I feel I owe this to her, I feel I’ve got to tell this to somebody who can maybe do something with it.”

“That would be the police,” I said. “If any of this is evidence important to the investigation — or indeed to a trial later on — the police would have to hear it from you directly, anyway. Sooner or later you’d have to...”

“I’ll worry about that when the time comes. Meanwhile, I want your word that you won’t say where you got this information.”

“I can’t make that promise.”

“Why not?”

“Because if it is information regarding a crime, I would feel obliged to give it to the police.”

“I thought this was like a confession box,” Melanie said.

“If you’re talking about lawyer-client privilege...”

“Yes, whatever you call it.”

“You’re not my client, Miss Simms. I have no reason to keep confidential anything you say here.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really do believe that if you have information about Miss Miller’s death, you should go to the police.”

“No, I can’t go to the police,” she said, “my brother would kill me.”

The word “kill” sent a shiver up her spine, causing her shoulders to pull up into an involuntary shrug. She sucked in a hissing stream of breath, and then clenched her hands tightly in her lap, as though trying to squeeze the last remnants of the tremor from her body. She turned swiftly to look at the closed door. She turned back to me again. She crossed her legs. She uncrossed them. She crossed them again, and then tucked her skirt and her coat around her. In a whisper she said, “It was Mr. Sherman.”

“Jim Sherman?” I said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You think Mr. Sherman killed Vicky?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What makes you think so?”

“What makes me think so is what I heard last Friday night.”

“And what was that, Miss Simms?”

She turned to look at the closed door again.

“Is that locked?” she asked.

“No, it’s not.”

“Could you lock it, please?”

“Miss Simms, there’s a receptionist sitting just down the hall, she won’t allow anyone in here without first...”

“Please lock it, Mr. Hope.”

Sighing, I rose from behind my desk, went to the door, and locked it. The notion of Jim Sherman killing Vicky, or anyone, for that matter, was entirely absurd, and I was beginning to think Melanie Simms was a bit unhinged. But I came back to the desk and sat in the swivel chair behind it once again and patiently said, “All right, the door is locked.”

“This was Friday night,” she said. “I was working the lounge. That was where I waited on you Sunday, do you remember?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It was quiet around then, this must’ve been about eight, eight-fifteen, the people hadn’t yet started coming in for the show. The dining room was busy, but not the lounge.”

I tried to visualize the lounge as it must have looked on Vicky’s opening night, the room lush with fresh plants supplied by Fleur de Lis, Boston ferns and Swedish ivy, vining philodendron and dieffenbachia, votive candles in ruby-red holders on white tablecloths, the pleasant hum of conversation, the clink of ice in cocktail — but no, that would have been closer to nine, when the room was crowded with people waiting for the show to start. Melanie was talking about an earlier time, the Happy Hour already gone, the lounge dim and relatively empty, the bartender listening to the piano player as he stroked all the old tunes from all the old Broadway—

“The phone behind the bar rang, and Danny picked it up. It was Vicky calling from her dressing room. She said she was dying of thirst and could someone bring her a Perrier with a little lime in it. Danny mixed the drink, and I carried it back to her. The dressing room at the Greenery, what it is, it used to be part of the ladies’ room, like a little sort of lounge area off to the side, you know? That’s when the restaurant first opened and Mr. Sherman and Mr. Atherton had no plans for bringing in entertainment. But then they hired Vicky and she needed a place to change, so they put up these fancy screens, you know, and a red velour curtain on these brass rings, and they fixed it up with a dressing table with lights around it, and a nice chair and a couch, you know, everything a person would need. I’m explaining it in detail like this because you have to understand how I could hear what they were saying in there. I mean, there’s no door, you see. Just the screens, and the velour curtain behind them, which you push back on this big brass rod. That’s how I happened to hear what they were saying. What Vicky and Mr. Sherman were saying.

“I didn’t know if I should go in at first. You can’t knock on a curtain, you know, and I was standing outside there with the Perrier and lime on a tray, and listening to them, and I had the feeling I shouldn’t be listening to this, it was none of my business what they were saying, but at the same time Vicky’d asked for the drink, she’d called the bar to say she was dying of thirst, so what should I do? I figured she’d made her call before Mr. Sherman got there, before this argument between the two of them started, and I felt pretty sure she wouldn’t want me breaking in on them with the Perrier. But there I was with it, and listening to everything they said, and I didn’t know whether I should just pull the curtain back, you know, and say, ‘Hi,’ as if I hadn’t heard anything, or maybe just go back to the bar and tell Danny she’d changed her mind, I just didn’t know. So I just stood there.

“What they were arguing about, I began to figure out, was the material she’d picked to sing there at the Greenery for her opening night, the same stuff she was singing on Sunday night when you were there. But on Friday there was still time to change it. I mean, on Friday that girl from the Herald-Tribune was going to be there listening to Vicky so she could write a review on her — what’s her name, the girl on the Tribune, Joan something...”

“Jean Riverton,” I said. Jean was hardly a “girl.” She was fifty-four years old and what might have been best described as a virulent boil on the backside of Calusa’s creative community; her reviews, all too often scathing, could shut down a performance overnight. I had missed the one she’d written on Vicky’s opening because I’d been out on the water with my daughter until late Sunday afternoon.

“Yes, Jean Riverton, that’s her name,” Melanie said, “you know the girl I mean. She was supposed to be there Friday night — well, actually she was there, but not just then, this was still maybe eight-fifteen, eight-thirty — and Mr. Sherman was telling Vicky it still wasn’t too late to put at least a few rock-and-roll songs in the repertory... is that the word, repertory?”

“Yes, repertory.”

“Instead of giving them a program of all that — excuse me, but this is exactly what he said — all that old-fart stuff from the forties and fifties. He told Vicky she was known as a rock-and-roll singer, that was how she’d made her reputation, she wasn’t Dinah Shore, she wasn’t Rosemary Clooney, she wasn’t Ella Fitzgerald, she wasn’t Teresa Brewer, she wasn’t Sarah Vaughan, she was Victoria Miller and that stood for hard rock and what she was planning to sing tonight was soft shlock. That was the word he used, shlock, what does shlock mean?”

“Well, just go on,” I said.

“Mr. Sherman told her he’d been telling her this for the past two weeks now, ever since rehearsals started with that mummified relic — those were his words, too — who played for all those opera singers at the Helen Gottlieb, but Vicky wouldn’t listen, she just wouldn’t listen, and now she’d be going on in a half-hour, less than a half-hour, and couldn’t she for Christ’s sake please ask the piano player to play at least one of the songs she’d made famous, didn’t the piano player at least know ‘Frenzy,’ everybody in the whole world knew ‘Frenzy.’ Vicky very calmly said yes, they had gone over this a hundred times in the past two weeks, and she thought it’d been decided that the crowd in Calusa was an older crowd and that the songs she used to sing back in the sixties wouldn’t be the proper songs to sing for them, especially not in an intimate lounge like the one there at the Greenery, and especially not with just a piano accompaniment, even if the piano player was only a mummified relic — she was imitating Mr. Sherman there, you know, mimicking him — and that she certainly didn’t want to discuss it now, twenty-five minutes before she went on, so would he mind getting — this is what she said, Mr. Hope, so you’ll have to excuse me — would he mind getting the fuck out?

“Well, the discussion till then had been more or less on a civilized level, you know, nobody really raising his or her voice, just the two of them having at it like a husband and wife who are arguing over money or the kids or whatever, but all of a sudden Mr. Sherman went through the roof. He asked her who the hell she thought she was, ordering him out of a dressing room that had cost him close to two thousand dollars to set up for her, lights around the goddamn dressing table — excuse me — and full-length mirrors all over the place, and the couch she asked for so she could rest before a performance and the heavy velour curtains and the ornate screens, who the hell did she think she was, some kind of star still? Some kind of star selling million-copy gold records instead of a has-been selling real estate in a grubby office on Sabal Key? Don’t you tell me to get out of here, you...”

Melanie stopped abruptly. She clasped her hands in her lap again, and then looked down at her shoes and — her face beginning to flush — said, “This is what he said, I’m only repeating it, Mr. Hope. He said, ‘Don’t you tell me to get out of here, you cheap little cunt,’ and that was when one or the other of them, I don’t know which one because I couldn’t see what was going on, I could only hear from where I was standing outside the curtain, one of them slapped the other one, I don’t know if it was Vicky slapping Mr. Sherman or the other way around. But there was the sound of this slap, you know, and then just silence. I stood there thinking I’d better not go in after all, I’d better just go back to the bar and say she’d changed her mind, or maybe just pour the drink out and take back the empty glass. When Mr. Sherman started talking again, his voice was very, very low, I could hardly hear him, so maybe she was the one slapped him after all, and he was steaming as a result, you know, and talking very low the way people do when they’re boiling mad. He said, ‘Fine, very good, so long as we understand each other. If that other cunt, the one on the Tribune gives you a bad review tonight, and if people stay away from this restaurant because of you and that forties shit you plan to sing, then lady, you are dead. Believe me, lady, you are dead.’ I knew he’d be coming out then, and I knew he’d realize I’d been listening if he caught me standing there, so I ducked outside the screens and went back to the bar with the drink and told Danny she’d changed her mind. But you know, Mr. Hope, Joan Riverton’s review... Jean Riverton’s... was very bad the next day, in the paper, I mean. It was really awful. And I don’t know whether Mr. Sherman was saying Vicky’d be dead, you know, meaning she’d be fired or something, or whether he meant she’d really be dead, which is what happened to her, didn’t it? Somebody killed her on Sunday night, and it was Mr. Sherman who said, ‘Believe me, lady, you are dead.’ ”

She took a deep breath. She nodded, and then looked down at her hands — still clasped in her lap — and then looked up again, directly into my eyes, and said like a challenge, “That’s what I heard last Friday night.”