Rumpelstiltskin

9

“It’s Aftra,” Bloom said on the telephone.

It was a little after nine o’clock and I was running late. I had just got out of the shower, in fact, and was standing with a towel wrapped around my waist, dripping water all over the white bedroom broadloom that must have cost the owner of the house I was renting at least twenty dollars a square yard.

“I guess maybe it’s capitalized,” Bloom said. “Capital A, capital F, capital T...”

“What is it?” I asked. “A country in Africa?”

“AFTRA? No, it’s a union. The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The union Eddie Marshall belongs to. Or — as they have him listed in their files — Edward Richard Marshall. I called the Atlanta local not five minutes ago. They checked their Rolodex and came up with a current address for him in a town called Valdosta, population around thirty-five thousand, county seat of Lowndes County, not too far from the Florida border. We’ve been ringing there, but no answer. Kenyon just finished going through the stuff that nice lady in Skokie sent us, came up with three FM and four AM stations for Valdosta. We’re calling all of them now, trying to reach him.”

“Good,” I said.

“I tried you at the office first,” he said. “You weren’t there yet.”

It sounded like a reprimand. I said nothing. I had left Dale’s house at two in the morning, and I had slept — on and off — for less than six hours; I felt hardly less than refreshed, even after my shower.

“We finally reached Miller. He’ll be coming in here at eleven, right after the little girl’s funeral. What time is it now, anyway?”

“I haven’t got my watch on,” I said.

“Ten after nine,” he said, answering himself. “I’d like you to hear what he has to say, but if you were present he’d probably scream we were violating his rights. Maybe I can convince him to let us tape the interview. You think he’d let us tape it?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I will. I’ll use the old ‘If You Have Nothing to Hide’ routine. Where’ll you be around eleven, eleven-thirty?”

“At the office. I hope.”

“I’ll call you there. You’re not going to the funeral, huh?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Well, okay, I’ll talk to you later.”

“I ran into Jim Sherman yesterday,” I said.

“Oh? Where?”

“The rodeo. Out in Ananburg. He was miffed that I’d gone to the police.”

“Tell him to relax, we’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

“That’s what I told him. Who’s the bigger fish?”

“Whoever killed Vicky and her little girl. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t him. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Right,” I said, and hung up and went back into the bathroom to shave. My face was full of lather when the telephone rang again. It was Arthur Kincaid, the man who’d called the night before to ask me about the coal-mine tax shelter.

“Don’t you ever return your calls?” he asked.

“I got in late last night, Artie, I’m sorry.”

“I just called you at the office,” he said. “Do you know what time it is?”

“It’s nine-twenty,” I said, looking at the bedside clock.

“That’s right. What time do you go to work?”

“Artie,” I said, “I’m running late this morning. Send me the offering brochure, I’ll look it over and get back to you.”

“When?”

“When I’ve formed an opinion.”

“When will that be?”

“I’ll get to you by the end of the week,” I said.

“I’ll send it over by messenger.”

“Fine.”

“Can you get to it this afternoon?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then when?”

“Artie...”

“All right, all right,” he said. “As soon as you can, all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you, Matthew,” he said, and hung up.

I had finished shaving and had rinsed my face and flossed my teeth and combed my hair when the telephone rang again. I stomped out naked into the bedroom and snatched the receiver from the cradle.

“Hello!” I said.

“Wow,” Dale said.

“Oh, hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, this phone’s been going like sixty.”

“I know, I’ve been trying you for the past ten minutes.”

“Where are you?”

“Home,” she said. “In bed.”

“I just got up myself a little while ago.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I have a client coming to the office at ten-thirty, what time is it now?”

“Nine-thirty,” I said.

“Guess I’d better get up then, huh?”

“I think so.”

“I wish you were here with me,” she whispered.

“Mm, me too.”

“When am I going to see you again?”

“How about tonight?”

“What time?”

“I don’t know what’s waiting for me at the office, I’ll have to call you later.”

“Okay, I won’t make any other plans.” She hesitated. “Matthew?” she said.

“Yes?”

“No, never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”

“What were you about to say?”

“No, nothing.”

“All right then.”

We said our good-byes, and I began dressing. I was in my undershorts when the next call came. I looked at the phone incredulously. I let it ring. I kept looking at it. Finally I picked it up. “Hello?” I said wearily.

“Matthew, it’s me again,” Bloom said. “We located Marshall, or at least we found the station he’s working for, little AM station up there in Valdosta, plays mostly rock. I spoke to the station manager, a man named Ralph Slater, he told me Marshall left for a week’s vacation after his show last Friday, he’s got a morning show he does from nine to twelve, took off right after it, said he was going fishing on the Keys. But he’s not back yet.”

“Well, maybe...”

“He was due back this morning,” Bloom said. “So where the hell is he?”

I did not get to Bloom’s office until two o’clock that afternoon because by the time I got to work there were three dozen calls piled up and two people waiting to see me, and then Abe Pollock called and asked me to have lunch with him in atonement for not having yet got those liquor figures to me, which he promised to have by tomorrow at the very latest if he could get his client off his dead ass. After lunch my daughter called from St. Mark’s to say she’d left the house without any money this morning, and she had to pay for her yearbook pictures today at the very latest so could I please send someone over with a check for twelve dollars and fifty cents? I wrote out a personal check and asked Cynthia to drive it over there, and then buzzed Frank to tell him I’d have to skip the afternoon meeting with him and Karl because Bloom had called and wanted me to listen to the tape he’d made of the Q and A with Dwayne Miller. Frank asked me when I had begun working for the Calusa P.D.

We listened to the tape in Bloom’s office.

He had told me that Miller had come in voluntarily after they’d finally managed to reach him early this morning at his house in Manakawa. Miller claimed to have been on a fishing trip with some buddies, leaving Saturday morning just before dawn and not getting back until very late last night. He had not learned that his granddaughter was dead until Detective Kenyon informed him of the fact on the telephone. He seemed annoyed that Konig — instead of himself — had made all the funeral arrangements. Surprisingly, though, considering his normal cantankerous nature and his further annoyance over Konig’s usurpation of what he considered to be his grand-paternal obligation, he told Bloom he would have no objection to their entire conversation being taped; all he was interested in was finding the person who’d killed his daughter and little Allison. The tape started with someone, presumably Bloom, blowing into the microphone, and then his voice intoning the words, “Testing, one, two, three, four,” and then a click and a pause and another click and then Bloom’s voice saying, “This will be a recording of the questions put to Dwayne Miller and of his responses thereto made this twenty-first day of January at ten-fifteen a.m. in the Public Safety Building of the Calusa Police Department, Calusa, Florida. Questioning Mr. Miller was Detective Morris Bloom of the Calusa Police Department. Also present was Detective Peter Kenyon.” There was another pause, and then Bloom went through the entire Miranda-Escobedo song-and-dance and elicited from Miller the information that he was willing to answer police questions without an attorney present. The interview began:

“Mr. Miller, you told me before I started the tape here that you’ve been on a fishing trip from early Saturday morning till late last night, which would’ve been late Sunday night. Can you tell me what time you left your home on Saturday morning?”

“I was picked up at a quarter to five.”

“That would be four-forty-five a.m. on Saturday, January nineteenth, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you returned at what time?”

“About two in the morning.”

“Two this morning? Monday, the twenty-first?”

“Yes.”

“Were you aware at any time during your trip that your granddaughter, Allison Konig—”

“No, I was not aware.”

“That she’d been found dead Friday night?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have gone on the trip if I’d known that. As it was, I only went to shake the grief I was feeling over Vicky.”

“Were you on a boat all that time, Mr. Miller?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Wasn’t there a radio on the boat?”

“Yes, there was, but we had no need to turn it on. The weather was beautiful, we didn’t have to listen for any Coast Guard reports or anything.”

“Who else was on this trip with you?”

“Man named Stan Hopper, who owns the boat, and another man named Dick Oldham.”

“Just the three of you.”

“That’s all.”

“Did either of the other men know about your granddaughter’s death?”

“No, sir, they did not.”

“I’d like to contact them later, if you don’t mind—”

“Not at all.”

“To ascertain the times you’ve given me, if that’s all right.”

“Yes, that’s fine.”

“Mr. Miller, I’d like to talk about this trust you set up for your daughter back in 1965.”

“What about it?”

“I’m sure you know the terms of the trust.”

“I’m the one who set it up, of course I know the terms of it.”

“You know, for example, that your daughter Vicky was the primary beneficiary—”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And your granddaughter was the alternate beneficiary.”

“Not at the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I created the trust, there was no granddaughter. Vicky wasn’t even married. This was 1965, she was only twenty years old.”

“But from what I understand—”

“Yes, provision was made for her children, if ever she had any, to be alternate beneficiaries, yes. As it turned out, she only had the one, Allison. She miscarried with the first child.”

“Mr. Miller, did you also know that if both your daughter and your granddaughter died before the trust terminated, the accumulated income and principal would revert to you as grantor of the trust?”

“Yes, I knew that.”

“Did you know the termination date of that trust?”

“Yes. It was to terminate on my daughter’s thirty-fifth birthday.”

“Would you know the date?”

“January twenty-second.”

“Then your daughter would have been thirty-five years old tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“And you knew all this.”

“I knew all of it, yes.”

“Mr. Miller, did you visit your daughter on the night before she opened her singing engagement at the Greenery? That would have been a Thursday night, January the tenth.”

“Yes, I went to see her.”

“Where did this meeting take place?”

“At her house. On Citrus Lane, out there near the ball park.”

“Why did you go there?”

“To try to convince her to back out of what she was about to do.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The job she had at the Greenery. I told her it’d be bad for her. I told her it still wasn’t too late for her to call the whole thing off, get in touch with Eddie Marshall, like she should’ve in the first place, if she wanted to resume her career.”

“You felt Mr. Marshall would have been of help to her, is that it?”

“Damn right he would’ve. It was Eddie who made her a star all those years ago. You want my opinion, he’s the one she should’ve married, and not that money-grubbing fool Tony.”

“Oh? Was there something more than a professional relationship between your daughter and Mr. Marshall?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, I—”

“Where were you when all this was happening? On the moon someplace? Back there in the sixties, you couldn’t open a magazine without there being something about Vicky in it. And about Eddie, too.”

“About their relationship, do you mean?”

“Yes, their romance, whatever you want to call it. I’ll tell you, I thought sure they’d get married one day, it seemed so right. But I guess Tony turned her head, all his big important friends, you know. My daughter was just a country girl — a star, yes, but at heart just a barefoot kid from Arkansas. May’ve been my fault, I don’t know. I put everything into that trust, you see, had all the income go right back into it, gave Vicky a modest allowance, but that was all. So she kept getting invited to that big mansion Tony had over near the university out there on St. Charles, Arabella and St. Charles, and she was meeting New Orleans society, and politicians from Washington, and singing stars from all over the country, and people who owned radio stations and record companies and whatnot, and before you knew it Eddie seemed like small-time stuff to her. Just a little Eye-talian boy from someplace in California, that’s all. Never mind he made her a star. That didn’t count anymore once Tony Konig sank his teeth into her.”

“Italian? Marshall doesn’t sound like...”

“Well, he changed his name, you see. Years ago.”

“Would you know what his maiden name was?”

“What?”

“The name he was born with.”

“No, I don’t. Don’t think I ever even heard it, in fact. He changed it before he left California, he was Eddie Marshall time I met him.”

“What was his reaction when your daughter decided to marry Konig?”

“Well, who knows? He never said nothin about it, but I guess it must’ve hurt him, wouldn’t you think? Got my daughter three gold records, didn’t he? Saw her day and night, they must’ve been sleepin together, I’d say. Kids back then were doin whatever they felt like, it wasn’t like when we were kids. So I’m sure they were sleepin together, and I’m sure it must’ve hurt Eddie when she broke the news to him. Well, she made a mistake, that’s for sure. I could tell right off she’d made a mistake. Tried to make up for her bad marriage by workin herself to death. That’s how she lost the first baby. Drove herself and the band too hard workin on that album, the one they were gonna call ‘More Vicky.’ Lost the baby, sure enough. And then quit the business.”

“Do you have any idea why she decided to try a comeback at this time?”

“No idea at all. Unless it was because she knew all that money would be coming in soon, and figured she could take a chance.”

“Did she mention anything about the money that night? Anything at all about the trust?”

“No, sir, we did not discuss money at all. What we talked about was her doing this damn fool thing out there at the Greenery. I told her it was wrong, I told her it’d be a disaster. Which is just what it turned out to be, didn’t it. Did you read what that bitch wrote about her in the paper?”

“But Vicky wouldn’t listen to you, is that right?”

“Wouldn’t listen, that’s right.”

“Mr. Miller, did you threaten to disinherit her?”

“I did.”

“Then you did discuss money.”

“Well, in that sense, yes.”

“In the sense that you meant you’d somehow change the provisions of the trust—”

“Well, yes, but I think she knew I was bluffing.”

“But you did mention the trust.”

“Well, yes, in passing.”

“Because you said earlier—”

“Yes, I know what I said, and I’ll say it again. We did not discuss the trust, per se, we did not discuss the details of the trust, the money in the trust, we did not discuss money. Except as I told her I’d disinherit her if she went ahead with that job at the Greenery.”

“And she knew you meant the trust.”

“I suppose she knew it. She also knew I was bluffing.”

“In what way?”

“Well, she probably knew the trust was irrevocable, and I couldn’t change it if I wanted to.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“No, I never told her anything about the trust but what I thought she needed to know.”

“Which was what?”

“That everything in it would be hers when she got to be thirty-five.”

“Did you tell her how much was in it?”

“Nope.”

“Did you mention that Allison was alternate beneficiary?”

“Nope.”

“Did your attorney ever discuss the trust with her?”

“Nope. Why should he?”

“Then all she knew was that when she reached the age of thirty-five the trust would terminate and everything in it would be hers.”

“That’s all she knew.”

“Mr. Miller, before we started talking here, I advised you of your rights, and I mentioned that you could stop this interview at any time just by telling me so, do you remember that?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“I’d like to ask you some specific questions now about where you were, exactly, between the hours of three a.m. on Monday morning, January thirteenth, and nine a.m. that same morning. If you have any objections to answering such questions, then please tell me so, and we’ll end the interview.”

“That’s when my daughter got killed, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, she was killed sometime between those hours.”

“I have no objection to answering any questions you might put to me. I want to help you find who did this, that’s all.”

“Can you tell me where you were that morning?”

“I was with a woman named Gretchen Heibel at her home on Westview Road out on Fatback Key.”

“Do you have the address there?”

“Yes, it’s 642 Westview.”

“And you were with her from three a.m. that morning—”

“I was with her from eight p.m. Sunday night, when I picked her up for dinner, and then we went back to her house afterward, and we spent the night together, and I left for the groves first thing in the morning.”

“What time would that have been?”

“What?”

“When you left for the groves?”

“About eight-thirty.”

“Eight-thirty a.m. on Monday morning.”

“Yes, around then.”

“Did you or Miss Heibel — Gretchen Heibel, did you say?”

“Yes, Heibel.”

“Would you spell that for me, please?”

“H-E-I-B-E-L. Heibel.”

“Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“Miss.”

“Did you or Miss Heibel leave the house anytime between three a.m. and nine a.m. that Monday morning?”

“No, sir, we did not.”

“That’s neither of you.”

“Neither of us, correct.”

“And she’ll confirm that?”

“I’m sure she will.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Two or three months, it must be... well, wait, we met just after Thanksgiving.”

“Is it a close relationship?”

“Not close enough so that she’d lie for me where murder’s involved.”

“Would you describe it as casual then?”

“I would describe it as an adult relationship between a man of fifty-six and a woman of forty-seven, that’s how I would describe it.”

“I’d appreciate it, Mr. Miller, if you refrained from telephoning her before we have a chance to speak to her.”

“If you plan on visiting her—”

“I do.”

“You won’t find her at home, not during the business day, anyway. She works in the sales office at Timucuan Cove, that’s the new condominium going up on Whisper.”

“Thank you, I’ll try her there.”

“Quits at five.”

“Thank you. Mr. Miller, I’m going to warn you again that you can end this interview anytime you—”

“Stop warning me so much, I ain’t about to end it.”

“Your granddaughter, as you know—”

“Do we have to talk about Allison? For God’s sake, I’ve just come from putting her in the ground!”

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“It’s just... well, damn it, ask your questions, let’s get it over with.”

“Your granddaughter was found at eight-thirty p.m. this past Friday, that was January the eighteenth. The medical examiner has estimated the time of her death as six p.m., and I’d like to know now, Mr. Miller, where you were between four-thirty that afternoon and eight-thirty that night.”

“I was with a woman named Gretel Heibel at her home on Westview Road out on Fatback Key.”

“You mean Gretchen.”

“No, Gretel.”

“You said—”

“This is Gretel. Gretchen’s sister.”

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

“And her address, Mr. Miller?”

“The same as Gretchen’s, 642 Westview.”

“They live in the same house?”

“Yes, sir, they do.”

“And you were with—”

“I went to the house Friday to have a drink with Gretel and Gretchen at five-thirty. Gretchen had a dinner date, so she left around seven sometime. Gretel and I had dinner alone there, and we spent the rest of the night together.”

“Did either of you leave the house at any time between—”

“No, sir, we did not. I was there from five p.m. Friday till about four a.m. the next morning, at which time I got up, and let myself out, and went back to my own house ’cause I was expecting Stan Hopper and Dick Oldham to pick me up for the fishing trip.”

“Had either of the Heibel sisters heard anything about your granddaughter’s death?”

“I can’t speak for Gretchen, because she didn’t come home that night. But neither Gretel nor I was watching television or listening to the radio — we had the record player going — neither of us heard a word about it. I told you before, I wouldn’t have gone on that fishing trip if I’d known my little granddaughter had... had... been killed.”

“Where can I find Gretel Heibel?”

“At the house.”

“Will she be there during the day?”

“Yes, she works at home. She illustrates children’s books.”

“Anything you want to add to this, Mr. Miller? Or clarify? Or change?”

“Nope, nothing.”

“All right then, that’s it.”

Bloom snapped off the cassette player and said, “What do you think?”

“Have you talked to the ladies yet?”

“Not yet, I was going to later. Figured I’d wait till Gretchen — is she the one who sells the condos? — gets home, kill two birds with one stone. Yeah, she’s the one at Timucuan Cove. Gretel’s the one who does the children’s books. Boy, I can’t wait till I’m fifty, sixty years old. Konig and Miller have had more sex over the past weekend than I’ve had in the past two weeks out there on old Avenida del Sol. You want to know why my wife fell in love with our house? Because her father’s name was Sol. I told her ‘Sol’ means ‘sun’ in Spanish, it’s Avenue of the Sun. She said she didn’t care what Sol meant in Spanish, to her Sol would always mean Sol Fishbein, God rest his soul. So we live in a hacienda-style house on Avenida del Sol, and I haven’t had any sex in the past two weeks because I’m on this fecockteh diet and I haven’t got the energy, if you want to know.”

“Have you contacted the fishermen yet?”

“Yeah, the big fishermen. Dick Oldham and Stan Hopper, or vice versa. They confirm Miller’s story, he was with them from early Saturday morning to late Sunday night. Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t out slitting his granddaughter’s throat on Friday night. You want to come with me later? When I go see the Dolly Sisters? It’ll be after you quit work, you won’t have to worry. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll buy you a beer afterward,” Bloom said, and grinned.

Fatback Key is in Calusa County, but it is not within the city limits of Calusa itself. Instead, it falls within the boundaries of Manakawa to the south. Fatback is the wildest and narrowest of the county’s several keys, flanked on east and west by the Gulf and the bay, two bodies of water that during the hurricane season sometimes join over Westview Road, the two-lane blacktop that skewers Fatback north to south. The bridge connecting Fatback to the mainland is a humpback that can accommodate only one car at a time. Directly over the bridge is a large wooden signpost with two dozen arrows pointing off either left or right, the names of the key’s residents carved into the wooden arrows and then painted in with white. Dusk was falling as we came over the bridge, the wooden planks rumbling under the wheels of Bloom’s car, his headlights on in anticipation of the dark, which sometimes comes quite suddenly in Calusa. He pulled in alongside the directional sign, and we both scanned the sheaf of bristling wooden arrows, found the name HEIBEL lettered on one of them, and turned to the left and southward.

The Heibel house was on the bay side and marked with a simple wooden plaque standing in the sand and bearing only the sisters’ last name. The mailbox was just across the road, on the Gulf side, and marked with the numerals 642. The house itself must have been built back in the twenties, when land speculation was earning fortunes for those wise enough to have discovered the beauty and serenity of the county’s most beautiful key. It resembled more than anything else the sort of Beverly Hills mansion a silent-screen star might have lived in, inspired by Spanish-mission architecture, with white stucco walls and orange tiled roofs, and arched windows and stone paths that meandered through cloisters of palms toward the water on the bay side, which I could see through an open patio overhung with ferns. Bloom rang the front door bell.

The woman who answered the door was wearing a paint-spattered blue smock over jeans. She was perhaps five feet eight in her bare feet, and her blond hair was pulled back into a pony tail at the back of her neck, a style that seemed too young for her age, which I guessed to be somewhere in the early forties. She had the kind of elegant Teutonic beauty typified by Hildegarde Neff, her blue eyes mildly quizzical as she peered out into the dusk and said, “Yes, can I help you?” There was only the faintest trace of a German accent in her speech.

“I’m Detective Bloom, Calusa Police Department,” Bloom said, and showed her his shield and his laminated I.D. card. “This is Matthew Hope.”

“Yes?” she said.

“Miss Heibel?”

“I am Gretel Heibel, yes?”

“Miss Heibel, I wonder if we might come in for a moment.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“We’d like to ask you some questions.”

“This is about the murders, isn’t it?” she said. “I know Dwayne’s daughter was killed...”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And now his granddaughter. I heard on the television that also his granddaughter was found murdered.”

“Yes, Friday night.”

“Ach,” she said, and sighed heavily.

“That’s what we want to talk about,” Bloom said.

“Ach,” she said again, and stepped aside and said, “Well, come in, please.”

The entry floor was laid with terra-cotta Mexican tiles, and the half-wall at its farthest end was lined with plants in large clay tubs. Above the low wall was a colonnade of stark white posts beyond which was a huge living room with arched doorways leading out to the illuminated swimming pool and the bay beyond. Just inside the arches a long table was set up with paint pots and jars of water and drawing paper and brushes and pencils and soap erasers and paint-smeared rags, all bathed in the glow of an angular desktop Luxo lamp.

“I was working,” she said, “please forgive the mess. I like to work where I can see the bay. I used to work in a room upstairs, but it overlooks the Gulf, and the view is sometimes too wild there for my kind of illustration. I do children’s books,” she explained.

“Yes, Mr. Miller told us,” Bloom said.

“Please sit down,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“Something soft perhaps? A Coke? Some iced tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, then,” she said, and smiled, and waited for Bloom to begin.

“We were hoping your sister would be here by now,” he said.

“Yes, she should be home any time now. Did you want to speak to her as well?”

“If we may.”

“Yes, surely. What is it you want to know?”

“Miss Heibel, can you tell us where you were this past Friday between the hours of four-thirty p.m. and eight-thirty p.m.?”

He had not, I noticed, mentioned anything about wanting to confirm Miller’s alibi, had not given her the slightest clue that the only thing of real interest to him was the whereabouts of Dwayne Miller on the night his granddaughter was killed. He had told her only that he was from the police, that he was here to talk about the murders, and that he wanted to question both her and her sister. For all Gretel knew, she herself might have been a suspect. She sat watching him expectantly now, considering her answer, her slender hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles, her blue eyes blinking nervously.

“I was here,” she said. “Friday night I was here.”

“How about Friday afternoon?”

“Yes, I was also here. Working.”

“Alone?”

“My sister came home at about five. I was alone until then.”

“And were you and your sister here for the rest of the night?”

“No, my sister had a dinner engagement. She left here about seven.”

“Leaving you alone?”

“No, Dwayne was here, too.”

“When did he get here, Miss Heibel?”

“At about five-thirty. We had drinks together, the three of us.”

“And then your sister left.”

“At about seven, yes.”

“And you and Mr. Miller stayed here.”

“Yes, we had dinner together.”

“Did he leave after dinner?”

“No, he spent the night here. We are lovers, you see.”

“What time did he leave?”

“Early the next morning. I was sound asleep, but I know he set the alarm for three a.m. I would say he left sometime between three and four. I know he was going on a fishing trip.”

“Would you know where your sister was that night?”

“You will have to ask her.”

I didn’t know quite why Bloom had asked that last question. I did know that a medical examiner’s estimate of the time of death was at best an approximate guess that took into account such variables as the temperature of the air and God knew what else. The ME’s report had set the time of Allison’s death as six p.m., but in each of Bloom’s interviews — first with Konig and then with Miller and now with Gretel — he’d asked where they’d been at four-thirty p.m., which meant he was giving the ME a ninety-minute leeway for error. Miller hadn’t got here to Fatback Key until five-thirty on the afternoon Allison was killed. He could have made it here from the Cushing Sports Arena in less than forty minutes, depending on traffic. Similarly, if Gretchen Heibel — the real-estate-selling sister — was somehow involved in this, she could easily have driven from Fatback Key to Calusa before that teenager discovered Allison in the drainage ditch. I surmised this was Bloom’s reason for wanting to know where Gretchen had spent the night. Was it possible the pair of them had kept the little girl captive somewhere and that Bloom was now trying to pinpoint that place? The surmise seemed farfetched, and I suddenly had the sinking feeling that Bloom, for all his expertise, was clutching at straws.

“Anyone pick her up here?” he asked.

“Do you mean when she left?”

“Yes.”

“No. She left in her own car.”

“At seven, you say.”

“Yes, approximately seven.”

“Well,” Bloom said, and sighed. “What time does she usually get home from work?” he asked, and looked at his watch.

“She is normally here by now.”

I looked at my watch. It was almost six-thirty.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t care for something while you wait? Some hot coffee perhaps?”

“Matthew?”

“I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee,” I said.

“I’ll put some on the stove,” Gretel said, and rose at once and went into the kitchen. Bloom stood up, stretched, and walked to the long work table near the arched doorways. He glanced briefly at a brightly colored drawing and then looked out over the swimming pool and the bay.

“Nice place,” he said.

“Beautiful.”

“Must cost what, would you guess?”

“Half a million.”

“More, I’d say. Pretty woman, don’t you think?”

“Attractive,” I said.

“Miller didn’t strike me as the last of the red-hot lovers, did he you?”

“Well, there’s a certain raw power about him.”

“Mm,” Bloom said, and glanced again at the drawing. “Who do you suppose this cutie is?” he asked.

The drawing depicted, in broad strokes and a representational style, some sort of misshapen little monster leaping in the air, both feet off the ground, his tiny fists clenched over his head, his face distorted in rage.

“Rumpelstiltskin,” Gretel said behind us, and came into the room, and walked to the table. She picked up the drawing and held it closer to the light. “This is just a sketch, of course, I will refine it later. Do you know the fairy tale?”

“Yes,” I said, vaguely remembering something about a maiden having to guess the name of the dwarf who’d helped her do something or other sometime in the past.

“About somebody letting down her long blond hair,” Bloom said.

“No, that is Rapunzel. This is Rumpelstiltskin. By my countrymen, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Do you know Grimm’s Law?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Bloom said.

“Also by Jakob Grimm, who was famous for more than his fairy tales, you know. It is a formula describing the changes in Indo-European stop consonants. B, d, and g become p, t, and k in German — and so on. But you must know Rumpelstiltskin, nein?”

“Well, sure,” I said, not at all sure anymore.

“It is about a German Müller — how do you say it in English? A man who owns a mill, and he grinds the grain there, do you know? Ein Müller. Anyway, he tells the king that his daughter can spin gold out of straw. The king takes her to his castle and locks her in a room and asks her to do this or else she will die. To spin the straw into gold, eh? Which of course she cannot do. But a dwarf appears to her, and tells her he can do it for her, for a price, and she gives him her necklace to spin the whole room of straw into gold. Well, the king is of course astonished, and he locks her in a bigger room the next night, with even more straw in it, and he tells her that if she values her life she will spin this into gold as well, which again she cannot do. Until the dwarf once again appears, and this time she gives him her ring, and he does it for her, he spins all the straw into gold. Well, the king is truly amazed, and now he takes her to the biggest room in the castle, and it too is filled with straw, and he tells her that if she can spin all this into gold by morning, he will marry her. She is crying and crying, and she doesn’t know what to do until the dwarf again appears — but she has no more jewelry to give him, she has already given him the last of her jewelry. So she promises the dwarf that if she becomes queen, she will give him her firstborn child. They seal the bargain, and he turns all the straw to gold, and she becomes queen of all the land.

“Well, a year goes by, and the dwarf returns and he wants her to keep her promise, he wants the firstborn child. She offers him all the riches in the kingdom, but he refuses them, he wants the child instead, he insists on the firstborn child. She is in tears again, she is sobbing and begging, and so he takes pity on her and says if she can guess his name in three days’ time, why, she can keep her child. So he comes back on the first day, and she guesses names like Caspar and Melchior and Balthazar and all the names she can think of, but it is none of those. And he comes back on the second day, and she begins guessing more exotic names, more crazy names like Sheepshanks and Spindleshanks and Spiderlegs and so on, but it is none of those names, either, and the dwarf goes away laughing because he knows the child will soon be his. But then a messenger comes to the queen and he tells her that he saw a very strange sight in the forest, and that it was a dwarf dancing around and singing, and what he was singing was ‘Today I brew, tomorrow I’ll bake, next day I’ll the queen’s child take; for little dreams my royal dame that Rumpelstiltskin is my name!’ Well, when he comes back the next day, the queen teases him, eh? She says, ‘Is your name Thomas?’ and he tells her no, and she says, ‘Is your name Richard?’ and he tells her no again, and then she says, ‘Is it by chance Rumpelstiltskin?’ So the dwarf jumps up and down in rage — that’s the sketch you’re looking at there — and tears himself in two, and that is the end of Rumpelstiltskin.”

“I remember it now,” Bloom said, nodding.

“Yes, so do I,” I said.

“It is fun to illustrate,” Gretel said, and then turned toward the front door, apparently hearing a key in the latch before either Bloom or I did.

The woman who entered was wearing black tailored slacks and a pink blouse with paler pink buttons, pink shoes with French heels, a pink plastic barette sweeping her long blond hair back and away from one side of her face. She was as tall as Gretel, with the same fine features, the rather generous mouth and high cheekbones, the aquiline nose and striking blue eyes. Miller had said in his interview that Gretchen Heibel was forty-seven years old, but she looked no older than her sister, with the same slender body, the same lithe, long look. An expression of surprise crossed her face as she came into the living room and saw us standing at the work table. She glanced at her sister questioningly.

“Gretchen,” her sister said, “these men are from the police.”

“Ah?” Gretchen said, and strode into the room, her hand outstretched. “How do you do?” she said, shaking first Bloom’s hand and then mine. “I’m Gretchen Heibel, have you offered the gentlemen something to drink, Gretel?”

“Yes, I...”

“Something?” she asked. “Or are you permitted?”

“I’m making coffee now,” Gretel said.

“I’ll have something stronger, if you don’t mind,” Gretchen said and smiled, and sat in an easy chair near the work table. Slipping off first one shoe and then the other, she said, “It’s been one of those days,” and rolled her big blue eyes. Her English was much better than her sister’s, accent free, colloquial. “I don’t know your names,” she said.

“Detective Bloom,” Bloom said.

“Matthew Hope.”

She looked directly at me. “You’re not a detective?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m an attorney.”

“Whose?”

“Anthony Konig’s.”

“Vicky’s former husband?”

“Yes.”

“Mm,” she said. “Then this is about the murders. Gretel, darling, would you pour me some scotch, please, just one ice cube.”

“Yes, it’s about the murders,” Bloom said.

“Are my sister and I suspects?”

Bloom said nothing.

“Or is it Dwayne you’re after?”

“We’re not after anyone, Miss Heibel.”

“Well, surely you’re after someone.”

“I meant...”

“What you meant is that you’re not specifically trying to pin this on Dwayne — that is the expression, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Bloom said, and smiled. “We’re not trying to pin this on Mr. Miller. Specifically.”

“Ah, thank you,” she said to her sister, and accepted the drink handed to her. “I think I hear the kettle,” she said.

Gretel went out into the kitchen again. Gretchen sipped at her scotch. “So,” she said, “where do you want to begin?”

“With Monday morning, January thirteenth, between three a.m. and eight-thirty a.m.”

“What about it?”

“Where were you?”

“Oh? Then am I a suspect?”

“No, I simply...”

“Ah, you want me to account for Dwayne’s whereabouts, yes, I see. He was here with me, if that’s what you want to know.”

“From when to when?”

“We had dinner together, he picked me up at about eight, eight-thirty.”

“Where’d you have dinner?”

“The Pepper Mill.”

“On Sabal?”

“On Sabal, yes.”

“Where did you go after dinner?”

“We came back here.”

“What time was that?”

“After dinner. I don’t know what time, actually. Ten? Ten-thirty? After dinner,” she said, and shrugged.

“When did he leave here?”

“The next morning.”

“He spent the night here?”

“Yes, he often spends the night here.”

“What time did he leave in the morning?”

“Eight, eight-thirty, I’m not sure. He went directly to work from here.”

“Was your sister here that night?”

“No, she was in New York, she had a meeting with her editor and the author. The translator, actually; this is Grimm, you know.”

“When did she get back?”

“On Tuesday.”

“When you say Mr. Miller often spent the night here...”

“Yes, for the past several months or so. With me, or with my sister...” She hesitated. I could not tell whether what she said next was simply designed to shock or whether it was a sort of European candor to which American men aren’t much accustomed. “Or sometimes with both of us together.”

“I see,” Bloom said, and cleared his throat.

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Ah, here’s your coffee.”

Gretel had come into the room carrying a silver tray on which were two cups of coffee, two spoons, a creamer, and a sugar bowl.

“I was telling Detective Bloom that Dwayne often spent the night with both of us,” Gretchen said, and this time I knew for certain that she was intending to shock.

“Yes,” Gretel said quietly. “That’s true.”

“Is there any saccharine?” Bloom asked, and cleared his throat again.

It was dark when we left the Heibel house. Bloom was silent all the way to the sign with its bristling arrows, silent as we crossed the noisy humpback bridge, silent as he made his left onto 41 and headed the car back toward Calusa. He had promised me a beer, and we stopped for one in a joint called the Townline Rest, just this side of the Calusa city limits. A waitress wearing black tights, a black leotard, black high-heeled pumps and a short, frilly white apron took our order and seemed disappointed when it was only beer. Bloom clinked his mug against mine, said “Cheers,” and then swallowed a huge mouthful of beer and foam. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, and said, “Looks like his alibi checks out, huh? Both of them.”

“Looks that way,” I said.

“Except for those few unaccountable hours when he could have been out there doing all kinds of dirty work. But still, that would’ve been cutting it pretty close.”

“Yes.”

“So,” he said, and shrugged, and sighed, and drank some more beer. “I’m forty-six years old,” he said, “and I’ve never been to bed with two women at the same time. How old are you, Matthew?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Have you ever been to bed with two women at the same time?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Was it terrific?”

“There are a lot of arms and legs,” I said.

It was close to eight when he dropped me off where I had left the Ghia at the Gateway Shopping Plaza, and almost eight-thirty when I put my key into my own front door. I mixed myself a very strong martini, turned on the recording machine, and listened to my telephone messages. My daughter had called to thank me for the check and to say I had saved her life. Dale had called to ask if I’d forgotten all about her and to suggest that I might like to come over if I didn’t get in too late. The third call was from Bloom. I called him back at once.

“Yeah, hello, Matthew,” he said. “Good news. We got Sadowsky, the drummer. The New York cops finally reached his mother, found out he’s been playing at a hotel down here in Miami ever since the season started. Kenyon moved on it while we were busy talking to the krauts. Sadowsky’s coming in voluntarily, Miami’s a hop, skip, and jump from here. I’m expecting him any minute. You want to sit in on it?”

“I’d like to,” I said.

“Come on down,” Bloom said, and hung up.