There Was a Little Girl

2: And she had a little curl...

Warren arranged to meet Toots Kiley at a little past one that Sunday afternoon. They met in one of those beer and burger joints designed to look like an old-fashioned New York saloon, but succeeding only in looking like some Florida decorator’s notion of an old-fashioned New York saloon. Everything was just a wee bit off. The cut-glass panels were too glittery, the brass too strident, the wood too mellow. The only authentic touch was in the shopworn St. Patrick’s Day decorations still hanging from the seventeenth.

In Calusa, Florida, there’d been no St. Patrick’s Day parade; in fact, down here the holiday passed each year with hardly any notice at all. Except in the bars. The bars always decked themselves out in green. Some of them even served green beer. Presumably, this was in tribute to the widely circulated notion that Irish people drank a lot. Warren didn’t know if the concept was sheer myth or absolute fact. Frankly, he didn’t give a damn either way. Neither he nor Toots were here to drink. Matthew Hope was in serious trouble at the hospital, and Warren needed her help in finding whoever had shot him.

“When he didn’t come around by seven,” he told her, “they started running all these tests on him. The doctors. They didn’t let us know till later, it must’ve been eight o’clock, by then we were...”

“Who’s this?” Toots asked.

“Me, Patricia, and Frank.”

“Patricia?”

“Demming. An assistant SA Matthew’s been seeing.”

Toots nodded and picked up her cheeseburger. She’d have loved a beer with it, but she’d been clean for three years now, and she wasn’t going to let a lousy beer tumble her right back into the cocaine habit. Toots was twenty-six years old, a tall, slender, suntanned, brown-eyed blonde who’d let her frizzed perm grow out and who now wore her hair long and falling straight to her shoulders. On this chilly Sunday, the twenty-seventh day of March, celebrated simultaneously as Palm Sunday and Passover by Christian and Jew respectively, Toots was wearing a pink sweater with a white bib collar showing above the crew neck, faded blue jeans, and cowboy boots. Warren had to admit she looked healthy. She was chewing on the hamburger like a starving wolf.

“What they did,” he said, “first they checked his arm and leg reflexes, there’s a word they have for that, but I forget what term he used, testing the extremities. They got very faint neurological reflexes, so they... they... I find this hard to talk about,” he said, and brought his hand up to cover his eyes, and sat very still for several moments, his hand covering his eyes, his head bent. Toots said nothing.

Warren swallowed and then took his hand away from his eyes, and wiped them with the back of it, and then he said, “They told us they’d pulled back his eyelids then, and shined a bright light into his eyes, first one eye, and then the other, to see if the pupils would react. They did, thank God, which meant his reflexes weren’t entirely lost, the back of the brain was... was still functioning. The cortex or the brain stem, I forget which is... which is...”

He’s about to lose it again, Toots thought.

But he didn’t.

“Then they... they ran a piece of cotton over the cornea, touching it to see if there’d be a protective reflex, and there was, but he was just... just barely responding. He’s not in coma, you understand, there’s still brain activity, but he’s still not entirely awake and aware. Those are the two terms they use, awake and aware. Being awake relates to the level of consciousness. Being aware relates to the content of consciousness. These are altered states of consciousness, you see. Coma’s the worst, a person in coma is completely out of it. But there’s also stupor and obtun...I don’t remember what they called it, obtunation? Oduntation? Lethargy is another one. That’s the mildest one. These are all terms they use to... to describe the... the various levels of wakefulness and awareness. Matthew isn’t completely awake, and he isn’t completely aware, either.”

“When will he be?” Toots asked.

“They want to watch him for another day or so, see if the brain wave pattern improves. They’re not getting a flat EEG, but there’s not much electrical activity, either. They have to wait and see. What happens. Tomorrow or the next day. Peripheral, is what it’s called. Examining the arms and legs. Peripheral neurological exam.”

Warren sighed, and then nodded, and then looked down at his plate, where his eggs were already cold. He picked up a fork, and poked it into one of the yolks. Yellow ran onto the plate.

“I want to get the son of a bitch who did this,” he said.

“Amen,” Toots said.

“We’re running a week behind Matthew,” he said. “Everything he did, everything he learned, we’re running a week behind him. Last Sunday, the twentieth, he went to see the daughter of a woman used to be part owner of the circus, name’s Maria Torrance. I want you to go see her today, find out what she told him, find out what could’ve led him from there to wherever he went next, whatever it was he was following. ’Cause, Toots, I feel positive whatever he was onto, that’s what got him shot last night. He wouldn’t have gone to Newtown without it was something took him to Newtown. And whatever took him there got him shot.”

“I’ll call her,” Toots said, and stabbed a forkful of fries. “Have you got a number?”

“Patricia told me she lives on Fatback Key, I looked it up in the directory. Her name’s Maria Torrance...”

“You already told me that.”

“Here, I’ll write the number down for you,” he said, and took a slip of paper from his wallet and began copying the phone number onto a page in his notebook. “Incidentally, on Friday night he had dinner with Patricia, told her something had come up, and then left her to go somewhere. He didn’t say where, but it was obviously Newtown, the way things’ve turned out. Also, the shooter was driving a black two-door Mazda.”

“Got it,” Toots said, and took the page he tore from his notebook, glanced at the number, and then asked, “Where will you be later?”

“I’m heading over to the newspaper right now,” he said, “check the morgue for that suicide three years ago. I’ll be home after that, whenever that’ll be, long as it takes me to find anything.”

“I’ll call you later, fill you in,” Toots said. “I know you want to get started, go ahead. I’ll pick up the check.”

“No, you got it last time.”

“No, you did. Anyway, go on.”

“Toots...”

“I know. You want to nail this son of a bitch.”

He hadn’t known that Willa Torrance was a midget until he began perusing the Calusa Herald-Tribune articles on her suicide. “Wee Willa Winkie” was what they’d called her. He tried to remember the way the nursery rhyme went. But the name wasn’t Willa, was it? What...? Willie. Yes. Wee Willie Winkie.

Willa Torrance had been wearing a baby doll nightgown when she’d shot herself. Blood spatters on each of the shoulder straps.

Her bedside clock had been stopped by a .32-caliber bullet at exactly 5:10 A.M., the bullet entering through the back of the clock and then lodging itself in the works without exiting. She’d been lying on her side at the time, but had opted for shooting herself in the forehead. The alarm had been set for 5:15 A.M. Her daughter had discovered the body at 5:35. The various newspaper accounts quoted Maria as saying that her mother had planned to be on the road by 6:00 A.M., “before the morning rush-hour traffic started.” Maria had further stated that her mother was still asleep when she’d left the trailer at five.

Warren wondered if he’d have to go to Missouri on this, talk to the coroner’s people there.

He hoped not.

There were wonders galore to explore in Missouri, joys unimaginable to be found there, but not while he was running a week behind whatever discoveries Matthew had made, discoveries Warren was sure had led to the attempt on his life.

All of the newspapers referred to the suicide as a “tragedy” and talked about the great loss to the circus world. Apparently, Wee Willa Winkie had been something more than a sideshow midget sitting on a sideshow giant’s lap, the better to exaggerate the differences in their respective heights. She’d been an uncommonly beautiful woman in miniature, a perfectly proportioned, captivating enchantress who sang as well as danced. Many of the articles referred to her as “The Lilliputian Queen of the Midway,” and described her act as superior to anything then showing on Broadway — but Calusa, and the Calusa Herald-Tribune in particular, tended to wax overly enthusiastic when touting the cultural aspects of the town, often claiming as a “native” any artistic visitor who spent as short a time here as a month in the winter.

All of the obituaries and feature stories reported Willa’s age as thirty-seven at the time of her death, her height as thirty-three inches, and her weight as twenty-nine pounds. Only one of the articles went into detail about the condition that had caused her diminutive size. The fact that she had stopped growing at the age of six was attributed to a malfunction of the pituitary gland, which produces the growth hormone. The clinical term for this condition was “hypopituitary dwarfism,” a definition that distinguished Willa’s type of dwarfism from the other ninety-nine types in the United States. Many of these entailed some sort of bone disorder that resulted in disproportionately short people with large heads and small limbs. Others involved painful spinal irregularities. In common speech, as opposed to medical terminology, Willa was a “midget,” a mature adult who looked like a tiny woman, her proportions similar to those of any normal, fully grown female.

The article went on to say that not very many midgets were currently in evidence because semiweekly injections of a growth hormone could result in a normal growth pattern, if the treatment was maintained over a period of ten years. The article had been written three years ago, at the time of Willa’s death. It explained that such treatment was now readily available throughout the United States. But as late as 1979, when Willa would have been twenty-five, only a handful of research programs were offering the treatment, and by then she would have been well past the age when treatment should have been started.

All of the obits mentioned that she’d been born Willa DeMott, and raised in the town of Lancaster, Ohio. All of the obits mentioned that it was there in Lancaster that she’d been discovered by Max Roeger, while she was performing on a float in a high school pageant, twirling a baton bigger than she was. All of the obits mentioned her brief marriage to someone named Peter Torrance, “a circus man.” All of the obits said, “Ms. Torrance is survived by her only daughter Maria Lovelock Torrance,” or words to that effect. Warren wondered how the daughter had got her middle name. And whereas the obits remained otherwise silent on Maria’s physical condition, all of the feature stories mentioned that she was perfectly “normal” in size.

It was not until sometime after three that afternoon that Warren came across the first substantial reference to Willa’s former husband. For several days in March last year, the Trib had run a series of features on the circus scene in Calusa and environs. The first issue outlined the history of circuses from the time of the Roman era to the present, and gave a glossary of circus talk for the uninitiated. Warren had not known before he read the article in that issue that a “grab joint” was a hamburger stand, a “perch act” was a pole balancer’s act, and three acrobats lying on their backs and tossing around a fourth one was called a “Risley act,” live and learn.

The second issue highlighted some of the old Big Bertha performers who still made their homes in Venice, Calusa, Sarasota, or Bradenton. Warren learned here that Big Bertha was circus talk for the Big One, which of course was Ringling. Finally, in the last issue devoted to the series, the paper zeroed in on the smaller Steadman&Roeger show, which — at the time of the article’s appearance — had made its winter quarters here for the past nineteen years.

No retrospective of the S&R Circus would have been complete without mention of the “tragic” death of Willa Torrance, who’d entertained under the name of Wee Willa Winkie. In fact, much of the article was devoted to her untimely death in the town of Rutherford, Missouri, which — again, at the time the article appeared — had been two years back. But whereas all of the obituaries had noted that Willa Torrance was discovered in Lancaster, Ohio, when she was a mere seventeen years old, none of them before now had mentioned that shortly after she joined the circus, she met the man who would become her husband.

Peter Torrance, the “circus man,” had actually been the marketing director for S&R when Willa Torrance came aboard at the age of seventeen, some twenty-three years ago. He was described in the article as “a tall, rangy man with an air of old-world charm and sophistication,” an account that left no ambiguity as to whether or not he, too, had been a midget, but left dangling the origin of his old-world manners. Torrance did not sound particularly European. Perhaps he was British. Or perhaps, as had been the case with countless immigrants seeking America’s streets of gold, his name had been changed upon arrival by immigration authorities too burdened or harried to deal with a Polish Trzebitowski, a Japanese Tsuboi, a Norwegian Tønnesen, or an Icelandic Tryggvason.

The piece went into great detail on what Torrance’s duties had been when he first met Max Roeger’s most recent discovery and immediate star. Apparently, a circus’s marketing director was an expert at public relations, a man expected to arrive in any given show town several months after the booking agents had made telephone contact, usually two to three weeks before the show itself arrived. He was the essential link between townie and clownie, so to speak, the man who paved the way for a mutually enjoyable and profitable encounter. As the last one to leave any show town, sometimes lingering a day or two after everyone else was long gone, it was his task to make certain the circus had cleaned up after itself and left a favorable impression, its calling card for the next season’s return.

That Torrance could find the time to court, no less to win the heart of the midway’s new queen was an equal tribute to his management skills and his ardor. Court her he did, and win her heart he did — all in the space of a single season, which by all accounts had been S&R’s most successful one in all its years. The pair was married six months after Willa joined the circus, when she was just eighteen and Torrance was twenty-five. Their first and only child, Maria, was born ten months later.

They were divorced a year after her birth.

When you’re on dope, you do everything there is to do, you know people you’d never wanted to know before, you learn to despise yourself for what you are doing to yourself. You learn very quickly to lie, and almost as quickly to steal. Male or female, you learn that you can always barter sex for the drugs you need to sustain yourself. Well, not yourself, really. Not really yourself. This stranger you’re supporting is merely someone else inhabiting your body, clamoring inside your body for what this stranger needs to survive. If lying and stealing are not enough to satisfy this stranger inside you, then you must sometimes physically hurt people to get what you need. Hurt them badly, take from them what you need to buy the cocaine to satisfy the stranger residing somewhere inside this body of yours that somehow looks the same on the outside — oh, a little thinner, perhaps, a trifle gaunt, in fact; a somewhat driven, almost haunted look in the eyes; the mouth a little tight, perhaps even a bit drawn — a body you know has been confiscated by this stranger inside, a body being abused by this stranger you would not spit upon if you were sober.

The stranger you would not spit upon is yourself.

You revile yourself for what you have become, what you have allowed yourself to become, and you tell yourself if only I had the willpower to stop, if only I could get a decent job someplace, I would quit this shit in a minute, I would not go down on strange men in alleys stinking of urine, I would not beg anyone for a free hit just this one last time I promise you, I would clean up my act, I would become sober again, if only.

For Toots Kiley, the “if only” was when Otto Samalson, the private investigator for whom she was working, discovered she was tooting coke and fired her on the spot. She’d respected Otto, thought of him as almost a second father. Her own father had become a living ghost the moment her mother died. Otto taught her everything there was to know about investigation, turned her into one of the best private eyes in this town. A cop named Rob Higgins taught her everything there was to know about cocaine, turned her into the biggest nose in this town. Sniffed cocaine day and night. Preferred cocaine to eating or to sex or to anything else on this planet, preferred cocaine to being herself again, the innocent young girl her father had named Toots after the harmonica player Toots Thielemans. She wanted to marry cocaine, live with cocaine for the rest of her life, love, honor, and obey cocaine till death us do part. Cocaine was her be-all and end-all. Cocaine or snow or C or blow or toot or Peruvian lady or white girl or leaf or flake or happy dust or nose candy or freeze or even C₁₇H₂₁NO₄, a derivative of Erythroxylon coca. Or any of the other darling little euphemistic pet names Higgins taught her for a drug that could fry your brain whether you sniffed it up your nose or smoked it in a crack pipe.

Took her two years to kick the habit.

She was planning to go see Otto again, ask him if the old job was still available, when he got killed tailing a wayward spouse. It was Warren Chambers, instead, who’d given her the first job she’d had since her nosedive two years earlier.

Tell me about the job, okay? she’d said.

First tell me you’re clean, Warren had said.

Why? Do I look like I’m not?

You look suntanned and healthy. But that doesn’t preclude coke.

I like that word. Preclude. Did you make it up?

How do you like the other word? Coke?

I used to like it just fine. I still think of it every now and then. But the thought passes. I’m clean, Mr. Chambers.

How long has it been?

Almost two years. Since right after Otto fired me.

And now you’re clean.

Now I’m clean.

Are you sure? Because if you’re still on cocaine, I wish you’d tell me.

I am not on cocaine. Or to put it yet another way, I do not do coke no more. I am clean. K-L-double-E, clean. What do you need, Mr. Chambers? A sworn affidavit? You’ve got my word. I like to think it’s still worth something.

There was a time when it wasn’t.

That was then, this is now. Mr. Chambers, are you here to offer me a job, or are we going to piss around all morning?

Call me Warren, he’d said, and smiled.

After all her years of experience with cocaine, Toots Kiley thought she could recognize a cokehead whenever she saw one.

But she didn’t realize Maria Torrance was one until the lady offered her a toot.

It was close to four o’clock. They were sitting on the deck facing Calusa Bay and the intercoastal waterway, Toots wearing a denim skirt, blue sneakers, and a yellow blouse, Maria wearing tight white shorts, white sandals, and a white T-shirt without a bra, her red hair pulled back into a ponytail. A matching red Mercedes-Benz convertible with an MT-1 vanity plate had been parked in the driveway when Toots arrived.

The water was choppy this Sunday afternoon, but that didn’t stop any of Calusa’s weekend boaters. The intercoastal was thronged with powerboats, the bay beyond teeming with bloated triangular white sails. Toots would never understand the lure of boating. Far as she was concerned, the best way to enjoy boats was the way she was enjoying them right this minute: just sitting onshore watching them. Maria had spent the past half hour educating Toots about her mother, and then she’d shifted the conversation to her father, Peter Torrance.

“I hardly knew him,” she was saying. “He left when I was only a year old, still an infant, really. In a sense, I’ve never really known him at all.”

“Know where he is now?” Toots asked.

“For all I know he’s dead,” Maria said. “There was a letter from him when Mother died, wanting to know if he’d been mentioned in her will, can you imagine? Wanting to know if she’d left him anything. Gone for all those years, wants to know if she left him anything! I turned it over to her lawyer.”

“Had she left him anything?”

“Not a cent.”

“I gather the parting wasn’t a pleasant one.”

“Pleasant? He ran off with one of the McCulloughs, behaved like some damn gazoonie you hire for the season. This was supposed to be a respected person on the staff. The marketing director. A married man with a baby daughter! Didn’t even leave a note. Just disappeared in the night with Aggie McCullough, one of the fliers, would you like a drink?”

“Thank you, I don’t drink,” Toots said.

Maria looked at her.

“How about a toot instead?” she asked.

Toots wondered how she’d known. Was there something on her face, something in her eyes that said, I’m a sober coke-head, test me? Or was Maria misreading her name? Surely Toots had pronounced her own name correctly when introducing herself, the Toots rhyming with “puts” and not with “boots.” But if Maria had mistakenly heard her, then mightn’t she have assumed the name was merely a nickname earned because the lady did, in fact, toot? If the lady toots, why not call her Toots?

“Thanks, no,” she said.

“Sure?”

Still watching her steadily, blue eyes fastened to her face.

“Positive,” Toots said.

“I think I’ll have one,” Maria said, and turned away and walked back into the house. Toots sat watching the boats out on the water, wondering whether Maria was mixing herself a drink or snorting a line. When she came back out of the house, it was obvious she’d done both. There was a gin-tonic in her right hand, but her eyes were brighter than they’d been five minutes earlier, her smile more dazzling, her stride more confident, her mood one of keen exhilaration. Her nipples under the white T-shirt were puckered.

“Sure now?” she asked again, and jiggled the ice in her glass, and waggled her eyebrows.

“Positive,” Toots said again, and hoped this time the emphatic plosive made her meaning clear. “How’d they meet?” she asked. “Your parents.”

“Through the circus. He was from Ireland originally, worked circuses on the Continent before he came to America. Do you know the Marateo Circus in Italy? Very famous. He was a booking agent with them for four years. Torrance is an Irish form of Terrence. It’s from the Latin, means ‘tender, good, and gracious.’ Isn’t that a hoot, man who leaves his wife with a year-old child? I was cute as a button, they say. My father was a very tall man, from what they tell me, but everyone was scared to death I’d stop growing, the way Mother did when she was six. But I turned out pretty normal, didn’t I?” she said, and jiggled her sandaled foot and grinned mischievously at Toots over the top of her glass.

Images of a very tall man making love to a midget immediately filled Toots’s mind. She was reminded of a ribald joke she’d once heard and almost started telling it, until she remembered that the woman sitting opposite her happened to be the daughter of a pair as unseemly as the couple in the joke. Her mind lingered on the premise. Visions of maypoles danced in her head.

“Did you tell all this to Mr. Hope?” she asked.

“About my father, you mean? Yes.”

Toots wondered if she’d also offered him a few lines of cocaine.

“When your father wrote to you,” she said, “where was he living?”

“L.A.”

“With the woman he’d run off with?”

“Aggie? No, that didn’t last more than a minute. She was back with the circus the very next season.”

“How’d your mother feel about that?”

“They became very good friends, in fact.”

“I take it the McCulloughs are an act.”

“High flyers, yes. Aerialists. Aggie’s brothers and some of their children are still with S&R. So’s her son and daughter-in-law. They’re really very good. Aggie’s retired now, she lives in Bradenton with her third husband, man who used to be a bear trainer. Worst animals in the world to train. Very dangerous. Bite you in half soon as look at you,” Maria said, and snapped at the air, clicking her teeth together sharply, and smiling at Toots immediately afterward. Toots suddenly wondered if she was lesbian. No pierced ears with a multitude of earrings in them, no such blatant signal, no subtle ones, either, a tentative touch, a brief exploratory resting of a hand upon an arm, nothing like that. But still...

“Was that the last time you heard from him? After your mother died?”

“Yes.”

“Had he tried to contact her at any time before then?”

“Not that I know of.”

“After she bought her share of the circus, for example?”

“No. Why?”

“Well, a man reappears out of the blue to ask if his divorced wife left him anything in her will, you’ve got to wonder if he tried to hit her up for cash while she was still alive. Is all I’m saying. Hears she’s part owner of a circus now, figures she might be an easy mark. But you don’t know that he had any contact with her after he left, huh?”

“No. My mother never mentioned having heard from him.”

“Were you very close with her?”

“Very.”

“She’d have told you, huh?”

“Yes, she told me everything.”

“Ever tell you she was planning suicide?”

“No. It wasn’t suicide. Someone killed her.”

“Did you tell that to Mr. Hope?”

“Yes.”

“How did he react?”

“He wanted to know if I had any idea who might have done it.”

“And did you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell him?”

“I did.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him Davey Sheed had shot and killed my mother.”

“Davey...?”

“Sheed. S&R’s cat trainer.”

The nurse monitoring Matthew Hope’s blood pressure and pulse was getting essentially normal readings on both. A hundred over seventy for the b.p., ninety-five for the pulse. But she knew that his EEG had shown disorganized electrical activity and that the doctors were already talking among themselves about coma. If he flat-lined on his next EEG, this would indicate that the cortex of the brain had stopped functioning. The longer he stayed in a comatose state, the fewer were his chances of waking up. If he flat-lined for two days in succession, they could assume he was brain-dead, and that his chances for recovery were essentially zero. That was when they would call in the family and ask what they chose to do about life-support systems.

The nurse wondered what was going on inside his head.

Inside his head, there was a blackness as vast and as empty as a Siberian plain. Inside his head, there was a cold, keening wind sweeping in over the pebbled plain. In the darkness, there were crackling sounds and sudden bursts of light. An electrical storm was crashing in over the cold, dark plain. Each time lightning crackled and spit, he saw a black whip snaking out of the blackness. Each time the wind howled, he heard the roar of a tiger. Images flashed and were gone. Now a blue-and-white tent. Now a black and monstrous generator truck rumbling in the darker black. Voices echoed in a vast echo chamber. There was more lightning. And the electric crackle of the whip. And a tiger’s head hanging in the midnight sky, flashes of lightning striping her magnificent head...

...jaws opening wide as Davey Sheed approached her. Matthew was standing just outside the cage, George Steadman at his side. The showman was leaning in close to him, yelling over the crack of the whip and the roaring of the cats, and the scolding, cajoling, encouraging patter of his cat trainer. Steadman smelled of Old Spice aftershave. The cage smelled of tiger piss and human sweat and something less identifiable, perhaps fear.

“It takes a long time to put up the cage and chute,” Steadman was saying. “That’s why the wild-animal act is always the first one in the show. Davey Sheed, King of All the Beasts. That’s how he bills himself. Soon as he’s done, the clowns come out while we’re taking down the cage, and then we go off the ground and up in the air for the high-wire act, sometimes while we’re still taking down the... oops!” he said, and snapped his full attention to where the female tiger Sheed was working had jumped off her pedestal and was moving dangerously close to him.

“There’s a line they know they can’t cross,” Steadman whispered. “It’s the length of the whip or the stick the trainer is using. They’re taught not to come any closer than that. She’s moving in on him, see that? And he’s letting her know he’ll have none of it. Listen to him.”

“Sakti!”

Snapping her name like a whip.

“No, Sakti!” Sheed yelled, as if scolding a tabby who’d peed on the carpet instead of a three-hundred-pound beast who tossed her head disdainfully, and clawed for the whip again with her right paw. Sheed, a handsome, dark-haired, muscular man of medium height, was working bare-chested in blue jeans and boots. There were four other tigers in the cage; the trio of young male lions hadn’t yet been brought in. Steadman had explained to Matthew that male cats were less aggressive, which was why cat trainers used females for their so-called fighting acts. Of the five tigers in the cage with Sheed, Steadman had pointed out a young male, two mature females, and two elderly males. The two to watch were the females, he’d said, one of them on the ground with Sheed now, quarreling over turf. The other one seemed keenly interested in what was going on, shoulders hunched, neck craning, eyes intent on the action. Matthew had the feeling she might join the argument at any moment.

“Up where you belong, Sakti,” Sheed said, and relaxed his tight grip on the whip’s handle, refusing to get into a tug-of-war with a clawed opponent. He had lowered his voice now, having caught her undivided attention with his earlier shouting, reducing the argument to a one-on-one personal bickering that had nothing to do with any of the other animals in the cage, particularly the other female who was crouching the way Matthew had seen household cats do before they lunged at a backyard lizard.

“Get up there now,” Sheed said, and Sakti watched him, tail flicking, but she did not paw at the whip again. He lowered the whip entirely. Took a step toward her. He’s crazy, Matthew thought. Another step. Closer now. The other female’s ears were back flat against her head. Matthew felt she would go for him in the next instant. Apparently Sheed’s two outside men felt the same way. They were moving restlessly on either side of the cage, ready to join him if push came to shove. One of them had a pistol in his hand.

“Come on now,” Sheed said, moving in very close to the tiger now, his voice soft, “enough of this, we have work to do. Up!” and he snapped his fingers an inch from Sakti’s nose, and the big cat turned and leaped up onto the pedestal again. The other female watched a moment longer, and then seemed to lose interest entirely. Yawning, she turned away. The yawn seemed contagious. Both elderly males joined her, and then one of the younger tigers.

“We never feed them before the act, you know,” Steadman said. “We keep them hungry while Davey’s putting them through their paces. They don’t get fed till he’s finished with them.”

Matthew did not think he would like to be a wild-animal trainer.

As Sheed put the cats through the routines they’d rehearsed and re-rehearsed a thousand times already, as he called for his outside men to let the three young lions in through the chute, and then worked them into the act so that now there was a volatile mix of tiger and lion and one sole brave human, Matthew told Steadman that he’d gone to see Maria Torrance the day before, to talk to her about the proposed land offer. He was now confident she would not oppose it, which cleared the way for him to approach Florida Sun and Shore with Steadman’s opening bid. In fact, he had an appointment with a man named Lonnie McGovern there, later this afternoon.

“I want to ask Mr. Sheed a few questions first,” Matthew said, “and then I’ll be...”

“Oh?” Steadman said. “What about?”

“I understand he knew Willa Torrance pretty well.”

“Everyone knew Willa pretty well,” Steadman said. “What’s that got to do with acquiring the fairgrounds?”

“Maria suggested I talk to him,” Matthew said vaguely, “see what he thought about it.”

“About what?” Steadman asked.

“In fact, it might not be a bad idea if you called her yourself within the next few days,” Matthew said, sidestepping the question, not for nothing was he a twinkly-toed shyster. “Fill her in on what you plan to do, treat her like a real partner with a good head for business.”

“Maria?” Steadman said, and raised his brows. “A good head for business?”

“I think so,” Matthew said, and suddenly recognized his own unconscious pun. A good head for business. Maria had, in fact, shaved her scalp entirely bald, giving herself the undeniably good head she needed for demonstrating the effectiveness of the wigs she sold. He felt a smile starting, but the smile froze on his face when the other female tiger leaped off her perch and came rushing at her trainer.

Sheed did not hesitate a moment.

He turned the leaded handle of the whip so that he was holding it like a club, and just as the animal seemed ready to leap, he whacked her on the nose with it, whap, and yelled her name like a cannon shot, “Rahna!” and whacked her again, and shouted “Rahna!” and gave her yet another whack, backing away from her all the while, easing himself toward the cage door, where one of his outside men was already standing, ready to pull it open the moment he reached it. Rahna was crouched low now, ears flat, tail flicking, watching him from eyes that seemed to have gone as yellow as her coat.

One of his outside men, a burly guy with muscular tattooed arms and a weight lifter’s chest bulging inside a grimy T-shirt, yanked open the cage door. Sheed slipped through the narrow opening, and the outside man slammed the door shut just as Rahna sprang, hitting the door with all the uncoiled force of four hundred plus pounds. Sheed turned to look into the cage. He was breathing heavily. Rahna was pacing back and forth some six feet back from the door now, tail flicking angrily, eyes grazing him like twin yellow lasers. Sheed extended his hand, palm up, toward the second outside man. Initially, the man seemed not to understand him. Then he looked at the pistol in his own hand, grasped what Sheed was wordlessly saying, and placed the pistol onto the trainer’s outstretched palm.

He’s going to shoot her, Matthew thought.

Sheed nodded to the first outside man, who shook his head. No, he was saying. Sheed nodded again, insistently this time. Yes. Again, the outside man shook his head.

“Open it!” Sheed snapped.

He’s going back in, Matthew thought. He’s crazy.

The outside man reluctantly threw back the bolts on the cage. Rahna whipped around when she heard the metallic clicking. Cautiously, the outside man opened the cage door. Rahna snapped her head toward Sheed the instant he slid through the narrow opening and into the cage. Her ears went back again. She was going into a crouch again.

“No, Rahna!” he shouted, and raised the gun over his head. “No!”

The word seemed to mean nothing to her. She opened her jaws and roared in defiance, still crouched low, shoulders hunched, ears back.

Sheed fired into the air.

Rahna sprang out of the crouch, seemed to whirl in midair, landed on her feet again some four feet from where she’d been crouched, and then turned immediately to face Sheed again.

“Now stop this,” he said.

Rahna cocked her head as if listening.

“Get back up there,” he said.

She blinked.

“Up,” he said.

She opened her jaws but the roar was more like a growl.

“Let’s go,” he said, “Now,” he said, “Up!” he said, and cracked the whip at her, and she turned instantly and ran toward her perch and leaped up onto it. Sitting like a docile house cat on her favorite cushion, Rahna blinked again and twitched her ears, and then yawned as she had earlier.

“Good girl,” Sheed said, and then spun away from her, disdainfully showing the tigress his back. Lifting both arms over his head, he faced each sector of the tent in turn, as though acknowledging applause from an invisible, adoring crowd.

“Bravo,” Steadman said in soft appreciation, and Matthew suddenly realized that the entire dispute between Sheed and the two huge females had been staged and rehearsed God knew how many times, a carefully choreographed brawl that involved the trainer, his two boisterous female cats, the other observant but essentially uninterested animals in the cage, and the two fearful outside men — an artful performance designed to demonstrate how recklessly courageous was the King of All the Beasts, Davey Sheed.

Matthew couldn’t wait to talk to him.

Warren found him in a white trailer lettered in red on its side with the words:

He mounted the several steps leading to the door near the rear of the vehicle, knocked, waited, knocked again, and then called “Mr. Sheed?”

Silence.

“Mr. Sheed?”

A rumble from inside the trailer, somewhat like the low growl of one of Sheed’s own cats.

“It’s me,” Warren said, his face close to the door. “Warren Chambers. We talked on the phone just a little while ago.”

“Mrff,” from inside the trailer.

“Mr. Sheed?”

“Yes, wait a goddamn minute, will you?”

Warren waited.

He thought he heard someone peeing inside the trailer. He thought he heard a toilet flushing. He kept waiting. He heard water running. Sheed washing his hands. Warren hoped. A moment later, the door opened.

Davey Sheed looked somewhat older than one would have expected the king of all the beasts to be. For no good reason, Warren had anticipated a man in his late twenties or early thirties; who else would have been foolhardy enough to step into a cageful of wild animals? But the man standing in the doorway to the trailer, a scowl on his sleep-sodden features, looked to be in his mid-fifties. Dark-haired and beetle-browed, hazel eyes prying through the portage of the head like brass cannons, so to speak, he stood barefoot and muscularly bare-chested in skimpy jockey shorts, glowering at Warren as though they hadn’t arranged a meeting for one-thirty that Monday afternoon, which time it now happened to be. His chest and arms were interlaced with old scars, perhaps the result of altercations with cats he had known, and perhaps a contributing factor to his somewhat surly demeanor.

“Mr. Sheed?” Warren asked.

“You woke me up,” Sheed said.

“I’m sorry, I thought we’d said...”

“Come in, come in,” Sheed said, and stepped aside to permit Warren entrance, scratching his balls as he moved deeper into the trailer toward the dining and cooking area up front. Lie down with cats, Warren thought, and you start behaving like cats.

“We did say one-thirty, didn’t we?” he asked.

“I dozed off,” Sheed said, dismissing the question. “Sit down. Would you like a beer?”

“No, thank you,” Warren said, and looked for a place to sit. Almost every flat surface in the trailer was strewn with dirty laundry. The stench of cats rose from much of it. Lie down with cats, he thought again. He was damned if he was going to touch any of Sheed’s dirty underwear or socks.

“Where?” he asked.

“Anywhere,” Sheed said, and swung his hand across the dinette table, sweeping the clothing on it to the floor. Walking to the refrigerator opposite the table and its banquettes, he opened the door, took out a can of beer, popped the cap, closed the door, and brought the can to his mouth. Warren noticed that the drainboard on the sink counter alongside the range was stacked with soiled paper plates and plastic utensils. He wished he was Sheed’s mother; he’d send him to his room without dessert.

“Mr. Sheed,” he said, sitting carefully on the banquette to the left of the table Sheed had cleared, “as I told you on the phone...”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I’m trying to track Matthew Hope’s...”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“...movements last week in an attempt...”

“Yeah,” Sheed said.

“...to find out why someone shot him. Policemen usually concentrate on the twenty-four hours before a homicide...”

“Why?” Sheed asked. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Warren said, “but he’s in very serious condition at Good Samaritan.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sheed said, and belched.

“Yes,” Warren said. “And the twenty-four hours following it, because those are the most important times. The pre-twenty-four because they tell us where he went and who he saw...”

“But you’re not a cop,” Sheed said. “I understood...”

“That’s right, I’m a private investigator. Who worked with him. He’s a close friend of mine.”

“Okay,” Sheed said, and nodded.

“But I used to be a cop. In Boston.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Which is how I happen to know this stuff,” Warren said, feeling like a jackass for having to explain. “Anyway, the post-twenty-four’s important because that’s when the perp is widening his edge, that’s when a trail can start getting cold.”

“Um-hmh,” Sheed said, scratching his balls again, bored to tears. He’d probably read all this shit in some cheap paperback cop novel, and didn’t care to hear it all over again in the sanctity of his cat-piss trailer. He put down the beer can, picked up a pair of jeans from where they were tossed onto the other banquette, and began putting them on.

“I figure I’m following him by a week,” Warren said. “Today’s the twenty-eighth, I’m a week behind him. Which gives whoever shot him a very big edge.”

“Yeah, that’s a shame, all right,” Sheed said.

No sarcasm in his voice, no boredom, just saying the words flat out, no inflection, no emotion, no anything. Maybe working in a cage with wild animals did that to a man. Left him incapable of reacting emotionally to anything. Show any emotion outside the cage, then you were liable to lose your cool when you were in there with the cats and it counted. Show them anything they could see or smell or sense, and they’d claw you to pieces. Witness Sheed’s scars.

“You told me on the phone that he’d come to see you last Monday,” Warren said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Sheed said, and zipped up his fly, and then slipped on a pair of loafers without socks, and picked up the beer can again, and took another swig.

“Can you tell me what you talked about?”

“Willa mostly.”

“Torrance?”

“Yes. What’s this about, anyway?”

It was about Maria having told Toots that Matthew planned to talk to Sheed as soon as he possibly could. It was about Matthew having been here last Monday. It was about Maria having told first Matthew and then Toots that the guy swilling beer over there by the sink had killed her mother. That’s what it was really about. But that was the one thing Warren could not reveal.

“Didn’t Mr. Hope tell you?” he asked.

“He told me someone was challenging her will...”

“That’s right,” Warren lied.

“And he wanted to know about her state of mind before the suicide.”

“You knew her back then, did you?”

Taking him back to the then and there, three years ago, when Willa Torrance allegedly put a bullet in the middle of her forehead, a conclusion her daughter rejected in favor of a theory that had Sheed shooting her and then placing the gun in her lifeless hand.

“Listen,” Sheed said, “you mind if we get out of here? I hate being cooped up in this dump.” He tossed the empty beer can onto the stack of already accumulated debris, adding measurably to the dumpiness of the trailer, and then moved immediately to the rear door, not waiting for an answer. Wearing only jeans and loafers, still bare-chested, he went outside. Warren followed him.

What ten minutes earlier had been a big blue and white tent surrounded by what appeared to be a trailer park on a mud lot caked and hardened by a week of baking sunshine; what at one-thirty had, in fact, seemed like a graveyard for vehicles — not a human being in sight, not a leaf stirring on this breezeless, steamy, Florida day; what had then been somnolent and still, had now transmogrified to a bustling open-air carnival. It had been siesta time, Warren supposed, but now everyone was awake and alive.

As Sheed led him toward where he said his cats were caged at the far end of the lot, the field swarmed with performers in leotards and tights, blue jeans and bikinis, halters and shorts, sweat suits and — in at least one instance — an actual tutu tattered beyond belief. Like a wide-eyed child moving through a circus wonderland magically stripped of its shimmering trappings, its performers nonetheless immediately recognizable in rehearsal clothes, Warren followed Sheed toward the tent, moving through and past bouncing acrobats and scurrying clowns, ballet girls painstakingly practicing steps, jugglers tossing balls and clubs and fiery torches, men and women leaping on teeter boards and rolling on glittery globes, a trainer putting half a dozen scrappy little dogs through their frantic scurrying paces, another trainer trying with little success to coax a pony to jump over a hurdle...

“The horse won’t do it,” Sheed explained. “That’s all part of the act, it gets a million laughs. Let’s cut through the tent.”

...a midway ventriloquist working with a dummy who looked like Groucho Marx, talking to the air as he drank a glass of water — the ventriloquist and not the dummy — talking all the while, leapers and vaulters and tumblers and balancers, all bounding and jumping and prancing and hopping and sprouting from the field like energetic weeds.

“Shortcut through the tent,” Sheed further explained, and walked through the wide entrance where the flaps were fastened back into yet another area of frantic activity, this one multileveled, like a three-dimensional chessboard. Rehearsing on the ground, in one of the two rings, was a woman putting a half-dozen riderless horses through their paces...

“Your liberty horses,” Sheed commented. “No riders.”

...first in single file, and next two by two, and finally three by three, the magnificent animals thundering around the ring, hooves flying in unison as the brunette trainer in jeans and cowboy boots coaxed them along with cooing words of encouragement. In the second ring, a trainer — assisted by a tall brunette wearing shorts and a pink T-shirt — was urging three huge elephants to sit on their haunches and raise their front legs and trunks.

“The bull hand is his wife,” Sheed said.

Close by both rings, but outside of them, web girls were relentlessly climbing ropes, and ladder-walkers were dangling upside down and hanging in space, one of them from a bit clenched between his teeth. On the second level, midway between the ground and the trapezes way up high, a pyramid of wire-walkers moved steadily, precariously, cautiously, but certainly across a steel-strand cable that stretched some thirty feet from platform to platform. Two men on bicycles, each holding a long balancing pole, formed the base of the triangle. Above them was a third man perched on a narrow plank supported by a pole strapped at either end to the chests of the cyclists. He, too, held a long balancing pole. Standing on his shoulders, wearing leotard-and-tights rehearsal clothes, was a long-haired redhead, her hands spread toward the top of the tent like the wings of a large bird in flight.

“The Zvonkova family,” Sheed said. “From the Moscow State Circus. They knew Willa much better than I did.”

High above the ground, higher still than the wire-walkers, the flyers rehearsed. Craning his neck, eyes sweeping the top of the tent, Warren watched as a blond woman in black tights and a pink top concentrated on an empty trapeze swinging back toward her platform, gauging her timing against that of an equally blond man dangling head downward on another swinging trapeze, and off she went, catching the bar and flying out into space, back, forward again, back, forward, timing herself, and finally releasing her grip on the bar, somersaulting once, twice, and yet another time, reaching for her catcher’s outstretched hands — and missing.

As she fell like a stone for the net far below, Sheed shrugged and said, “Going for the Big Trick, the triple. Marnie knows it like her own name, her timing was just a hair off.”

The blonde bounced up out of the net, arms outstretched, hit the net with her feet, bounced up again, walked swiftly to the side, flipped out of the net and onto the ground, and walked immediately toward the runged stanchion leading up to her platform. Glancing up to where the blond man was now sitting upright on his trapeze and looking somewhat bored, she called, “Sorry, Sam!” and began climbing.

On the far side of the tent, an eight-piece band — all of its musicians in jeans and T-shirts — was tuning up. The keyboard player, a woman, hit a B flat over and over again for the trumpet, tuba, trombone, and tenor-sax players. The reed man doubled on alto and clarinet; he tuned the clarinet from the same B flat, and then the woman plinked him an E flat for the alto. The bass and guitar players, in a world of their own, kept a running string dialogue going between them, while the drummer banged out paradiddles and ruffs, trying to drown out the universe. Sheed and Warren came through an open tent flap into bright sunshine just as the band struck up a lively marching tune. It felt like the first day of May, but it was still only the twenty-eighth of March.

The big cats had just been fed, they lay dozing in their cages. Sheed went from cage to cage, slipping his hands casually through the bars, gently scratching the massive heads of the tigers and lions, murmuring each one’s name in turn, mentioning to Warren that there was no such thing as a tame animal, these cats were simply trained.

“I think of them as my friends, though, isn’t that right, Simba?” he asked, scratching one of the male lions behind his left ear, the lion nuzzling his hand. “Lions are easier to work with than tigers,” he said, “yes, Simba, yes, they’re social animals, they travel in prides. Your tigers are solitary hunters, they don’t like being part of a pack. They make their own decisions, won’t give any kind of signal before jumping you, very dangerous animals, yes, Simba, that’s a good boy. I got most of my scars from leopards, though, they’re worse than your bears, I won’t work with them anymore.”

“Your bears?” Warren asked, picking up the possessive.

“No, your leopards,” Sheed said. “Your panthers, too, for that matter. Quick, untrustworthy, more unpredictable than all your other cats. But your bears are from another planet entirely. ‘A bear bears a grudge,’ that’s an old circus saying. You insult a bear, you treat him badly in any way, give him any kind of excuse to build up steam inside, he’ll remember it, he’ll bide his time till he can get even. You’ve got to be crazy to get in a ring with a bear. You ever see a circus bear without a muzzle? You know how pit bulls clamp onto a leg? Or moray eels grab a hand when you stick it into wherever they’re hiding? That’s your bear. Won’t let go till he’s chewed it off. Nothing in his eyes, nothing on his face, no sign whatever he’s about to attack, and whammo, he’s on you in a minute and he won’t let go.”

Warren wanted to talk about Willa Torrance.

“So what can you tell me about her state of mind?” he asked, jumping in again with both feet.

“Willa, you mean?”

No, your bears and your tigers and your lions, Warren thought, but did not say.

“She seemed okay to me,” Sheed said, and shrugged, “but who knows what goes on in a woman’s head, huh? Shoot herself that way? Never would’ve thought it.”

“Nothing depressing her at the time? Nothing bothering her?”

“Not that I knew of. There was that thing with Aggie, you know, but that was ancient history by then.”

“Aggie?”

“McCullough. Sam’s mother, you just saw him catching for Marnie up there. Best hands in the business. Willa’s husband ran off with her. Or so I understand. I wasn’t with S&R at the time, I only heard about this later.”

“What was his name, do you know?”

“Peter Torrance, a twenty-four-hour man or something, I really don’t know.”

“But you say this was long before...”

“Oh, yeah, ages ago. Aggie came back to the circus, though, and she and Willa became close friends. So there wasn’t any kind of hard feelings there, this wasn’t like a bear nursing a grudge.”

“What happened to Torrance?”

“I have no idea.”

They were walking back toward the trailer now. Everyone they passed seemed eager to greet Sheed, flattered when a celebrity of his stature responded with a wave or a smile. Here on his home turf, the trainer seemed as supremely confident as he was in a cageful of wild animals — Davey Sheed, indeed King of All the Beasts.

“How well did you know her?” Warren asked.

“Willa?” he said. “Or Aggie?”

“Willa.”

“Pretty well.”

“How well is that?”

“Figure it out,” Sheed said, and smiled.

They were at his trailer now. Sheed was starting up the steps to the door; as far as he was concerned, the interview had ended.

“When did you last see her?” Warren asked.

“Why?”

“I’m curious.”

“I’ve been through this before, you know,” Sheed said, and reached for the doorknob.

“You’re giving me a lot of bullshit about somebody challenging her will, but you’re really here to ask me did I kill her, aren’t you?”

“Did you?” Warren asked.

“Sure. Which is just what I told the police in Rutherford. I killed Willa Torrance, fellas, so take me away and lock me up. Come on, will ya? She shot herself three years ago, who the hell would be challenging her will now? You and your pal should think up a new story.”

“My pal is in the hospital,” Warren said.

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” Sheed said. “But I’m not the one who put him there.”

“What kind of car do you drive, Mr. Sheed?”

“A yellow Cougar,” Sheed said, and opened the door. A faint whiff of cat piss wafted out on the still sunlit air. “In keeping with my line of work,” he added, and smiled again, and stepped inside.

Detective Morris Bloom had not returned from his vacation until that Monday morning, and what with one thing and another, it was not until two-thirty that afternoon that he learned Matthew Hope had been shot on Friday night and was in serious condition at Good Samaritan Hospital.

He got there at three o’clock. Patricia Demming was still in the waiting room. He knew her well, had worked dozens of cases for her since she’d joined the S.A.’s Office. She filled him in on Matthew’s condition, told him he should be coming around any minute now. She did not look too terribly convinced. She looked up at the clock, sighed, and then asked, “Which of your people are on the case?”

“Kenyon and Di Luca were on it,” Bloom said. “I’ve taken over personally.”

“Good,” she said, and nodded.

“Any idea what he was doing in Newtown?”

The same question, over and over again. What the hell was he doing in Newtown?

“No,” she said. “Warren Chambers went there Friday night, canvassed the neighborhood...”

“Anything?”

“Hooker saw the shooter’s car. All she could tell him was it was a black two-door Mazda.”

“No year?”

“She didn’t know.”

“License plate?”

“Didn’t notice it.”

“Did she see the shooter?”

“Just a hand. Wearing a black glove.”

“I’ll call Warren, see what else he’s got.”

“Toots is on it, too.”

“Couldn’t ask for better. I just don’t want us duplicating whatever...”

“Yeah, you should talk to him.”

She fell silent again.

She was thinking of the first time she’d laid eyes on Matthew Hope...

...a cat appearing suddenly out of the driving rain, a swift, gray, emaciated creature that looked like the scrawny raccoons they had down here, darting off the curb and into the gutter. She slammed on her brakes at once, and the little red Volkswagen she’d been driving back then went into a sidelong skid and smashed into the left rear fender of a sleek blue car parked at the curb. “Oh dear,” she said, and got out of the Volks and was looking at the banged-up fender when a barefooted man wearing a white terry cloth robe came thundering down the front walk from the house, coming through the pouring rain like a fury intent on strangling her. She stood in her little red silk dress and red high-heeled shoes, soaking wet, rain spattering the roadway, rain pelting everywhere around her, long blond hair getting wetter and wetter and wetter, and all she could think of saying in the face of his monumental anger was “I’m awfully sorry.”

“Sorry, my ass,” he said.

He was six feet tall or thereabouts, she noticed, with dark hair plastered to his head now, dark brown eyes smoldering in rage.

“I didn’t want to hit the cat,” she said.

“What cat?” he said.

And naturally, the damn cat was gone by then, so much for motivation.

“He ran out into the road,” she said lamely. “I hit the brake and... I’m sorry. Really. I am.”

He didn’t look as if he gave a good goddamn whether she was sorry or not. He merely kept staring at his expensive car, which she figured was brand-new or close to it, while she looked from the fender of the car — which she now saw was an Acura — to the grille of her lowly VW, and then to the skid marks on the wet asphalt. The marks clearly defined the course her little car had taken before wreaking its havoc. Guilty as charged, Your Honor. She shook her head as if amazed by the wonder of it all, but he wasn’t buying innocence or guilelessness, he was fuming mad, even if he was sort of cute.

“I’m an attorney,” she said at once, figuring she’d better pull some rank here pretty damn fast before he...

“So am I,” he said.

That had been the beginning.

“Matthew was heading over to Sun and Shore soon as he finished talking with Sheed last Monday,” Warren told her on the telephone.

“You get that from Sheed?” Toots asked.

“Steadman. Sheed wouldn’t give me the right time.”

“What’s the guy’s name there? Sun and Shore?”

“Lonnie McGovern.”

“I’m on my way,” Toots said. “Where will you be?”

“The hospital. See what they took from Matthew when they checked him in.”

“Then where?”

“Depends what I get. By the way, Sheed drives a yellow Cougar.”

“Maria drives a red Benz.”

“So much for that.”

“I’ll call you at home later.”

“Right,” Warren said, and hung up.

The man at Florida Sun and Shore appreciated blondes.

He told Toots Kiley almost at once that his wife was blonde and his three daughters were blond, and he had favored blondes his entire life long — though he himself was unlucky enough to have brown hair, as she could plainly see.

Thinning brown hair, Toots noticed, but did not say.

“It’s always a pleasure to talk to a blonde,” he said, and smiled broadly.

In addition to the thinning brown hair, he was also unfortunate enough to possess watery blue eyes, a thin-lipped mouth, and a nose out of a catalog that sold funny noses with black-rimmed eyeglasses and a shaggy black mustache attached. It happened that he was wearing black-rimmed eyeglasses and sporting a shaggy black mustache. His name was Lonnie McGovern, and he told Toots that in addition to appreciating blondes he also appreciated Cincinnati, Ohio, which is where he was from originally.

“The wife and I moved down with the kids six years ago,” he told her, and glanced admiringly at her legs and then her breasts and then the blond hair he appreciated so much. Toots wondered why he figured he had the right, but she said nothing about it. She was here to find out what McGovern and Matthew had talked about during their meeting last Monday.

“You told me on the phone,” McGovern said, “that you were investigating...”

“Yes...”

“The shooting...”

“Yes, this past Friday night,” Toots said.

“Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with Sun and Shore. Or with me, for that matter.”

“We’re walking in his footprints,” Toots said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Trying to determine if anything he did or said could have provoked the shooting.”

“Well, I can assure you,” McGovern said, his bushy eyebrows rising closer to his receding hairline, “that nothing said in this office could have even the remotest bearing...”

“Perhaps if you tell me just what was said,” Toots suggested, “I can judge for myself.”

McGovern seemed suddenly not to appreciate blondes as much as he had earlier. It was okay for her to sit there with her cute little fanny planted in the leather chair opposite his desk, her splendid legs crossed, the blond hair he had recently appreciated falling straight to her shoulders, an object to be admired and perhaps ogled — until one encountered the eyes. The eyes were brown and unflinching. The eyes accompanied the unsmiling mouth, letting McGovern know that this was a serious meeting here, however blond Toots may have been, however much blondness was a flavor McGovern particularly liked. Until now, at any rate. Now he was studying her across the desk and wondering how that soft blond hair of hers could have turned so suddenly into a burnished gold helmet.

Women, he thought, and sighed heavily, and said, “Mr. Hope came here with an offer. On behalf of George Steadman and the Steadman&Roeger Circus.”

“Could you tell me...”

“I don’t feel at liberty to discuss the terms of the offer.”

“I already know that Mr. Steadman was hoping to buy the state fairgrounds.”

“How do you know that?”

“Maria Torrance told me. She’s half owner of the circus, she’s well aware...”

“Then ask her what the offer was.”

“I’m not truly interested in dollar amounts, Mr. McGovern.”

“Mr. Hope came here with an offer,” McGovern said again. “I really feel that’s all I can divulge at this time.”

“At which time do you feel you may be able to divulge more?” Toots asked.

“I’m sorry, Miss Kiley, but I’m sure you must realize that whatever financial matters were discussed in this office...”

“I’m not asking you to tell me how much money was offered for the land,” Toots said. “I’m trying to find out if Mr. Hope mentioned anything besides the land.”

“Like what?”

“Like anyone or anything that might have hindered the purchase.”

“He didn’t mention any obstacles. I don’t see why he should have. Man comes here wanting to buy a choice piece of property, he’s certainly not going to forewarn the seller of any...”

“How about the seller forewarning him?”

McGovern looked at her.

“Are there any obstacles to the purchase of that land?”

McGovern kept looking at her.

“Mr. McGovern,” she said, “did you and Mr. Hope discuss any obstacles to the purchase of that land?”

“Yes,” McGovern said. “As a matter of...”

...fact, the problem came up shortly after Matthew arrived. On the phone, he had told McGovern only that he represented a party interested in the purchase of the thirty acres of land commonly known as the state fairgrounds. He understood that Florida Sun and Shore...

“Yes,” McGovern had said.

“...represents the owner or owners of that land, and I was wondering if I could stop by sometime Monday afternoon...”

“Only time I’ve got free on Monday is four o’clock,” McGovern told him.

“I’ll be there,” Matthew said.

Ten minutes after Matthew got there, McGovern told him there was a cloud on the title. The owner of the property, a Florida investor given to land speculation...

“What’s his name?” Matthew asked.

McGovern hesitated a moment, debating whether it was okay to reveal the name of the party his firm was representing. Apparently, he’d had no directives to the contrary. He took off his black-rimmed glasses...

Matthew expected the nose and the mustache to come off with them.

...wiped the lenses on his tie, put the glasses on again, said, “John Rafferty,” and raised the bushy eyebrows in anticipation, as if he expected Matthew to recognize the name. Matthew did not.

“Fifteen months ago,” McGovern said, “Rafferty got in way over his head on a tennis club he was buying in Lauderdale. He went to a friend here in Calusa, and asked to borrow two million dollars...”

Matthew did not have any friends who could lend him two million dollars. He said nothing.

“Very successful businessman down here,” McGovern explained, “you’d recognize the name in a minute if I told you.”

“Well, why don’t you just tell me, then?” Matthew said, and smiled encouragingly.

Again, McGovern seemed to be debating whether or not this was information he could safely reveal. Apparently, he decided once again that there was no danger involved. “Andrew Byrd,” he said, “owns half the real estate on Lucy’s Circle, plus acres and acres of property near the airport.”

Matthew nodded. He had not recognized Byrd’s name in the promised minute, but Lucy’s Circle was a man-made island that served as a luxurious stepping-stone between the mainland and two upscale barrier-island communities. If Calusa could claim a Gold Coast shopping area, Lucy’s Circle was it. The rest was all malls. Matthew kept listening.

It seemed that Rafferty had asked Byrd for the loan of two million dollars, promising to pay simple interest for the use of the money, at the maximum legal rate of twenty-five percent per annum. Byrd had considered this a good deal. He’d done business with Rafferty in the past, and the man had always paid him back on the button. But as security for the loan, he asked Rafferty for a first mortgage on the thirty-acre parcel...

“...of land on Barrington and Welles, the so-called state fairgrounds,” McGovern said.

Matthew was already ahead of him. Rafferty had undoubtedly defaulted on the loan, and Byrd had sought a foreclosure judgment against him. Since there was now a “cloud on the title,” as McGovern had just told him, Matthew assumed a judgment had not yet been entered and filed, but that litigation was in progress. Otherwise, McGovern would have told him there was a lien, and not a cloud, on the property. In short, McGovern was warning him that...

“...there is a first mortgage on the property, and this would have to be satisfied before a transfer of the land could be affected.”

“An existing mortgage isn’t the buyer’s responsibility,” Matthew said.

“That’s correct. Mr. Rafferty would have to satisfy the mortgage.”

“For two million dollars, you said.”

“Yes. Plus twenty-five percent interest for the fifteen months the mortgage has run. Plus a reasonable profit on his investment.”

“I’m prepared to offer two million dollars for the parcel,” Matthew said.

“That wouldn’t even satisfy the mortgage,” McGovern said.

“Will you discuss it with Mr. Rafferty?”

“I know he would refuse such an offer.”

“I don’t see why. Land in that part of town is worth only a hundred thousand an acre.”

“More like two hundred thousand,” McGovern said.

“Six million dollars would be an outrageous price for that property.”

“Mr. Rafferty has already turned down offers of four.”

“How did Mr. Byrd feel about that?”

“Mr. Byrd hasn’t yet been granted a judgment. You’re not even in the ballpark, Mr. Hope.”

“Define the ballpark,” Matthew said.

“Byrd is looking for his two million plus interest and legal fees to date. And, as I said, a reasonable return on his money. If you made an acceptable offer right this minute — and truly, Mr. Hope, two million dollars is ridiculous — we still wouldn’t be able to close till when... a month from now? Perhaps longer? For the sake of convenience, let’s say we could close by the first of May. By then, the interest would have run for sixteen months at a bit more than forty thousand a month, give or take a few pennies, for a total of six hundred and sixty-six thousand and change plus legal fees — and we all know what lawyers charge these days, don’t we? Add, let’s say, a safe return on the two million at six percent prime, and I’d say we were already somewhere close to the four million mark.”

“I’d say closer to the three million mark,” Matthew said. “How would Mr. Rafferty feel about that? Payment in full, no mortgage.”

McGovern looked at him.

“Figure your client takes home half a million, and Byrd gets the rest,” Matthew said. “Both of them would save a lot of time and money on endless litigation, and...”

“I don’t represent Mr. Byrd,” McGovern said.

“Well, how do you think Mr. Rafferty would feel about taking home half a million? If Byrd prevails, and there’s a foreclosure sale, your client may end up with nothing.”

“Mmmm,” McGovern said.

“What do you think?”

“I would have to ask him.”

“Could you please? And if you tell me where I can reach Mr. Byrd, I’ll contact him directly.”

“His office is in Newtown,” McGovern said.

Late afternoon sunlight was streaming through the windows behind McGovern. Toots blinked.

“Newtown?” she said.

“Andrew Byrd is a black man,” McGovern said.

The battle-ax nurse in charge of the hospital’s Storage Section was wearing a white uniform like any of the other nurses at the hospital, and her little black plastic name tag read, DOROTHY PIERCE, R.N., so Warren guessed she was a bona fide nurse, though why they would waste a qualified person in a section that stored the personal belongings of patients was something beyond his ken.

He had stopped at the main desk to check on Matthew’s condition, and then had taken the elevator down to the very bowels of the hospital, where Dorothy Pierce, R.N., held sway. Dorothy Pierce, R.N., was now telling Warren Chambers, P.I., that he could not have a look at Matthew Hope’s appointment book.

“Why not?” he asked. “You just told me he had one on his person when they checked him in.”

“Exactly,” she said. “On his person.”

“Huh?” Warren said.

“Which makes it personal property,” she said.

“All I want to do is look at it,” Warren said.

“For what purpose?”

“To copy the...”

“That would be a violation of the patient’s rights.”

“You didn’t let me finish my sentence.”

“I heard enough of it to know what...”

“But you don’t know what I want to copy.”

“What is it you want to copy, Mr. Chambers?”

“His calendar appointments for last week.”

“That would be a breach of regulations,” she said. “I don’t even want to hear about it.”

“Miss Pierce...”

“Mrs. Pierce.”

“Mrs. Pierce, a very good friend of mine is very sick upstairs, and I’m trying to find out what he did last week that might have got him shot. If you won’t let me have his appointment book...”

“I won’t.”

“Then I’ll have his law partner apply for a court order...”

“Don’t snow me, kiddo,” she said.

“Either his law partner or any one of a dozen police detectives I happen to know.”

“Like who?” Mrs. Pierce said.

“Like me,” Morris Bloom said from the doorway behind her.

Matthew’s appointment book was a fine, brown leather Ghurka he’d bought in one of the shops on Lucy’s Circle. Measuring some four inches wide by six and a half inches long, the book when opened to its calendar section displayed each week split approximately in half, the four days from Monday through Thursday on the left side of the dividing binder, the remaining three days on the right side. Warren copied those pages on a Xerox machine in the hospital’s Clerical Office, where the objections of a second battle-ax nurse were finally overcome when Bloom showed her his detective’s shield.

In the first lined space for Monday, March 21, Matthew had written the words Call Felicity Codlow, FSU. Several spaces below that, he had written, Circus 2:00 P.M., and just below that, Lonnie McGovern, Sun&Shore, 4:00 P.M. Studying the entries now, Warren figured that Matthew had written his telephone reminder after he’d seen Maria Torrance on Sunday, but before he’d gone out to the circus grounds on Monday. Warren had no idea who Felicity Codlow was, but he knew that FSU stood for Florida State University, and he further knew there was a branch of the school in Sarasota, near the new airport that serviced the Calbrasa tri-city area.

At twenty minutes to six that evening, after Bloom had gone back to his office with Matthew’s actual appointment book in hand, Warren scanned the Sarasota/Bradenton/Calusa telephone directory for an FSU listing, dialed the number, and asked the woman who answered the phone for Miss Codlow, please.

“Mrs. Codlow, yes,” she said, “just a minute, please.”

Warren waited.

“History,” a woman’s voice said.

“Yes, hello,” Warren said. “Mrs. Codlow, please.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Warren Chambers.”

“May I tell her what this is about, sir?”

The sir didn’t mollify Warren; he hated when they did that. Nurses in doctors’ offices were the worst offenders. You called a doctor because you wanted to speak to the doctor, and not some nurse-twit wanting to know what this was about. Warren was always tempted to say, “I have a leaky penis.”

“I’d like to talk to her personally,” he said.

“Moment.”

He waited again.

“Stuart England,” a no-nonsense voice said.

“I wanted Mrs. Codlow,” Warren said.

“This is Mrs. Codlow.”

He was certain she’d announced herself as Stuart England, but he plunged ahead regardless. “This is Warren Chambers,” he said, “I’m an investigator who’s done work for Matthew Hope...”

“Yes, my God, how is he? I saw the news on television the other night, what on earth happened?”

“Well, as you know...”

“I spoke to him only last Monday. What...”

“That’s why I’m...”

“...could have possibly taken him to Newtown at that hour of the night?”

“I know he was planning to call you...”

“Yes, he did.”

“About what, Mrs. Codlow?”

“Well, he knows I teach English history... my husband and I know him socially, you see, him and Susan both, knew them even before they were divorced, actually. I suppose he assumed I’d know something about lovelocks.”

“I’m sorry, something about...?”

“Lovelocks.”

“What... I’m sorry, Mrs. Codlow, but I don’t know what that means, lovelocks.”

“Lovelocks were a men’s fashion of the seventeenth century. A way of wearing the hair.”

“The hair?”

“Yes. The style became popular in England when James the First... I teach Stuart England, you see...”

“I see.”

“Sixteen-oh-three to seventeen hundred.”

“I see.”

“James the First allowed a lock of hair on the left side of his head to grow much longer than the rest of his hair. A lovelock, it was called. It was combed forward from the neck, and it usually hung casually over the front of the shoulder. Some men decorated it with a ribbon tied in a bow. It was all the rage.”

“I see. And... Matthew called to ask about this... uh...”

“Lovelock, yes. The Puritan writer, William Prynne, wrote a long discourse on the style. He called it ‘The Unloveliness of Lovelockes,’ spelled with an ‘e’ back then in 1628. Would you like to hear what he wrote?”

“Well... uh... yes,” Warren said.

“He wrote, and I quote exactly, ‘Infinite and many are the sinfully strange and monstrous vanities which this inconstant, vain, fantastic, idle, proud, effeminate and wanton age of ours hath hatched and produced in all parts and corners of the world...’”

“Yes, but how did he really feel?” Warren said.

“Indeed,” Mrs. Codlow said, and trilled a delightfully girlish laugh. “He went on to say, ‘I have resolved for the present to single out one sinful, shameful and uncomely vanity with which to grapple, which hath lately feigned on many effeminate, loose, licentious, singular, fantastic and vainglorious persons of our masculine and more noble sex; to wit, the nourishing and wearing of unnaturally shameful and unlovely locks, or love locks, as they style them. These lovelocks had their birth from the very Devil himself!’ He went on and on in like manner for a good sixty-three pages that defy all sense or logic, the more noble sex indeed!”

“Did Matthew say why he wanted to know about a hair fashion?”

“Well, apparently he’d done a bit of homework beforehand.”

“What sort of homework?”

“I expect he’d been to the library. He told me that he knew Lovelock was a town in Nevada, and that Lovelock was also the name of a thirty-nine-year-old Olympic track star who was killed under...”

“Killed?” Warren said at once.

“Yes, under a subway train in Brooklyn. Back in 1949. Dr. John E. Lovelock was his full...”

“Ah,” Warren said.

“Pardon?”

“He was going for her middle name.”

“I’m sorry, what...?”

“He was chasing down her middle name. Lovelock. That’s someone’s middle name.”

“It is?” Mrs. Codlow said.

“Yes. A woman he’d seen the day before.”

“I see,” she said, but the tone of her voice indicated she wasn’t quite following Warren. “In any case, he called me because he’d also found a reference to lovelock as a fashion, and he wanted to know more about it. Remembering that I taught Stuart England...”

“Yes.”

“He thought I might know something about the style.”

“And you did.”

“I did. History does have its amusing sidelights, you know. Besides, James’s quarrel with the Puritans was of enormous historic importance.”

“So what you told Matthew...”

“I had no idea he was tracing a name, you understand.”

“Yes.”

“I simply told him what a lovelock was.”

“You said...”

“I said it was a sort of curl. A tress of long, curled hair.”

“A curl.” Warren repeated.

“Yes. Quite simply, a curl.”