There Was a Little Girl

3: Right in the middle of her forehead...

Bloom had met Matthew Hope for the first time right here in this office on the third floor of what the city of Calusa discreetly and euphemistically called the Public Safety Building. This was your basic cop shop, though, a police station constructed of varying shades of tan brick, its architecturally severe face broken only by narrow windows resembling rifle slits in an armory wall — not a bad innovation in a climate like Florida’s.

You entered the building through bronzed entrance doors, and you went up to the third-floor reception area, where an orange-colored letter-elevator rose like an oversized periscope from the floor. You told the uniformed police officer sitting at a desk in front of the paneled wall facing you that you wanted to talk to Detective Morris Bloom, and she buzzed him from the newly installed “communications center” equipment on her desk, and then told you to follow the hallway to the office at the far end, and there was Bloom, a heavyset man in his mid-forties, an inch over six feet tall, and weighing close to two hundred pounds after his recent trip up north.

The day he’d first met Matthew, if he recalled correctly, Bloom was wearing much what he was wearing today, a rumpled blue suit, a wrinkled white shirt, a blue tie. A total picture of sartorial elegance, but that’s the way he looked, take it or leave it, whenever he slept in his clothes as he’d done last night. He was probably a few pounds heavier than he’d been back then, but the fox face was the same, and so was the nose that had been kicked around the block a few times, and the shaggy black brows and dark brown eyes that made him look as if he were about to weep even when he wasn’t feeling particularly sad — a bad failing for a cop.

He was, in fact, feeling particularly sad this Tuesday morning because he’d just called the hospital and they’d told him that Matthew Hope’s condition was still “stable but critical,” whatever the hell that meant. Now he sat here waiting for a man named Andrew Byrd to arrive, looking up at the clock — he’d be here in five minutes — and remembering the very first words Matthew had ever said to him: “I’m an attorney. I’m familiar with my rights.”

Bloom had known a great many streetwise bums who were also familiar with their rights, so it didn’t cut much ice with him that this particular rights-aware person happened to be an attorney. Attorney or not, the night before Bloom had ever laid eyes on him, Matthew Hope had slept with a woman who’d subsequently been beaten to death.

“Well, Mr. Hope,” Bloom had said, “the way I look at it, you’re technically in custody here, and I’m obliged to advise you of your rights. I’ve been a police officer for close to twenty-five years now, and nothing gives me a bigger pain in the ass than interpreting Miranda-Escobedo. But if I’ve learned one thing about interrogations, it’s that it’s better to be safe than sorry. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just reel off your rights to you, and then we’ll be over and done with it.”

“If it makes you feel better,” Matthew said.

“Nothing about murder makes me feel very good, Mr. Hope, but at least this way we’ll be starting off even, everything according to how the Supreme Court wants it, okay?”

“Fine,” Matthew said.

Snotty bastard, Bloom thought.

But sometime during the course of the interrogation, he’d changed his mind. Winding down, he’d asked, “And you say she was alive when you left, huh?”

“She was very much alive,” Matthew said.

“I think maybe she was,” Bloom said, and nodded.

Matthew studied him.

“Mr. Hope,” he said, “this line of work, you develop what Ernest Hemingway used to call a built-in shit detector. You familiar with Ernest Hemingway? The writer?”

“I’m familiar with him.”

“You learn to sense whether somebody’s telling the truth or somebody’s lying, I’m sure it’s the same in your line of work. I think you’re telling me the truth.”

Matthew kept studying him.

“If I’m wrong, sue me,” Bloom said.

He had not been wrong.

The buzzer on his desk sounded.

He picked up.

“Ballistics on six,” a woman’s voice said.

“Thanks, Lois,” he said, and hit the six button, and said, “Bloom.”

“Maury, it’s Ed Raines, how are you?”

“Fine, Ed, what’ve you got?”

“Depends what you already know,” Raines said. “Way I have it, your people at the scene already nailed the slugs as twenty-twos, which is exactly right. All three bullets are twenty-two-caliber long rifles, two of them badly deformed, one of them clean as a whistle. No recovered casings, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Which ties in with our findings here.”

Meaning Raines knew the gun hadn’t been an auto. Whenever an auto is fired, it tosses out a spent cartridge case. These cases are usually recovered at the scene, since the shooter rarely has the time or the inclination to pick up after himself. When a revolver is fired, however, the empty shell stays in the cylinder. Bloom knew that the people in Ballistics could identify an unknown firearm either from a bullet or a cartridge. How they did it was quite another matter.

In much the same way that lawyers and doctors had invented secret languages only they could understand, thereby making it possible to charge exorbitant fees for what was essentially basic translation, so had ballistics experts come up with an arcane tongue that utilized code words like twists and grooves and lands and pitch and angle and breech and muzzle and rifling and direction and axis and extractor and rim and ejector and snot.

Nonetheless, Bloom knew that four factors were constant in every pistol of the same caliber and make. The ballistics people measured the width and number of the grooves on the bullet, and the direction and degree of the twist. Width, number, direction, and degree. WNDD. Like a sixty-watt FM radio station somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey. One, two, three, and four, which they then checked against their various charts and tables, and voilà...

“The gun was an Iver Johnson Trailsman Snub,” Raines said, “model sixty-six. It’s available as a thirty-eight-caliber, a thirty-two, or a twenty-two long rifle — which is what this one was. Eight-shot cylinder capacity...”

Three of which were fired at Matthew, Bloom thought.

“...tempered, blue-black, finished steel throughout, chrome lining in the barrel, top break frame. The snub weighs twenty-five ounces, and she’s got a two-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. That’s it for now. Let us know when you’ve got something we can test-fire.”

Aluvai, Bloom thought.

“Thanks, Ed,” he said.

“My pleasure,” Raines said, and hung up.

The instrument buzzed again almost the moment Bloom put the receiver back on its cradle. He picked up at once.

“Mr. Byrd here to see you,” Lois said.

“Send him right in,” Bloom said.

She had known about Matthew since Saturday morning, when she heard the news on the radio while driving to her aerobics class, but although she’d called the hospital to inquire about his condition, she hadn’t decided to come here till today.

She still wasn’t sure she should be here.

Their roller-coaster marriage had been followed by an acrimonious divorce. Even two years later, when they’d met again at a party, they could barely manage civil conversation.

“Are you still angry?” she’d asked.

“About what?”

“Joanna’s school.”

Their separation agreement had given her the right to send their daughter to any school she chose. She’d chosen one in Massachusetts. Now she was asking him if he was still angry.

“Actually it might be good for her,” he said. “Getting away from both of us.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” she said.

She was wearing a fire-red gown held up by her breasts and nothing else. Dark eyes in an oval face, brown hair newly styled in a wedge, black pearl earrings dangling at her ears. He had given her those earrings on their tenth wedding anniversary. Three years later, they were divorced. Now, two years after that, they stood on a deck overlooking a beach that spread to the shoreline. A full moon above laid a silvery path across the water. From somewhere below the deck, the scent of jasmine came wafting up onto the night. Some kids up the beach were playing guitars. Just like that summer on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Except that on the night they’d met long ago, it had been mandolins and mimosa.

“I knew you’d be here tonight,” she said. “Muriel phoned and asked if it was okay to invite you. Did she tell you I’d be here?”

“No.”

“Would you have come? If you’d known?”

“Probably not,” he said. “But now I’m glad I did.”

She almost told the woman behind the reception desk that she was his wife. All these years later, and somehow she still thought of herself as his wife. “We were married,” she said instead. “I was hoping...”

“Mr. Hope isn’t allowed visitors yet,” the woman said.

“Can you tell me what his condition is?”

“Stable.”

“Is his doctor here at the hospital?”

“I’ll check,” the woman said, and picked up a telephone. She hit several buttons, waited, and then said, “Mary, is Dr. Spinaldo on the floor?” She listened, nodded, and then said, “I have Mr. Hope’s ex here, she’d like to talk to him. Spinaldo, yes.”

Susan said nothing.

“Right here at the desk,” the woman said into the phone. “What’s your name, ma’am?” she asked.

“Susan Hope.”

Still Susan Hope, she thought. After all these years, still...

“Susan Hope,” the woman said into the phone. “Shall I send her up?” She listened again, and then said, “No, his ex. Can Spinaldo talk to her? Good. I’ll send her right up.” She replaced the phone receiver, said, “TIC waiting room, fourth floor,” and handed Susan a card that read VISITORS PASS.

“Thank you,” Susan said, and went past a uniformed security guard, and walked swiftly toward the elevator. The doors opened, disgorging a gaggle of nurses in crisp white uniforms.

The party was black-tie, all the men in white dinner jackets, all the women in long slinky gowns. The band’s drummer had gone up the beach to disperse the kids playing guitar and then had come back to join the piano player and the bass player on the patio below the deck. They were now playing “It Happened in Monterey.” The moon was full. The Gulf of Mexico glittered beneath it like shattered glass.

“What are you thinking?” Susan asked.

“I’d get arrested,” Matthew said, smiling.

“That bad?”

“That good.”

“...a long time ago,” the lyrics said.

“You look beautiful tonight,” he said.

“You look handsome.”

“Thank you.”

“...lips as red as wine,” the lyrics said.

“But then, Matthew, you always did look marvelous in a dinner jacket.”

He was staring at her again.

“Something?” she said.

“Yes, let’s get out of here,” he said in a rush.

The elevators swished open. A nurse wheeled out an old man on a stretcher, and Susan followed her out into the fourth-floor corridor. She searched for a sign, found one telling her that the trauma intensive-care unit was to the right, and began walking down the hall. She was suddenly very frightened, suddenly fearful that the doctor would tell her Matthew was either dying or already dead.

The first person she saw in the waiting room was Patricia Demming. She debated leaving. Instead, she went to her, extended her hand, and said, “Hello, Patricia, how are you?”

“Did you have this meeting Mr. Hope had arranged?” Bloom asked.

“I did,” Byrd said.

He was a tall, brawny man in his mid-thirties, Bloom guessed, conservatively dressed in a tan tropical-weight suit, a shirt the color of sweet corn, and a chocolate-brown tie fastened to his shirt with a simple gold tie tack in the shape of a tiny shield. The letters AB emblazoned the shield like an ancient scroll writ small in curlicued script. Andrew Byrd was the color of his tie.

He sat before Bloom’s desk, his long legs casually crossed, his manner indicating a complete willingness to cooperate. Hanging on three walls of the room, or otherwise resting on shelves fastened to those walls, virtually surrounding Byrd with impressive exploits of derring-do, were framed photographs of the detective squad Bloom had commanded up north; and a citation plaque from the Nassau County chief of detectives; and a pair of laminated front-page stories from the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, headlining the daring capture of two bank robbers in Mineola, Long Island, by a young police officer named Morris L. Bloom; and a boxing trophy Bloom had received while serving in the U.S. Navy; and a Snoopy doll his then-nineteen-year-old son had given him on a Father’s Day some years back, the hand-lettered sign around its neck reading: To the best bloodhound in the world. Love, Marc.

All of this might normally have intimidated and/or disarmed the bad guys Bloom interrogated in this office, but Andrew Byrd was not one of the bad guys. Instead, he was a reputable and highly esteemed Calusa businessman worth some six hundred million dollars according to an issue of Forbes that Bloom had found in the stacks of the Calusa Public Library. Trim and fit in his well-tailored suit, speaking in a voice somewhat reminiscent of the Islands — a faint Jamaican lilt, was it, a Bahamian pulse? — he told Bloom that Matthew had called him late Monday afternoon, the twenty-first, and had arranged to come to his office early the next morning, the twenty-second.

On Bloom’s desk, Matthew’s appointment calendar was open to the page showing those dates. In the space for March 22, he had first written, in blue ink, Andrew Byrd, 9:00 A.M., and below that, in pencil, John Rafferty, 12 Noon. Below that, he had written, again in pencil: Phone MEMO. What the hell was a phone memo?

“He came to see you at nine, is that right?”

“On the button,” Byrd said.

“Where is your office, Mr. Byrd?”

“In Newtown. 1217 Kensington Circle. In the mall there. I built that mall, Mr. Bloom. It’s one of the most successful malls in all Calusa. The one downtown is still empty, built five years ago, you can’t give away space there. Kensington’s in Newtown, mind you, not exactly the garden spot of Florida, but my mall is full of upscale shops. I’ve even got Lord&Taylor in there, do you know of any other Lord&Taylor in Calusa? Lord&Taylor, Victoria’s Secret, The Coffee Connection, The Sharper Image, Laura Ashley, Barnes&Noble, you name it, anything you’d expect to find in a Palm Beach mall, I’ve got in Newtown. I don’t have to tell you that in some sections of Newtown, it’s worth your life to go out after dark. Well, look what happened to your Mr. Hope. The Kensington Mall draws people from all over the tri-city area, though — white, black, purple, they all come to my mall. The security there is the best in all Florida, bar none. You can park a Caddy, a Lexus, a Beemer, a Mercedes, the most luxurious car you can name, a Rolls even, you name it, when you’re finished with your shopping you’ll find it just the way you left it. I myself drive a Jag, Mr. Bloom, I park it in the mall garage when I go to work every morning, it’s safe there all day long. There’re no rowdies in my mall, no teenagers looking for trouble. Kensington isn’t a place for hanging out, it isn’t a street corner. It’s a place for people to come to and do business in a safe and pleasant environment. I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished there. I’ve built places all over Calusa... hell, all over Florida, for that matter, I own half the property on Lucy’s Circle, I guess you know that...”

“Yes, I do.”

“Sure, it’s what everyone mentions, the jewel in the crown. But I’m proudest of what I accomplished there in Newtown. I created a place where blacks and whites can shop together in peace and comfort. Before I built that mall, what white man in his right mind would go to Newtown? Sure, okay, on the way to the airport, but that was all. Now they come flocking there. And the blacks come, too, not because it’s close but because it gives them something they can be proud of, right there in Newtown, something that makes them hold their heads high in self-respect.”

Byrd was telling the truth in a slightly embroidered fashion. Kensington Mall was, in fact, one of the most profitable malls to have opened in Calusa during the past several years. It was safe and clean and well lighted and every bit as upscale as Byrd had claimed. And, too, it did draw customers from all over the tri-city area, black and white alike. But the mall was situated a good four miles from where Matthew had been shot last Friday night, and it was doubtful that anyone who hung out in the neighborhood of Roosevelt and G would be shopping Godiva Chocolatier on any given Friday night.

“What’d he come to see you about?” Bloom asked.

Toots Kiley had already told him what Matthew had earlier learned, that Byrd was suing the owner of the land, hoping to have a foreclosure judgment entered.

“The land on Barrington and Welles,” Byrd said. “What they call the state fairgrounds. He had a party interested in buying it. Sun and Shore told him — Florida Sun and Shore, big realtors over on Pineapple — told him I’d taken the owner of the land to court. They knew he’d find out, anyway, the minute he began asking around, this wasn’t an act of generosity on their part. I told Mr. Hope that, in any event, the problem wasn’t with me. The problem was with Rafferty.”

“Rafferty?” Bloom asked.

“John Rafferty. Sole owner of the thirty-acre parcel before he mortgaged the land to me. Mr. Hope seemed to understand that I wasn’t the one standing in the way of any prospective purchase of the land. It’s Rafferty who’s been...”

...holding this thing up in court, Byrd told Matthew, because he wasn’t about to let him give the land away just to square a bad debt.

Matthew was sitting across from Byrd in his office on the top floor of the Kensington Mall, the digital calendar on Byrd’s desk reading MAR 22, early morning sunlight streaming through the windows behind him, a veritable jungle of greenery planted on the rooftop deck beyond. The mall would not open until ten. Byrd had been here since eight, he’d told Matthew, his daily habit except for Sundays.

“I’ve been trying to get a foreclosure judgment for the past three months now. I’ve got a two-million-dollar mortgage on that land, and I want my goddamn money back. Plus interest to the date of foreclosure, if and when that ever happens, plus the money I’ve spent on legal fees trying to collect. The mortgage is for twenty-five percent per annum simple interest, which is the legal limit for any business loan of five hundred thousand or more... well, I guess you know how the law works.”

“I do,” Matthew said.

“Of course you do,” Byrd said. “I loaned the money to Rafferty’s corporation, which made the higher interest rate acceptable. Made it a business loan, you see. Anything over twenty-five percent simple is usury in this state. They’re very tough on usury down here...”

“Yes, I know.”

“Of course, you do. They not only send you to jail, but you lose all the money you loaned. Which is even worse than going to jail,” Byrd said, and burst out laughing.

Matthew believed him. To Andrew Byrd, losing money would be a fate worse than going to jail.

“The original loan was for a year,” Byrd said, “two million bucks at twenty-five percent simple, which made it a decent investment. That’s five hundred thousand dollars in interest, that’s good money for a year. Okay, when Rafferty defaulted, he already owed me the half mil, and in the three months since, he’s piled up almost another hundred and twenty-five thou. That’s what it comes to at the stipulated two-point-oh-eight points a month.”

“Are you a lawyer?” Matthew asked.

“No, thank God,” Byrd said, and burst out laughing again when he remembered he was in the presence of one. “What makes you think so?”

“Well, you used the word ‘stipulated,’ which...”

“But that’s a word in English, too, isn’t it?” Byrd asked, and began laughing louder when he realized he’d just deprecated legalese.

“I suppose it is,” Matthew said, smiling. “But you won’t find a lawyer on earth who’ll agree to ‘agree to’ rather than ‘stipulate.’”

“I have a feeling you’re not one of those lawyers,” Byrd said.

“Only in court,” Matthew said.

The way Byrd looked at it, Rafferty was already into him for $2,625,000 plus the legal fees it had cost him in his struggle to get a judgment for foreclosure. The day he was looking forward to was the day the sheriff stood on those courthouse steps at eleven in the morning, which was when all foreclosure sales were held in Calusa County, and conducted a public sale for the thirty-acre parcel on Barrington and Welles. At that time, Byrd would bid the $2,625,000 plus he’d already spent on the goddamn fairgrounds, be awarded the land, and get his deed in the mail a week later, after which he would turn the land over to a broker for sale. If the broker got the asking price, Byrd would call it a day. If he got less than he’d already laid out, he would once again go against Rafferty, this time for a deficiency judgment. He may not have been a lawyer, but Byrd sure as hell knew his remedies at law.

“As I understand this,” he told Matthew, “your client is offering three million for the land. I’d take it in a minute. Pay me back everything I’ve laid out, let Rafferty have whatever’s left, sure, that’d be wonderful. But until I get that damn judgment, my hands are tied. Rafferty’s the one who’s...”

“I realize that. But I thought, if I could go to him and tell him you were ready to drop the suit and settle for...”

“You don’t understand. Rafferty doesn’t want that land sold right now. He’d like to hold on to it till doomsday, watch it go up in value, the way everything goes up in value sooner or later in Florida.”

“Not everything,” Matthew said.

“Almost everything,” Byrd conceded. “The point is... well, figure it out. In reality, I own more of that land than he does. It’s just a matter of getting the court to hand down a judgment. I recorded that mortgage the minute I made the loan. There’s no one behind me on it, I’m Rafferty’s sole creditor. But I can’t go after the land, or anything else he owns, even though he personally guaranteed the loan. I can forget the five-million-dollar house he owns on Whisper, that’s protected by the Homestead Act. But he’s got property all over Florida, and I can’t touch any of it till I win the court case. It’s ridiculous, the way his lawyers keep stalling this thing along. Excuse me, but I hate lawyers, I really do. You’d think they’d want to save their client all those legal fees... this is costing him money, too, am I right? Give me a deed in lieu, let the thing rest. But no, Rafferty’s going to fight this thing till we’re both old and gray.”

“Unless I can tell him you’ll settle for the two million five. That’ll leave him...”

“You still don’t understand,” Byrd said, and shook his head. “The son of a bitch is doing this because — well, never mind.”

“What were you about to say?”

“I’m black, all right? That’s what I was about to say. And I’m more successful than he is. Who put up Kensington? Was it Rafferty? Oh, sure. Rafferty put money in the downtown mall, that’s what he did. Lost his shirt along with everybody else. He doesn’t want a successful black man to take his land, that’s all there is to it. My black money was good enough for him when he needed it, but he doesn’t want my black hands on land he still thinks he owns.”

Matthew said nothing.

“Which he does, in fact, till the court decides otherwise. That’s the way it is, Mr. Hope. If your client wants that land, he’ll have to deal with Rafferty. Right now, he’s the only one who has the right to sell it. And he won’t, I promise you. Accept your three-million-dollar offer, and then hand most of it over to me? No way. He’d rather fight this out till the cows come home. You go talk to him. You’ll see.”

Matthew was silent for several moments.

Then he said, “You’re telling me this is a personal thing...”

“You don’t know how personal.”

“You’re saying the man’s prejudice would stand in the way of...”

“Oh, he doesn’t even know he’s a bigot,” Byrd said. “You ask him, he’ll tell you I’m his best friend. Hell, we went to high school together, I’ve known him forever.”

“But you say he’s not your friend.”

“I say he hates me.”

“Then why’d he come to you for money?”

“Nowhere else to go. He was at the end of his rope. Look, I have loaned him money in the past — which he’s always paid back, by the way. This time, though, he’s in too deep. He keeps pouring money into that tennis club, it’s like a bottomless pit, there’s no way he can salvage it. That’s what rankles, that’s why he’s fighting me in court. He knows he defaulted, he knows I should be granted that damn foreclosure judgment, he knows all that. But it rankles that I’m sitting here in this fancy office on top of the most successful mall in town, while he hasn’t got a pot to piss in. That’s what twists inside him like a poison snake. And that’s why he’ll never accept your client’s offer.”

“I’m obliged to make the offer, anyway,” Matthew said.

“Go right ahead. It won’t do you any good.”

“Because you feel this is a personal matter.”

“Yes.”

“But this wasn’t a personal loan.”

“No, no, my company made the loan. Lawson-Byrd Investments.”

“Who’s Lawson?”

“My wife. That’s her maiden name. She’s also my partner.”

“In actuality, then, Rafferty owes the money to both of you.”

“And don’t think that doesn’t rankle, too.”

“How do you mean?”

“It rankles, that’s all. With him, everything rankles.”

“Enough to turn down an offer that’ll settle his debt...”

“Doesn’t care.”

“...get him off the hook...”

“What does he care?”

“...and relieve him of any further legal costs?”

“The man just doesn’t care.”

“You really think he’d slit his own throat just to...”

“My throat first,” Byrd said.

Patricia wondered why the good Dr. Spinaldo was directing most of his conversation to Susan Hope rather than sharing it between them. Did the good doctor believe Matthew and Susan were still married? Did he believe that the holy bonds of matrimony were sacred and eternal, once husband and wife, always husband and wife? His manner was unmistakable. He was treating Susan as the Wife, ignoring Patricia as the...

What?

In this day and age?

“...no perceptible change in his condition,” the doctor was telling Susan, his body actually turned toward her, his back virtually to Patricia. “His vital signs are still stable, and his responses to externally applied stimuli remain unchanged. You must understand, Mrs. Hope, that...”

Patricia noticed she did not correct him.

“...we are dealing here with altered states of consciousness, in which the alert state and the comatose state are at extreme ends of a behavioral continuum. Your husband...”

Again, Susan did not correct him.

“...isn’t alert, but neither is he comatose. The other two points on the continuum are lethargy and stupor. We use the term ‘stupor’ to define a state from which the patient can be awakened only by forceful and frequent stimuli. I would suggest that your husband’s condition would fall somewhat higher on the continuum than stupor. Semicoma is a highly unscientific term, and I’m loath to use it. Nonetheless, it would possibly best describe his condition.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Susan said, and then, as an afterthought as she started out of the room, “It was nice running into you, Patricia.”

Patricia wanted to strangle her.

“Mr. Rafferty, please,” Bloom said into the phone.

“This is Rafferty.”

“Detective Morris Bloom, Calusa P.D.,” Bloom said.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Rafferty, we’re investigating a shooting that took place last Friday night...”

“Matthew Hope, right.”

“You’re familiar with the incident, sir?”

“It’s all over television. In fact, I was wondering when you’d get to me.”

“Why is that, Mr. Rafferty?”

“I just assumed you’d be checking on anybody he had anything to do with recently.”

“That’s right, sir, we are.”

“And I’m further assuming you know he came to see me last Tuesday afternoon.”

“That’s what it says in his appointment calendar, sir.”

“So there you are.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Rafferty, I wonder if I could stop by there sometime today, go over some of...”

“Sure, that’s what I was expecting.”

“What’s a good time for you, sir?”

“How about right now?”

“Well, I’m waiting for a long-dist...”

“I’ll be here all morning,” Rafferty said. “When do you think you’ll be free?”

“Can we make it for eleven?”

“Fine, I’ll look for you. Do you know where I am?”

“I know where you are,” Bloom said.

Warren and Toots were walking the loop. This was a favorite pastime in Calusa, especially on rainy days, when you couldn’t go to the beach, and you had a choice between the movies and shopping. It wasn’t raining this particular Tuesday morning. It was, in fact, quite a nice sunny day for a mid-morning stroll around Lucy’s Circle. Warren didn’t like meetings in his office because the place was about the size of a shoebox and it made people feel claustrophobic. He had called the hospital from the office first thing this morning, and then he’d called Bloom, and finally he’d called Toots and asked her to meet him on the Circle for coffee. They were walking the loop now, Toots in yellow denims, sandals, and an orange-colored top, Warren in gray tropical-weight slacks, blue sneakers, and a short-sleeved, dark blue shirt. They were both wearing sunglasses. Neither of them looked into any of the shop windows. What they were trying to do was lay out what they already had and then figure where they should go from here.

The thing that was troubling Warren was what he called the Double Two-Step. What they were doing here, essentially, was duplicating everything Matthew had done last week. By walking in his footprints, they were hoping to learn what he had learned. Once they knew that, then maybe they could figure out why someone had shot him. But Matthew had been following two separate trails, the land purchase in the here and now, and a questionable suicide three years ago.

Maria Torrance had stated without compromise that someone — in fact, someone quite specific, someone named Davey Sheed, in fact, King of All the Beasts — had killed her mother. If this was true, then probing a case the Missouri police had closed as a suicide three years earlier could very well have proved dangerous to Matthew. On the other hand, the purchase of the state fairgrounds was turning out to be a complex situation in its own right.

On the phone this morning, Bloom had recounted Byrd’s recitation of his meeting with Matthew last week, and it now appeared that Matthew had uncovered a festering situation he’d intended to pursue further. The penciled notation in his appointment calendar had undoubtedly been written in after his meeting with Byrd. He had seen Byrd at nine last Tuesday morning. His appointment with Rafferty was for noon that same day. He had also made a note to himself that read...

“Does ‘phone memo’ mean anything to you?” Warren asked.

“No.”

“Anyway, Bloom’s seeing Rafferty later today,” Warren said. “I’m eager to know what the hell’s going on between those two. Man hates another man so much, but he asks him for two million dollars?”

“And gets it, don’t forget.”

“And then refuses to pay it back. How does that figure?”

“Why’d Byrd lend it to him in the first place?”

“Twenty-five percent interest, that’s why.”

“The limit before it becomes usury.”

“Damn good return on the dollar.”

“But would you lend it to a man who hates you?”

“Byrd says it’s cause he’s black.”

“If you hate black men, don’t go to one for money,” Toots said, and shrugged.

“But he did.”

“And he got the money. Despite the fact that Byrd knows he’s a bigot.”

“Or claims he’s one. Love to know what’s going on there,” Warren said.

“Love to know what Bloom gets from Missouri.”

“What do you think he’ll get? He’ll get, ‘Case Closed, don’t bother us.’”

“Maybe not.”

“Let’s go out to the circus again,” Warren said. “See if anybody remembers just what did happen in Rutherford, Missouri.”

“That was three years ago, Warren.”

“If somebody blew her brains out in the trailer next door to me, I’d remember three years ago, wouldn’t you?”

“Not if I was the one shot her,” Toots said.

“Right in the middle of the goddamn forehead,” Warren said.

The collect return call from Rutherford, Missouri, came at seven minutes past ten that morning. The caller asked to speak to Detective Morris Bloom, and then identified himself as Dr. Abel Voorhies, one of the physicians who’d prepared the Medical Examiner’s Office report on Willa Torrance three years back. Bloom accepted the call. Voorhies went on to say that at the time, he’d had some doubts about the conclusion the M.E.’s Office had drawn, but the majority opinion...

“Majority?” Bloom asked. “How many people were involved in the autopsy?”

“Well... excuse me, but was it Mr. Hope who put you onto me?”

“No. What do you mean?” Bloom asked at once. “Are you talking about Matthew Hope?”

“Yes. Because he called here last week, you see, and asked virtually that identical question. I thought...”

“You spoke to Mr. Hope last week?”

“Last Tuesday, yes.”

So that was it. Phone MEMO. Phone Medical Examiner Missouri.

“What’d he want?” Bloom asked.

“Well, he told me Mrs. Torrance’s will had come up in some sort of real estate negotiation...”

“I see,” Bloom said.

“Yes, and he wanted to know the details of her suicide three years ago. Apparently a clause in the will... well, it doesn’t matter. We get similar requests every year, on the anniversary of her death, newspaper and television reporters digging up the past, we’re quite used to it here in Rutherford. This is the county seat, you know...”

“I didn’t know that,” Bloom said.

“Yes, which means we’re relatively well staffed and therefore able to handle such requests. Mr. Hope wanted to know whether we’d been concerned about the lack of a suicide note...”

“Yes, what about that?” Bloom said.

“I told him what I’ve told anyone else who asks me. And there are plenty of askers, believe me. I told him, yes, I had been concerned about the lack of a note. Then again, not all suicides leave notes, I’m sure you know that.”

“That’s true, but...”

“And not all right-handed suicides shoot themselves in the right temple. I’m sure there’re plenty of them who shoot themselves in the middle of the forehead. The way Willa Torrance did. Have you investigated many suicides, Mr. Bloom?”

“My fair share.”

“Well, wouldn’t you ask, if someone was intent on killing herself, and if this person actually had a gun in her right hand — which was where the gun was when her daughter discovered the body at five thirty-five A.M. — and if this person was lying on her back contemplating what she was about to do, deciding that she was finally and irrevocably going to do it, wouldn’t you ask why she’d chosen such an awkward position?”

“What position was that, Dr. Voorhies?”

“Well, she was lying on her right side, you see.”

“Yes?”

“So why would she have contorted her wrist into such a clumsy position in order to shoot herself in the forehead? Why hadn’t she simply turned her head and shot herself in the right temple? Or even turned her entire body to lie on her back, either of which positions would have made the act easier to execute — and, incidentally, would have conformed more closely to statistics for gunshot suicides by right-handed people: the gun in the right hand, the wound in the right temporal region. Are you following me?”

“Yes, I am. Go right ahead, Doctor. I’m listening and taking notes.”

“I simply wondered why she’d chosen to bend her arm up from the elbow, twist the wrist at an almost ninety-degree angle to the arm, and put the bullet in her forehead from that odd position. Don’t you think that’s odd?”

“Yes, I do.”

“The alarm clock bothered me, too.”

“The alarm clock?”

“Yes. She’d set her alarm, you see. Now, in my experience — and admittedly I’m a mere country doctor, Mr. Bloom — but in my experience, someone contemplating suicide does not normally decide to do it at such and such a time the following morning. Gosh, I think I’ll kill myself at five-fifteen tomorrow, better set the clock for it, get up bright and early to shoot myself in the forehead while lying on my side. No, Mr. Bloom. In my experience, suicide is most usually the result of months and months of desperation, the final decision coming suddenly, after a bleak and lengthy period of uncertainty and delay.”

“That’s been my experience, too, Doctor.”

“Yes. But the alarm was nonetheless set. Her daughter had set her own alarm for four-thirty, and she testified at the inquest that her mother was still asleep when she’d left the trailer at five. Yet ten minutes after that, Mrs. Torrance was awake enough to twist her hand into the awkward position necessary to shoot herself in the forehead while lying on her side. Five minutes before her alarm went off. This did not sound like suicide to me, Detective Bloom.”

“But suicide was the M.E.’s finding.”

“Three of us examined the body, Mr. Bloom. My two colleagues concluded it was suicide. I wrote a minority report, but the majority prevailed.”

“What did your report say?”

“It said that I considered homicide a distinct possibility. I recommended further police investigation.”

“Did the police ever...?”

“No, there was a coroner’s inquest, and then the case was closed.”

There was a long silence on the line.

“I told Mr. Hope all of this last week,” Voorhies said. “You should’ve asked him. Saved yourself a long-distance call.”

News of Matthew’s shooting had been broadcast on the radio shortly after it occurred last Friday night. The television news shows had carried it on Saturday morning, and the Saturday newspapers had headlined it in both their editions that day. But then the hubbub had sort of died down over the weekend, and there’d been nothing more on it till this morning, when a front-page story in the Trib appeared. The story was headlined LAWYER IN COMA. The subhead read NO CLUES TO SHOOTING. The story was written by a staff writer who thought he was Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill, but who was in reality only George N. Marley.

Calusa wasn’t a tiny little fishing village; it was a bustling community of some fifty thousand permanent residents, and not everyone in it could be expected to know Matthew Hope. But Marley’s piece apparently touched some kind of chord out there, because all at once the hospital switchboard was lit up with calls from strangers wanting to know how the lawyer was doing. The callers were told that Mr. Hope’s condition was stable but critical. A lot of people thought “critical” meant he was about to die. Some of them said, “Oh, the poor man,” or words to that effect. None of them knew Matthew, and none of them knew the person impersonally reporting on his condition. But they felt it necessary to let someone know they were feeling something for this person who, like so many other people in America, had been senselessly shot and was now lying in coma, as Marley had erroneously reported it.

“What is his condition?” the callers asked.

“Stable but critical.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the callers said.

They didn’t know Matthew from a hole in the wall.

They were saying something quite else.

John Rafferty was a man in his mid-to late thirties, Bloom supposed, some two or three years older than Andrew Byrd, which made it entirely possible that they’d gone to high school together, as Byrd had mentioned. A portly man with a fringe of graying-brownish red hair around his balding pate, his freckled face giving evidence that he might have been completely redheaded back then, he was wearing a lime-colored sweater over a white open-throat shirt and darker-green slacks. White loafers. No socks.

They were in the living room of his luxurious home on Whisper Key, the one Byrd had said was protected by the Homestead Act. Blueprints were open on the huge glass-topped coffee table in front of a sofa upholstered in a nubby white fabric. Sliding glass doors opened onto a vast patio, a huge swimming pool, and the waters of Calusa Bay beyond. Byrd had said the house was worth five million. Bloom believed it.

“Did you go see Andy, too?” Rafferty asked.

“Andy?”

“Byrd.”

“Oh. Actually, he came to see me.”

“Of his own accord?”

“He had business near my office, so he agreed to stop by.”

“Nice of him,” Rafferty said dryly. “I figured you’d have called him. Your Mr. Hope came here right after seeing him, so I figured you’d be following the same pattern. Hell of a thing, what happened, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Bloom said.

“Now the lunatics’ll start yelling about more gun control. What they don’t realize is that gun control doesn’t take guns out of the hands of criminals, it takes guns out of the hands of people like Matthew Hope.”

Bloom said nothing.

He was wondering if John Rafferty owned a gun.

More specifically, he was wondering if John Rafferty owned a twenty-two-caliber Iver Johnson Trailsman Snub, model sixty-six.

“What did you and Mr. Hope talk about?” he asked. “When he was here last week?”

“A client of his wants to buy the land I own over near I-95. The state fairgrounds. He came here with an offer.”

“Did you accept it?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“Was it a reasonable offer?”

“Is this just curiosity, Detective Bloom? Cause I know damn well I don’t have to answer that kind of question.”

“You don’t have to answer any kind of question, Mr. Rafferty. This is just a friendly visit.”

“I’m sure it is. Which doesn’t mean I have to disclose any of my personal business dealings.”

“Of course you don’t,” Bloom said, and smiled pleasantly. “But I already know that three million was offered for the property.”

Rafferty blinked.

“I also know you’re in litigation over a bad debt,” Bloom said.

“That’s for a judge to decide,” Rafferty said.

“No, the bad debt is a fact. It’s for a judge to decide whether Andrew Byrd gets a foreclosure judgment against you. If he does, he’ll snap up Matthew Hope’s offer in a minute.”

“Meanwhile, he hasn’t got the judgment.”

“Meanwhile, he hasn’t, that’s true,” Bloom said. “How’d Mr. Hope react to your rejection, by the way?”

“He’s a lawyer, how do you think he reacted? A lawyer’s job is to convince you his client’s right. Hope tried to convince me the three mil was a good offer. As if I don’t know what that land’s worth.”

“That’s right, you’d already turned down four million, hadn’t you?” Bloom said, nodding.

“That’s right,” Rafferty said, and blinked again. “How’d you know that?”

“Did you tell Mr. Hope you’d turned down four million?”

“He already knew it. Have you been talking to him?”

No one’s talking to Matthew just now, Bloom thought.

“Or was it Andy?” Rafferty said. “Did Andy tell you I turned down the four?”

“He may have mentioned it in passing,” Bloom said.

“None of his fuckin’ business, anyway,” Rafferty said, and began pacing in front of the long glass wall. Outside, beyond the swimming pool, a stately blue heron walked delicately toward the bay. “What Andy wants me to do is sell that land for whatever’ll get him his money back. I guess you know the sum he loaned me was two million...”

“Yes.”

“He wants that back, naturally, plus interest, naturally, and now legal expenses cause he took the thing to court, instead of just letting it rest a while. He knows he’ll get his money back sooner or later, what the hell’s he worried about?”

“I gathered he would prefer having it sooner,” Bloom said.

“Yeah, well, fuck him. We’ll see what the judge has to say about it. Meanwhile, I’m not selling that land to anybody. Not Hope’s client, whoever he might be...”

“Didn’t he say?”

“No. Big secret. Lawyers,” Rafferty said, and rolled his eyes. “Two, three years from now, that land’ll be worth ten, twelve million dollars. Why should I sell it now? Just to satisfy them?”

“Who do you mean by ‘them,’ Mr. Rafferty?”

“Them, who do you think? My creditors. Andy and Jeannie. They can just wait, they’ve got plenty of money as it is.”

“Who’s Jeannie?”

“His wife. Years ago, neither of them had a pot to piss in.”

The same expression Byrd had used to describe Rafferty’s current financial situation. Except for the five-million-dollar house.

“So now they’ve got a little money, they start putting on airs,” Rafferty said. “I drive a fuckin Pontiac, they both drive Jags. A white one for her, a black one for him. Cute, am I right? Lawson was her maiden name. Jeannie Lawson. I knew her when she was still in high school, I gave her a part-time job in the office, she must’ve been sixteen, seventeen. She worked for me one whole summer. I was the one talked her out of running away with the circus.”

Bloom was suddenly all ears.

“When was this?” he asked.

“I told you, when she was still in high school. I was the only one’d give Andy the right time of day. Florida’s the South, you know, no matter how many beaches or palm trees we’ve got down here. Never mind civil rights, down here a nigger is still a nigger. I was the only one befriended Andy. So he pays me back by stealing her away from me.”

Bloom was listening harder and harder.

“Nobody’d have anything to do with her anymore. This was five or six years ago, and here’s a white girl starting up with a black man? In the South? Who’s fifteen, twenty years older than she is? He used to work on a construction crew for a housing development my company was putting up, that’s how they met. They call themselves African Americans now, I wish they’d make up their fuckin minds. A blonde, you should see her. She’s still blond, but I think she’s partners with Revlon now.”

Five years ago, Bloom was thinking. Maria Torrance would’ve been seventeen, about the same age as young Jeannie Lawson.

“And you say she wanted to run off with the circus?” he asked.

“Yeah. Crazy idea. Well, she was crazy altogether, am I right? Starting up with Andy?”

“Which came first?” Bloom asked. “Starting up with Andy, or wanting to run off with the circus?”

“Andy. All the kids at Calusa High were ready to run both of ’em out of town on a rail, you know. Cut off Andy’s balls, tar and feather ’em both, run ’em both out of town. She called me one night, told me she was going to run away with the circus. She said she could become an elephant girl, ride around the ring on an elephant’s back. I asked her where she’d got such a crazy idea, she told me she’d talked to the owner, he said she had good legs, with practice he could make her a good elephant girl.”

“Which circus?” Bloom asked.

“Ringling, I guess. Why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Maybe the other one down here, the small one. Who remembers? This was a long time ago.”

“You said five or six years...”

“Yeah, at least.”

“Would you remember which?”

“I’m thirty-seven now, so it must’ve... Andy’s younger than me, that’s another thing that pissed me off, her starting up not only with a nigger, but with a guy younger than me! He must’ve been twenty-eight, twenty-nine at the time. She was seventeen. So how long ago was that?”

Bloom waited.

“I was thirty-two, so, yeah, it was five years ago. What happened was Andy and Jeannie both left town... well, Andy had to. Really. They’d’ve killed him.”

“Where’d they go?” Bloom asked.

“He went to South America. She left with the circus a few months later.”

“But... They’re married now,” Bloom said, puzzled.

“Yeah, they’re married, all right. Jeannie came back to town soon as the season ended. She’d had enough of shoveling elephant shit. Andy came back two years later. With a fortune. Told everybody he’d come back to claim his little bride. Only trouble was, she was already married by then.”

“Who was she married to?” Bloom asked.

“Me,” Rafferty said.

He knew he wasn’t dead because he kept remembering things. You couldn’t remember anything when you were dead, could you? He didn’t think so. He kept seeing things flashing yellow and jagged across the blackness in his head, but he remembered things, too, all the conversations he’d had, all the things they’d told him. Snatches of talk floated in the darkness, whispers, secrets, things they’d said, things he’d been piecing together bit by bit, a flash of yellow, and then another, and another, and he was falling, he remembered everything.

The circus grounds.

Bustling with activity on this Tuesday afternoon, Steadman behaving like the lord of the manor as he led Matthew through, performers greeting him, interrupting their rehearsals to chat. There was still a sense of tentativeness here. They would not be moving out until the second day of April, which meant the performers still had almost two weeks in which to perfect their routines. So they approached their separate acts — and indeed each other — like old friends who would nonetheless take some getting used to. The roller-ball girls fell from their moving perches far too often, the jugglers missed far too many unlighted torches, and here under the big tent — where Steadman, puffing on a cigar, sat beside Matthew — ten performers known collectively as the Toy Chen Acrobatic Troupe, practiced their entrance over and over again.

The opening stunt was visual as well as physical. The youngest of the Chens, a pint-sized little girl rehearsing in leotards and tights, came bursting through a pair of hanging red silken curtains, hit the ground running, and went into a series of somersaults that took her to the opposite side of the ring. As she popped to her feet again, arms opening wide to the top of the tent, the second of the Chens came running through the parted curtains. This one was a few inches taller than her younger sister. She hit the ground and did the same series of somersaults, and was followed by a slightly taller Chen coming through the curtains, each of the family escalating in size until at last the three oldest Chen brothers came bouncing out in succession, followed by Papa Chen, tallest of the lot, all of them somersaulting to the end of the line, the tiniest Chen up front, the tallest Chen bringing up the rear.

The trick, Steadman explained, was to keep a sense of momentum going so that it almost seemed the same performer was coming through those curtains each time, having grown a few inches each time. Timing was essential here — as it was in every circus act — the new tumbler popping through those curtains and leaving his feet the instant the preceding performer rolled out of the last somersault and jumped to his feet.

“They’re from Shanghai,” Steadman said. “Best acrobats in the world come from China. They’re starting to develop some good aerial acts over there, too. That’s not a tradition with them, you know, like acrobatic arts, but they’re becoming very skilled at it. Two, three years from now, I’ll have Chinese flyers every bit as good as the McCulloughs, you’ll see.”

Matthew suddenly realized why he didn’t like circuses.

He didn’t like them because they were boring.

Watching the Chen family repeat its opening sequence God knew how many times, over and over again, until it seemed that not ten but ten thousand Chinese of graduating sizes were tumbling out in numbing succession from between those parted red curtains, repeatedly somersaulting across the tent, incessantly popping onto their feet, arms snapping ceaselessly skyward, grins magically appearing on ten beaming Oriental faces, Papa Chen snapping his fingers and flipping his hand palm-upward to initiate the next stunt — but, no, the next stunt was to be delayed yet another time while all the Chens swarmed once again behind those secret silken curtains (some secret by now) and prepared to perform one more time (Matthew hoped) an opening he had now seen at least a dozen times.

This time, the band was here.

Hooray for the band, he thought.

And this time, there was a snare-drum flourish and then a brassy trumpet blast as the first of the Chens, that tiny three- or four- or five-year-old darling, popped through the curtains with her arms high in introduction and leaped immediately into the first of those damn somersaults, cascading across the tent as the snare drum rolled, once, twice, three times, four times, five times and bingo! Up onto her feet with a trumpet’s red blare just as the next slightly taller Chen overlappingly popped through the curtains with a grin that said, Hi-Folks-I’m-Here! Surprise! Matthew could almost do it himself by now.

He was reminded of the old joke about the stranger in New York stopping a man on the street and asking, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice,” the man replies.

It was all a matter of practice, Matthew figured. Practice and repetition. Which, in the long run, was what made it so boringly predictable. If you’ve seen one circus, he thought, you’ve seen them all. You know that there’s going to be the big opening number — what Steadman had already told him they’d begin rehearsing next week and perform in full costume at the dress rehearsal next Friday, what they called the “spectacle,” or simply the “spec.” And then there’d be the animal act, and then the diverting clowns while the cages were dismantled and removed from the ring, and then something up in the air, and then some more animals, either dogs, horses, seals, elephants, or unicorns, and then all the jumpers, rollers, flyers, leapers, prancers and dancers and blitzen and all, all calculated to stun you with acts of derring-do and double dare, while meanwhile stunning you to sleep with sameness.

Practice, practice, practice.

Matthew wanted to know about the seventeen-year-old runaway named Jeannie Lawson. Was Steadman the “owner” who’d told her “with practice he could make her a good elephant girl”? And did he know that she was now married to a man named Andrew Byrd, who was seeking a foreclosure mortgage on the very land Steadman was trying to buy?

Steadman looked surprised.

He had taken his cigar from his mouth, and was holding it in his hand an inch from his lips, looking very much like an unskilled actor simulating clichéd astonishment, his mouth open in a small O, his eyebrows rising as the Chens moved into the second routine in their act, similarly rehearsed ten thousand four hundred and twenty-seven times in order to achieve the high level of perfection essential to complete boredom. Matthew suddenly remembered a dirty limerick about boredom, and almost grinned aloud as it flashed through his mind.

Steadman must have detected the half smile on Matthew’s face. His look of surprise changed to one of faint puzzlement. Or was he trying to forge a connection between the long-ago elephant girl named Jeannie Lawson and the here-and-now prospective judgment creditor named Andrew Byrd?

“Who?” he said.

Which one? Matthew wondered.

“Jeannie Lawson,” he said. “Jeannie Byrd. Andrew Byrd’s wife.”

Covering all the bases.

“As I told you earlier, I don’t know who owns the fairgrounds. My information was that Sun and Shore...”

“Yes.”

“Are you now saying that someone named Andrew Byrd...?”

“Doesn’t own the land, no. He’s seeking a foreclosure judgment.”

“And you say he’s married to a woman who was once an elephant girl with Steadman&Roeger?”

“Perhaps.”

“How long ago?” Steadman said, and began puffing on his cigar again. It had gone out. He took a book of matches from his vest pocket — Matthew wondered how many other men in America still wore vests — and began lighting the cigar again. Great billows of smoke polluted the air. In the ring, the Chens were jumping through hoops again and again and again and again. Four thousand three hundred and two.

“She would have joined you five years ago,” Matthew said. “For a...”

“And you expect me to remember...”

“...for a single season. She said the owner told her he could make her a good elephant girl.”

“The boss bull man is the one who hires any performers in his elephant act,” Steadman said. “Not the circus owner.”

“Did you have an elephant act back then?”

“We’ve always had an elephant act. I believe I told you...”

“Yes.”

“...that elephants and cats bring in maybe forty percent of our audience.”

“Yes. Do you remember which elephant act was with you back then?”

“Five years ago,” Steadman said, and puffed thoughtfully on the cigar. The drummer was trying to bring down the tent with a series of bass-drum explosions as the Chens bounced up onto each other’s shoulders. “So that would’ve been... let me see.” He puffed on the cigar again, let out a wreath of smoke. Matthew fully expected one of the smaller Chens to jump through it. “I guess that would’ve been Rudi Kroner. Best elephant man in the business. His son’s with the Beatty-Cole show now. Hans Kroner, almost as good as his father was.”

“Where’s the father now?”

“Dead.”

“Would you remember him hiring a young girl named Jeannie Lawson?”

“Rudi had an eye for the young girls,” Steadman said, “dressed them in next to nothing, draped them all over his bulls. Blue costumes, he... wait a minute, wait a minute. Was she the one in some kind of trouble with a black man?”

“I’m not sure you’d call it trouble, but...”

“Had to get out of town before they skinned her alive? Is that the one?”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

“Oh, I remember her, all right,” Steadman said. “Jeannie Lawson, absolutely. Wild little thing. Came on in March, quit at the end of the season. Willa tried to take her under her wing... well, you know, she mothered every young chorus girl in sight...”

And now, as Steadman sent clouds of bilious smoke on the air, and the Chens incessantly rehearsed routine after routine, the trumpet, drums, tuba, and trombone punctuating every complicated move they made, Steadman searched through his memory to a time five years ago and Matthew tried to visualize the woman who was Willa Torrance, all of thirty-three inches tall, mothering these young kids who were far from home. The circus’s famous little girl, so to speak, offering solace, guidance, and comfort to girls littler than she, fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds, some of them younger than that, traveling with a circus — which was not quite the same thing as being a novitiate nun at the Convent of the Sacred Tears of Mary. You sometimes had...

...twelve- or thirteen-year-olds hanging upside down on a rope, wearing costumes tight enough to show every crack they owned. Jeannie Lawson was a pretty little thing, blond as brass, cute little figure, long legs, good breasts, came to the circus with a reputation that preceded her like a cannon shot. Rudi dressed all his chorus girls in blue, a good color to complement the gray of his bull elephants. Kept his animals shaved close so the girls’ costumes wouldn’t rip on the tough bristles, used a blowtorch to give them their haircuts.

The prime requisite for any so-called chorus girl or showgirl or ballet girl was a figure that looked good in tights. An elephant girl needed the additional attribute of courage. It might have appeared a simple task to sit smilingly between an elephant’s ears on his domed head, wearing next to nothing, one arm prettily raised to the crowd, but when you considered the indisputable fact that a good-sized African bull elephant could weigh anywhere between four and five tons and could trample you in an instant without batting an eyelash, then perhaps it was understandable why a hundred-and-twenty-pound slip of a thing might consider twice before climbing onto its back. Which was exactly what made elephant girls appear so delicately desirable. Not that Jeannie Lawson needed any Beauty-and-the-Beast assistance.

On Choosing Day, if Steadman recalled correctly, Jeannie chose not one but two young boys. Having narrowly escaped being shorn of her golden locks, branded with a scarlet S, covered with hot tar and fluffy white feathers, and then rail-ridden out of her tolerant hometown of Calusa, Florida, she now seemed to take some kind of obstinate pride in her notoriety. It was not every white girl in the South who could boast of having bedded a black man. There were two black gazoonies working for S&R back then, and Jeannie started her burgeoning career with them, literally taking them to her bosom, first one at a time and then in tandem, and then tossing them out of her trailer when Rudi Kroner claimed her for his own; not for nothing had he promised the seventeen-year-old high school dropout that “with practice he could make her a good elephant girl.”

Apparently they practiced all through April, May, and June, in and out of the ring. But by the fifteenth of what was already a very hot and sticky July, Jeannie tired of what amounted to a virtually married existence with a much older man, and took up first with Evgeny Zvonkova — uncle to Boris, who now headlined the Zvonkova family act with his wife, Rimma — and next with the resident cat trainer, Davey Sheed, King of All the Beasts. The miracle was that Rudi did not throw young Jeannie out of the elephant act on her cute little ass, but by then the season was well under way, and he had trained her, after all, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to replace her at this late stage of the game. Besides, she still favored him with her presence in his trailer whenever the spirit moved her.

In circus parlance, Jeannie was known as a “specialist.” This did not mean that she rode elephants well — which apparently she did, by the way, seemingly possessed of an immediate natural affinity for the huge beasts. It did mean that she was reputed to have engorged organs larger than the one in the Ringling band, Andrew Byrd’s included, a distinction that endeared her to the hearts of every man within a circus mile, her scent seeping into their nostrils as surely as did the sticky substance secreted from the temporal glands of female elephants when they were aflame with desire. Jeannie Lawson seemed continuously aflame with desire. Which was perhaps what prompted Willa Torrance to take her aside for a little heart-to-heart, mother-to-daughter chat.

Willa had no idea that most of the people traveling with S&R referred to her as Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, a sobriquet premised on (1) an unflinching devotion to God, drummed into her by her Methodist parents back in Ohio, both of whom were perfectly normal in stature, by the way; and (2) a missionary zeal for conducting social work among the alcoholic gazoonies and pubescent teenagers who formed a part of any circus, large or small.

Young Jeannie Lawson would have none of it.

In no uncertain terms, she told Willa she was a grown woman who didn’t need advice from someone who hardly came up to her kneecaps, or words to that effect, and suggested that Willa leave her alone unless she wanted one of Davey’s big cats to swallow her in a single gulp one dark and stormy night. Willa may have been co-owner of the circus, but she did not have the clout to fire the circus’s biggest star and main attraction, with whom Jeannie happened to be sleeping. She backed off. Or so the story went.

Jeannie stayed with the circus until it returned to Calusa in October. She then said so long to her various bedmates — including, by season’s end, some of the younger girls, or so it was further rumored — and went smiling off into the sunset. Steadman never saw her again.

“I assumed she went back to being a townie,” he told Matthew now. “Though I have to tell you, once you get a taste of the mud, it isn’t always easy to return to civilian life. But now you tell me...”

“Yes. She’s married to a man named Andrew Byrd, who’s...”

“I don’t know the name.”

“He’s the black man you mentioned earlier.”

“Well, you know what they say, don’t you?”

“No, what do they say?”

“Once a woman acquires a taste for licorice...”

Steadman let the sentence trail. He raised his eyebrows, smiled knowingly, and tried to puff on his cigar again, but it had gone out. Matthew watched him lighting it. The Chens were taking down their red silk curtains. The elder Chen, as befitted his patriarchal station, walked regally out of the ring, two of the women following several steps behind. The smallest of the Chens began rolling up the silk. Two web-and-ladder girls in leotards, tights, and ballet slippers stamped flat-footed across the ring to where one of the ladders was hanging several feet above their heads. One of them loosened a rope from its cleat, and began lowering the ladder while the other one watched, her hands on her hips. Neither of the girls was older than fifteen. Matthew was still thinking about Jeannie Lawson’s single season with the circus.

“You may be seeing her again,” he told Steadman.

“How so?”

“If Byrd gets his foreclosure judgment, and you still want that land...”

“I still want it,” Steadman said.

“Well, she’s not only his wife, she’s a partner in his company.”

“Small world, isn’t it?” Steadman said.

Susan placed the call to her daughter at two thirty-seven that Tuesday afternoon. She had left the hospital at ten this morning, but it had taken her all this time to muster the courage. She listened now as the phone rang on the other end. The last time she’d spoken to Joanna, she’d been told that it was snowing up there in Massachusetts. “Then again,” Joanna had added, “it’s always snowing up here in Massachusetts.”

The phone was in the dormitory corridor, at the far end of the hall from Joanna’s room. Susan waited.

“Logan Hall,” a young girl said breathlessly.

“Hello, may I speak to Joanna Hope, please?” Susan said.

“Who’s this, please?”

“Her mother.”

“Second, I’ll see if she’s in her room.”

Susan waited.

A moment later, another girl’s voice came onto the line.

“Hello, is there someone there?” she asked.

“Yes,” Susan said, “I’m waiting for Joanna Hope.”

“Oh, sorry,” the girl mumbled. “I thought somebody’d left the phone off the hook.”

“No, there’s someone here,” Susan said.

“Sorry,” the girl said again.

Susan could hear her footsteps hurrying off down the corridor. She kept waiting.

“Hello?”

Joanna’s voice.

Thank God.

“Honey,” she said.

“What is it?” Joanna asked at once. “What’s the matter?”

“Honey...”

“Oh, Jesus, no,” Joanna said. “What is it? Did he have a heart attack or something?”

She marveled, as always, at her daughter’s powers of intuition where it came to anything concerning Matthew, felt again the slight pang of jealousy she always felt whenever she recognized the depth of their love for each other.

“Your father’s in the hospital,” she said.

Ever since the divorce, Susan had stopped referring to him as “Dad” or “Daddy” when speaking to her daughter. It had formally become “your father.” Your father’s in the hospital.

“What happened?” Joanna asked. Same imperative, impatient tone in her voice.

“He was shot.”

“What?”

“Someone shot him.”

“When? What do you mean? Shot? How...?”

“Friday night. He was meeting someone in Newtown...”

“Newtown?”

“And he was shot. He’s in semicoma now.”

Better to give her the highly unscientific layman’s term than to try defining the various levels of consciousness.

“What does that mean?” Joanna asked at once. “Semicoma?”

“He’s neither alert nor comatose. The doctor said...”

“Who? Which doctor?”

“Spinaldo.”

“Who’s he?”

“The man who operated on your father.”

“Where was he shot?”

“The shoulder and chest.”

“Then how can he be in coma?” Joanna asked, her voice rising. “I thought only head wounds...”

“He’s not in coma. They can still wake him. But...”

“Is he conscious then?”

“No. But...”

“Then he’s in coma.”

“No, darling. The doctor...”

“Mom, is he in coma or isn’t he?”

“The doctor used the word semicoma. That’s the word I used with you. It’s not a scientific term, but it best describes your father’s condition. That’s exactly what the doctor said.”

“I’m coming down there, Mom. I’ll...”

“No, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“I’ll find out when the next plane leaves, and I’ll be on it.”

“Honey, there’s no need for that just yet.”

“What do you mean ‘just yet’?”

“I mean, there’s no danger that your father...”

“Yes, what?”

“That he’s going to die or anything. The doctor didn’t...”

“I want to be there when he wakes up, Mom.”

“All right, darling.”

“Can I use my Visa card for the ticket?”

“Yes, fine. Call me when you know what flight you’ll be on. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll take a cab straight to the...”

“I want to.”

“Mom?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Mom... how bad is he?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Okay, Mom, let me go make my calls.”

“Call me when you have the flight information.”

“I will. I hope I can still catch one this afternoon.”

“Call me.”

“Yes, Mom. Later.”

There was a click on the line.

Susan put the receiver back on the cradle.

She wished she knew what she was feeling.

When Warren and Toots got to the circus grounds that Tuesday afternoon, they were told that Steadman was in a business meeting with his various marketing people and would not be able to talk to them till four or five that afternoon. The time by Warren’s digital watch was 2:57 P.M.

“What do you think?” he asked Toots. “Should we wait?”

“Let’s find the McCulloughs meanwhile,” Toots said.

“Why?”

“Ask them about Sam’s mother.”

“Sam’s what?”

“His mother. Aggie. The one Peter Torrance ran off with.”

“Oh. Yeah. Why?”

“I like skeletons in the closet, don’t you?”

“Not particularly.”

“I love them,” Toots said. “Hey, you!” she yelled at a guy running by with a mop and a pail of water. “Where do we find the McCulloughs?”

“Which ones?” the man said. “There’re six of ’em with the circus.”

“Sam and whatever her name is,” Toots said.

“Marnie?”

“Whatever.”

“Probably flying around the top of the tent,” the man said, and began giggling unexpectedly.

Warren looked at him.

“Where are they when they aren’t flying?” he asked.

“Trailer up top,” he said. “You’ll see their name painted on the side in red. The Flying McCulloughs. That’s what they call theirselves.”

“Thanks,” Warren said.

“You ought to take a look in the tent first, though,” the man said. “They practice day and night, practically.”

“Thanks,” Warren said again.

With the easy familiarity of a man who’d been here countless times before (once, actually) and knew the way, he led Toots to the opening in the big tent, and ushered her inside. The tent was empty except for six people on pedestal boards some forty feet above the ground. They were dressed in skintight pink costumes, a man and a woman on each of the opposite pedestals, two men sitting on trapezes that were hanging motionless between the pedestals. Warren guessed these were the Flying McCulloughs. All six of them. He and Toots took seats on the backless bleacher benches and looked up to where the man on the pedestal to the right was saying something to the woman beside him. Toots had just noticed that all of the McCulloughs were blond. She wondered out loud if they were bleached. Warren guessed they probably were. “Part of the act,” he said. He wished he could hear what they were saying up there. He loved all kinds of backstage talk, all kinds of inside jargon. He even loved the argot of the criminal underworld. Regional dialects, slang, cant, all of it tickled him. He told this to Toots now. She looked at him and said, “Yeah?”

“Really,” he said.

Their eyes held a moment.

“Me, too,” she said, and turned away, looking up to where the man on the closest pedestal board had now swung out a trapeze, setting it in motion.

“Just the double passing leap, one more time,” he called to the two men still casually sitting on the center trapezes. Warren guessed they were catchers, though they weren’t hanging upside down just yet. What he and Toots were looking at was a pedestal on the right and a pedestal on the left, a goodly distance of naked air between them. The two so-called catch trapezes divided this space into thirds. There was the pedestal on the right, and then a catch trap hanging some distance out from it and slightly lower than it, and then another stretch of empty air and the second catch trap, and then the pedestal to the left of it. All of this forty feet above the floor of the tent. Blonds wherever you looked. Pink tights, too. A blond man and a blond woman on each pedestal, the two blond catchers now setting their own traps in motion.

What they saw up there now were four moving pendulums, swinging back and forth toward each other and away from each other in a rhythm Warren knew had been carefully calculated and timed. He guessed they were counting in their heads up there. He guessed the flyers on the pedestals were premising their moment of flight on the swing of the catch traps between them. He didn’t yet know what they were about to do. He’d have covered his eyes if he’d had the slightest inkling.

Not a sound up there now, not a whisper.

Just the traps swinging, and the flyers silently counting, the traps to the left and right rushing back toward the separate pedestals — and suddenly they were off!

A simultaneous leap on the right and the left, each flyer catching the fly bar as it reached the apogee of its swing toward the pedestal, the trap moving out again, this time with a fyier hanging from it, moving in an inevitable arc toward the catch trap moving forward in its own inevitable arc. And then—

Jesus!

In what seemed the mere tick of a heartbeat, each flyer suddenly let go of the fly bar and somersaulted past...

Warren’s eyes popped wide open.

Toots grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard.

Passing each other in midair...

Warren had never...

God, he had never...

“Are you seeing this?” Toots shouted, and squeezed his hand again...

...each flyer somersaulting past the other in midair, coming out of their singles, arms outstretched toward their respective catchers. Left and right, catcher and flyer met and grasped and held, hands locking on wrists, each catch trap swinging back toward the pedestal left and right, each flyer releasing, back arched, feet touching the pedestal, a long-haired blonde reaching to grab and assist, arms going up in the traditional ta-ra salute. Warren and Toots burst into spontaneous applause.

Warren kept remembering the way she’d squeezed his hand.

They were sitting on the performers’ side of the cookhouse, sharing — or at least Warren was — a second afternoon drink with Sam and Marnie McCullough. Toots was abstaining, though she could have used a drink after what she’d just seen up in the air out there. McCullough was pouring again into plastic cups from a pint bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. Marnie came walking back from the ice machine on the far side of the tent, long blond hair swinging, hips and behind swinging in the pink tights, face deadpanned, though she had to be noticing the admiring glances of the men sitting at tables hither and yon. She plunked down the small black plastic bucket she’d refilled with ice cubes, swung one long shapely leg over the bench, and sat alongside Toots, who was still raving over what the McCulloughs had done up there at the top of the big tent.

“Far as I know, we’re the only aerialists can do that trick,” McCullough said. “It’s much harder than throwing a quad...”

“By a mile,” Marnie said. “Little soda in mine, please, Sam.”

“...cause you’ve got two flyers in motion at the same time, plus the catch traps also in motion...”

“Plus the flyers passing each other in those singles. If they don’t pass clean, they can knock themselves and their catchers down to the net.”

“My uncle invented that trick,” McCullough said, and grinned, obviously pleased that it had gone off so well, so early in the rehearsal period. He seemed pleased, too, that Toots had been so effusive with her compliments. Warren noticed that his gaze kept swinging back to her as he poured the Scotch.

“Sure you won’t have one, Toots?”

“Positive, thanks. I don’t drink.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Is that what I call you? Toots?”

“That’s my name.”

“Here you go, Mr. Chambers.”

“Warren,” Warren said.

He was also remembering that Toots’s eyes had met his and held when they’d recognized their shared affinity for jargon. Somehow, this seemed important to Warren.

“Cheers again,” Marnie said, and raised her cup.

“Cheers,” Warren said, and wondered if Toots disapproved of him having a little drink — well, two little drinks, counting this one — while they were on the job. But, hell, he wasn’t a policeman, he was a private entrepreneur. No such thing as being on duty. Still, he detected some kind of attitude there, some kind of tiny little frown between her eyes that seemed to say Watch it, Warr, we need clear heads here. But his head was clear. He was listening to every word, wasn’t he? And he knew exactly what he wanted to ask McCullough and his shapely wife bursting out of her skintight pinks there, although talking to them had been Toots’s idea in the first place. He suddenly wondered what Toots might look like in the same pink costume. Or in any skimpy costume, for that matter. Bra and panties, for that matter. Pink or otherwise.

Sitting alongside the other blonde, Toots looked by comparison clean and sweet and somewhat girlish, even though she’d suffered through a long period of substance abuse and withdrawal, an ordeal Warren doubted the high-flying McCullough woman had ever experienced. Threw your timing off, cocaine did. So could Scotch. The second drink was getting to him. He put down the glass at once, and focused on what Toots was saying.

“...yet they became close friends afterward.”

“Yeah, go figure,” McCullough said.

“Did you know Willa at the time?”

“Oh, sure,” McCullough said. “I was just ten or eleven at the time, but everybody knew her. She was a star, you know.”

Warren guessed McCullough was currently thirty-two or thirty-three. He also supposed that Marnie was in her late twenties, though she looked a lot older and a lot harder than that. Maybe circuses did that to people.

“Sam and I didn’t know each other back then,” Marnie said. “I didn’t join the circus till after we were married.”

“Which was when?” Warren asked.

“Seven years ago.”

“She’s only been doing this for seven years,” McCullough said. “She’s a natural.”

“Oh, sure,” Marnie said, and waved him away modestly, almost blushingly.

For a moment, there was a flash of the girl she must have been before becoming a circus performer. Warren wondered what sort of girl young Jeannie Lawson had been. Or, for that matter, young Willa Torrance.

“Were you old enough to know what was going on?” Toots asked.

“Oh, sure,” McCullough said. “In a circus, eleven years old is old, believe me.”

Warren guessed so.

“Also, when your mother takes off with a slime ball...”

“Was he?”

“Torrance? Oh, sure. Dumped her in Seattle, sent her back east without a cent to her name. I wanted to kill the son of a bitch.”

“Sam’s aunt was taking care of him and his sister,” Marnie said. “After Aggie left. His mother. Aggie. His father was dead, you see...”

“Died when I was seven,” McCullough said.

“A fall from the top of the tent...”

“Broke his neck when he hit the net wrong. So Torrance takes advantage of a widow trying to raise two kids...”

“Who’s at the same time still performing, don’t forget.”

“Tell me about it,” McCullough said. “You don’t concentrate up there, you can get in serious trouble. Well, look what happened to my father.”

“Thirteen shows a week, she had to do.”

“Moving all over the country. My mother had it rough after my father died, believe me. So Torrance steps in and promises her the moon. My sister and me wake up one morning and there’s nobody there but us chickens, boss. Mama’s off with a slime ball, twenty-four-hour man.”

Marketing director, actually, Warren thought.

“But the marriage was supposed to be a good one, wasn’t it?” Toots said.

“Whose?” McCullough asked.

“The Torrances. Peter and Willa.”

“Yeah, well, circus marriages, you know,” McCullough said, and winked at his wife.

“I’ll break your head,” she said, smiling.

“Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes,” Warren said. “We understand that’s what they used to call her.”

“Willa, yeah. Even the kids knew that name. We also called her the Virgin Runt.”

“That bad, huh?”

“That good. Well, what do you suppose all that stuff years later was about?”

“What stuff?”

“With Jeannie Lawson. Good versus Evil is what that was all about. It was almost as if... well...”

“Yeah, go ahead,” Toots said.

“It was as if... I’m just speculating, you understand...”

“Sure, go ahead,” Toots said.

“What I’m saying is she was a good little girl when she came aboard, but after her son of a bitch husband ran off with my mom, she got even worse.”

“Better, he means,” Marnie said.

“I mean she got to be a crusader,” McCullough said. “That’s what all that stuff with Jeannie Lawson was, all those years later. A crusade.”

“In other words,” Marnie said, “she got too good for her own good.”