There Was a Little Girl

4: When she was good...

Early on Wednesday morning, the twenty-third of March, Matthew telephoned the Byrd residence, and asked to speak to Mrs. Byrd, please. When she came onto the line, he told her he was a lawyer who’d met with her husband the day before to discuss some land his client was hoping to purchase...

“What land is that?” she asked.

“On Barrington and Welles,” Matthew said. “The state fairgrounds. I’m not calling about that, though...”

“What are you calling about?” she asked. “Who’d you say this was again?”

“Matthew Hope,” he said. “Mrs. Byrd, I understand you once knew Willa Torrance...”

“Oh God, is it that time of year again?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I get a call every year around the anniversary of her death. You’d think she was Marilyn Monroe or somebody.”

“Actually, that won’t be till May,” he said.

“Terrific,” she said. “Give me something to look forward to.”

He visualized her rolling her eyes.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you about her,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Well, as I may have mentioned to your husband...”

Actually, he hadn’t mentioned this to him at all.

“...there’s been a challenge...”

“I don’t like to meddle in any of Andy’s projects. If this is something you’ve already discussed with...”

“No, it...”

“...him, then...”

“It isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

“There’s been a challenge to the will,” he said, figuring if the lie had got by Davey Sheed, it should be good enough to get by Jeannie Lawson Byrd as well. “I was hoping...”

“What will?”

“Mrs. Torrance’s will.”

“How would I know anything about her will? I was seventeen the last time I saw her. That was a good five years ago.”

“But you knew her pretty well back then, didn’t you?”

“No. She was a grown woman, you should pardon the expression, and I was a teenager.”

“The challenge is coming from someone you might have known while you were with the circus,” he said.

Oh, what tangled webs we weave...

“Who?”

“I’m not at liberty to reveal that, Mrs. Byrd.”

...when first we practice...

“Why not?” she asked.

...to deceive.

“Not on the phone,” he said.

“Anyway, I hardly knew Willa.”

“I was wondering if I could come out there, Mrs. Byrd...”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Or perhaps...”

“No.”

“I know how keen your husband is to have this deal go through...”

“My husband’s in Mexico just now. You can talk to him when he gets back.”

“The point is...”

“I told you...”

“If I can put this other matter to rest, we might be able to move ahead more swiftly on the land deal. I’m aware that the Lawson-Byrd company...”

“All I do for Lawson-Byrd is sign papers and checks. I have nothing else to do with the company.”

“I understood otherwise.”

“You understood wrong. My husband will be home on Friday morning, you can talk to him then, if you like. As for Willa...”

“Mrs. Byrd,” Matthew said, “she may have been murdered.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said, and hung up.

Timucuan Acres was situated on what had once been a cattle ranch, but an enterprising and foresighted developer had purchased the land for a song some twenty years back and just three years ago had turned it into a golf course surrounded by million-dollar homes on two-acre parcels. Man-made lakes now interrupted the monotonous green of the landscape. Fountains abounded. A stone wall ran around the entire property, a pillared entrance gate and security box guarding the homeowners within from intrusion.

On the telephone with Jeannie Lawson Byrd this morning, Warren had learned that Matthew had spoken to her sometime last week. She’d voluntarily given Warren this information the moment he’d told her his friend had been shot and was in critical condition at the hospital. Warren also knew by now that she and the young Willa Torrance had butted heads five years ago, and he was wondering now what that had been about.

According to the high-flying Sam McCullough, Jeannie’s single season with the circus had been quite a stormy one. As Sam remembered it — and oh, how he loved remembering it — Jeannie had started with a pair of ignorant gazoonies, and then had moved onward and upward through the circus ranks. In fact, there wasn’t a man or boy on the show who hadn’t known her intimately — “Including me,” he whispered in an aside to Warren while Marnie and Toots were chatting it up.

Apparently, Willa hadn’t appreciated all this activity.

Her “prudish attitude,” as McCullough called it, may have been the result of her husband having run off with none other than McCullough’s own mother sixteen years earlier, who the hell knew? McCullough chose not to speculate on matters psychosexual, especially since his mother and Willa had become good friends again by the time young Jeannie Lawson began rampaging through the circus’s male population. But he wondered, nonetheless, about what had triggered Willa’s animosity.

So did Warren.

He was here today because he wanted to know what, if anything, Willa’s battle with Jeannie had to do with her subsequent suicide-murder-whatever two years later — God, how he hated cheap mysteries, especially those with solutions buried in the deep, dark past. But if any of this had anything whatever to do with whoever had shot Matthew, he damn well wanted to know about it. In truth, he didn’t care why Matthew had been shot, he was interested only in whodunit, yet another thing he hated about mysteries. One of these days, he was going to quit the job and join the post office.

Meanwhile, it also seemed odd to him that Steadman had known Jeannie Lawson back then when she was sleeping with everything but the bull elephant she rode (and maybe even that), but he’d never met her husband, Andrew Byrd, the man who was now seeking a mortgage judgment on the very land Steadman hoped to buy. Small world indeed, as Steadman had reported mentioning to Matthew last Tuesday.

The security guard was big and sweaty and white. He was wearing a wrinkled gray uniform that made him look like one of the elephants Jeannie Lawson must have ridden back then when she was a teenager. Warren rolled down his window. A blast of hot air suffused the car, overwhelming the air-conditioned interior.

“Mrs. Byrd,” he said.

“Who wants her?” the guard asked.

“Warren Chambers,” he said, and opened his wallet and flashed his P.I. ticket. The laminated ID card was a smaller replica of the license hanging on his office wall. The guard glanced at it, picked up a phone, hit a button. Warren turned away, totally uninterested. In the near distance, the sprinklers were going. A small rainbow curved over an emerald-green lawn. Through the shimmering mist, he could see beyond to where a lake sparkled blue in the morning sun.

“Go on through,” the guard said, hanging up the phone. “Round the oval, first road on your right is Palm Drive...”

One of twenty thousand in the state of Florida, Warren guessed.

“...the address is twelve-twenty Palm.”

“Thanks,” he said.

The guard nodded and belched.

The striped barrier went up. Warren drove on through, past the sprinklers and the lake, and around the oval, and onto Palm Drive, and into the long driveway on the right of 1220. He got out of the car, stretched, and then went up the front walk to a low redbrick ranch with a pebbled white roof. He rang the doorbell and waited.

He was ready to show his ticket again if he had to.

A woman opened the door. Well, a girl maybe. Seventeen or eighteen — he guessed that was still a girl. Black girl wearing a black uniform with a little white apron and cap. He figured he’d accidentally stepped into a French movie.

“Mrs. Byrd,” he said. “I have an appointment.”

The girl looked at him blankly.

“Warren Chambers,” he said. “Chambers Investigations.”

“Oh, yes, suh, come right in, suh, she’s ’spectin’ you,” the girl said, in a southern black accent that immediately dispelled any notions of La Belle Paree.

Warren stepped into the foyer. It was cool and dim and it opened onto a huge living room decorated in whites, blues, and greens, hung with abstract paintings.

“Juss have a seat, suh, ah’ll go fine her,” the girl said, and left him standing near a white grand piano. He looked around the room, and then sat on a white leather sofa that matched the piano. He was staring through the sliding glass doors at the pool and golf course beyond when she came in.

She was wearing tight green shorts and a snug dark-blue T-shirt that together complemented the throw pillows scattered on the thick white nubby carpet near the glass doors. High-heeled white sandals, long suntanned legs, and long blond hair — this was a week for blondes, all right. First Toots and Marnie and now Jeannie Lawson Byrd, twenty-two years old if she was a day.

“Mr. Chambers?” she asked.

She did not seem surprised that he was black. Many people were taken aback when they met him after only a phone conversation. But she was married to a black man, and perhaps this rendered her truly color-blind. Her hand was extended, there was a welcoming smile on her face. He felt immediately at home.

“How do you do?” he said, and took her hand. “I’m glad you could find time for me.”

“Not at all,” she said, and shook hands briefly, and then walked to a tufted ottoman opposite the sofa and sat. “When you told me on the phone that Mr. Hope had been shot...”

“Yes, I...”

“I’ll do anything I can to help you. As I told you, he called me last week...”

“Yes.”

“...and I’m afraid I was somewhat rude to him.”

“Well...”

“No, I was, truly. I’m assuming you knew he’d called...”

“No, I learned that from you this morning.”

“Oh. Then... I’m not sure I understand. I thought you were investigating his shooting...”

“Yes.”

“...and talking to people he’d...”

“Yes, but I didn’t know he’d called you. I wanted to see you because...”

“Yes, why did you want to see me, Mr. Chambers?”

A sudden change in her manner? Or was he imagining things? And yet, she’d just told him she’d been rude to Matthew on the telephone. Was he about to be subjected to the same behavior? He didn’t want this to go badly. There were too many things he needed to find out.

“Mrs. Byrd,” he said, “lots of people in this day and age in America get shot for no reason at all. They just happen to be in the wrong place at the right time.”

“You mean the wrong time, don’t you?”

“No, I mean the right time. If someone’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, nothing’s going to happen to him. Two negatives...”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” she said.

“Matthew Hope went to Newtown to meet somebody,” Warren said. “This wasn’t just an accidental drive-by shooting that happened to claim an innocent victim. Someone knew he’d be there, someone wanted him dead.”

Jeannie said nothing.

“He’d been asking around about Willa Torrance’s death three years ago,” Warren said.

“Yes, I figured as much. On the phone he told me she may have been murdered.”

“How’d you react to that, Mrs. Byrd?”

“I told him I wasn’t surprised. And I hung up.”

“Is that what you meant about being rude?”

“I was rude even before that.”

“Why?”

“Because he was asking questions about Willa Torrance. Willa and I did not get along, Mr. Chambers. I do not enjoy talking about her. In fact, if you’re here to...”

“I’m here for any information that might lead me to whoever shot my friend.”

“I have no such information.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sorry, what...?”

“Sometimes people don’t realize...”

“Yes, but I really have no idea who shot your friend.”

“Can we at least try?”

There was a long silence.

Jeannie looked at him.

“Please,” he said.

She kept looking at him. Sat primly on the ottoman, sleek suntanned knees together, hands folded on them. Staring at him. At last, she sighed heavily and said, “What do you want to know?”

For the seventeen-year-old who was Jeannie Lawson, the circus was a wonderland of fantasy and fulfillment. Secure in her own good looks, cognizant of the fact that Rudi Kroner, the best elephant trainer in the business, had chosen her as a protégé, aware too of the notoriety she’d achieved in Calusa, where everyone on the circus seemed to know about her high school affair with a black man, she became that rarity among traveling shows of any kind, an instant celebrity.

That she chose, at first, to squander her luster on a pair of dim-witted Mississippi gazoonies Steadman had rescued from dish-washing jobs in one of Calusa’s sleazier fish joints, was more a matter of willfulness than appetite. The two young black men, respectively seventeen and nineteen, were in fact much handsomer than Andrew Byrd, but this wasn’t why she’d bosomed and bedded them.

“It was a matter of pride,” she told Warren. “Wasn’t anyone in town going to tell me what to do.”

Reverting to a kind of cracker English she must have spoken as an adolescent, replaced over the past five years by her current carefully honed and honeyed voice.

“I deliberately picked two black kids,” she said. “To show em.”

Warren guessed that was showing ’em, all right.

A circus is not unlike any other road show. The touring company of a hit Broadway play, a band playing town after town, a ballet troupe wending its way across America, each and all become small incestuous universes responsible only unto themselves. But Jeannie knew that the rules and regulations governing black-white behavior in a circus weren’t very different from those governing such behavior in the wider universe that was the U.S. of A. After a week and four days of “showing the rednecks,” she advised Jordan and Neal, as their names happened to be, to get the hell back to the fish joint in Calusa before somebody on the show hurt them. She was, in fact, fearful for her own safety as well. Some of the less reasoning gazoonies had taken to calling her either “nigger lover” or “The Licorice Stick Kid.” It was Rudi Kroner who came to her rescue after the two kids from Mississippi speedily caught a bus back to Calusa.

Reasoning avuncularly, Rudi explained that among the many other reasons for his having thought she would make a good elephant girl were her splendid tits, ass, and legs. When she asked him what the many other reasons were, he told her there were no other reasons. He explained, too, that in the world of the traveling circus, there were hierarchies and pecking orders, which she might think were one and the same thing, but which in a circus were not.

“I found all of this interesting,” Jeannie said now.

The pecking order, Rudi explained while patting her knee, was the circus’s method of categorizing its lower-class citizens: the billing crew, the barkers, the candy butchers, the hammer gang, and so on. The hierarchy, on the other hand...

“Und, inzidentally,” he said in his guttural Teutonic way, “a memper of zie hierarchy neffer calls a vorkman a gazoonie.”

The hierarchy, on the other hand, was a ranking of the upper classes, Rudi explained as he slid his hand up under Jeannie’s skirt and onto her panties. And, incidentally, there was a very big difference between the words category and rank.

“I was still finding all of this interesting,” Jeannie said, and lowered her eyes like a nun. Warren wondered if she was coming on with him. Somehow, he hoped not.

The point of Rudi’s discourse was that no one in the lower classes would dare question the actions of anyone in the hierarchy. Never, never, never would any of the redneck workmen question the words or deeds of an animal trainer, for example. The animal trainers were the very pinnacle of the circus hierarchy, higher even than the equestrians — which was a lie — or the aerialists, and here Rudi began chuckling at his own inadvertent pun, while simultaneously toying with the elastic leg holes of Jeannie’s panties.

“I’m trying to tell this exactly the way I remember it,” Jeannie said.

“I’m grateful,” Warren said.

“I’m trying to be as honest as I know how,” she said.

A daring young man on a flying trapeze, for example, could not very easily direct an elephant to squash a person flat in his tracks, as Rudi could have done if any of the workmen...

“Those verstinkener gazoonies...”

...ever again called her some of the names he’d heard them calling her while she was “foolink aroundt” with those two “Negeren.”

“You shouldt haff known bezzer zen to be so shtupit,” he scolded, and kissed her all over.

Oddly, she used his “Hierarchy Argument” — as she came to call it — to great effect later on when she dumped the wire-walker, Evgeny Zvonkova, for the cat trainer, Davey Sheed.

“I think Rudi was getting tired of me when he let Evgeny move in,” she said, and smiled prettily. “Men get tired of women. Even beautiful women,” she added modestly, and crossed her long suntanned legs. “I used the same ‘Lions are gonna eat you!’ threat when Willa began crowding me — but I’m getting ahead of myself. Would you like something to drink, by the way?”

“Thank you, no,” Warren said.

“What time is it, anyway?”

“Almost noon.”

“Shall I ask Reggie to make us some lunch?”

“Well, I don’t want to put you...”

“Be no trouble at all,” she said, and rose smoothly from the ottoman, and walked into the entrance foyer, and looked off to the right someplace, presumably to the kitchen, and called “Reggie!” and waited, and then, again, “Reggie?”

“Yes’m?”

“Could you come in a minute, please?”

“Yes’m.”

The maid who’d earlier let Warren into the house rushed into the foyer now, and stood there in what looked like an uncertain curtsy, waiting for instructions. Warren wondered how Andrew Byrd felt about having a black maid in his house.

“Do you know that cantaloupe I brought home yesterday?” Jeannie asked.

“Yes’m?”

“Could you cut that in half and serve it with a nice little mixed salad? The melon first, then the salad. With the dressing my sister sent for Christmas. Would that be all right, Mr. Chambers?”

“That’d be fine, thank you.”

“And to drink?”

“Some iced tea?”

“Two iced teas, Reggie.”

“Yes’m. Did you want this in the dining room or outside on the terrace?”

“Outside, I think.”

“Yes’m.”

“Call us when you’re ready.”

“Yes’m,” the girl said, and backed out of the room.

There was an awkward silence for just a moment.

“Andy thinks I should hire a redhead,” Jeannie said, and shrugged.

Warren said nothing.

“How would you feel about that?” she asked.

“I can’t afford a maid,” he said.

“If you could.”

“I guess a black one might bother me. Because of the stereotype.”

“I kicked over all the clichàs when I was seventeen,” Jeannie said.

“Not everyone has.”

“Then fuck everyone,” she said. “Where were we?”

Just about right there, Warren thought, but didn’t say.

“You were telling me how you’d scared Willa with the...”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Jeannie said, and burst out laughing. “They think if you’re sleeping with a guy who can order cats around, he’ll send one over to pay a visit some night. I think I was a little scared of that myself, come to think of it. Davey was a very crazy man. Some of the animal trainers begin thinking they’re indestructible, you know, it’s funny. They start bonding with the animals, it’s as if they have a better relationship with them than with human beings. Davey used to do this trick where he put his head in a lion’s mouth, scared me half to death. Didn’t bother him at all. Used to tap her under the chin, her name was Sadie, she’d open her mouth, he’d stick his head inside, come out grinning a few minutes later. Never mind her breath, that was another thing altogether,” Jeannie said, and began laughing again.

Warren was beginning to find her delightful. He was beginning to think she wanted him to find her delightful. And desirable. Which he was also beginning to find her. Twenty-two years old, he thought. He suddenly wished he were sharing a cup of coffee with Toots somewhere out on Whisper Key.

“...how or why Willa became interested in my goddamn business,” she was saying.

Willa.

She had got around to Willa at last.

“Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes, you had to know her back then,” she said, and shook her head in wonder at the memory.

“What was she like?” Warren asked.

The prod.

She didn’t need one.

“Actually, she was terrific,” Jeannie said, sounding somewhat surprised. “I mean that, I’m not being sarcastic. She was a complete pain in the ass, don’t get me wrong, but she was gorgeous, and talented, and sexy besides. Sexy, yes. This kind of little girl manner in a woman’s body. She was a grown woman, you understand, with a woman’s breasts and legs and hips, it just happened she was tiny, that’s all. But she was a perfect miniature, really, a terrific shape, men used to go crazy for her. Which was what made them want to carry her into the desert on their camels, if you know what I mean. I think she was kind of a tease, too. I mean, I think she knew men were thinking they’d like to pull down her white cotton panties and sample her golden goodies... she was a blonde, you know, well, a sort of reddish blonde, not a true blonde like me... and she took advantage of this girl-woman contradiction. Turned them on and then slammed them down. ‘Hey, guys, this is just little Shirley Temple here, you can’t go having thoughts like that about me.’ That sort of thing. Do you know the Judy Garland joke?”

“No, I don’t,” Warren said.

“Well, when she was shooting The Wizard of Oz, one of the Munchkins came over to her and said, ‘Judy, I’d just love to eat your pussy.’ And she said, ‘Well, if you ever do, and if I find out about it...’”

Warren looked at her deadpanned.

“Maybe you have to be a midget,” Jeannie said, and shrugged and shook her head. “It’s like the drummer joke.”

“Which one is that?” Warren asked.

“This little six-year-old boy is banging on pots and pans in the kitchen, and this five-year-old girl comes in and says, ‘What are you doing?’ The boy says, ‘Shhhhh, I’m playing the drums, I’m a drummer.’ Well, the little girl shouts, ‘A drummer?’ and she grabs him by the hand, and drags him into the bedroom, and lifts her skirt, and says, ‘Kiss me on the wee-wee.’ And the boy says, ‘Oh, I’m not a real drummer.’”

“Uh-huh,” Warren said.

“Like I said, you’ve got be a drummer,” Jeannie said, and shook her head again. “Anyway, what I was saying was that Willa coming to see me was ridiculous when you think about it. I mean, seeking me out and trying to show me the error of my ways? While she herself was doing her sexy little-girl dance on the midway? Thirty-five years old and showing half her ass in a tiny little skirt, smiling her dimpled come-hither smile? Where’d she come off, man, telling me how to behave? I knew she was talking about me, bad-mouthing me all over the place, but then to have the nerve to come to me? To confront me that way?”

“When was this?” Warren asked.

“Sometime in August. The season was winding down, I forget which town we were playing. It was hotter’n hell, I remember that. I was sitting in Davey’s trailer in just a bra and panties when she came around...”

The August heat on this night in Alabama...

She remembers now that it was someplace in Alabama...

...it’s stifling hot. Outside, the insects are raising a racket in the tall canes lining the parking lot. They have set up the big top on land bordering a swamp, delightful during the daytime, sort of, but not too terrific at night when the mosquitoes begin swarming and you’re afraid an alligator might lumber up onto the bank and bite you on the ass.

The trailer is air-conditioned, and it has its own toilet, which beats having to share the donniker with the roustabouts, who leave it smelly and messy. Davey Sheed is sitting at the banquette table, wearing his little Ben Franklin glasses and reading Penthouse — or, rather, just leafing through it for the beaver shots. He’s wearing shorts and nothing else. His body is scarred from his many tussles with the big cats he trains, but she finds this emblematic of his manhood and his courage, and therefore alluring.

The tap at the door is almost drowned out by the incessant drone of the insects outside, audible even over the hum of the air conditioner. Davey looks up from his magazine, and then says, “See who that is, will ya, hon?”

In black bra and panties — black to hide the dirt, an axiom of road show travel — Jeannie goes to the door and opens it. The screen protects her from the barrage of insects fluttering around the small outside light. Standing in that light is the Virgin Runt, wearing shorts, halter, and heels that add two inches to her diminutive stature, ducking away from the bugs flapping all around her and threatening to pick her up and fly off with her.

“Okay to come in?” she asks, and yanks open the screen door without waiting for an invitation, barging right in, and walking to the banquette where Davey quickly closes the magazine as if he’s been suddenly confronted by the minister’s wife.

“Davey,” she says, “why don’t you run over to the cookhouse, have a beer with the guys?”

“What for?” Davey asks. “I’m perfectly comfortable right where I am.”

“I’d like to talk to Jeannie,” Willa says. “Woman-to-woman.”

Jeannie flashes Davey a look that says, “Don’t you dare move!” but he either misses it or ignores it. “Shit,” he says, causing a tiny frown to crease Little Miss Muffet’s brow, and then he gets up from where he’s sitting and goes over to one of the trailer cabinets where he keeps his insect repellent. He sprays some all over his naked arms, chest, and legs, sprays some into his hair for good measure, and then slips on a pair of sandals and leaves the trailer.

“What do you want from me?” Jeannie asks.

Willa tells her that she knows this is no Sunday-school show, there are bally girls turning tricks and ticket sellers shortchanging customers, she knows all that. But something has come to her attention recently regarding Jeannie’s sex life, and she’d like to discuss it now, if Jeannie doesn’t mind. Jeannie does, in fact, mind. Jeannie is, in fact, incensed by the notion that Little Miss Priss here is poking her nose into her sex life, which is none of her goddamn business. Willa climbs onto her high horse, too, which is not easy for someone her size to do, and tells Jeannie that it is her business when it reflects on her and her act, and Jeannie tells her she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, and Willa says I think you know damn well what I’m talking about, and the two of them are ready to tear out each other’s throats right there in the middle of the Alabama swamp.

“What was she talking about?” Warren asked.

“Well,” Jeannie said.

“Yeah?”

“Well...”

Warren waited.

“There was a little girl,” Jeannie said.

“What do you mean?”

“In her act. Two of them, in fact.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Two genuine little girls. Eleven-year-olds.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Little girls, do you understand what I’m saying? No boobs, no hips, no shapely legs like Willa’s, these were just little prepubescent kids. Willa was a woman. These were little girls.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Both of them taller than Willa.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Don’t you get it?”

“No.”

“They were taller than she was.”

“Uh-huh?”

“She used them as bookends.”

“Oh.”

“These two skinny, spindly-legged, flat-chested eleven-year-olds wearing little girl skirts and blouses identical to hers... well, not exactly. They wore black skirts and white blouses, and she wore a white skirt and a black blouse. For contrast, hmm? Also, they wore Mary Janes, and she wore high heels — which even so, she was still shorter than they were.”

Warren was nodding.

“You’re beginning to see it,” Jeannie said.

“I’m beginning to see it.”

“The girls made Willa look even smaller than she actually was! Here’s this tiny little thirty-five-year-old woman you can fit in your vest pocket, this sexy little thing making you come in your pants, and she’s shorter than the two eleven-year-olds dancing and singing their hearts out on either side of her.”

“Okay,” Warren said. “But... So what?”

“Well...”

“Yes?”

“Willa had the nerve to tell me... how can I put this delicately?”

Warren waited. He had not before this moment realized that Jeannie Byrd had any qualms whatever about putting anything indelicately. But apparently she was seriously trying to think of a way to phrase something that might offend his maidenly ears, so to speak. He kept waiting.

“She accused me of doing to Maggie...”

“Maggie?”

“One of the little girls. They both had black hair, did I mention that? For contrast. Like the skirts and blouses.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She accused me of doing to Maggie... well... what the Munchkin wanted to do to Judy Garland.”

Warren worked his way back.

“I see.”

“What the little girl asked the drummer to do to her.”

“I see.”

“The nerve,” Jeannie said.

Indeed, Warren thought.

“And... uh... were you?” he asked. “Doing these things she... uh... said you were doing?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said.

“Of course not, forgive me, I shouldn’t have...”

“It was none of her business, either. Even if I was.”

“But you weren’t.”

“Who said I wasn’t?”

“I thought...”

“I said it was none of your business.”

“I guess it wasn’t,” Warren said.

“It wasn’t. Or hers, either. I asked her what made her think I needed advice from a shrimp like her who was probably muffing those sweet little girls herself, Maggie and Connie, both of them, those were their names. I told her if she didn’t get out of the trailer right that very minute I’d go get Davey and he’d stuff her head in Sadie’s mouth and tell her to bite it off. I told her she might be half owner of S&R, but without Davey and his cats, there’d be no goddamn circus at all! I think she got the message.”

“I take it she left the trailer.”

“She left the trailer. And never bothered me again.”

“I see. And in November...”

“October. Near the end of October...”

“You left the circus.”

“Left the circus.”

“And never saw Willa Torrance again.”

“Never.”

“Did you know she supposedly killed herself?”

“Of course. I told you. Every year they call me to...”

“I meant at the time. Did you hear about it when it happened?”

“They called me then, too.”

“Oh? Why?”

“They were calling anyone who’d known her.”

“Who called you?”

“Newspapers. Magazines. Television people.”

“The Missouri police?”

“No. The police didn’t call me.”

“Sam McCullough was wondering why...”

“Him,” Jeannie said, and rolled her eyes.

“You knew him?”

“I knew him. He used to tease Davey’s cats. If one of those cats had ever got hold of him... cats never forget, you know.”

“Neither do bears,” Warren said.

“Bears are the worst,” Jeannie agreed.

“He was wondering why she’d got so agitated.”

“Agitated?”

“Willa,” he said, and watched her eyes.

When he was a cop, he’d been taught to watch the eyes. Watch them whenever you’re questioning anyone, watch them whenever anyone was holding a gun. The eyes were always the tip-off. He had taught Matthew to watch the eyes, too. He wondered now if he’d had the opportunity to see the eyes of the man or woman who’d shot him. He kept watching Jeannie’s eyes. They flicked toward the terrace. The black girl, Reggie, was sliding open one of the doors.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” she said.

“Yes, Reggie?”

“Lunch is ready, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Jeannie said, and rose from the ottoman and said, “Shall we?” and led the way out to the terrace.

Warren wouldn’t let it go.

As they dipped spoons into their cantaloupes, he asked, “What do you make of that?”

“Make of what, Mr. Chambers?”

“Willa getting so upset by... well, whatever it was you were doing.”

“What’d Sam say I was doing?”

Eyebrows arched, faint smile on her mouth.

“Well, according to him, you were... well, you said so yourself.”

“Said what myself?”

“That you were, well, promiscuous.”

“Sam used to steal my panties from the clothesline,” Jeannie said, “do you know that? Threw them in the cage with the big cats.” She smiled again, and then added, “Drove them wild.”

“How do you account for it?”

“The scent, I guess.”

“I meant Willa getting so upset. By your behavior.”

“I have no idea. As I told you...”

“Yes?”

“The last time I saw her, I wasn’t even eighteen yet. Everyone else kissed me good-bye,”

Jeannie said, and thrust her spoon into the cantaloupe again. Lifting the spoon to her mouth, she added, “Except her.”

“I never trust anyone who says, ‘I’m trying to be as honest as I know how,’” Toots said.

They were driving north on U.S. 41, looking for a Thai restaurant that had just opened. It was close to six o’clock and Warren was ravenously hungry. Cantaloupe and a salad weren’t quite what he considered the makings of a substantial lunch.

“I think she was telling the truth,” he said. “Up to a point.”

“I once knew a girl who used to say, ‘I’ll be perfectly honest with you,’ every time she was about to tell a lie.”

“I think Jeannie was...”

“Oh? When did it get to be Jeannie? Last I heard, it was Mrs. Byrd.”

“During lunch she asked me to call her Jeannie.”

“Was that when she was telling you how she used to abuse a couple of eleven-year-old girls?”

“Believe it or not, Toots...”

“There’s another red flag.”

“Huh?”

“‘Believe it or not.’ Anyone says that, you know he’s about to tell a lie.”

“I’m not about to tell any lie.”

“Then why’d you say ‘Believe it or not’?”

“Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me when I told you that’s when the story began to veer off.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“The eleven-year-olds.”

“Her beautiful tender romance, you mean?”

“What the hell’s wrong with you, Toots?”

“Nothing. I’m listening to you report on your pleasant lunch with a child molester...”

“Jesus, I’m trying to tell you...”

“...who didn’t tell us a damn thing we don’t already know about Willa Torrance...”

“Well, that’s true.”

“...but who charms you out of your shoes...”

“Well, she is a charming...”

“...while Matthew’s in the hospital in coma! Yesterday, you get drunk...”

“I was not drunk, Toots!”

“No?”

“No!”

“What’d you drink at lunch today?”

“Iced tea.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Listen, Toots, I’m not the reformed...”

“Yeah, what? You’re not the reformed junkie? That’s right, I am! And I know when somebody ain’t sober, damn it! And you weren’t sober yesterday!”

“No? Then why do you think I went to see the Byrd woman?”

“Oh, now she’s the Byrd woman.”

“What the hell would you like me to call her?”

“Fine, fine, the Byrd woman. That’s fine. The Byrd woman.”

Warren turned from the wheel to give her a look.

“I said that’s fine,” Toots said. “Watch the goddamn road!”

“I went there because McCullough...”

“Because McCullough wondered...”

“Because he wondered why the hell Willa had taken such a fit about...”

“Yes. A good reason to go. Let’s drop it, okay? She told you the truth, the whole truth...”

“I’m trying to tell you she didn’t! I got the feeling she was lying about those kids in Willa’s act. I got the feeling that wasn’t what she and Willa argued about.”

“Then what did they argue about?”

“I don’t know.”

“In other words, your visit was a complete waste of time. We still don’t know a fucking thing. What’d Bloom have to say?”

“About what?”

“The burglary. Is he going to call Missouri?”

Warren looked at her blankly.

“Did you call Bloom?” she said. “No. Was I supposed to call him?”

“Do you remember our meeting with Steadman yesterday afternoon?”

“Of course I do.”

“After you and McCullough knocked off a whole bottle of Scotch?”

“A pint bottle. And I only had two drinks!”

“Do you remember what Steadman told us?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t call Bloom.”

“No.”

“You said you were going to call him as soon as you got home.”

“All right, I didn’t call him.”

“I thought you weren’t drunk.”

“Goddamn it, Toots! I had two lousy...”

“Do you remember Steadman telling us about a burglary?”

“Yes. No. What burglary?”

“In Willa’s trailer.”

“Willa’s...?”

“Two nights before her death.”

Warren glanced over his right shoulder, and then pulled the car into the curb. He cut the ignition. He turned to look at her.

“Tell me,” he said.

The police officer Bloom spoke to in Rutherford, Missouri, at seven o’clock that Wednesday night was the lieutenant who’d handled the so-called Circus Burglary while S&R was playing the town three years ago. He was not the same man who’d handled the so-called Circus Suicide two days later that same year. Captain Leopold Schulz had investigated that one. Lieutenant Heinze told Bloom up front that the Rutherford P.D. did not believe the two incidents were related. They had been investigated separately and there were separate files on each. The burglary file was still open, in that the perp had not yet been apprehended. Perp, Bloom thought. Even in Missouri. The other file had been closed out as a suicide.

“Why?” Heinze asked. “Have you got a lead for us on the burg?”

Even burg, Bloom thought.

“No,” he said, “but we’re working a shooting down here, and we’re running background checks on some of the people in the victim’s orbit.”

“What kind of shooting?”

Bloom told him.

“And a burglar was in his orbit, is that it?” Heinze asked.

“No, we’re just trying to find out what the victim may have known.”

“Yeah?” Heinze said.

“Yeah. He didn’t happen to call you, did he?”

“What was his name again?”

“Hope. Matthew Hope.”

“No, I haven’t had any calls from anybody named Hope.”

Which means Matthew didn’t know about the burglary, Bloom thought.

“Why would he’ve called me?” Heinze asked.

“I just thought he might’ve.”

“No, he didn’t. I have to tell you... this seems like a long way around the mulberry bush.”

“Maybe it is, but we haven’t got much to go on here.”

“Calling Missouri about a burg happened three years ago.”

“Yeah,” Bloom said. “Can you give me the details?”

“What happened was somebody broke into her trailer...”

“Mrs. Torrance’s trailer?”

“Yeah, the one she shared with her daughter. Though, from what we could gather, she wasn’t spending much time there, the daughter.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was shacking up with the cat trainer, man named Davey Sheed.”

“So she wasn’t in the trailer during the burglary?”

“Nobody was. It happened during a performance. He’d’ve been in even deeper shit if there’d been people inside there when he done it. If we’da caught him, that is.”

“Any suspects at the time?”

“Yeah, we rounded up the usual,” Heinze said, and waited for a response.

“Like who?” Bloom said.

“Townies who victimize people passing through. Also persons of less than spotless repute on the circus itself. Plenty of those traveling with circuses, you know.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“Nothing. That’s why the case is still open.”

“What’d the burglar get?”

“I told you. We never did catch him.”

“I meant what’d he steal?”

“Oh. Just some doodads and gewgaws.”

“Like what?”

“Jewelry mostly.”

“What else?”

“Oh, some negotiable securities. What it is, you see, he ran off with the whole damn safe.”

“There was a safe in the trailer?”

“Yeah, one of these little fire safes ain’t worth a damn. You know them lightweight things you can pick up and pack in your pocket? That’s what this was. He just carried it right off.”

“Where was it? Out in plain sight?”

“No, she kept it in the fridge.”

“The fridge?”

“Yeah. Thing didn’t measure but about fifteen, twenty inches all around. She took out some shelves, stuck it in the fridge. Kept her diamonds nice and cold.”

“Were there diamonds?”

“Oh, yeah. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, she had a nice little collection, the lady did.”

“You said securities, too. What...”

“Government bonds.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s all she told us. Well, a wristwatch or two, and a silver rattle from when she was a baby, and some things belonged to the daughter was shacking with the cat man.”

“Like what? The daughter’s things.”

“Oh, pretty much the same. Baubles and such.”

“Expensive?”

“Some of them.”

“In the diamonds, rubies, emeralds class?”

“Well, there was a string of pearls she listed as costing in the thousands. And a sapphire ring was a sweet-sixteen birthday gift.”

“Was there a gun in the trailer?” Bloom asked.

“Wasn’t a gun on her list of things, nossir.”

“I’m not talking about in the safe. Did your people find a gun in the trailer?”

“We weren’t looking for a gun.”

“But was there one?”

“We weren’t looking for anything ’cept traces of the perp.”

“Was anything missing except the safe?”

“Not according to the lady.”

“Then if the lady owned a gun, it would’ve been left behind. She didn’t mention a gun being missing, did she?”

“No, sir, she did not.”

“I’m thinking specifically of...”

“I know what you’re thinking specifically of, Detective Bloom. I’m familiar with the suicide, though I didn’t investigate that particular case.”

“Then you know the weapon used was...”

“Yessir, a thirty-two-caliber Colt Detective Special.”

“Was such a weapon found in the trailer during your search?”

“We did not make a search of the trailer, per se, sir. The lady provided a list of what was missing, and we accepted that as...”

“But you did check for latents and such, didn’t you?”

“We did, sir, latents and fibers, and hair samples, and footprints inside and outside in the mud, but we weren’t looking for any weapons, and we didn’t find any.”

“Do you know whether Willa Torrance owned a thirty-two-caliber Colt?”

“I do not.”

“Did her daughter mention her mother owning a gun?”

“I did not ask her daughter that question.”

“What questions did you ask her?”

“The usual. Whether she’d seen anyone lurking about the past few days, whether she’d invited anyone into the trailer who might’ve been nosing around the fridge, whether she’d ever come into the trailer and found anyone there who had no right being there, and so on. She told me she hadn’t been home much the past few weeks, referring to the trailer. Referring to it as home. Where she’d been was with the cat man.”

“Davey Sheed.”

“Yessir. Living in his trailer, for the most part.”

“Did anyone... during either of the two investigations... ask Maria Torrance whether her mother had ever owned a Colt thirty-two?”

“I never asked her that, sir. A gun had not figured in any crime at the time. We were investigating a burglary. We had no reason to ask about any gun. I don’t know what Leo... Captain Schulz... asked the daughter or what questions were asked at the coroner’s inquest. You’d have to speak to him about the investigation he conducted. So far as the inquest goes, you’d have to...”

“Can you transfer me over to him?”

“I’d be happy to, sir, but he’s on vacation right now. March ain’t the best time of year in Missouri.”

“Where is he, would you know?”

“Matter of fact, he’s down in Florida,” Heinze said.

The drive from Calusa to Bradenton took Bloom less than twenty minutes on I-95. Captain Leopold Schulz was staying with his wife in a motel on the Tamiami Trail and was unhappy about having to conduct police business while he was on vacation. As a matter of fact, as he’d told Bloom on the telephone, him and the wife...

“Me and the wife,” he said, “have an eight-thirty dinner reservation, which means we have to leave here at a quarter past, which means you’ve got half an hour to ask whatever questions you may have in mind. Frankly, Detective, I don’t understand why you couldn’t have asked your questions on the phone. Same way that lawyer did.”

“What lawyer?” Bloom asked at once.

“Lawyer from down here, called me last week.”

“Matthew Hope?”

“That’s the one.”

“When last week?”

“Wednesday morning, must’ve been nine o’clock my time.”

Ten o’clock in Florida, Bloom thought. Matthew had called the minute he figured they’d be awake in Missouri.

“Did he happen to ask about a thirty-two-caliber Colt Detective...”

“Yes, he did.”

“...Special?”

“Yes, he did.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Same thing I’m telling you now.”

Bloom watched him. He had not told Schulz that he wanted to see his face and his eyes when he asked him about a gun that might have been a murder weapon. Which was why he hadn’t asked his questions on the phone. He watched Schulz’s face now. Across the room, Schulz’s wife was watching television, all dolled up and ready to go to dinner. She, too, seemed annoyed by Bloom’s presence. Hell with her, he thought. Hell with them both. And kept watching Schulz’s face and eyes.

“I told him there was no question in my mind but that Willa Torrance had used that pistol to shoot and kill herself. That’s what I told your Mr. Hope.”

“Was there any question in your mind about who owned that pistol?” Bloom asked.

“You train your people well,” Schulz said, and smiled thinly. “He asked that very same thing.”

“He’s not one of my people,” Bloom said.

“I got the impression he was with your State Attorney’s Office down here.”

Maybe because he wanted you to get that impression, Bloom thought.

“What’d you tell him?” he asked.

“I told him we assumed the gun belonged to Mrs. Torrance.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me and my team of investigating detectives.”

“Assumed the gun was hers?”

“A reasonable assumption, considering it was in her hand.”

“Did you ask anyone if the gun was hers?”

“I believe we asked the daughter.”

“And what did the daughter say?”

“The daughter said she believed the gun to be her mother’s.”

“On what evidence?”

“She said she’d heard her mother say something about wanting to buy a gun. After the burglary they’d had.”

“The burglary two days earlier?”

“That’s the one. You’re pretty much up on this case, aren’t you?”

“Maybe because Matthew Hope got shot last Friday night,” Bloom said dryly.

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that,” Schulz said.

Mrs. Schulz looked over from the television set. She, too, seemed terribly sorry to have learned that Matthew had been shot — but she turned back to the set almost at once.

“He didn’t happen to mention that burglary, did he?” Bloom asked.

“No, he didn’t. I’m the one mentioned it to him. When I told him the daughter’d said her mother wanted to buy a gun, he asked me why, and I told him there’d been a burglary in her trailer two days before she killed herself. He wanted to know what the perp had stolen, all that. I told him everything I could remember.”

“Did you mention that Lieutenant Heinze had investigated the burglary?”

“No, he didn’t ask me that.”

“Just wanted to know what’d been stolen...”

“Yes, all that.”

“Did he ask whether the police had found a gun in the trailer? On the night of the burglary, I mean?”

“Yes, I believe he did ask that.”

Of course he would’ve asked that, Bloom thought. But how come nobody on the Rutherford P.D. had thought to ask it? Half a dozen cops must’ve crawled all over that trailer, dusting for prints and vacuuming for fibers and hairs and looking for footprints to cast, but two days later, nobody thought to ask Hey, was the suicide weapon in there while we were investigating that burglary?

“So you figured she’d gone out to buy a gun after the trailer was burglarized, is that it?” Bloom asked.

“I’m not the one who figured that. Her daughter figured it.”

“Her daughter figured Willa Torrance had bought a gun after...”

“Something like that.”

“Well, I’ve got a man in the hospital here,” Bloom said, “so I really wish you could be a bit more specific about what her daughter figured or didn’t figure.”

The tone of his voice caused Mrs. Schulz to turn from the television again, a surprised look on her face; apparently not too many people talked to her husband that way. The tone also caused Captain Schulz to put on his best Hey, You’re Fucking with a Police Officer Here look, which had no effect whatever on Bloom, who happened to be a police officer himself — not to mention in his own jurisdiction.

Both men glared at each other.

Schulz blinked first.

“She told me her mother had mentioned wanting to buy a gun. She did not say her mother had actually gone out and bought one.”

“Then you didn’t really know for a fact that the gun you found in Willa Torrance’s hand actually belonged to her.”

“We did not find any evidence that would have led to that conclusion.”

“In fact, the gun could have belonged to anyone,” Bloom said.

“It was in her hand,” Schulz said firmly, and looked at his watch.

“You won’t be late for dinner, don’t worry,” Bloom said. “Did you know that at least one physician on the autopsy board...”

“Yes, Abel Voorhies.”

“Dr. Voorhies, that’s right, didn’t agree...”

“Voorhies also does abortions,” Schulz said.

At the television set, his wife nodded emphatically.

“Whatever else he may do,” Bloom said, “he did write a minority report on the Torrance case. It was his opinion...”

“Yes, I know his opinion.”

“...that homicide was a distinct possibility. In fact, he recommended further police

investigation. Was there further police investigation, Captain Schulz?”

“The Rutherford Police Department, and the Rutherford Medical Examiner’s Office, and the Rutherford coroner’s inquest, all concluded that Willa Torrance had died by her own hand. There was no need for any further investigation. I think you should also know, Mr. Bloom...”

“Leo, we’d better get moving,” his wife said, and rose from where she was sitting, and snapped off the television set, and went immediately to the dresser, where her handbag was resting.

“I think you should know,” Schulz repeated, “that there hasn’t been an unsolved homicide in Rutherford in the past thirty years. We suffered enough bad publicity with that damn circus suicide, can you imagine what...?”

“Leo!” his wife said sharply.

Bloom nodded.

“Enjoy your meal,” he said, and walked out.

All the way to Charlotte, she had deliberately willed her mind blank, using a trick Sarah Harrington, her roommate, had taught her. What you did, you conjured up all things white, like snow and bridal gowns and swans and clouds and frosting on a cake and turtledoves and mashed potatoes and Santa’s beard and fluffy bath towels and cotton in bloom, and then you made your entire mind go white, a field of endless white into which no bad thoughts could intrude except when your father was lying in coma a thousand miles away.

She’d called her mother moments before she raced downstairs to the cab waiting outside the dorm, and then caught USAir’s flight 1577 out of Boston by the skin of her teeth. They’d landed in Charlotte at seven-fifteen, twenty-three minutes late, which meant she’d had to run like hell to catch the seven-forty-five connecting flight to Calusa, even though all the smiling flight attendants assured her it would wait. The plane was due to arrive at the Calbrasa tri-city airport at nine twenty-nine that night. Her mother would be waiting. Now all she had to do was get there.

She tried to think white again, but all she could think was gray. The gray of Sebastian’s fur, except for his belly. She thought of the belly all soft and white, but white wasn’t working just now, all she could conjure was poor gray Sebastian the cat and the day he’d got hit by the car, oh how she’d loved that big old smiley-faced cat.

“I got home from school about three-thirty,” she’d told her father, “and I looked for Sebastian, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I was going to the mailbox to see if there was anything for me, and I just happened to look across the street — do you know where that big gold tree is on Dr. Latty’s lawn? Right there, near the curb. Sebastian was... he was just lying there in the gutter. I thought at first... I didn’t know what I thought. That he was... playing a game with me, I guess. And then I saw the blood... oh, God, Dad, I didn’t know what to do. I went over to him, I said, ‘Sebastian? What... what’s the matter, baby?’ And his eyes... he looked the way he sometimes does when he’s napping, you know, and he still has that drowsy look on his face... only... oh Dad, he looked so... so twisted and broken. I didn’t... I just didn’t know what to do to help him. So I came back in the house and called your office, but they told me you were out. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where Mom was, and I couldn’t get in touch with you, so I just went in the bedroom and hit the burglar alarm panic button. I figured that’d bring everybody running. Mr. Soames from next door came over, and then Mrs. Tannenbaum, and she drove her station wagon to where Sebastian was lying against the curb and we... we picked him up very carefully. We made a stretcher from a board Mrs. Tannenbaum had in her garage. We lifted him only a little, enough to get him on the board. Then we came right here to the vet’s, I knew where it was from when Sebastian had his shots last time. Daddy,” she said, “Dr. Roessler doesn’t think he’s going to live.”

They buried him in the backyard.

There was a spot under the poinciana tree where Sebastian used to lie flat to watch the pelicans swooping in low over the water, his eyes twitching, his tail snapping back and forth like a whip. They buried him there. It was twenty-five past six, and beginning to get dark. Her mother wasn’t home yet. Her father asked Joanna if there was anything she wanted to say. She knelt by the open grave and placed a small orange seashell onto the Styrofoam chest they’d bought on the way home. “I love you, Sebastian,” she said, and that was all. Her father shoveled back sand and then topsoil and replaced the rectangle of grass he’d earlier carefully removed. Joanna put her arm around his waist. Silently, they went back into the house together. He poured himself a stiff hooker of Scotch over ice, and he asked Joanna if she wanted a beer. She nodded. He opened the can and handed it to her. She took a sip and said, “I hate the taste of beer,” but she kept drinking it, anyway.

Her mother stormed into the house ten minutes later.

She’d come out of her hairdresser’s to find the right front tire of her Mercedes flat. She’d called their local gas station for help, but it had taken them an hour to get there, and another twenty minutes to put on the spare. Then, on the way home, the causeway bridge got stuck open for another—

“Is that beer you’re drinking, Joanna?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Did you give her beer to drink?”

“Yes, I gave her beer to drink. Susan... the cat’s dead. Sebastian’s dead.”

“What?”

“He got hit by a car, honey.”

“Oh,” her mother said, and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, “oh,” and began weeping.

Joanna thought now of Sebastian’s big masked face and those emerald Irish eyes of his, and the way he stalked lizards as if they were dinosaurs and the way his ears twitched when he lay between the speakers with his head on his paws, listening to modern jazz. She thought of running to her father one time to tell him about the game she and Sebastian had been playing, and saying to him, “We had the most fun. I was chasing him around the sofa, and he was laughing and laughing...”

She thought of Sebastian the cat now because she did not want to think of her father. Thought of Sebastian laughing. Thought of how her father used to talk to him in a thick Irish brogue, and the way Sebastian laughed whenever he tickled the cat’s soft, white furry belly — yes, he was sure, too, that Sebastian was laughing.

She squeezed the love rock in her hand now, and thought, Please don’t let him die, dear God.

The three of them met in Bloom’s office at close to nine that night. They were there to snowball the thing, a procedure familiar to all of them. They were there to recap what they’d separately learned in the expectation that they’d be able to deduce what Matthew had learned.

That was the compelling impetus behind each question they asked themselves. What had he discovered? Which single piece of information had led to the attempt on his life? Or which combination of facts was responsible for placing him in jeopardy? Where else had he been during the days and hours before the shooting?

His calendar was infuriatingly mute beyond Tuesday, the twenty-second day of March, a week ago yesterday. He’d been very busy that day. A meeting with Andrew Byrd at nine that morning, and another meeting with John Rafferty at noon. He’d gone from there to the circus...

This was not in his calendar, but Steadman had reported the meeting to Warren and Toots when they’d spoken to him yesterday...

...and then on Wednesday morning, apparently prompted by whatever he’d learned from Steadman, he’d spoken first to Jeannie Byrd, and next to Captain Schulz in Rutherford, Missouri. They knew this only because both Jeannie and Schulz had volunteered the information. But had Matthew phoned anyone after his call to Missouri? If so, the telephone company might — and Bloom stressed the word — might, without a court order, be willing to supply them with a list of numbers he’d dialed either from his office or his home.

Meanwhile, his activities after that last call to Missouri were a blank. Whom else had he seen or spoken to between ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, the twenty-third of March, and ten-fifteen on Friday night, the twenty-fifth, when someone pumped two bullets into his shoulder and chest?

What else had he learned, damn it!

The gallery opening was still going full blast when Matthew got there at a little past nine. The poster in the window read:

The long, narrow room was thronged with the usual Calusa wine-cheese-and-crackers set, a gathering of has-been, would-be, and wannabe artists who flocked to these things as if Picasso himself were honoring them with a one-man show. The fact was that any artist of true importance, with a few notable exceptions, rarely showed work in Calusa. Maxine Jannings was a somewhat ditsy dame in her early sixties who painted nothing but cats.

The only cat Matthew had ever loved was Sebastian.

There was one specialty bookshop in all Calusa — “specialty” being a euphemism for “mystery, science fiction, and comic books.” Matthew had stopped in there shortly before Christmas, hoping to find a good mystery novel for Cynthia Huellen, the firm’s receptionist and factotum. To his great dismay, he had found an entire section devoted to mystery-solving felines. Cute cats who actually solved mysteries. He’d be damned if he’d buy an intelligent woman a novel about a sleuthing cat. Instead, he bought a novel about a letter carrier who solved mysteries in his spare time. When he’d mentioned to Bloom that there were actually books about cats trying to put the police out of work, Bloom said he would get his dog to eat them. Matthew didn’t know whether Bloom actually owned a dog, but the sentiments were his exactly. Cynthia later told him the letter carrier detective stunk, too.

Maxine Jannings painted cute cats.

Point of fact, Your Honor, she looked somewhat like a cat herself. Or, rather, like one of the performers in the musical Cats who tried so very hard to look like cats, but succeeded only in looking like dancers in cat ears and cat whiskers. Maxine Jannings didn’t have whiskers, and her ears were hidden by a massive hairdo that gave her the appearance of someone who’d just been struck by lightning. But she was long and lithe and her green eyes were heavily outlined to look like cat eyes and she was wearing a long gray shimmery gown that matched the color of her hair and strengthened the image of a tall tabby. She was also wearing fire-engine — red lipstick and dangling red garnet earrings, and she was holding a cigarette in a red cigarette holder in her right hand and puffing out dense billows of smoke in an already smoke-filled room. Matthew felt like calling in a three-alarm fire.

Delilah Phibbs, the “art” critic for the Calusa Herald-Tribune, asked Maxine where she’d ever found the inspiration for her playful cat paintings, and Maxine bridled instantly, telling her at once that she did not consider her paintings “playful” in any way, manner, or form, that instead they were quite serious metaphors for human behavior.

“As for example,” she said, turning regally, “the painting we’re standing in front of this very moment is titled ‘Cat-rimony,’ which, of course, has much to say about the sexist male judicial control of the purse strings in any divorce settlement. The painting to its right...”

Matthew was here to talk to Maria Torrance.

His reasoning was as simple as a cat’s: Maria had been the last person to see her mother alive.

He found her wearing her slinky red wig and talking to a group of young men who were trying to look down the front of her white silk blouse. The blouse was unbuttoned down to the third button from the top, the way Burma’s used to be in the old Terry and the Pirates comic books, valuable copies of which Matthew had seen in the same specialty bookshop selling the cat-detective novels. The Dragon Lady had looked more like a cat than any of those slinking around Maxine Jannings’s paintings demanding alimony in some dark alley. Matthew was no stranger to alimony payments. He still made them like clockwork every month — no hard feelings, Suzie baby.

Maria spotted him as he came across the room, broke away with seeming reluctance from the gang of breast fetishists surrounding her, sidled over to him at once, and whispered urgently under her breath, “Let’s get out of this dreadful place!”

They walked from the gallery on Julian Street, past Pace Avenue, and onto Dorothy’s Way, where a truly excellent gourmet restaurant had just opened its doors in tribute to the culinary skill of the lady after whom the street had been named. He’d caught Maria at home just before she was leaving for the opening, and neither of them had eaten dinner yet. But eager as they both were to try La Vecchiaccia, as the new place was called, and even knowing that in Calusa a gourmet restaurant had about as much chance of surviving as a wren in a fox’s mouth, they were both dressed far too casually for elegant dining.

Most of the snowbirds had already headed north, the better to catch Easter Sunday in their natural habitat. After the middle of March down here, you could go to any restaurant of your choice without having to worry about a reservation. They chose Marina Lou’s, which was on the water, and where they could enjoy a sandwich or a light snack on what had turned into a hot and sticky springtime night. Matthew was wearing a pale blue cotton jacket over darker lightweight slacks and a white shirt open at the throat. Maria was wearing a jungle-green mini, high-heeled leather sandals to match, and the recklessly unbuttoned white silk blouse. Matthew kept remembering that she was bald under all that red hair cascading to her shoulders.

They each ordered a drink, and sat watching the running lights of the boats out on the water, cruising Calusa Bay in the shimmering dark, the scene peaceful and idyllic, a favorite among real estate agents trying to impress prospective house buyers. Home buyers, Matthew remembered, excuse me. Down here, the real estate agents sold homes, not houses. One of the boats began signaling to another one. You rarely saw that down here, he thought, boatsmen blinking lights to each other. Maybe because none of them knew the Morse code.

Maria ordered the French dip, and Matthew, watching his cholesterol, ordered the grilled grouper, even though he knew it was as difficult to find a good fish in Calusa as it was to find a snake in Ireland. He’d been told this was because the commercial fishermen had to go out too far for a good catch, and by the time they got back to shore, the fish was already a day old. He didn’t know whether this was true or not. He knew only that the last truly delicious fish he’d eaten was while he was on vacation in Italy almost a year ago. He told this to Maria now. She seemed inordinately uninterested. He guessed she wasn’t a fish lover. Or an Italophile.

“So what is it you were wondering?” she asked. “When you called, you said...”

“Yes. Two things, actually.”

She sipped at her drink, watching him expectantly. Out on the water, the second boat was signaling back.

“First, the burglary,” he said.

“What burglary?”

“Two days before your mother killed herself.”

“She was murdered,” Maria said.

A blonde sitting at the table closest to theirs turned suddenly to look at them.

“Two days after a burglary occurred,” Matthew said, nodding.

The blonde was all ears now.

He lowered his voice.

“Do you know what was stolen?”

“Some things of hers, some things of mine. Nothing terribly valuable.”

“How much would you say...?”

“I have no idea.”

“Ballpark.”

“I really don’t know. My mother gave a list to the police, and also to the insurance company. My pearls were worth five or six thousand dollars, I guess, and the sapphire ring she’d given me for my birthday cost something like eight thousand. But I don’t know what her jewelry cost.”

“How about the bonds?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think there was any connection?”

“Between the burglary and her murder, do you mean?”

The blonde had tilted in toward them. She’d alerted her boyfriend to the conversation as well, and he was listening, too. Matthew gave them both a look, but it didn’t help. They thought they were watching television here. They thought they were watching a mystery show where a goddamn cat would eventually unmask the killer.

“Yes, between the burglary and the murder,” Matthew said, and shot them another look, more withering this time. The blonde turned away first. The guy with her indulged in a little macho eyeball-wrestling before he, too, went back to his own business, which happened to be eating an overcooked steak. Maybe he figured Matthew was a contract hitter down here to murder eavesdroppers. Matthew gave him another look, reinforcing the image.

“I don’t see how,” Maria said.

“Tell me again about the day of her murder,” he said, and realized all at once that he now completely accepted her conviction that her mother had been killed. “From when you woke up that morning,” he said.

Maria sighed deeply, and took a long sip at her drink. At the other table, the blonde and her boyfriend were busily occupying themselves with their food, but Matthew knew they were still listening attentively.

“I got up at four-thirty,” Maria said by rote, “I’d set my alarm for four-thirty. Mother was still asleep. I knew she’d set her alarm for five-fifteen, even though she’d told me she wanted to be on the road by six. She always cut things close to the wire. I went over to the cookhouse, met Davey Sheed there for breakfast. We were lovers at the time...”

Sheed was out of sorts that morning. His cats didn’t like rainy weather; it was his opinion that cats were at their most dangerous whenever it rained. He’d had a difficult time loading them, and...

“What time was that? When you went to the cookhouse?”

“Five o’clock.”

“And you got back to the trailer when?”

“Five thirty-five. I must’ve started back around five-thirty.”

“And you were with Sheed all that time?”

“Yes.”

“From five to five-thirty?”

“Yes. He was angry I hadn’t slept with him the night before. He blamed that on Mother, said she was jealous of our relationship.”

“Jealous?” Matthew said.

“Yes,” Maria said, and hesitated. “From... from what I could gather, he and Mother had once been intimate.”

“Who told you that?”

“No one, actually. It was hinted at.”

“By whom? Your mother?”

“No, no. My mother? God, no! It was Davey who did all the hinting.”

“What kind of hinting?”

“Dropped little things that made me think he’d known her intimately.”

“Like what?”

“Oh... like once he mentioned a beauty spot she had. Which he couldn’t have known about unless he’d seen it. It was in a very private place, you see, a very personal place. And once he... well, this is too crude.”

Matthew waited.

“Men can be so goddamn crude,” she said, and shook her head.

Matthew said nothing.

“Anyway, he led me to believe... by things he said while we were, you know, making love...” She shook her head again. “I was only nineteen, you know, some of the things he said were pretty shocking. The things he did, too. He trained wild animals, you know, he was sometimes like one of them himself, the things he made me do. Anyway,” she said, and sighed heavily, “he led me to believe he’d made love to my mother when I was still a little girl.”

“Did you think that was true?”

“I guess so.”

“Did you ever ask her?”

“No. Never. My mother? Never.”

“And you say he was angry that morning?”

“Yes. We had an argument, in fact, because he...”

The cause of Sheed’s anger was that Maria had chosen to sleep in her mother’s trailer the night before rather than in his trailer. On a night that was raining, no less, when she knew how the cats reacted to thunder and lightning, he had told her a million times how storms affected them. So instead of staying there with him when he needed her comfort and solace because he knew what lay ahead in the morning when he tried to load cats who’d be skittish and feral...

“That was a favorite word of his, feral. It means...”

“Yes.”

“Reverting to the wild, you know. Going back to the wild after being domesticated. Davey’s theory was... well, I guess you know you can never really tame a wild animal...”

“Yes.”

“...you just train them. But his theory was that training is a sort of domestication, and every now and then, the animals turn feral on you. They go wild again, they get savage again, they get unpredictable. Like women, he used to say. Like me, he used to say. Like my mother, he used to say. And Jeannie. And Marnie. And every other damn woman he fucked on that show!”

The blonde at the table alongside theirs let out a gasp. The man with her turned sharply, as if ready to punch out Maria for uttering words he shouldn’t have been listening to in the first place. Matthew braced himself. The blonde calmed her escort down. Loudly, he asked for a check. He gave Matthew a dirty look. And then another one. The waiter brought Maria’s French dip and Matthew’s grouper just as the couple got up to leave. The waiter knew something had happened, but he couldn’t figure out what. All he knew was that the couple had stiffed him.

“Why do you think it was Davey who killed her?” Matthew asked.

“Because of something he said.”

“What did he say?”

“He said... really he could be so crude.”

“What was it he said, Maria?”

“He said he felt like going over to the trailer and forcing her to choke on it.”

“When did he say that?”

“While we were at the table. While he was still fussing about my having spent the night home.”

“Home,” Matthew repeated.

“With Mom.”

“Did you mention this at the inquest?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t really a threat. He was just being... sexy, I guess.”

“Mm-huh, sexy,” Matthew said.

“Telling me how big he was. You know.”

“Mm-huh.”

“Making Mom choke on it.”

“Mm-huh.”

“I’m not saying I found it sexy. I’m saying he thought he was being sexy.”

“I understand.”

“Besides, I wasn’t positive about the time.”

“What do you mean? What time?”

“When he left.”

“Left?”

“The table.”

“You told me you were with him from five to...”

“Yes.”

“...five-thirty, when you went back to...”

“Except for the few minutes he was gone.”

“Are you saying he wasn’t with you all that time?”

“That’s right, he wasn’t.”

“Did they ask you this at the inquest?”

“The inquest already had the medical examiner’s report. They were looking to show suicide. And I wasn’t sure about the time, you see. He might’ve left after...”

“How long was he gone?”

“About ten minutes. Said he had to use the donniker.”

“The donniker?”

“The portable toilet. That’s what we...”

“What time do you think he left?”

“I’m not sure. That’s the thing of it. That’s why I didn’t mention it at the inquest.”

“Try to remember now. Your mother’s clock was stopped at...”

“I know. Ten after five. But I’m not sure whether he left the table before then or after then.”

“Well, you say he was gone for ten minutes...”

“No longer than that.”

“Where was the toilet?”

“Just outside the tent. He could’ve gone back to his trailer, I suppose, but it was raining.”

“He was gone for ten minutes...”

“Yes.”

“...and then he came back to the table?”

“Yes. And had another cup of coffee.”

“Was he still angry?”

“Oh sure. Davey was always angry.”

“But I mean...”

“Yeah, he was still annoyed that I hadn’t spent the night with him.”

“Did your mother know you were sleeping with him?”

“Yes.”

“Say anything about it?”

“Just to be careful.”

“Any reason for that advice?”

“I guess she knew him,” Maria said, and shrugged.

“Meaning?”

“Well... you know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Davey could be rough when he wanted to.”

“Mm-huh.”

“You know,” she said.

“Mm-huh.”

“Men,” she said, and shrugged again.

“After he came back to the table... how long did you sit there together?”

“Another fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“And you say you left at five-thirty?”

“Yes.”

“To go back to the trailer.”

“Yes.”

“Was he still sitting there when you left?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t leave before you did?”

“No. Well, just that one time.”

“I mean after he came back.”

“No, he didn’t leave again. Not before I did.”

“You were there at the table with him for another fifteen minutes before you left the tent...”

“That’s right.”

“...at five-thirty.”

“Yes.”

“That means he was back at the table by five-fifteen.”

Maria looked at him.

“He could’ve been in your mother’s trailer at ten past,” Matthew said.

Maria kept looking at him. Nodding, seeming to be running the timetable in her mind, she picked up the roast beef on roll, dipped it into the gravy, and brought it dripping to her mouth. It seemed to Matthew that she kept running the timetable as she chewed, going over it again and again in her mind.

“Tell me what happened when you got back to the trailer,” Matthew said.

The first thing she sees is the blood. It is the blood that shouts at her the moment she closes the door behind her. The rain is beating down fiercely, she has turned to close the door behind her, pulling it shut behind her against the wind and the rain, and then she steps fully into the vehicle, shaking rain from her yellow raincoat, turning toward the bed, and seeing the blood shrieking red at her from across the room, the straps of her mother’s white gown stained with red, the aluminum trailer wall behind her splashed with red. She begins screaming. Stands rooted just inside the door, screaming.

The first person to burst into the trailer is George Steadman, wet and bluff and yelling, What the hell...? and then stopping dead in his tracks when he sees the body on the bed, the hole in the forehead, the blood spattered all over the wall, Oh Jesus, he says, Oh Jesus, Willa. And then the trailer is suddenly full of other people, roustabouts running from God knows where, the McCulloughs crowding in with the entire Chen family, whose first year with the circus this is. A man named Barney Hale from London pushes his way past the others so he can get to the bed where her mother lies bleeding and dead. He’s an aerialist who’s been on the show for as long as Maria can remember, back to when she was a little girl, he does this trick where he hangs from a cable by his hair, spinning in the air from this long black lock of hair. Davey Sheed bursts in looking surprised and pushes his way to the bed as well, stopping just alongside Barney, putting his hand on Barney’s shoulder where he’s kneeling and sobbing beside the bed where her mother lies with her eyes wide open and her mouth wide open and the back of her head wide open. Someone yells that the police are here, and a cop in a soaking-wet black rain slicker and a peaked hat with a hood falling over the shoulders of the coat steps into the trailer, bringing wind and water with him, and pushes through the crowd, yelling Back away, folks, nothing to see here, let me through, folks, pushing his way to the side of the bed where Davey is standing and looking down at her, and Barney is still sobbing, his long black hair tied back with a black woolen cord and draped over his shoulder. The cop stops cold when he sees the woman on the bed. He goes pale, almost turns away, gets a grip on himself. Maria is still screaming. She cannot stop screaming.

Matthew looked up from the grilled grouper on his plate.

“What’d you say his name was?” he asked.

“Who?” Maria said.

“The one with the long black hair.”