There Was a Little Girl

5: She was very, very good...

The one-armed bear trainer was out in the backyard doing a handstand when Matthew showed up there on Thursday morning, the twenty-fourth of March. A bear of a man himself, big-boned and thickly muscled, Harry Donovan balanced himself on his only hand, his hairy chest, shoulders, buttocks, and legs revealed in the neon-blue thong swimsuit he was wearing.

Matthew had called ahead and had been warned by his wife not to express any surprise over her husband’s handicap. Harry’s left arm, she’d explained, had been torn off by a bear some eight years ago, and he was still quite sensitive about it. Matthew immediately thought that asking someone not to notice a person’s missing arm was akin to warning him not to mention Cyrano’s nose. As if to fortify the warning, the blond woman in the swimming pool put her fingers to her lips the moment he turned the corner of the house. Matthew assumed this was Aggie McCullough Donovan, trapeze high flyer, mother to Sam, mother-in-law to Marnie, and runaway paramour to Peter Torrance some twenty-one years ago, my, how the time did fly when you were enjoying yourself.

She climbed out of the pool the moment she saw him, shaking her head in warning again while her one-armed husband, his back to her, now hopped across the lawn upside down on that single arm; Matthew wondered if the man was perfecting an act he hoped to audition for George Steadman. Aggie was a woman of about forty, he guessed, the same age Willa would have been if she hadn’t been the victim of a suicide or a homicide, whichever the case turned out to be. Like her husband, Aggie was wearing a thong swimsuit, but perhaps because she was expecting company, hers wasn’t topless. Instead, it was a very brief yellow maillot that concealed and revealed, here and there and everywhere, the well-muscled, well-toned, and at the moment, richly tanned body of an athlete; not for nothing had Aggie vaulted repeatedly from fly bar to catch trap in her days as a performer. Smiling, extending her hand, moving like a ballplayer or a ballet dancer, she walked in seeming slow motion across the lawn to where Matthew was standing.

“Mr. Hope?” she said.

“Mrs. Donovan?” Matthew said, and just then Harry pushed up on his single arm and leaped to both feet.

“Hey, you’re here!” he said.

He was sweating profusely. Matthew didn’t feel like taking his hand, but the man was advancing on him now, offering it, a wide grin on his face. The handshake was sticky and wet. Perspiration poured from Donovan’s face and neck and hairy body. Matthew felt like taking a shower.

“Time for a beer,” Donovan announced, although it was still only ten in the morning. “Can I get you one?”

“Thanks, no,” Matthew said.

“I’ll have one, hon. Have a seat,” Aggie said, and offered Matthew an aluminum folding chair with bright-yellow webbing. She herself sat on the lawn, more or less at his feet. The chair’s webbing matched her swimsuit. He wondered if she knew he could look down the front of it and see the areola of her left nipple. He resolved not to look. First Cyrano’s nose, then Donovan’s arm, and now Aggie’s left nipple. It was turning into a very trying day, and it was only a little past ten in the morning.

Donovan came out of the house, carrying in his single hand four bottles of beer he was holding by their necks between his spread fingers. A bottle opener was tucked into the waistband of his thong swimsuit. Aggie was careful not to help him as he struggled the beers upright onto a small, round table with a clear plastic top. He plopped down into a twin to the chair Matthew was sitting in, picked up one of the beer bottles, clamped it between his knees, pulled the bottle opener from his waistband, uncapped the bottle, and handed it to his wife. He uncapped a bottle for himself, put down the opener, clicked his bottle against Aggie’s, said, “Here’s to golden days and purple nights,” and brought the bottle to his mouth.

Matthew felt an irresistible urge to ask, “So how’d you lose your arm?”

He squelched it.

“It was nice of you to see me on such short notice,” he said.

“Happy to oblige,” Aggie said. “Willa was a very good friend of mine.” She took a sip from the frosted bottle, and then brought the bottle to her chest and casually nestled it there between her breasts. “If this has something to do with her death, however...”

“Yes, it does.”

“Because, you see, I left the circus after Harry...”

Matthew tensed.

“...decided to quit,” Aggie said smoothly, not mentioning that the reason he’d decided to quit was that some inconsiderate bear had eaten his left arm. “That was eight years ago. Willa, as you know...”

“Yes.”

“...died only three years ago. Harry and I were already living here in Bradenton. Not in this house. We had a different house. We bought this one a year ago. Because it has the big lawn and the pool. Harry loves to swim.”

Matthew tried to visualize him swimming. Although Aggie had warned him repeatedly about the missing arm, everything she said seemed to point directly to it.

“Also, I can do my workouts in the yard back here,” Donovan said, and took another long pull at the beer. “My push-ups, my handstands, my chinning... I’ve got a bar set up right there between those two palms... my lifting, all my regular routines. When I had the act...”

Never once mentioning bears.

“...it was important to keep in shape. To stay strong. It gets to be a habit. I don’t have the act anymore, and I miss it sometimes, but...”

“Oh, you do not,” Aggie said, and waved the comment aside. “He loves doing nothing,” she said to Matthew. “There’s a lot to say for being retired. Living down here. Lying around in the sun all day. A lot to say for it.”

“Like what?” Donovan asked.

“Oh, come on, you love it.”

“I miss the circus,” Donovan said. “Eight years, I still miss it.”

“Well,” Aggie said, and lifted the bottle to her mouth and drank, and returned it to its nesting place between her breasts.

“I guess I’ll run inside and shower,” Donovan said. “I must smell like a...”

Matthew guessed he’d been about to say “bear.”

Instead, he said, “Nice meeting you, Mr. Hope, I know you and Aggie’ve got a lot to talk about.” He nodded, picked up the opener and tucked it into his waistband again, snatched the two unopened bottles of beer from the table, and went lumbering toward the house. The sliding screen door rasped open and then closed again behind him. Somewhere in the thick foliage separating the Donovan lot from the one next door, a cardinal cried its distinctive rich-ee, rich-ee, rich-ee call. The yard went silent again. Sunlight slanted onto the pool, dappling the water. Aggie rolled the bottle of beer between her breasts and drank again.

“Mrs. Donovan,” he said, “while...”

“Aggie,” she said. “Please.” And smiled.

“While you were on the show,” he said, “Aggie, did you know a performer named Barney Hale?”

She looked up at him.

“How do you happen to know that name?” she asked.

“Someone mentioned it to me.”

“Who?”

“Maria Torrance.”

“Willa’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Maria? Why would Maria...?”

“She was remembering the people in the trailer. The night her mother died. The people who came into the trailer afterward.”

“And she said Barney was one of them?”

“Yes. Did you know him?”

“I couldn’t tell you if he was in that trailer. I wasn’t there. I’d already left the show by then. I was already gone five years when Willa killed herself.”

“How about before you left the show?” he asked. “Did you know him then?”

She said nothing for a moment.

“He was an aerialist from London,” Matthew said, goading her. “Barney Hale. He spun around in the air, hanging by his hair.”

Aggie looked up into his face.

“Long black hair,” Matthew said. “Wore it braided over his shoulder.”

She searched his eyes. It seemed to him she was wondering how much he knew, which in fact was very little. He said nothing, simply waited. At last, she nodded in acceptance, apparently deciding he knew it all already, so what the hell? He kept waiting.

“I learned all of this later,” she said. “Peter told me in Seattle.”

Yes, but what? Matthew thought.

And still said nothing.

“I was too busy with my own career,” she said, “to know... or frankly to care... what Willa was doing or why she was doing it. The McCulloughs hadn’t perfected the act yet, you see. After my husband died, we were still working on it day and night. We called ourselves the Flying McCulloughs, but I don’t think any of us had even thrown a quad yet, this was back... well, it was before Peter Torrance, before I got involved with Peter. This had to be twenty, twenty-five years ago. We hadn’t even started thinking about the double-passing leap...”

Actually, it was more like twenty-three years ago, Aggie remembered now. Her husband had already been dead for four years by then, she and his two brothers were running the act. They’d brought back her brother-in-law Jimmy, who’d sworn he never wanted anything more to do with circuses, but there he was again in winter quarters. So now there were six Flying McCulloughs all over again, Aggie and her late husband’s brothers Jimmy and Jack, and Jack’s wife, Tillie, and the two kids, Sammy and Jenn. Her brothers were the catchers, she and Tillie were the two flyers, and the kids decorated the traps, tossed imaginary bouquets to the crowd, grinned a lot, helped the flyers back onto the platform when they sailed back — getting on again wasn’t as easy as it looked. They were both adorable little blondes... well, everybody in the act was, even Jimmy and Jack, who actually bleached their hair.

“Both my kids are terrific aerialists now,” Aggie said, “why’d he take all the goddamn beer with him? So’s Marnie, my daughter-in-law. Terrific flyer. You should see her throw a triple.”

That first season with S&R was a really exciting time for the McCulloughs. Steadman was breaking in a lot of new acts that season, the McCulloughs, and Barney Hale, and also Harry Donovan...

“...who you just met, the one-armed wonder who can carry off a case of beer without his wife even noticing.”

Donovan had an act called Harry and the Dancing Bears, three of them. Gordo was the one who finally chewed off his arm eight years ago. But this was long before that. Aggie had no interest in him at the time. She was still a relatively recent widow, busy perfecting the act, trying to raise her kids to be good and decent, which wasn’t easy in a circus environment. Barney Hale was a very handsome guy, on Choosing Day half the girls in the show went after him. He had this Brit way of talking, he sounded a lot like Cary Grant, a bit more Cockney perhaps, but something like Cary Grant. And a smile that knocked people out of the bleachers whenever he flashed it. What he used to do, he’d hang from a cable by his hair, which sounded ridiculous, but it was a very dangerous stunt. There was a woman named Marguerite Michelle who used to work with the Big One, she did a similar act. Had a hook wrapped in her hair, used to hang from a cable, juggling flaming torches while she spun around up there. One day, her hair pulled loose in the middle of a spin and she dropped twenty-five feet to the sawdust and broke her neck. This was around the time the McCulloughs joined S&R; the Ringling accident was in all the newspapers, it made aerialists everywhere stop and think.

Barney didn’t juggle torches, he worked with parasols instead. What he did up there, he dangled from his hair on the cable while he juggled these open silk parasols. The parasols were weighted so he could juggle them without losing them, he’d start with two of them and gradually work his way up to five. It all looked so simple and soft, all those pretty red and yellow silk parasols floating around up there while the band played this tinkly, airy Japanese music, Barney bare-chested in silk tights, one leg red, the other yellow, his long thick black hair wound with red-and-yellow silk ribbons and fastened to the cable hook. It all looked so lovely and languid and so simple a child could safely do it, but nothing in a circus is simple and nothing in the air is safe.

Willa had been married to Peter Torrance for almost three months when Barney joined the circus. From all appearances, she was totally devoted to her husband, a good and perfect wife who pined for him whenever he was gone and adored him whenever he was there. As marketing director, Peter traveled ahead of the circus and was on the road much of the time. Willa sometimes invited the girls in for poker in her trailer...

“Everybody plays cards on a circus... well, not the gazoonies. They’re into crap games, for the most part...”

...which the girls, even the snobby equestrian elite, considered an honor because she was truly a very big midway star. The midway back then was the curtain raiser to the big show. The entertainers out there put the crowd in a real circus mood, and made lots of money besides. Willa was the undisputed queen of the midway, this darling little eighteen-year-old who was cute as a button and sexy as hell, with a great sense of humor and a real concern for people. Whether you were invited into the trailer for an evening of cards, or merely for tea on a cold wet day, you had the feeling Willa cared personally about you. She had this way about her that just inspired confidence. The girls told her about their boyfriends or their marital problems or their career ambitions or even when their periods were late, it was amazing the way this teenager really — she was only eighteen, after all — could be so maternal with girls and even women much older than she was. What it got down to, Aggie guessed...

“Well, she was simply this very good and decent person, and this goodness communicated itself to anyone who came into her presence. Even Peter... even when he left her... what I’m saying is that even he found it difficult to say anything bad about Willa. She was just that kind of person.”

“Then why’d he leave her?” Matthew asked.

He waited, fearful he’d blown it. He was wondering what Frank would say when he told him he’d been too damned impatient to just shut up and listen. He was also wondering what Frank would say when he told him he’d been following a painted circus wagon for the past six days, instead of working on the real estate transaction that had set the entire quest in motion. Patiently now, belatedly now, he waited for Aggie McCullough Donovan to explain whatever mad passion had caused Peter Torrance to run off to Seattle with her.

“I thought you knew,” she said, and hesitated.

“Knew what?”

“Lovelock,” she said.

“What?”

“Well... the little girl.”

“I’m sorry, I...”

“There was the little girl, you see.”

Maria Lovelock Torrance was born ten months after Willa and Peter were married. Although the newborn infant baby was perfectly beautiful and seemed entirely normal, there was concern at the time that she might one day develop the same pituitary problem that had caused her mother to remain eternally diminutive. By then, however, there was talk in medical circles of shots that could correct hormonal deficiencies, and Willa — in her levelheaded, pragmatic way — figured she would cross that bridge if or when she ever came to it. She had no idea, of course, that her subsequent sobbing confession would cause her husband to run off with a high-flying trapeze artist who by then had learned to throw a quite respectable triple, in and out of bed.

“I don’t understand,” Matthew said. “What confession?”

“If it’d been me, I wouldn’t have told him in a million years,” Aggie said.

Told him what? Matthew wondered.

“Told him what?” he asked.

“That the baby was Barney’s.”

Naked in bed, sleepless in Seattle in a room overlooking the houseboats on Puget Sound, Peter told his runaway young lass on the flying trapeze that Barney Hale was the father of his wife’s child. Aggie was naturally all amazed until he explained that the middle name, “Lovelock,” was Willa’s artful little tribute to the baby’s true father, he of the long black braid from which he dangled. Willa swore that she’d been to bed with the man once and only once — then why the goddamn homage? Peter wondered — and then on a night when she’d drunk a bit too much champagne in celebration of a telegram she’d personally received from John Ringling North, telling her she was the most extraordinary entertainer he’d ever seen on any midway, and promising her a starring niche with Big Bertha if ever she decided to leave S&R. Barney happened to be playing poker with Willa and some of the girls that night...

“Maybe they mistook Barney for one of them,” Aggie said now, somewhat snidely, “that long sexy hair of his...”

...and had stayed to help Willa clean up after the game, which was when the telegram arrived. Beside herself with joy, Willa popped the cork on a bottle of Moët & Chandon she had on ice in the fridge, a gift from an unknown admirer who’d caught her act on the midway one night and sent the bubbly around anonymously the next morning. One thing led to another, as they say in confessional boxes and girls’ college dorms. Barney Hale was twenty years old and far from family and friends in London, and Willa was eighteen and sympathetic by nature. Barney let his hair down, so to speak, and Willa offered generous aid and comfort.

It was Aggie’s opinion, when she gave it deeper thought, that the affair could have been reasonably expected, had anyone been paying closer attention. Peter was, after all, seven years older than Aggie, a mature grown-up who was on the road a great deal of the time. Barney, on the other hand, was constantly hanging around, if only spectacularly from the top of the tent. As Aggie had mentioned, he was a singularly good-looking young man, and Willa could not have failed to notice him dangling from that heavy lock of hair, his lithe young body in silk tights, twirling his parasols and pectorals and whatever else up there, nothing but a healthy scalp standing between him and imminent disaster. As she had further mentioned, Willa was adorably winsome and lusciously seductive besides. If Barney had ever seen her — as most certainly he must have — flashing her little girl panties and kicking her shapely legs in performance, might he not have entertained fantasies of possibly more extravagant exhibitions in the privacy of her trailer one night, where conceivably he could dangle more than a thick braid of hair before the dimpled darling of the midway?

By her own subsequent admission, Willa and Barney had been together on just that one tipsy occasion — but who could say how many other midnight trysts there’d been? If this had been a mere inebriated one-night stand, why the sly inclusion of “lovelock” into the baby’s given name, an insertion that seemed to point not only to Barney’s trademark mane but also to the very act that had created the child: a couple locked in embrace, locked in love, a love lock. And if their ardor had been a mere passing fancy, why the later tearful confession to her husband? It was Aggie’s guess that the affair had been a long-running one, even though no one had ever witnessed them holding hands together, or exchanging soulful glances, or dining tête-à-tête in the cookhouse tent, or behaving in any way other than circumspect. Then again, no one was particularly looking.

“Did she tell you this?” Matthew asked.

“No. I’m guessing.”

“Even when you became friends, years later...”

“Never. She told me it was just that once. A one-night stand. She said Barney’d meant nothing to her.”

“How’d she know the baby was his?”

“She didn’t use any birth control that night.”

“That doesn’t sound conclu—”

“No, she was always very careful about birth control. She was afraid a child would inherit her problem, you see. But that night with Barney, she was drinking champagne. I guess we do things when we’re drinking champagne.”

“Does Maria know any of this?” Matthew asked.

“God forbid,” Aggie said.

“So you and Torrance were together for a year or so...”

“Eleven months, actually.”

“...and then you came back to Florida.”

“Yes. Well, not Peter. I didn’t know where he went. He lives in Atlanta now.”

“But you went back to the circus?”

“Yes. Until eight years ago, when Harry had his accident.”

“Have you seen Torrance since?”

“Yes, last week.”

“What?”

“He stopped by last week to say hello.”

“You mean he’s here? In Bradenton?”

“Well, in Calusa.”

“Doing what?”

“He thinks he owns thirty percent of a circus.”

In a fit of extravagance and generosity, the telephone company messengered a list to Bloom’s office at ten-thirty that morning, the last day of March. Actually, the list was not what Bloom had requested, in that it was merely a record of the calls made from the offices of Summerville and Hope, and did not supply the calls Matthew had made from his home. Bloom guessed that someone had simply pressed a print button, but a call from a young man at the telephone company made it appear that the entire office staff had been energized in a major effort to supply the document. Going along with the game, Bloom thanked him profusely; he had learned over the years that dealing with the telephone company was akin to waging war with a foreign power.

He called Matthew’s office the moment he received the business-bill printout, and spoke to a woman there named Cynthia Huellen, who promptly matched most of the phone numbers with those of familiar clients, banks, law firms, accountants, state attorneys’ offices, clerks of the court, and various other regulars Summerville and Hope dealt with on a daily basis. There were two numbers she didn’t recognize, however, and judging from the prefixes, they were both on the mainland. She told Bloom she’d check further and get back to him.

At ten forty-two, she called back to say that she’d talked to all the attorneys in the firm, and learned that one of those calls had been made by Mr. Summerville last Tuesday afternoon, to a restaurant where he and his wife would be dining that night. None of the other lawyers could identify the remaining number. The phone company printout indicated that the call had been made at 11:51 A.M. on the twenty-fourth of March. That would have been last Thursday, a week ago today. Cynthia offered the information that Mr. Hope hadn’t been in very much last week, but she did remember him coming in at a little before noon that day, and going directly into his office. She suspected he might have made the call at that time. In any event, he went out again shortly afterward.

“What time would that have been?” Bloom asked.

“Around one.”

“Did you see him go out?”

“Yes, sir, I was just coming back from lunch.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No, sir, he didn’t.”

“Thank you very much,” Bloom said. “If you ever want a job with the police department, just let me know.”

“Thank you, sir, it was my pleasure. Mr. Bloom?”

“Yes?”

“Is... is he going to be all right?”

“I hope so,” Bloom said.

She had told them if they wouldn’t let her stay by his bedside, she would slit her wrists and bleed all over the hospital. They believed her. People tended to believe hysterical fourteen-year-olds. Besides, she was his daughter, after all, and by then they were fearful he’d never wake up for more than a few seconds at a time. They did not want it on their collective conscience that they had kept the man’s daughter from working her primitive magic. Not when the man might remain a vegetable for the rest of his life. Besides, they were all familiar with magic. They were all doctors, and the practice of medicine was not too far removed from the magic Joanna had begun performing late last night when she’d got to the hospital, and was still performing now at ten-thirty in the morning.

She had pressed the love rock into the palm of his hand.

His fingers had not closed on it, there had been no response, so she had kept it pressed there with her own hand, holding his bigger hand under hers, the love rock pressed into his palm. The love rock was a small stone he had given her when he and her mother separated. It had a little white heart painted on it, outlined in red, and lettered inside with the single word LOVE, also in red. When he gave her the rock, he told her he wasn’t divorcing her, he was only divorcing her mother. He told her he would always love her. He told her if ever she doubted his love, she should look at the rock, stare at the white heart with its red outline, and then squeeze the rock and the word LOVE would pop right out of that heart, it would jump right out of that heart, and shout LOVE at her, and she would know he was still there, always loving her.

She kept the rock pressed into his hand now, wishing his fingers would close on it, wishing she could feel some movement in his hand, because then she would know that he was going to be all right again. The doctors had told her that they’d been successful in provoking minor responses from him, but that these were not significant and they still could not form any realistic prognosis.

She had begun the litany last night at ten minutes past eleven, when they’d allowed her to go into the room where he was lying alone in the semidark, and she continued the litany now, twelve hours later, sitting beside his bed in the same room, sunlit now, holding his hand with the love rock pressed into his palm. She spoke the litany in a soft, murmuring voice, because prayers didn’t count unless you said them aloud, he had taught her that when she was just a little girl.

She wanted the litany to remind him of all the things they’d done together, since as far back as she could remember. The litany promised him all the things they were going to do together once he got better and got out of here. She led him through the litany the way he used to lead her across the playground when she was a little girl, his hand in hers...

“Do you remember when we were in Italy that time?” she told him in her soft murmuring voice, “and you and Mom were having a fight, and you shook off my hand? You were holding my hand, and you yelled that my hand was all sticky because I’d been eating gelato, do you remember? And I burst into tears because I thought you were mad at me, too, and you knelt down and looked into my face, and you wiped my tears with your handkerchief, and then you took my hand again, which was still all sticky with gelato, and you walked me over to one of those fountains they have all over Italy — I guess this was Rome, you’ll remember better than I do, you can tell me when you wake up if it was Rome or not. And you wet your handkerchief in the fountain, and you washed my hands with it, and then you kissed me on the nose and said, ‘I love you, Jinkies,’ which you used to call me when I was a very little girl, I still don’t know why. You’ll have to tell me when you wake up, okay? Do you promise?

“And, Dad, do you remember when you taught me the alternate lyrics to ‘Jingle Bells’? I’ll sing them for you now, but when you wake up, we’ll have to sing them together, okay? Now don’t laugh, I know you know them much better than I do. I must’ve been eight, wasn’t I? When you taught them to me? Wasn’t I eight at the time? Are you ready? Squeeze my hand if you’re ready, okay? Well, ready or not, here I commmme! ‘Jinkie Burrs, Jinkie Burrs, Jinkies all the way. Oh, what fun it is to hide in the closet every day.’ I can’t remember the rest, you’ll have to sing the rest for me when you wake up. I think you used to call me Jinkies long before then, though. Joanna Jinkies, or Jinkie Joanna, which one was it? You also used to sing ‘When Joanna Loved Me,’ do you remember that? I love the name Joanna, you know, Mom told me you were the one who chose it, she wanted to call me Deborah. Deborah Hope. Which isn’t bad, I suppose, but Joanna is so much nicer. Joanna Hope. I love that name, I may keep it even when I get married, if I ever do get married, the way things are going.

“By the way, don’t forget to remind me when you wake up. There’s this boy I want you to meet, his name is Louis, he’s an upperclassman, and real cool. Louis Klein, he’s Jewish, he lives in West Newton, he invited me to his parents’ house for Passover. Don’t you think it’s the dumbest thing that we had our spring break before Passover and Easter, when all the kids really want to be home? I would’ve missed you if you’d gone to Little Dix a week sooner than you had, do you realize that? Well, now I have this excuse to be home again, how about that, but it’s not gonna be much fun till you wake up, so hurry up, willya, please?

“I like Patricia, by the way, she’s a real cool lady. In fact, I’m sorry we didn’t get to spend more time together. But you were leaving on vacation at the end of the week, and I had to split my vacation time with Mom... it’s a pain in the ass having divorced parents, you know, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it, Dad. This isn’t a pitch, I really do like Patricia. I mean, she’s beautiful, and smart, and I think she really does care for you. So please don’t take it as a pitch, I’m not expecting you and Mom ever to get together again, I’ve outgrown that, you don’t have to ever worry about that ever again. Although I have to admit, there was a time there, when you and Mom were getting kissy-facey all over again, I sort of got my hopes up. Anyway, forget that, the important thing is that you wake up soon, and you and me and Patricia can go on a boat trip or something together, maybe down the Caloosahatchee, so I can get to know her better.

“Do you remember the time we went fishing for bigmouth bass on Lake Okeechobee? It was raining, do you remember, and you said you wanted to go to a movie, and Mom and I said we hadn’t gone all the way down there — on a boat, no less — just to go see a movie. This was when we had the Windbag, do you remember? Anyway, I think you had some kind of idea from when you were a kid in Chicago that if it rained, you were supposed to go to a movie. We finally convinced you to come out on the lake with us, and oh, Dad, it was so gorgeous, do you remember? The mist rising in the rain, and the boat gliding over the surface, and everything so silvery and still. We caught so many fish!

“I want to go back to Chicago soon, Dad, I mean it. That’s a promise you have to make me. It’s been too long a time since I’ve seen Grandma, and also I love that city, I really do. I think if I ever get married, I may move to Chicago. On the other hand, Louis hasn’t even kissed me yet, so chances are pretty good I’ll get to be an old maid. Anyway, when you wake up, let’s check our calendars and see when we can get away, okay? Just squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Dad, I just want to know you can hear me. That’s the love rock in your hand, the one you gave me, I want you to squeeze it so it’ll shout love at me, do you remember telling me it would shout love whenever I squeezed it? Why don’t you squeeze it now, Dad? Then you can wake up and we can talk about all these plans we have to make.

“You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you. This girl in my dorm... her father’s a judge someplace? He sent her this transcript of the Barton trial... it was in some law journal, did you know that? Well, it was. He told her he’d never read a better defense in his life. How about that? She wanted to know if you were actually my father! I’m famous, do you realize it? I was planning to send the article down to you, I’ll do that when I get back to Mass. I plan to sit here till you wake up, you know, so don’t be too long about it. I don’t want to get old and gray while Louis chases every other girl on campus.

“Would you like to know what he looks like? Welllll, he’s got sort of muddy-brown hair, which isn’t a particularly picturesque way of describing it, I know, but that’s what it is, Dad, the color of mud, so what can you do, right? And he’s got dark-brown eyes, and a fox face... oh, by the way! I know you’ll appreciate the fact that Mr. Summerville’s method of categorizing faces has caught on up at school. Everybody’s either a fox face or a pig face now, ever since I told the kids about his system. Louis is a definite fox face, and he’s on the lacrosse team, and he knows all the lyrics to Evita, which I think is cool.

“Dad... could you just squeeze my hand a little? Just so I’ll know you’re hearing me, okay? I’m not rushing you or anything, I’ll sit here forever if I have to, but if you feel like telling me you know I’m here, that’d be okay, too. You don’t have to squeeze the love rock, that might be too difficult for you right now. But I’ve got my hand resting on your palm, can you feel it? So if you want to give it a little squeeze... I mean, we don’t have to go for a shout here, like with the rock, we can just go for a tiny little whisper, okay? Just an itty-bitty squeeze, Dad, how does that sound to you? If you feel like it, of course. There’s no hurry, you just take all the time you need.

“Dad...

“Daddy...

“I love you so much, Daddy.

“Please wake up, won’t you? I’ll sit here forever, you know, so don’t think you’re going to get rid of me by pretending you’re asleep. I’ll just sit here and keep telling you over and over again that I love you, until you’ll simply have to wake up, how’s that? Then we can go to as many movies as you like, never mind fishing, I know you don’t like fishing. We’ll go to five movies in a single day, if you like, one after the other. Have you ever been to a seder? Maybe you can teach me what a person does at a seder. Meanwhile, how about squeezing my hand, Dad?”

His hand lay just beneath hers, his fingers curled but motionless on the cool white sheet.

She tried very hard not to cry.

The supervisor’s name was Miss Finch.

Bloom couldn’t believe she worked for the telephone company. Instead of spouting the party line about company policy and reasonable cause and reasonable suspicion and court-ordered Trace-and-Traps and MUDs and LUDs and other arcane terms known only to policemen requesting eavesdropping warrants and judges reluctant to sign them and telephone company personnel eager to protect their own asses, Miss Finch actually told him she understood the difficulties the police faced in reconciling criminal investigation with protection of the individual’s privacy.

He almost fainted on the spot.

Instead, he listened carefully and made detailed notes as she gave him the name and address of the subscriber someone had called from the offices of Summerville and Hope at 333 Heron Street in Calusa on March twenty-fourth at 11:51 A.M. And he listened in total amazement as dear Miss Finch in her appropriately squeaky, high-pitched, tiny-bird voice told him she would get to work immediately on compiling the names and addresses of anyone called from the residence of Matthew Hope on Whisper Key between Monday last week, the twenty-first of March, and Friday last week, the twenty-fifth of March, when he’d been shot outside a bar in Newtown.

And then, making the telephone company’s unexpected transformation all suddenly clear and understandable, Miss Finch asked, “What is Mr. Hope’s condition at the moment?”

Bloom knew many of the attorneys in town, but he wasn’t familiar with the one Matthew had visited last Thursday afternoon. The sign outside the whitewashed cinder block building on the South Tamiami Trail read:

A trim brunette wearing a tan suit and a pale lavender blouse with a stock tie sat behind a desk in a sparsely furnished outer office. Bloom told her who he was, said he had a two o’clock appointment with Mr. D’Allessandro, and then waited while she announced him to the inner office.

D’Allessandro was a sweaty little man in his mid-thirties, Bloom guessed, prematurely bald, wearing a dark brown suit too heavy for the climate; Bloom supposed he’d recently moved south, probably from someplace in the Midwest. He was growing a mustache, an attempt to add maturity to his pudgy little face. His fingers resembled small Vienna sausages. There was a college ring on his right hand. Bloom couldn’t read the name of the school, but two framed diplomas were on the wall behind his desk, one from the University of Pennsylvania, the other from Ohio State.

“I must tell you at once exactly what I told Mr. Hope,” he said. “That whatever transpired in this office between me and Peter Torrance was privileged communication.”

“Oh, sure,” Bloom said. “But that was before Mr. Hope got shot, hm?”

“I’m sorry he got shot, but...”

“Because now we’re looking at attempted murder, hm?” Bloom said.

“If you suspect my client of...”

“Who said anything...”

“...a crime, then I suggest...”

“...about suspecting anybody? I’m here...”

“You’re threatening me with...”

“No, I’m not.”

“...attempted...”

“I’m trying to find out, Counselor,” Bloom said sharply, “why Matthew Hope was here. Because then maybe I can find out why someone tried to kill him. Now I can understand why you’re protecting lawyer-client confidentiality, but surely that doesn’t apply to whatever Mr. Hope said, does it? Or was he your client, too?”

D’Allessandro looked at him sourly. “Can you tell me why he was here?” Bloom asked reasonably.

“He was here,” D’Allessandro said, “because someone told him Mr. Torrance had sought my advice.”

“There,” Bloom said, and spread his hands wide as if to say See? That wasn’t too difficult, was it? “Who was the person who gave Mr. Hope this information?” he asked.

“A woman named Agnes Donovan.”

“Told Mr. Hope that Torrance had sought your advice?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“That is privileged.”

“However, if Mr. Torrance had...”

“Privileged,” D’Allessandro repeated.

“Do you think Torrance may have mentioned to Miss Donovan...?”

“Mrs. Donovan.”

“Do you think he may have told her why he was coming here?”

“I have no idea what he told her or didn’t tell her.”

“Well, did Mr. Hope seem to know why Torrance had sought your advice?”

D’Allessandro said nothing.

“Did he?” Bloom asked.

D’Allessandro remained silent.

“Counselor,” Bloom said, “why are you making me pull teeth here? I’ve got a friend in the hospital and I’m trying to find out who put him there. Whatever Matthew Hope said to you is not privileged communication. He was not your goddamn client! Now, how about it? You want to play golf here, or you want to fuck around?”

D’Allessandro seemed ready to inform Bloom that in the state of Florida the use of open profanity or indecent or obscene language was a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable by sixty days in the slammer. Instead, he controlled himself admirably, and said, “Mr. Hope came here with several suppositions. I can tell you what those were, but I can’t affirm or deny the truth of them. I told him the same thing. I’m afraid his visit was a waste of time.”

“What were the suppositions?”

“Apparently Mrs. Donovan had told him...”

“Did he say that?”

“Yes. She’d told him that Peter Torrance had come to see me regarding a will probated three years ago at the time of his wife’s death.”

“His former wife, you mean. Willa Torrance.”

“It was Mr. Hope’s supposition — and apparently he got this from Mrs. Donovan, and I am neither affirming nor denying the truth of it — it was his supposition that Mr. Torrance believed he was still married to Willa Torrance. And was therefore entitled to a fair share of her estate. As her spouse. At the time of her death.”

“Can you tell me exactly what Mr. Hope said to you?

“Well...”

“Please.”

“He called me first, you know...”

“Yes.”

“And asked if he could come by sometime that afternoon...”

“This was last Thursday?”

“A week ago today, yes. We set up an appointment for two that afternoon. He arrived a few minutes earlier. The problem of confidentiality came up almost at once. On the phone he’d told me only that he’d seen a woman named Agnes Donovan that morning, and hoped I could give him some time regarding a matter that had come up during the visit. But the moment he sat down...”

“Yes, tell me exactly what he said.”

Bloom listened now as D’Allessandro described the meeting the week before, Matthew explaining that Agnes Donovan had been an aerial performer with the Steadman & Roeger Circus back when a man named Peter Torrance was marketing director, explaining further that she’d gone by the name of Aggie McCullough back then, a flyer with the trapeze act known as the Flying McCulloughs. It seemed that this morning she had told him that Peter Torrance was now claiming...

Well, the moment D’Allessandro heard the name of his client, he told Matthew at once that if this conversation was to be about Peter Torrance...

“No, no,” Matthew assured him. “Merely about what he told Mrs. Donovan.”

“I fail to see the distinction,” D’Allessandro said dryly.

What Mrs. Donovan had been told — and what D’Allessandro then listened to despite his better judgment because his visitor was not only persuasive but seemingly somewhat obsessed — what the garrulous Peter Torrance had told Aggie Donovan was that he’d never been informed of Willa’s intention to get a divorce, that she had gone down to the Dominican Republic on her own, without his knowledge, consent, or participation, that he’d received no notice beforehand or afterward, was unaware of any publication of notice, and did not in fact learn she was presumably no longer his wife until she killed herself eighteen years later, at which time all the newspapers referred to him as her former husband.

“In short,” Matthew said, “Torrance is claiming his wife obtained an ex parte divorce that is not a binding one. According to him, they were still married at the time of her death. Under Florida law, and as a surviving spouse, he now intends to elect a statutory share of her estate. At least, that’s what Mrs. Donovan told me.”

“You understand I can neither affirm nor deny that.”

“Of course. You’re aware, though, that in Florida, the statutory share is thirty percent of the fair market value of the net estate.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” D’Allessandro said.

“The major part of Willa Torrance’s estate was her fifty-percent share of the Steadman&Roeger Circus.”

D’Allessandro said nothing.

“Which Willa left entirely to her daughter.”

He still said nothing.

“In short,” Matthew said, “Peter Torrance is going for thirty percent of that.”

“If all of this is what Mrs. Donovan told you...”

“It’s what she told me. Well, not the part about the will. I knew that part already.”

“And if it’s true,” D’Allessandro said, “which I can neither...”

“...affirm nor deny,” Matthew said.

“...affirm nor deny,” D’Allessandro said, nodding, “what would you — as an experienced Florida attorney — advise Mr. Torrance?”

“If I were representing him, do you mean?”

“Yes. You understand, I’m new in Calusa.”

“Oh? Where from?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“Nice city.”

“Cold.”

“I’d advise him that he’s too late. Section 732.212 gives him four months from the date of first publication to file for elect—”

“There was no publication.”

“Or so he claims.”

“He knew nothing about any divorce.”

“Please understand, Mr. D’Allessandro, I’m not here to discuss whether or not Mr. Torrance has a case. My personal opinion is that he doesn’t, but you’re his attorney, not me.”

“Then why are you here, Mr. Hope?”

“Because I think Willa Torrance was murdered.”

“And what, if anything, does my client have to do with the murder of his wife?”

“His former wife.”

“According to her. According to him, they were never properly divorced, and he’s entitled to thirty percent of her estate.”

“Don’t you think it’s ironic,” Matthew said, “that I’ve been telling people all over town — even people out of town, for that matter, people in Missouri, for that matter — that there’s been a challenge to Willa Torrance’s will, and here it turns out...”

“Peter Torrance isn’t challenging the will. He knows the will is valid. He’s claiming...”

D’Allessandro cut himself short, apparently remembering the lawyer-client confidentiality he’d earlier defended to the death.

“He’s claiming he was improperly cut out of it,” Matthew said. “Sure. Even so, I find it ironic.”

“I still don’t know why you’re here,” D’Allessandro said.

“I’m here because shortly after Willa’s death, Peter came to see Maria Torrance...”

“His daughter,” D’Allessandro said.

“Maria Torrance,” Matthew repeated, “and asked if he’d been left anything in his former wife’s...”

“No, not former,” D’Allessandro said. “They were never divorced. The divorce wasn’t binding.”

“Be that as it may...”

“Be that as it is.”

“Have it your way,” Matthew said. “The fact is he came to see Maria three years ago to ask if he’d been named in the will. And now he’s surfaced again, and he’s claiming thirty percent of the estate. I’d like to talk to him, Mr. D’Allessandro.”

“Why?”

“I’d like to ask him if he was in Missouri on the night Willa Torrance got killed.”

“I see. You think he killed her, do you?”

“I don’t know who killed her.”

“Why do you feel it’s your obligation to find out?”

“I don’t.”

“Because that would seem to be a job for the police, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Then why...?”

“Because I don’t believe anyone should get away with murder.”

“I don’t admire amateur detectives, Mr. Hope.”

“I don’t admire amateurs of any sort.”

“Then why are you chasing...?”

“I admire murderers even less,” Matthew said. “Can you tell me where to find Torrance?”

D’Allessandro’s office was silent now.

Bloom watched him across the desk, wondering whether he’d told Matthew what he wanted to know, wondering if he would now compromise confidentiality and tell a police officer where to find Torrance. The silence lengthened.

“As I told your friend, I’m new in town,” D’Allessandro said at last. “I had to take the Florida bar exam twice before I finally passed it last year. On the money we got for the house in Pittsburgh, I figure we can hold out down here for another six months at most, till I get started, establish a clientele, make a name for myself. I’m a fair-enough lawyer, but I’m no great shakes. I wasn’t in the top ten of my class, I wasn’t Law Review, nothing spectacular like that. But I was earning a decent living in Pittsburgh, and I liked it up there. It was my wife who wanted to move down here, I don’t appreciate this kind of heat, I really don’t. She’s four months pregnant with our first child right now, and I’ve got, what, half a dozen clients I’m working for on a contingency basis? Peter Torrance is one of them. I don’t want him running for the hills. If you ask me, Does he have a case? I’d have to answer, Who the hell knows? In Pittsburgh, I’d have told him to take a walk. But this isn’t Pittsburgh. If I win this one, there may be a little money in it for me. I’m living on borrowed money here and borrowed time, Detective Bloom. If I don’t make it in the next six months, we’ll have to pack it in and head back north.”

D’Allessandro stopped.

For a moment, Bloom thought that was it.

Instead, he took a deep breath.

“Your friend Hope,” he said, “seems to have the time and money to run around playing detective...”

“I assure you he doesn’t.”

“It seemed that way to me.”

“It seemed that way to me, too,” Bloom said. “Once.”

“He comes here wanting to know where my client’s staying. He only suspects Willa Torrance was murdered, but even if she was...”

“But if she was, and if her killer is still...”

“Oh, please, Detective, someone gets murdered every hour of the day in this country! There are thousands of killers running around loose all over the place, but I’m not out there trying to catch them, am I? Maybe your friend wouldn’t have got shot if he’d paid more attention to lawyering instead of...”

“Maybe so. But maybe that’s why it’s important.”

D’Allessandro looked puzzled.

“Did you give him Torrance’s address?” Bloom asked.

“I did not.”

“Will you give it to me now?”

“I will not.”

“You’re starting on the wrong foot down here,” Bloom said, and stood up.

“Who cares?” D’Allessandro said. “I like Pittsburgh better, anyway.”

“Good. Because what I’m going to do the minute I leave here is head for the State Attorney’s Office, where I’ll ask for a grand jury subpoena ordering you to reveal the local address of Peter Torrance.”

“Such a subpoena might be seen by some courts as intruding on attorney-client privilege.”

“Fine. You move to have it quashed, Counselor. Maybe you’ll enjoy litigating this.”

“I’m sure I won’t. But tell me something, Detective Bloom... what makes you think the shooting in Newtown is in any way related to Peter Torrance? Is it your contention that Mr. Hope went to see him?”

“I consider that a definite possibility, yes.”

“And you’re asking me to breach lawyer-client confidentiality on such a flimsy supposition? Forget it. My regard for the law isn’t quite that slight. The fact is, I did not reveal my client’s whereabouts to Matthew Hope, and you don’t have a scintilla of evidence to show that he ever even found Peter Torrance.”

“Fine. I’ll go get my subpoena. Meanwhile, don’t leave for Pittsburgh.”

“Oh, I’ve still got six months,” D’Allessandro said airily. “But you’re a detective, Mr. Bloom. Wouldn’t it be easier and quicker to find Torrance some other way?”

Bloom knew he could get the subpoena he’d threatened, but he also knew that if D’Allessandro moved to quash it, the ensuing litigation would consume more time than he chose to spend getting a lousy address. He was delighted, therefore, to find Miss Finch’s promised list waiting on his desk when he got back to the office.

Matthew had made a great many calls from his home in the week before he’d been shot. Most of these were to his office; Cynthia Huellen confirmed that he’d called in frequently to check on his telephone messages. Many of them were to the State Attorney’s Office and/or to Patricia Demming’s home on Fatback Key; Patricia confirmed that he called her often, sometimes three or four times a day. Others were to people they already knew he’d later visited: George Steadman, Maria Torrance, Andrew Byrd, John Rafferty. The calls to Bradenton were the ones that most interested Bloom.

The first of these had been made early Thursday morning. The next one had been made on that same Thursday at 3:10 P.M., an hour and ten minutes after Matthew’s meeting with D’Allessandro. Figuring the meeting had lasted some forty-five minutes, Bloom calculated that he’d made the call the moment he got back to his house on Whisper Key. The next call was to the same number, not a minute later. And then another call to that same number a minute after that.

The number in Bradenton was listed to a man named Harry Donovan, whom D’Allessandro had identified as Aggie McCullough’s husband. Bloom dialed the number and waited while it rang. Once, twice, three times, four...

“Hello?”

A woman’s voice.

“Hello, this is Detective Bloom, Calusa Police Department,” he said. “Am I speaking to Mrs. Donovan?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Donovan, I’m calling about several telephone calls a man named Matthew Hope made to you last...”

“How is he?” she asked at once.

“He’s fine, thank you,” Bloom said, not knowing at all whether he really was, but not wanting to waste time talking about Matthew’s condition. “Mrs. Donovan, he called you four times last Thursday. One at eight fifty-seven in the morning...”

“Yes.”

“Three more at ten past three, and eleven past three, and twelve past three. Do you remember him calling you?”

“Yes, I do. I was so shocked when I heard what...”

“I wonder if you can tell me what these various calls were about?”

“Do you have any idea who did it yet?”

“No, ma’am, not yet. Do you remember your conversations with him?”

“Of course, I do. I’d seen him just that morning. That was what the first call was about. To set up a time for him to come over. We had a long talk here. I was really surprised when he called back.”

“Why was he calling, ma’am?”

“He wanted to know if I’d possibly heard from Peter again. He was still trying to find him, you see.”

“Had he asked you earlier how he could find him?”

“Yes, that morning. While he was here. I told him Peter was staying in Calusa someplace, but I didn’t know where. I suggested that he call Peter’s lawyer, see if he could help.”

“Arthur D’Allessandro?”

“Yes. On the Trail.”

“And had you heard from Mr. Torrance again?”

“No, I hadn’t.”

“Then you still didn’t know where he was staying.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Is that all Mr. Hope wanted?”

“Yes, that’s all. I’m sorry I couldn’t help him. He seemed like a very nice man. I hope...”

“Do you know whether Mr. Torrance is still in town?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Would you do me a favor, please?”

“Sure.”

“If he does call again, would you ask him where he can be reached? And then call me right away?”

“Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“No, no,” Bloom said at once. “I was just hoping I could talk to him.”

“What about?” Aggie asked.

The tone of her voice had suddenly changed. He knew at once that if Torrance did call, she would tell him the police were looking for him. There was that in her voice. However long ago her relationship with him had been, however trivial it might have been, there was still some attachment, Seattle still held a place somewhere in her heart. He was sorry now that he’d called.

“Let me give you the number here,” he said, and reeled it off before she could ask again what he wanted to talk to Torrance about. “Detective Morris Bloom,” he said, “just ask for me.”

“Do you think Peter shot him?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “We don’t know who shot him.”

“But you think Peter did,” she said, and hung up.

Bloom looked at the list of calls again.

The next call Matthew had made last Thursday was to Warren Chambers.

Bloom pulled the phone to him at once, and dialed the number. Warren picked up on the second ring.

“Warren,” Bloom said, “this is Morrie. I’ve got Matthew calling you at a quarter past three last Thursday. What was that all about?”

“He wanted to know if I could lend him a tape recorder.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something he could use to tape a person without the person’s knowledge.”

Bloom was silent for what seemed an eternity.

“Morrie?” Warren said.

“Why didn’t you tell me this?”

“I just didn’t think about it.”

“Did you lend him one?”

“I dropped a NAGRA reel-to-reel at his house.”

“Gave it to him personally?”

“No, he wasn’t home. I left it inside the kitchen screen door.”

“When was this?”

“Thursday afternoon sometime. Five, six o’clock. In there.”

“Did he say who he was planning to tape?”

“No.”

“Did you ask?”

“No. Morrie, I didn’t know he was gonna get shot the next night.”

“You know it now. You should have told me about this.”

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Man borrows a fucking NAGRA...”

“I’m sorry.”

“Plans to go in someplace wired, how the hell could you possibly...?”

“Please,” Warren said. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay. We all make mistakes,” Bloom said, and then told him about the one he himself had just made.

“I got a call from Bloom two minutes ago,” Warren told her. “I fucked up.”

“How?”

“Forgot to tell him Matthew borrowed a NAGRA from me.”

“When?”

“Last Thursday.”

“You fucked up, all right.”

“Yeah, rub it in.”

“Who was he planning to tape?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“No.”

“Great work, Warren.”

The phone went silent.

“But not the end of the world,” she said.

Warren sighed.

“You hear me?”

“I hear you,” he said. “Anyway, Bloom’s got his people running checks on all the hotels, motels, and B&Bs in Calusa...”

“What for?”

“He’s trying to get a lead on Torrance. Meanwhile, he just had a bad experience on the phone with Aggie McCullough...”

“What kind of bad experience?”

“He thinks he may have stepped into a tip-off.”

“What do you mean?”

“She claims she doesn’t know where Torrance is staying, but Bloom’s not sure she’s telling the truth. He’s afraid she’ll tell Torrance we’re looking for him. He wants us to go see these next two in person.”

“What next two? What are you talking about, Warren?”

“Matthew made a lot of calls from his house last week. Some of them were to people we’ve been tracking.”

“Like who?”

“Aggie McCullough, for one.”

“Never met the lady.”

“Matthew went to see her last week.”

“And the other two?”

“Jeannie Byrd and...”

“I’ll take Jeannie,” Toots said.

“How come?”

“So you won’t take her.”

“Don’t you even want to know who the other one is?”

“No. Who is she?”

“Maria Torrance.”

The offices of Hair and Now were situated in a building that had been designed by one of Calusa’s better-known architects. Meant to look like an old Spanish Colonial monastery, it resembled instead a pink and blue three-story office complex — which was what it actually happened to be.

The original intention had been to rent the street-level spaces as shops, but the architect had cleverly designed the building so that there were no display windows on the street side. Well, after all, did a monastery have any reason to display lingerie, bangles, or beads? Instead, to reach the shops, you first had to go inside the building, where they were arrayed around an interior cloister. From outside on the sidewalk, you never knew there were any shops in there at all. Unless you chanced to read the ladder of signs announcing the building’s occupants. Which Warren did before he headed around the cloister to the largest office compound on the ground floor.

The walls of Hair and Now’s curving, all-white reception area were hung with huge color photographs of women wearing different hairstyles in different colors. Warren wondered if Hair and Now was a beauty salon. He didn’t see any women sitting around in blue smocks, though, their heads under dryers. He went to the reception desk, told the woman there who he was, said Miss Torrance was expecting him, and waited as she picked up the phone and tried to locate her.

A door the color of cotton candy opened at the far end of the room. Warren glanced toward it as a young black girl in a purple mini and a white blouse came breezing through, dropped some papers on the receptionist’s desk, smiled at Warren, and breezed out again. He hadn’t seen any women in curlers beyond that pink door, either. The receptionist was trying another extension. Warren began wandering the room. To the right of each photograph was a chic little clear plastic label lettered in black, identifying the color and style of the model’s hairdo. Sunset Brown Cascade. Autumn Blond French Twist. Red Mahogany Poodle. Winter Wheat Wedge. Oak Brown Shag. Garnet Gold Bouff...

“Mr. Chambers?”

Warren turned.

“Miss Torrance is in the shipping department just now. She said if you’d care to join her there...”

“Yes, I would.”

“It’s just through the pink door, to the end of the hall, and then a sharp right. It’s a huge room, you can’t miss it.”

“Thank you,” Warren said, and walked to the pink door she’d indicated, and opened it, and walked down a hallway of small offices with wide-open doors. In each of the offices, someone was either on the telephone or sitting before a computer screen. There was an air of hectic activity, men and women placing calls and taking orders, telephones ringing, cursors blinking. From one of the offices, the black girl in the purple mini smiled and waggled her fingers at him. He returned the smile and went on by. At the end of the corridor, he made the sharp right as instructed and found himself in a truly vast room at one end of which was a loading bay, its doors open to the blinding sunlight outside. The room was furnished with long tables upon which sat what appeared to be... wigs?

Yep, that’s what they were, wigs in various colors and various hairstyles, many of which he recognized from the photos lining the reception area. The wigs sat on polymer molds shaped like human heads and marbleized like John Grisham book jackets. There were wigs everywhere he looked, in every hair shade and style he could imagine. At each of the tables, women in blue smocks but no curlers stood packing into wooden boxes the multitude of manes on their eyeless, lipless, marbleized molds. The boxes, taller than they were wide, seemed designed expressly to accommodate them. A helper in a similar blue smock stuffed little Styrofoam pellets into each box, guaranteeing a safe and uneventful journey for each marbleized head and the wig topping it. Over near the loading bay, silhouetted by the sharp sunlight that streamed through the open doors, a man with a clipboard was in earnest conversation with a redheaded woman. The entire scene seemed to Warren like something out of a James Bond movie.

Maria Torrance had been described by Toots as a tall, blue-eyed, zaftig redhead who did cocaine. The woman standing silhouetted in sunlight at the far end of the room was indeed tall — five-nine, if Warren was any judge — with long red hair falling straight to her shoulders. She turned as Warren approached, her blue eyes flashing sunlight, and immediately walked toward him, leaving the man with the clipboard standing abandoned for a moment before he went outside to supervise the loading of some very large wooden crates.

“Mr. Chambers?” she said, and extended her hand to him. She was wearing a clingy blue dress the color of her eyes, confirming at first glance the “zaftig” label Toots had hung on her. The eyes were as clear and as cool as an arctic ice floe. She shook hands cordially, told Warren how sorry she was to learn about Mr. Hope’s “accident,” and repeated what she’d told him on the phone, that she was willing to help in any way possible.

“Though you caught me at a bad time, actually,” she said. “We ship every two weeks, around the fifteenth and the end of the month.”

“Those are wigs, aren’t they?” Warren asked.

“Yes, that’s our business, we make wigs. Hairpieces. Toupees. Rugs. Call them what you will. I’m wearing one myself, in fact.”

Warren figured she was putting him on. He smiled, but made no comment.

“We ship all over the country,” she said. “We’ve got distributors in every state, including Alaska.”

Warren guessed that being bald could get cold away up there in Alaska. He was still wondering if she was really wearing a wig. Toots hadn’t mentioned anything about a wig. Had Matthew known about it? When he’d gone to see her early last week, had he discovered she was wearing a wig? If so, was she bald under the wig, or was her natural hair pinned up? He still figured she was putting him on.

“You told me on the phone that you’re trying to locate my father,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“We think Matthew... Mr. Hope... may have gone to see him.”

“Why?”

“Well, we don’t know why, actually.”

“Who’s we?”

“His associates.”

“Do the police think so, too?”

“We’re more or less working with the police.”

“And you all believe Mr. Hope went to see my father?”

“That’s where it seems to be leading.”

“There’s where what seems to be leading?”

“The investigation. We’re walking in Matthew’s footprints, you see. And he seemed to be trying to locate your father.”

“I wonder why,” she said, and shook her head.

“Miss Torrance?”

Maria turned toward the loading bay. The man with the clipboard was standing there again, without the clipboard this time, his hands on his hips.

“Yes, Jeff?” she said.

“Talk to you a minute, please?”

“Excuse me,” she said, and walked over to him. She ducked her head under the overhead door, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. Both of them disappeared around the side of the truck. Warren walked over to one of the tables, stood there watching the women in their blue smocks packing the wigs into their tall boxes, stuffing the boxes with Styrofoam pellets. He picked up one of the molded marbleized heads, kept turning it over and over in his hands. Androgynous, with an aquiline nose, no eyes, and no lips, the polymer piece was smooth to his touch. It had a good heft to it, too. He realized it wasn’t merely a shipping device, but something that could later serve as a permanent wig stand for the owner. In some homes, it could even pass for a piece of sculpture. Like his own ratty little apartment, for example. He wondered if he could buy one.

“Sorry,” Maria said, coming up behind him and almost startling him into dropping the head. He put it back quickly on the tabletop. “There was a problem with one of the shipping labels,” she explained. “Two hundred wigs going to a little town in Iowa by mistake. Instead of to Chicago. Do you think there are two hundred bald people in the entire state of Iowa?”

“Do you think there are two hundred people in the entire state of Iowa?” Warren said.

“Anyway, we caught it,” Maria said. “Or rather, the trucker caught it. I noticed you admiring one of our pedestals. They’re quite attractive, don’t you think?”

“Wouldn’t mind owning one,” Warren said. “Are they for sale?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Too bad.”

“Sorry.”

“No, no. Hey.”

“Mr. Chambers,” she said, abruptly changing the subject, “why do you think Mr. Hope was looking for my father?”

“I can only guess at that.”

“And what’s your guess?”

“He wanted to ask him whether he was in Missouri at the time of your mother’s death.”

“I see.”

Behind her, men were at the long tables now, packing the wig boxes into larger wooden crates already in place on forklifts. The image persisted of a James Bond movie, a tall, voluptuous, blue-eyed redhead in a clinging blue dress standing loose-hipped in the foreground, men and women in lighter-blue uniforms working like automatons behind her, boxes being packed into crates, forklifts moving the crates out to the loading bay, crates being hoisted into the trucks waiting in the sunlight beyond.

“Would you happen to know?” Warren asked.

“Know what, Mr. Chambers?”

“Whether your father was in Missouri when your mother died?”

“When she was killed, you mean. When Davey Sheed killed her.”

Warren said nothing.

“Why was Mr. Hope looking for my father?” Maria said. “I told him it was Davey. Why was he wasting time...?”

“You still think Davey...?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother warned him to stay away from me.”

“And you think that was reason enough for...”

“Reason enough.”

“How so?”

“Because... never mind.”

“Miss Torrance, if you really believe Davey Sheed...”

“I believe he did, yes. I believe he killed her. Because he and my mother were... involved, let’s say, before he started up with me. And she knew the kind of man he was, and she warned me to stay away from him, and when that didn’t work, she went to him.”

“What kind of man was he?” Warren asked.

“An animal,” Maria said. “King of All the Beasts, in every sense. I only learned that later. After it was too late. After she was dead. So you see, your Mr. Hope was after the wrong person. My father...”

“Matthew must have felt...”

“No, my father wasn’t in Missouri that morning. Nor at any time during our stand in Rutherford. My father didn’t come anywhere near us from the time he left my mother till the time he came to see me after her death.”

“When was that, Miss Torrance?”

“The minute he heard she was dead. He wanted to know if he was in her will. He wanted to know if she’d left him anything.”

“Where was this?”

“Right here in Calusa.”

“And now he’s back in Calusa.”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“He hasn’t dropped in on you again?”

“No.”

“Hasn’t called you?”

“No.”

“Yet he called Aggie McCullough,” Warren said.

“He used to love Aggie once,” Maria said. And then, somewhat wistfully, “He never loved me.”

Jeannie Lawson Byrd was another young twerp.

Toots hated twenty-two-year-olds who lived in luxurious houses, lying on chaise lounges, reading romance novels, and eating bonbons. Twenty-two, twenty-three, anyway. Give or take a few months, she was the same age as Maria Torrance, who lived in yet another expensive house in yet another part of Calusa. One of them a redhead, the other a blonde. Warren had told her that Jeannie Byrd had virtually admitted a relationship with one of the eleven-year-old girls who’d been in Willa Torrance’s act. There was a little girl, hmm? Hmmm, indeed. Warren hadn’t believed her for a minute.

Willa had the nerve to tell me... how can I put this delicately? She accused me of doing to Maggie... one of the little girls. They both had black hair, did I mention that? For contrast. Like the skirts and blouses. She accused me of doing to Maggie... well... what the Munchkin wanted to do to Judy Garland. What the little girl asked the drummer to do to her. 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.

That had been five years ago. Seventeen, eighteen at the time, whatever the hell. But Warren hadn’t believed her, and Warren was an experienced investigator. So what had Jeannie and Willa battled about back then? It seemed too coincidental to Toots that three of the women Matthew had visited before the shooting had shared an intimate relationship with the King of All the Beasts. She was here to learn whether or not Peter Torrance had tried to contact Jeannie while he was here in Calusa. But if anything else came her way...

“Why would he try to contact me?” Jeannie asked.

They were in the greenhouse behind the main house. Jeannie wasn’t eating bonbons, nor was she reading the latest piece of pulp paperback trash. Instead, she was potting plants, barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and a long striped butcher’s apron. Her slender fingers worked delicately among the blooms, picking off dead leaves and petals, molding moist earth around the stems of the plants.

“Did you know him back then?” Toots asked.

“Never met him. He was gone long before my season with S&R. Everyone said he’d left Willa for Aggie McCullough years ago, ran off to Seattle with her.”

“This was common knowledge, huh?”

“Oh, sure. Aggie was back with the circus by then, she and Willa were tighter than Dick’s hatband.”

“Any idea why he left Willa?”

“Rumor had it that she was sleeping with an aerialist who used to hang by his hair.”

“Would that have been Barney Hale?”

“I really don’t remember his name. You know how circuses are.”

“No, I don’t. How are they?”

“Trapeze artists aren’t the only things that fly. Rumors carry on the wind. You hear this, you hear that. Next day, you hear something else. It’s all very incestuous,” she said, and looked up over the potted petunias, or whatever the hell they were. “Do you understand what I’m saying? A circus is a very tight, enclosed, claustrophobic community. Everybody knows everybody else’s business, everybody’s poking his nose into everybody else’s affairs.”

“Affairs?”

“Well, yes. Literally.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There,” Jeannie said, and stepped back to admire her handiwork.

Toots was wondering if this might not be an opportune time to explore some of these incestuous relationships running rampant with the elephants and horses.

“I understand,” she said, and cleared her throat, “that you knew Davey Sheed pretty well.”

“I knew everybody pretty well,” Jeannie said, and cocked an eyebrow, and smiled knowingly, and reached for another leafy, flowering plant in a pot. Toots suddenly wished she knew the names of plants. This suddenly seemed an alarming gap in her education. Then again, she could tell you each and every nickname for cocaine. Snow or Peruvian lady or blow or white gir—

“How well did Willa know him?” she asked, biting the bullet.

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

A lie, Toots thought. In a class with Believe it or not and I’ll be perfectly honest with you.

“Never any rumors circulating about that, huh?”

“None that I heard.”

“Nothing flying on the wind, huh?”

“Nothing.”

“How about the daughter?”

“The daughter?”

“Maria. Was she sleeping with Mr. Tiger Piss?”

Jeannie looked up from the pot, a dead leaf in her hand.

“Not that I know of.”

“Just you, then, huh?”

“I don’t believe I said I was.”

“Oh. I thought you said you knew everybody pretty well.”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Forgive me, I thought that was a euphemism.”

“I don’t know what euphemism means.”

“It means saying ‘pretty well’ when you mean ‘fucking,’” Toots said, and looked her dead in the eye. “As I understand this, Mrs. Byrd, the night you and Willa had your big to-do, you were in Davey Sheed’s trailer.”

“That’s right.”

“In your bra and panties, is what I was given to understand.”

“Mr. Chambers is garrulous, I see.”

“I don’t know what garrulous means,” Toots said.

Jeannie pulled a face.

“So, uh, I don’t mean to pry,” Toots said, “but we’ve got someone in the hospital, you see, and a lot of shit seems to be pointing toward the great white hunter. The way we have it, Sheed was training more than cats. You already told Warren...”

“I find it easier talking to men than to women,” Jeannie said.

“Well, try me,” Toots said. “Was Willa sleeping with the cat man?”

“I told you. I haven’t the...”

“Foggiest, right. And that goes for the daughter, too, right?”

“I hardly knew the daughter.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“I have no idea who the daughter was sleeping with. She was only seventeen at the time.”

“So were you,” Toots said. “What’d you and Willa fight about that night in Alabama?”

“I already told Mr. Chambers...”

“Could you tell me, too, please?”

Jeannie took a deep breath.

“She accused me of unseemly behavior with one of the little girls in her act.”

“Maggie, right?”

“Maggie, yes.”

“Which is just what you told Warren.”

“Yes. And that’s the God’s honest truth.”

Believe it or not, Toots thought.

A ghetto is a ghetto, Bloom figured, regardless of how it looks.

Calusa’s black neighborhood was called Newtown, and its wintertime look wasn’t at all like that of the South Bronx, or Manhattan’s Harlem or Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. As Bloom drove through searching for the 1100 block on L Street, he saw no crumbling tenements, no graffiti-assaulted walls, no soot-stained, urine-stained banks of snow, no heaps of black-bagged garbage waiting for pickup someday, no old men warming their hands and staring into fires in sawed-off oil drums.

This was Florida.

And here in Newtown, at four on a Thursday afternoon in March, there was pale sunshine and palm trees, and flowering bushes, and houses with lawns, and children riding around on bicycles and skateboards. Most of the houses were small and constructed of wood siding with asphalt-shingle roofs. Some of them were badly in need of paint, but none of them were ramshackle. A few of the lawns could have used a trim, but for the most part, the neighborhood looked tidy and neat. Most of the people living in Newtown were black. There were some Hispanics and Asians as well, yes, but no white people lived here. The thing that made this a ghetto, Bloom figured, was that the people who lived here had to live here.

Oh, sure, in a democracy you could live anywhere you liked, certainly. There was no reason why any of the blacks living here in Newtown couldn’t buy a house on Flamingo Key tomorrow, for example — provided they had the five hundred thousand dollars or more such a house would cost. But, you see, the blacks living here in Newtown couldn’t in their wildest dreams ever hope to live on any of Calusa’s eminently desirable keys, ever hope to buy into any of the mainland’s luxurious condos. Yes, there were black lawyers and even a black judge in Calusa, and there were black doctors and black bank tellers and black dental hygienists, and other black professionals with high-salaried jobs — but none of them lived in Newtown. And now and again, yes, true, you found a black car salesman or department-store clerk living in Newtown, but for the most part, the small, affordable houses here were owned or rented by blacks who worked in any of the so-called service occupations, the gardeners, dishwashers, cleaning women, garbagemen, busboys, all the others who performed menial labor that required long hours and paid short wages.

There was a lot of crime in Newtown.

When dreams are denied a huge portion of the populace, those dreams will be sought elsewhere. There’s instant gratification in a crack pipe, you see, true democracy to be found in the smoking of cocaine. Anyone — black, brown, white, yellow, red, purple, blue — can journey to the moon for the price of a hit. But selling crack and doing crack are crimes — yeah, sorry about that, Bloom thought. And they foster yet other crimes, because the lotus-eaters need money to support their habits, and no gardener in the state of Florida earns enough to keep a full-time crack habit going. Therefore the gun.

Bloom wished he had a nickel for every gun on the streets of Newtown. One of those guns had seriously wounded Matthew Hope last Friday night, right here in this black part of town. And now a white man named Peter Torrance had been located in a rooming house on L Street. Bloom hadn’t called ahead. Bad enough the desk clerk had already been alerted by the canvassing phone call from the police.

He parked the unmarked sedan in front of what had been a small hotel when Calusa was a smaller, friendlier place, long before this part of the city was renamed Newtown. Back then when the Shelby Arms was built, this section of town was simply called Temple’s Fields after a landowner named Jason Temple, who’d owned all of the acreage running from Berringer Road to the bay front. It wasn’t until 1937 that the Hannah Lewis School of Art was built on the site of what had been Jason Temple’s main house on what was by then called merely Temple Field, the possessive having been dropped years ago. This name, too, was promptly changed to Newtown, by unanimous vote of the city council.

Newtown.

New town, indeed.

A brand-new town with a new grid pattern for streets on what had once been soybean fields bordered by scrub oak and cabbage palm, A to R running west to east, the names of presidents for the wider north-to-south roads. A new art school with four hundred and twenty students, for whom five wooden dormitories were built just this side of the Tamiami Trail. New shops and markets, and a new hotel as a convenience to the students’ parents, who enjoyed coming down to see the kids, especially during those brutal winter months up north.

Well, the area turned almost exclusively black after a fire demolished the art school and three of the dormitories. The school never reopened. It was rumored that it had been in financial trouble before the fire, and that the fire had been deliberately set. The remaining two dormitories were purchased by a man who converted them into storage sheds for his lumberyard. The Shelby Arms survived, though now there were no parents of art students to inhabit it. Instead, it became first an inexpensive hotel for the rare black couple who wandered down to Florida on vacation, and next a haven for color-blind hippies who liked the easy proximity to Newtown marijuana, and finally — after the hippies disappeared and after it was possible for blacks to check into any Holiday Inn anywhere in America — the place became a rooming house still called the Shelby Arms, but operating now almost exclusively for the convenience of hookers and their johns. Why Peter Torrance had chosen the place was a question Bloom intended to ask — if in fact the man was still here.

The desk clerk said Mr. Torrance was out just now.

Bloom asked if he had checked out.

The desk clerk, a rake-thin man of uncertain heritage, with pale-blue eyes and skin the color of tea, told Bloom that if he’d meant to say checked out, he’da said checked out. What he’d said was that Mr. Torrance was out just now. Bloom hadn’t yet flashed the tin. He still didn’t. He told the clerk he would wait. From the newspaper articles he’d read about Willa’s death, he had some idea what Peter Torrance would look like. Besides, he suspected not too many white men would be coming through the doors of the Shelby Arms. Prepared to wait however long it might take, he sat in a red velveteen easy chair opposite the desk. The chair had seen better days.

At twenty minutes past six, just as dusk was beginning to settle upon the street outside, a tall, angular man wearing a white suit out of a Tennessee Williams play came up the front steps to the hotel, walked into the lobby and over to the desk, and asked for his key. Bloom knew at once that this was Peter Torrance. He rose from the threadbare easy chair, approached the man as he was turning, key in hand, and said, “Mr. Torrance?”

The man’s pale-blue eyes opened wide in a gaunt but still handsome face. Remembering the newspaper articles, Bloom figured Torrance for a man in his fifties, but he looked a good decade or more older. Perhaps it was the very pale face, unusual for this part of the country, or perhaps it was the faintest sign of graying beard on that face, the sort of whiskery trace you saw on men too old or too tired to shave every morning, an echo of the spiky white thinning hair on his head. Or perhaps it was the anachronistic white suit, rumpled and graying, or the matching scuffed white sneakers. Or perhaps it was the fact that he was wearing a white shirt without a tie, the top button unbuttoned. The total effect was one of a beachcomber. Perhaps an alcoholic beachcomber. Bloom no longer had to ask what Torrance was doing in a fleabag like the Shelby Arms.

“Mr. Torrance?” he asked again.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“Detective Morris Bloom, Calusa Police,” he said, and showed his shield. “Are you Mr. Torrance?”

“What is this?”

“Some questions I’d like to ask you,” Bloom said.

The man turned to the desk clerk.

“What is this?” he asked him.

The desk clerk shrugged.

The man turned back to Bloom.

“I’m Peter Torrance,” he said. “What do you want?”

“Few questions I’d like to ask you.”

“What kind of questions?”

“How long have you been here, Mr. Torrance?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“Routine investigation,” Bloom said.

“Why am I in a routine investigation?”

“Do you know a man named Matthew Hope?”

Torrance blinked.

“We think a man named Matthew Hope was trying to make contact with you. Can you tell me whether he did or not?” Bloom asked, and noticed that the desk clerk was listening intently. “Let’s go outside, okay?” he told Torrance. “Find a place we can talk.”

“Well, all right,” Torrance said reluctantly. “But I must tell you...”

“Be easier outside, okay?” Bloom said, and took Torrance’s arm and gently guided him toward a pair of French doors that opened onto an unkempt garden at the rear of the hotel. They sat on a curving stone bench in the waning sunlight. The bench was considerably more comfortable than the easy chair inside. Flowering shrubs grew rampant everywhere. The last of the sun’s rays slanted in through trees hanging moss.

“Did Matthew Hope ever reach you?” Bloom asked.

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

“How long have you been here, Mr. Torrance?”

“Since the twentieth. Why?”

“Are you here on business or pleasure?”

“I came here to see an old friend.”

“On business or pleasure?”

“I was passing through, I thought I’d drop in to say hello.”

“Passing through from where?”

“I came over from Miami.”

“What were you doing in Miami?”

“Taking the sun.”

Bloom looked at his face.

“How long were you there?”

“Three or four days.”

“And you came here on the twentieth,” Bloom said.

“Yes. On the twentieth.”

Five days before Matthew got shot, Bloom thought.

“Excuse me, Detective — Bloom, is it?”

“Bloom, yes.”

“Excuse me, but I really would like to know what this is all about.”

“Who was the friend you dropped in on?”

“A woman named Aggie Donovan. Now, listen, really. I refuse to answer any more questions till you tell me...”

“Mr. Torrance, an attorney named Matthew Hope was seriously wounded last Friday night outside a bar not seven blocks from here. The day before, he had gone to see an attorney named Arthur D’Allessandro, hoping to get your address from him. We’re wondering now...”

“I know nothing at all about any of this.”

“Mr. D’Allessandro didn’t call to tell you...?”

“He did not.”

“How about Mrs. Donovan?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“Have you spoken to her recently?”

“Not since I visited her last week.”

“When last week was that?”

“Last... Monday, I believe it was.”

“And you haven’t spoken to her since?”

“No.”

“Did you mention to her that you were seeing a lawyer here?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you tell her why?”

“No.”

“You didn’t mention that you intended to elect a statutory share of your former wife’s...”

“We were never properly divorced,” Torrance said.

“...a statutory share of her estate? You didn’t mention this to Mrs. Donovan?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Didn’t tell her that you were looking for thirty percent of the estate?”

“I really don’t remember.”

“This was only last Monday, and you don’t remember?”

“We’re old friends, we talked about a lot of things.”

“Mrs. Donovan seems to think you told her all that. At least, that’s what she reported to Matthew Hope.”

Torrance sat in silence for a moment, a pale wraith in the lengthening shadows, his hands clasped, his head bent, looking down at the cracked and crumbling flagstones that formed a path to the bench.

“I may have told her that,” he said at last.

“Whether you told her or not,” Bloom said, “it is true, isn’t it? That’s why you went to see Mr. D’Allessandro, isn’t it?”

“Actually... well, yes.”

“Did Matthew Hope eventually find you, sir?”

“No, I don’t know anyone by that name, I’m sorry.”

“Mr. Torrance... were you in a town named Rutherford, Missouri, on or about the eleventh of May, three years ago?”

“If you’re asking whether I was there when Willa killed herself, I was not.”

“You know when she killed herself, do you?”

“Yes, of course, I do. Mr. Bloom, I want you to know that I’m answering your questions only because you seem to believe I had something to do with the shooting of this Hope person you keep mentioning. I want to repeat that I do not know the man, I’ve never met the man, and I had nothing whatever to do with his shooting, whenever that may have been.”

“Last Friday night,” Bloom said. “The twenty-fifth.”

“Whenever.”

“Were you anywhere near the Centaur Bar&Grill that night? That’s on Roosevelt and G.”

“I don’t know of any such place.”

“Were you anywhere near the circus grounds in Rutherford, Missouri, on the night Willa shot herself?”

“What’s one thing got to do with the other?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you there. As you just said, Willa shot herself. From what I can gather, Mr. Hope was shot by someone else. If you’re seeking a link somehow...”

“I’m trying to learn why he was shot, Mr. Torrance. On the day before the shooting, he went to your lawyer’s office to ask questions about you. Presumably because you’re seeking thirty percent of Willa Torrance’s estate. What I want to know...”

“We were never divorced. I’m entitled to a proper share of the estate.”

“But there wouldn’t be an estate if she was still alive, would there?”

“If she chose to kill herself, that’s none of my affair. I was not there at the time.”

“When were you there?”

“Not when she killed herself. Mr. Bloom... let me get something straight, may I?”

“Sure.”

“Are you attempting to reopen Willa’s case?”

“Not unless it’s tied to Matthew Hope’s shooting.”

“I do not know this fucking person! You’re really upsetting me, Mr. Bloom,” he said, and abruptly stood up. “If you have any real police business here, perhaps you’d better arrest me. Otherwise...”

“Otherwise I can go to the State Attorney for a grand jury subpoena,” Bloom said.

Torrance blinked again.

The ploy hadn’t worked with D’Allessandro, but D’Allessandro was a lawyer, and Torrance wasn’t.

“A subpoena?” he said. “What the hell for?”

“To order your testimony before a grand jury.”

“What testimony?”

“Regarding the shooting of Matthew Hope.”

“I’ve told you a hundred fucking times...”

“Shall I go make application, Mr. Torrance? Or can we talk quietly and peacefully here in this lovely little garden?”

Torrance let out his breath in hissing exasperation. Seething, he sat on the stone bench again, and clasped his hands again, tightly now, as if constraining them.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Were you anywhere near the circus grounds on that date?”

“No, I wasn’t. Willa’s case was a suicide, Mr. Bloom. If you’re trying to...”

“Matthew Hope didn’t think so.”

“Fuck Matthew Hope. He doesn’t work for the Rutherford Police, does he? Or the Rutherford Coroner’s Office? They determined...”

“Did the Rutherford police discuss Willa’s case with you?”

“No. Why would they? I was nowhere near Rutherford when Willa took her own life.”

“Where were you?”

“Gone by then.”

“So you were in Rutherford before then.”

“All right, let’s get this over with,” Torrance said, shaking his head in utter disbelief, making no effort to conceal his extreme impatience and annoyance. Clenching and unclenching his fists as if struggling not to strike this impossible boor who had no right to be questioning him this way about an event that had taken place in ancient times — all of three years ago — he said, “I was there, yes. But I was gone before...”

“When would that have been, Mr. Torrance?”

“I got there several days before she killed herself,” he said, the words forcing themselves from a tight-lipped mouth, the voice constricted and angry.

Bloom was unaffected.

“What were you doing there, Mr. Torrance?”

“I have friends there. I have friends all over. When I was with the circus, I knew anyone of importance in any town we showed. I was there to see some old friends.”

“And coincidentally, the circus was there at the same time, is that it?”

Torrance said nothing. Just kept clenching and unclenching his hands, not deigning to look at Bloom.

“Do you remember the dates you were there?”

“I told you. I arrived three or four days before her death.”

“That would’ve made it the seventh, the eighth, around then.”

“If you say so.”

“And you left when?”

“The day before she shot herself.”

“Did the Rutherford police know this?”

“I have no idea.”

“No one ever questioned you about your presence there?”

“Not until this moment,” Torrance said.

“Mr. Torrance,” Bloom said, “did you happen to see Willa while you were there in Rutherford?”

“Yes, I did. So what?”

“When did you see her?”

“I don’t recall the date.”

“What was the purpose of your visit?”

“I’d heard certain things while moving around...”

“What do you mean, moving around?”

“Visiting old friends here and there. In circus towns I used to visit.”

“What things did you hear?”

“Things I thought Willa should know.”

“Like what?”

“If I tell you, Mr. Bloom, will this be the end? Can we then end this stupid...?”

“What things did you hear, Mr. Torrance?”

“I heard...”

“Yes?”

“Well, I heard...”

Bloom waited.

“I heard there was a little girl, you see.”

What it got down to...

There was a little girl, you see, who was doing a little girl.

In other words...

Wee Willa Winkie was doing cocaine.

When Bloom was working with the Nassau County police, cocaine was often called the white lady or simply white lady, possibly because it was an expensive drug preferred by effete white folk and largely ignored by blacks, whose drug of choice back then was horse. Nobody called heroin horse anymore — nowadays, it was scag or smack or simply H — the same way nobody called cocaine white lady anymore, either. But the word girl had come to mean cocaine through a sort of perverse evolution.

Bloom thought it supremely ironic that all the feminists out there had fought so hard to get themselves called women rather than ladies, while at the same time cocaine was undergoing an indifferent sexist-pig change from white lady to white girl and then simply to girl. Sad, when he thought about it, which he rarely did. Nonetheless, “The brighter the blue, the better the girl” was an expression common to cops and thieves alike, and it referred not to the color of a lady’s eyes or dress, but merely to a chemical test for the purity of cocaine. What you did, whether you were an undercover narc or a mere dealer, you dribbled a drop of cobalt thiocyanate onto the suspect white powder, and if the stuff turned blue, it was cocaine. The fewer times the coke had been stepped on, the brighter was the blue reaction you got. The brighter the blue, the better the girl, verdad, amigo? When she ees good, she ees very, very good, eh, señor?

Bloom listened with increasing interest as Torrance told him he’d heard about Willa in more than one town, most recently in Rutherford, from contacts who still had a great deal of regard for him — and for her, of course — and who didn’t want to see her get in trouble with the law. Why Torrance should have cared whether Willa was doing girl or pot or smack or adam or whatever the hell her drug of choice happened to be was something Bloom couldn’t quite comprehend. The woman had been unfaithful to him; in fact, she’d had a baby by another man. Yet Torrance had felt obliged, as he put it now, to inform Willa that his old circus cronies all over were saying she’d turned into a Grade A nose.

“So you went to see her, huh?” he said. “To tell her what you’d heard.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t remember when this was.”

“It was probably...”

“Yes?”

“The day I left Rutherford.”

“And when was that?”

“The tenth.”

“You remember now, do you?”

“Yes. It was the tenth. I saw her that morning, and left town later that day.”

“How’d she greet you, after all those years?”

“Well, she was surprised to see me, of course...”

“I’ll bet. How long had it been?”

“Eighteen years. But she was extremely cordial. I guess she realized I was doing her a favor.”

“By telling her what you’d heard.”

“Yes, what people were saying about her.”

“Did she say it was true?”

“She said it was an absolute falsehood. But she was nonetheless grateful I’d told her. She said it made her realize she had enemies out there.”

“She said that, huh? That she had enemies out there?”

“Yes.”

“She didn’t happen to name any of these enemies, did she?”

“No.”

“How long were you with her?”

“An hour or so.”

“And she was cordial all that time, huh?”

“Oh, yes.”

“No hard feelings between the two of you?”

“No, no. Why should there have been?”

“Well... her and Barney Hale.”

“That was years ago.”

“You and the McCullough woman.”

“Willa and Aggie were good friends by then.”

“So how’d it end? Your conversation with her?”

“She said she’d try to track down the rumors...”

“Did you believe her, by the way? That none of this was true?”

“No.”

“You thought she was, in fact, doing coke.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“No. We shook hands, and said goodbye, and I told her I’d see her again sometime.”

“Did you? See her again?”

“How could I? I left town that afternoon, and she killed herself the very next morning.”