Three Blind Mice

10

The pallor had set in. And so had the gloom.

This was Stephen Leeds’s tenth day in jail, and the routine he had earlier described to Matthew was taking its toll on him. Send this man to prison for any extended length of time, and he would be destroyed as surely as if he were strapped into the electric chair.

He was sitting at the far end of a long table in what was called the P.C.R., the letters standing for Private Consultation Room, a bleak cubicle set aside for prisoner-lawyer conferences. There was a single barred window set high up on the wall behind him. It was raining steadily at nine o’clock that Friday morning. You could hear the rain pelting the fronds of the palm trees that lined the sidewalk outside the jail. The small, tight room felt almost cozy with the rain beating down outside. Leeds’s big hands were clasped on the table in front of him. He was listening intently to Matthew, who was asking him if he and his brother-in-law got along well, or was there—

“I hate his guts,” Leeds said.

“Why?”

“I’m a farmer and he’s a convicted felon. That’d be reason enough, even if there weren’t other things.”

“Why’d you hire him?”

“Jessica wanted him here.”

“Why?”

“To keep him out of trouble, was what she said. If you ask me, he’s the kind who’ll always be in trouble of one sort or another. That bank robbery wasn’t the first crime he committed, you know. It was just the first one he got sent away for.”

“What were the others?”

“You name them, he did them,”

“Like what?”

“Drugs, assault, rape, burgla—”

“Rape?”

“Rape.”

“When was this?”

“Which?”

“Start from the beginning.”

“The first dope arrest was when he was thirteen, fourteen, in there. Judge took pity on him, gave him a suspended sentence. He looks so damn clean-cut, you know, so apple pie, American boy next door, it’s hard to believe he’s a vicious son of a bitch.”

“Tell me about the assault and the rape.”

“The assault was when he was sixteen. He mugged an old lady in the park, ran off with her purse. Jessie says the old lady identified the wrong man. Maybe she did. They searched high and low for her handbag, threw the apartment and especially Ned’s room upside down, but they never did find it.”

“How about the rape?”

“Ned was seventeen, the girl was thirteen. And retarded.”

“And he got away with it?” Matthew asked.

“Jessie says he didn’t do it. The jury said so, too. His lawyer had five witnesses who claimed Ned was out bowling with them at the time of the rape, and the jury believed them.”

Wheels within wheels, Warren had said.

Ned Weaver charged with rape when he was seventeen years old. And an acquittal.

His sister the victim of multiple rape all these years later. And another acquittal.

“He wasn’t so lucky the next time around,” Leeds said. “That was the bank holdup. Jessie claims he was forced into it. Ned owed this Italian fellow some money, the man forced him to go along on the robbery, to square matters, you know? That’s what Jessie says it was. Just a matter of trying to settle a bad debt. Which doesn’t explain why Ned shot that bank guard, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“He shot him because he’s a vicious son of a bitch, is why. But even so, look at the sentence he got. Out in nine years. He’s been lucky all his life when it comes to kindhearted judges and pushover juries.”

“But your wife doesn’t feel that way, does she?”

“Oh, no, according to her, he’s Mr. Clean. Just had a string of bad luck, is all. He’ll get in trouble again, though, you wait and see. And next time I hope they lock him up for good.”

“Were all of these arrests in California?” Matthew asked.

He was wondering why the computer had located only the one arrest and conviction.

“The early ones were in South Dakota,” Leeds said, “while he was growing up. Growing up rotten. It’s hard to believe him and Jessie are from the same stock. She’s seven years older than he is, you know, she’s thirty-six. Her parents were killed in a car crash, she’s like a mother to him. Which I guess is why she wanted him here on the farm. But they didn’t move to San Diego till he was eighteen, after the rape episode. Just in time to get in trouble all over again, right? Clean slate in a new town, might as well shit all over it.”

“Is that where you met her? In San Diego?”

“No, no, we met right here in Florida. She used to model, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yes. She was doing a trunk show here at the Hyatt. We started talking, I asked her out… and that was it, I guess.”

“When was this?”

“We’ve been married for almost six years now.”

The gloom settled over his face again.

Marriage. Memories. A shining past.

And a future that seemed as dark as the rain outside.

“Didn’t even know she had a brother,” he said. “He was in prison when I met her, she never once mentioned him. The first I knew of him was when he showed up on our doorstep last summer. It was one of the hottest days of the year, I remember…”

… the sun sitting in the sky like a ball of fire, the sprinklers going in the fields, a Yellow Cab from town coming up the road and throwing dust a mile into the sky. Leeds is in the barn doing something, he doesn’t remember what just now, perhaps stitching a torn cinch on a saddle, he has always been very good with his hands, even when he was a kid, and he loves repairing things. He can’t imagine why a taxi has come out here to Timucuan Point Road, and he has no idea who the man getting out of the cab might be.

He puts down the saddle girth — that’s what he’d been working on, he now remembers clearly — and goes out to where the young man is paying the driver, the driver making change, the dust still rising on the air around them. It occurs to him that the young man has the same coloring as his wife. Green eyes, red hair — well, hers is a bit more on the brown side, a reddish-brown. But this is just a fleeting observation, and he makes no real connection, he never once thinks they might be brother and sister.

The young man turns and extends his hand.

He is wearing a short-sleeved shirt open at the throat, blue jeans, Western boots.

There is a mermaid tattoo on his right forearm.

The mermaid has long yellow hair and blue eyes and bright red lips and red-nippled breasts and a blue-scaled tail.

I’m Ned Weaver, the stranger says, hand still extended.

Which, of course, is Jessica’s maiden name, Jessica Welles Weaver, the Welles for her mother’s maiden name — is this young man a cousin or something?

But no, he is not a cousin.

Because a cry of joy sounds from within the house, and Jessica comes bounding out in cutoff shorts and a green T-shirt, barefooted, running toward the young man, who drops the duffel he’s been holding in his left hand, and turns to her and opens both arms wide to her, and clasps her to him, her long reddish hair — she was wearing her hair long then — cascading over his arms behind her back, showering the mermaid’s yellow hair and red-nippled breasts. Oh, Ned, she cries, oh God, how happy I am to see you!

“She’d been writing to him all the while he was in prison,” Leeds said now. “Had herself a P.O. box in town, he’d send his letters to her there. I didn’t know she’d offered him a job till all the introductions and the laughing and the oh my Gods were out of the way and we were sitting around the pool drinking. I didn’t know he was a jailbird until that night in bed when she told me his sad, sad history. Always the innocent victim, that brother of hers, dear little Ned, pure as the driven snow. Norton Albert Weaver, named for Jessica’s father, who’d been lucky enough to die long before his only son turned rotten. Norton Albert Weaver, a vicious son of a bitch if ever there was one, but I didn’t know that until the day with the dog. This must’ve been…”

… late October last year, the hurricane season all but gone, Ned settling into his duties on the farm. The man has a thumb can turn a ripe tomato blue, but he’s now one of the foremen around here, barking out orders, strutting like a peacock for the women in the fields, making pass after pass at pretty little Allie in the kitchen, who loves her husband to death and who’s so flustered by Ned’s unwanted attentions that she’s tempted to give up the only good job she’s ever had. She speaks to Jessica about it, and Jessica promises to talk to her brother. But privately, she tells Leeds that their housekeeper has been flirting with Ned.

That day with the dog…

The dog belongs to Allie and her husband, Pete, who before Ned took over as foreman was doing a fine job of running things by himself. Pete is a Vietnam vet, thirty-five years old — it’s difficult to realize that anyone who was a veteran of that war would now have to be at least thirty-three, but that is actually the case. He is a soft-spoken man who lowers his eyes whenever he’s addressed, as though he is fearful a person might look into those eyes and see reflected there all the things he has seen — and done. It is difficult to imagine this man ever killing anyone. But he is alive today. And if you were in combat in Vietnam, as was Pete, and you did not kill people, then you would not be alive today. The equation is a simple one.

Whenever he drives his truck out there in the fields, his dog is sitting beside him on the front seat. The dog’s name is Jasper. He is a spotted something-or-other; no one has ever been able to determine his ancestry with any accuracy, but it’s reckoned he is at least part Dalmatian, a dog with a somewhat sappy look on his face and a manner as gentle as his master’s.

On that day in October…

It is one of those crisp, glistening days that infrequently bless this part of Florida, causing all those settlers who moved from colder climes to thank their lucky stars all over again for the wisdom of their decision and the beneficence of the Lord Almighty. The cloudless sky stretched taut over the bountiful acres of the farm is as blue as Monday, and a fair wind is blowing in off the Gulf and carrying inland. There is a man-made pond on the farm, stocked with trout, stalked by water birds that take immediate wing whenever an alligator puts in a sudden and unwanted appearance.

It is against the law to shoot alligators in the state of Florida.

Alligators are a protected species.

Occasionally, a farmer or an orange grower will take a shot at one, and occasionally alligator steaks will appear on the dinner table — but no one talks about that much. In the state of Florida, there are a great many things that people don’t talk about. Rainy weather is one of those things. Cold weather is another. Shooting alligators or ospreys is yet another. But over the years, Leeds has shot and killed and later grilled and eaten three alligators that decided to make a home in his trout pond. A fourth alligator is in that pond on this bright, shining day in October.

“We all heard Jasper screaming,” Leeds said. “Sounded like a human being. A baby. Screaming and screaming. And then the screaming stopped. We were all on our way down to the pond by then. The alligator was still gnawing on that poor dog. Snout all covered with blood — have you ever seen the teeth on an alligator? Someone had tied Jasper to an old oak tree near the edge of the pond. The rope was still wound around the trunk of the tree. Jasper had circled and circled the tree trying to get away from that ’gator, and then he’d run out of rope and the ’gator just took him.” Leeds shook his head. “It was my brother-in-law who tied that dog to the tree.”

“How do you know that?”

“He all but said so.”

“When?”

“Right after the trial. We were all pretty upset about that verdict, you know, letting those men go free after what they did to Jessie. Ned said if he had his way, he’d go after all three of them and drag them down to the pond and tie them to that old oak, the way someone had done with Jasper. That’s when I knew he was the one who’d done it. I’d suspected it all along — we all did — but that was when I knew for sure it was him. I could see it right there in his eyes.”

“So what he said, in effect, was that he wanted to kill those men.”

“Well, yes. But the point is he wanted to kill them the way Jasper had…”

“Yes, I understand that. Did he sound serious when he said this?”

“As serious as any of us,” Leeds said. “We all wanted them dead.”

“Yes, but what I’m asking… do you think this was more than just an idle threat? What your brother-in-law said?”

“About going after them, do you mean?”

“Yes. Do you think he did, in fact, go after them?”

“Well, I…”

“Do you think he killed them?”

It was evident that the thought had never once entered Leeds’s mind. Ned Weaver as his sister’s avenger? Ned Weaver as the Midnight Vigilante? But if so…

“Do you mean…?”

He was sorting out the implications. If indeed Ned had gone after those men, if indeed Ned had killed them, then Ned had also dropped his wallet at the scene, Ned had set him up.

“The son of a bitch,” he said.

“Could he have done it?” Matthew asked.

“He’s mean enough, that’s for sure,” Leeds said.

“Did you see him at any time on the night of the murders?”

“Yes, he stopped by right after dinner.”

“Was he in the habit of stopping by?”

“Well, yes. Jessie’s his sister, you know. They’re very close.”

“Stopped by for what reason?”

“Just to say good night. This must’ve been a little before eight, we’d just finished dinner. We were getting ready to watch the movie.”

“How long did he stay?”

“Just a few minutes. Jessie offered him a drink — we were having an after-dinner drink outside — but he said no, he had some things to do.”

“What things?” Matthew asked.

“Didn’t say.”

“What time did he leave?”

“Eight o’clock? A little after? No later than that. We were still sitting at the table out back, by the pool.”

“Did someone show him to the front door?” Matthew asked.

“No. What do you mean? He knows the way, he’s in and out of our house all the time.”

“Went to the door by himself then?”

“Yes.”

“Did he go through the house?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Went through the house to the front door.”

“Yes.”

“And you and Jessie stayed out back.”

“Yes.”

“How long did it take him to leave?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean.”

“He said good night to you out back and walked through the house to the front door…”

“I assume he did.”

On the night of the murders, someone had driven Jessie’s Maserati to the marina and boarded Leeds’s boat. The someone had been wearing a yellow jacket and hat and he was seen later that night both at Kickers and in Little Asia. Leeds’s yellow jacket and hat had been hanging in the hall closet, just inside the entrance to the house. The study was off to the left, two steps down. The keys to Jessie’s Maserati had been hanging on a brass holder fastened to the study wall. The keys to Leeds’s boat had been hanging on that same wall.

“Did you hear the front door close behind him?” Matthew asked.

“I… really can’t say.”

“Then you don’t know how long he was in the house after he’d said good night.”

“No, I don’t,” Leeds said.

Matthew nodded. It was at least possible.

But the look of gloom had settled on Leeds’s face again, clouding his eyes, causing his mouth to go slack. He knew what Matthew was thinking, but he wasn’t buying it. Not any of it. His eyes revealed only despair.

“We don’t have to find the real murderer, you know,” Matthew said.

“I know,” Leeds said, and clasped his hands in front of him on the table again.

“We only have to show you couldn’t have done it.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re well on the way to doing that.”

“Are we?”

“Well, sure,” Matthew said. “We’ve got a witness who saw a license plate that doesn’t ex—”

“A dead witness,” Leeds said.

“What Trinh said is still on the record. We have his statement. And his murder only helps our case.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Because whoever killed him may have killed the others as well.”

“The papers are saying it was a copycat.”

“The papers are saying what the State Attorney wants them to say.”

“They hate my father,” Leeds said. “Because he tried to buy them out.”

“I know that. So don’t worry about what the papers are saying. The papers aren’t a judge and jury.”

“It feels like they are.”

He looked down at his clasped hands. Head bent. Behind him the rain kept riddling the palm fronds. His gloom was palpable. Matthew didn’t know what he could say to dispel it.

“We’ve also turned Stubbs around,” he said.

No answer.

“He’s ready to testify that the man who called him wasn’t you.”

No answer.

“Which is very good news. He was one of their best witnesses.”

No answer. Just sat there looking at his hands, the rain falling behind him. And then, without looking up, in a voice so low that Matthew had trouble hearing him, he said, “Be nice if it was Ned, wouldn’t it? But when I think of the victims he picked for himself” — and now he was shaking his head — “not the bank guard, that was just someone who got in his way. But the others” — still shaking his head, looking down at his hands — “an old lady… a retarded girl… that sweet, gentle dog…”

He looked up at last.

His eyes were brimming with tears.

“No, Mr. Hope,” he said. “I don’t think it was Ned. He just doesn’t have the balls.”

There was a message that Mai Chim Lee had called. Matthew looked at his watch. It was a little before noon. Hoping he’d catch her before she left for lunch, he dialed the number she’d left, let it ring six times, and was about to hang up when a woman’s voice said, “Longstreet and Powers, good morning. Or afternoon. Whichever it is.”

“Morning,” Matthew said. “For the next five minutes.”

“Thank God someone has the right time. Is your power still on?”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, I don’t know, just a minute.” He snapped on his desk lamp. “Yes, it is,” he said.

“There are some lines down, we’ve been out since ten this morning,” she said. “But enough of my troubles. How can I help you?”

“May I speak to Miss Lee, please?”

“Mary? Sure, just a minute.”

Mary, he thought, and waited.

“Hello?”

The singsong voice. The somewhat sorrowful lilt of it.

“Mai Chim? It’s Matthew.”

“Oh, hello, Matthew, how are you? I’m so happy you called back.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes, fine, thank you. Did you read about Mr. Trinh?”

“I did, yes.”

“Such a nice old man,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Matthew, I feel very bad about the other night.”

“Why should you?”

“Because I behaved so foolishly.”

“But you didn’t.”

“So very foolishly.”

“No.”

“Like a child.”

“I didn’t think so at all. Really, Mai Chim…”

“I’m almost thirty-one years old, Matthew.”

“I know that.”

“That’s not a child.”

“I know.”

“Matthew, would you care to have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“I’d love to have dinner with you,” he said.

“Please understand that I’m the one who’s asking you.”

“Yes, I realize that.”

“Good, then that’s settled. I think I know a very nice place. Can you pick me up at eight?”

“Eight sounds fine.”

“Perhaps we will get to know each other better,” she said, and hung up.

Matthew looked at the mouthpiece.

Warren Chambers’s answering machine had a recording capability that made it relatively simple to tape a conversation without the knowledge of the person on the other end of the line. All you had to do was hit the PLAYBACK button, dial your number, and — when your party started talking — hit the record and start buttons simultaneously. No beeps would sound to alert the party on the other end. The operation was what was known as covert.

He was making his call from the small office that used to belong to Samalson Investigations before Otto Samalson himself went out of business. Otto went out of business because someone shot him dead. Getting shot dead in the private-eye business usually happened only in novels and movies, but Otto had somehow managed the trick in real life. The Chinese lady who’d worked for him — Warren couldn’t remember her name, but she’d been damn good — left for Hawaii shortly afterward, and the office had remained unoccupied until Warren recently took over the lease and bought all the furniture from the man to whom Otto’s children had sold it.

The frosted-glass door to the Chambers Detective Agency opened onto a reception room that measured six by eight feet, into which were crammed a wooden desk with a typewriter on it and a wooden chair behind it, an upholstered easy chair opposite it, green metal filing cabinets and bookshelves, and a Xerox machine and a coatrack, all enclosed by walls now hung with photographs of Warren’s mother and his two sisters and their families back in St. Louis. Warren figured that if someone wasn’t going to hire you because you had pictures of your black family on the walls, then maybe he ought to look across the desk and discover that you were black, too.

Warren did not as yet have a receptionist; his answering machine served that purpose. Whenever he put on temporary help, whichever investigator he hired normally worked out of the reception area. His own private office was larger than the outer office — eight by ten as opposed to six by eight — but just as cluttered. It enjoyed the advantage of a window, however, which, combined with its few extra feet, made it seem spacious by comparison, even if the only view from it was of a bank building across the street.

Rain streaked that window as Warren dialed the number at the Leeds farm. Jessica Leeds herself answered on the third ring. Warren told her who was calling, and they exchanged some small talk about the awful weather, and then he asked if he might speak to Mr. Weaver, please. He did not say, “May I speak to your brother, please?” He felt that allowing her to assume he didn’t yet know this fact was the safest course to follow. She asked him to wait, please. He waited. While he waited, he hit both the record and start buttons. He was now recording dead air. But better that than any telltale click when Weaver came on the line. Rain slithered down the windowpane. He looked across at the bank building. Everything looked grey and bleak and dismal. He kept waiting.

“Hello?”

You’re on the air, he thought.

“Hello, Mr. Weaver?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Warren Chambers, I hope I’m not catching you at a bad time.”

“Nope.”

“I wanted to apologize, first of all, for our little misunderstanding the other day. I can see how…”

“Okay.”

The man was a monosyllablist.

“I can see how a person who looked as if he was trying to break into the house…”

“I said okay.”

Three words this time. Not bad. Warren wondered if he’d like to try for four.

“If you’ve got a minute…”

“Sure.”

“… there are a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Weaver, had you ever known Mr. Leeds to take his boat out for a little moonlight spin?”

“A what?”

“A little moonlight spin.”

“Sure. All the time.”

“You understand what I mean, don’t you?”

“Sure. A little moonlight spin.”

Good. He’d repeated the exact words Stubbs had heard on the telephone. A little moonlight spin. He was making remarkable progress, having come as far as five full words in a row. If Warren could get him up to six, or maybe seven, or maybe even a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate, and from there to a full paragraph — the possibilities were limitless, the horizons boundless.

“What time would you say he went out for these little spins?” he asked.

“Varied.”

Back to single syllable utterences again.

“Seven-thirty?”

“Later.”

“Eight-thirty?”

“Sometimes.”

“What time would you say?”

Say ten, ten-thirty, Warren thought. Say the words ten, ten-thirty.

“Eleven, eleven-thirty,” Weaver said. “That’d be a moonlight spin, around that time. If there was a moon, of course.”

Little bit of humor there. Little bit of jailhouse jokery. And certainly more words than Warren had heard from him since they’d started talking. But Weaver hadn’t said the words Warren wanted to hear, which would have been nice, since ten, ten-thirty was the e.t.a. the caller had given Stubbs on the telephone.

“You weren’t worried when he took the boat out at night, were you?”

“Nope.”

“It being dark and all,”

“Not with a moon.”

More jailhouse jollity. Must’ve been a card out there on the yard, young Ned.

“But when there wasn’t a moon, if he took the boat out for a little moonlight spin when there wasn’t a moon — would that have alarmed you?”

Say the word, Warren thought.

“Alarmed me?”

Bingo.

“Yes. Would that have alarmed you?”

“Nope.”

“How come? You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Say it again for me, Warren thought.

“Sure,” Weaver said. “Would I be alarmed.”

Thank you, Warren thought.

“Yes,” he said. “Him being out in the dark and all.”

“Man knows how to run a boat, don’t he?” Weaver said, and Warren could visualize him shrugging on the other end of the line.

“Well, thanks for clearing that up,” he said. “We were a little concerned about it.”

“Why?” Weaver asked.

“Something in the papers the State Attorney sent over,” Warren said.

“Oh,” Weaver said.

“So thanks again, you’ve been a big help.”

“Yeah,” Weaver said, and hung up.

Now, you little prick, Warren thought, let’s see if you were making any phone calls on the night of August thirteenth.

In Chicago when he was a boy, Matthew used to run along the lake, hoping one day to be fast enough to qualify for the track team at school. He’d never got fast enough. Too light for football, too slow for track, he’d opted instead for ice hockey and had broken his leg — or, rather, had it broken for him — during the first game of the season. The leg still hurt when the weather was bad. Like today. Running around the track at the police gymnasium, undisputed and unlimited admission courtesy of Detective Morris Bloom, the leg hurt like hell. But he could feel the pounds melting away.

This morning at eight, after he’d swum a hundred laps in the pool — and in the rain — he’d weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds. That was close to eighty-four kilos in Rome, where he’d put on some of the weight, and a bit more than thirteen stones in London, where he’d stopped on the way home to see a lawyer friend of his who now spent much of the year in Hawkhurst, Kent. Tomorrow morning, if it didn’t rain, he had another tennis lesson with Kit Howell, who had demolished him last Saturday. This time, Matthew hoped to be at least six pounds lighter and a lot faster on his feet.

The steady pounding of his sneakers on the track’s synthetic surface, rather than lulling him to sleep, provided a rhythmic background to his thoughts. It worked the same way whenever he was at a concert. He wondered why this should be so. Why mindless physical exertion stimulated thought as effectively as sitting in a concert hall with wave after wave of sound washing over him. There were two other runners on the track ahead of him, one a tall, hefty man wearing a black warmup suit, the other a slender man some five feet nine inches tall, wearing a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants, a blue watch cap pulled down over his ears. Matthew did not try to pass either of them. Nor did either of them seem intent on breaking any speed records. The hefty man was out in front, the smaller man some thirty feet behind him, Matthew some thirty feet or so in the rear. They kept up the steady pace, the regular distance between them, like strangers in a big city on a cinder track in a park. But this was indoors at the police gym, with the rain still drilling the streets outside.

He wondered why Trinh had been killed.

This was the single most significant development in the case, the murder of the man who had seen the killer entering an automobile parked at the curb outside Little Asia. This information had been reported in Calusa’s own lovely rag, the Herald-Tribune: Trinh Mang Duc, one of the key witnesses in the Stephen Leeds murder case, is reported to have seen the license plate on the automobile allegedly driven by the murderer. There it was. An invitation to slaughter. And good enough reason to petition for a change of venue.

But then why hadn’t the murderer also gone after Tran Sum Linh, who’d shared a smoke on his front step with one of his many cousins, and who’d seen a man in yellow running through the moonlit night toward the house the victims shared? He, too, was a witness, the essential before to Trinh’s after. Why go after one and not the other? Or was Tran next on the killer’s list?

The runners ahead were picking up the pace.

Matthew increased his own pace, keeping the same steady distance between himself and the nearest runner; the man in the blue woolen cap was now drenched with sweat, great black blots spreading over the back of his grey sweatshirt and the backs of his thighs in the grey sweatpants, sneakered feet pounding the track. Matthew was similarly soaked, contentedly awash in perspiration. Tomorrow morning, he would step out on that tennis court as svelte and as swift as Ivan Lendl. Whack, his racket would meet the ball, and swisssssssh the ball would zoom over the net — and it’s yet another ace for Matthew Hope, folks, the fourth in this exciting set. Fat Chance Department.

It had to have been the license plate.

Trinh seeing the plate.

Seeing it erroneously, as it turned out, but seeing it nonetheless. Because otherwise, if the killer was covering his tracks, he’d be going after all the witnesses: Tran, who’d seen him at a little after eleven, and the woman they’d named in yesterday’s paper — this time after Matthew had received from the S.A.’s office her name and sworn statement, thank God for small favors — someone named Sherry Reynolds who worked at Kickers and who claimed to have seen the ubiquitous man in the yellow jacket and hat getting off a fifty-foot Mediterranean, which happened to be the very sort of boat Leeds owned. Saw him disembarking at ten-thirty that night and getting into a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, which later on turned up in Little Asia, bearing the license plate Trinh and only Trinh had seen, which was an impossible plate in the state of Florida.

So why kill him?

The plate he’d seen simply did not exist.

But the killer couldn’t have known this because the newspapers hadn’t revealed the numbers and letters on the plate; Patricia Dem-ming had at least kept back that much.

So the killer did not know Trinh had made a mistaken identification.

The killer knew only that Trinh had seen the license plate, Trinh had identified the car, and if the State Attorney knew this then the police also knew this, and the ball game was over.

But then why kill Trinh?

Why not get the hell out of Calusa as fast as his feet could carry him, run to China, run to the North Pole, get out of town before they traced the license plate directly to his front door?

Something was wrong here.

Because…

If the killer thought the State Attorney and the police were in possession of his correct license plate number, then the cat was already out of the bag, and he would have run for his life. Or given himself up, one or the other. What he would not have done was go after Trinh Mang Due to shut him up after he’d already revealed what he’d seen. There was no sense to that.

So maybe Bloom and Patricia were both right, maybe this was a copycat murder.

Or maybe the killer knew — but how could he? — that Trinh had given them the wrong numbers and letters, and maybe he figured he had to get rid of Trinh before he remembered the right ones.

Damn it, that had to be it.

The killer had to have known—

The collision came suddenly and unexpectedly.

One moment Matthew was running along at a steady pace, lost in thought, losing weight and minding his own business, and the next minute the sweat-stained man ahead of him stopped dead, and before Matthew could stop his own forward momentum, he crashed into him. They went tumbling down together in an awkward embrace, Matthew pushing out with his arms in a vain attempt to prevent the crash, the other man partially turning when he realized he’d been hit from behind, meeting the full force of the blow with his hip, the track coming up fast to meet them both. “Oh shit!” the other man said, and Matthew recognized the voice and realized that the tangle of arms and legs in the grey sweatshirt and sweatpants was none other than Assistant State Attorney Patricia (“Do Not Call Me Pat or Even Trish”) Demming, even before she rolled over into a sitting position and yanked the blue woolen watchcap from her head to reveal a mass of sodden blond hair.

“You,” she said.

“We keep colliding,” Matthew said.

They were sitting in the center of the track now, both of them out of breath, facing each other, knees up, sneakered feet almost touching. Her sweatshirt was drenched.

“This time it was your fault,” Patricia said.

“No, you stopped dead.”

“My shoelace was untied.”

“You should have signaled.”

“I didn’t know anyone was behind me,” she said, and got to her feet. Matthew got up, too. The other runner had already circled the track again and was bearing down on them. He was red-faced and puffing hard, wearing headphones and flapping his arms at them like a swimmer doing a frantic breaststroke, urging them to clear the track before there was yet another collision. He went by like a locomotive on the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico, wherever that was, sweat flying from his face and his neck, feet pounding the track, while Patricia and Matthew crowded the rail for dear life.

“You’re soaking wet,” she said.

“So are you.”

“Seems like old times,” she said, and grinned.

He was remembering her in the red silk dress. Her nipples threatening the red silk. Both of them standing in the rain.

“I think I know why Trinh was killed,” he said.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” she said.

“Want to discuss it over a drink?”

“No, Counselor,” she said, “it was nice seeing you again,” and slapped the woolen watchcap against her thigh and walked swiftly toward the door leading off the track, shaking her head.

The 6:01 express was coming around again.

Matthew got out of its way.

Policemen standing in the rain look the same all over the world. Especially when they’re standing there looking down at a corpse. You won’t see an umbrella anywhere in evidence. The uniformed cops may be wearing rainslickers, and the plainclothesmen may be wearing trenchcoats, but blues or suits, it doesn’t matter, you’ll never see an umbrella. There were eight policemen, some of them suits, most of them blues, standing around the corpse in the drainage ditch.

This was still only nine o’clock that Friday night, the weekend hadn’t yet begun in earnest. None of the cops had been expecting a corpse quite this early. Anyway, in this city, the corpses were few and far between. Oh yes, several more per month now that crack was on the scene, but crack was on the scene everywhere in America, crack was the shame of the nation, a thousand points of light shining down on cocaine you could inhale from a pipe, this was some shining city on a hill, this nation.

Detective Morris Bloom was one of the cops standing around the corpse. He was wearing a blue suit and a white shirt, dark-blue tie with a mustard stain on it. The rain had tapered off to a slow, lazy drizzle. He stood hatless and coatless in the light rain, looking down at the corpse. An assistant Medical Examiner was kneeling beside the corpse. The drainage ditch had a curved bottom. The corpse was lying on its side facing the rear of the ditch, away from the road. No one had touched the body yet. No one wanted to. The skull was all crushed in. There was blood all over the ditch, blood on the shiny black road where the body had been dragged before it was dumped.

The assistant M.E. was having trouble with the curving sides of the ditch. The ditch was slippery, and he kept losing his footing as he tried to examine the body. No one had yet looked for any identification of any kind. They were all waiting for the M.E. to finish here. Or better yet, to get started here.

Cooper Rawles walked over from where he’d been talking to the officer who’d first responded. Like Bloom, he was hatless and coatless. But he’d just come off a plant at a homosexual bar where crack was allegedly being sold over the counter Hke jelly beans, and he was wearing tan tailored slacks, tasseled brown loafers, a pink V-necked cotton sweater over a bare chest, and a gold earring in his right ear.

“You look stunning,” Bloom said.

“Thanks,” Rawles said drily. “The man in George car says the motorist was gone when he got here.”

“What motorist?”

“The one who called it in. Gave the location and then split.”

“Small wonder,” Bloom said. “It’s the earring that does it, you know.”

“I thought the earring was a nice touch, too,” Rawles said.

The captain in command of Calusa’s detective bureau — a new man called Rush, for Rushville, Decker — came walking over from the Criminalistic Unit’s mobile van. He’d only recently replaced the bureau’s Captain Hopper, whom Bloom used to call His Royal Shmuck. Behind his back. Decker seemed like a good man. So far.

“How we doing here?” he asked the M.E.

“Can you get me some more light?” the M.E. said.

The cars were angled so that their headlight beams were pointed at the scene, and they had also set up a generator and some lamps — the road out here near the fairgrounds was normally pitch black — but there still wasn’t enough illumination. The men milled about the spot where the corpse had been dumped, casting long shadows, the light refracted by the falling rain.

“Let’s get the Doc some more light here,” Decker said, and two of the blues in orange rainslickers walked over from the knot of police cars and shined their long torches into the ditch and onto the corpse. A car with a State Attorney’s office seal on the door pulled to a stop behind the other vehicles, and a man Bloom hadn’t met before walked over and introduced himself as Dom Santucci, Assistant S.A. Decker shook hands with him and in turn introduced him to both Bloom and Rawles.

“Messy one,” Santucci said.

Bloom had seen worse.

“Any idea what did it?” Decker asked the M.E.

“Some kind of blunt instrument,” he answered. He was still kneeling over the body, seemingly more comfortable with his position now. The two officers in the orange slickers kept their torches shining at the back of the stiffs head, where the hair was all matted with blood around the craters in the skull.

“Like what?” Decker asked. “A hammer?”

“Hard to say. Whatever it was, it was wielded with considerable force. Can someone give me a hand here, help me roll him over?”

No one seemed eager to give him a hand.

“Give the Doc a hand there,” Decker snapped to the two officers in the orange slickers.

Both men put down their torches and straddled the ditch. Lying on the roadway, the torches cast a crazy kind of splayed light into the blackness. Legs widespread, the officers tested for purchase and then looked for a place to grab the body; neither of them wanted to get blood on his hands.

“One, two, three, ho!” one of them said, and they rolled the body over.

“Light, please,” the M.E. said.

The officers picked up the torches, shined them on the corpse’s face.

The man from the S.A.’s office let out a short, sharp gasp.

“That’s Frank Bannion,” he said.