Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (28 page)

But neither was she anymore.

She was, I realized, someone on the imminent edge of becoming an independent young woman. She had told me what
she
, in her own right, wanted and needed this weekend, and never mind the technicalities of the settlement agreement. And in her fourteen-year-old view of the eternal universe, she had gone on to assure me we had all the time in the world to see each other. I wondered now if perhaps I wasn’t
seeing
her for the first time in my life. Maybe, until now, I’d only been
watching
her.

“—up to the Circle this afternoon to get a new pair of shoes,” she was saying, “’cause the green satin ones I wore last year are all scruffy looking.”

I hesitated a moment, and then I said, “Joanna, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“Sure, Dad, what is it?”

I took a deep breath.

“Dale and I aren’t seeing each other anymore.”

There was a dead silence on the line.

“Gee,” Joanna said.

The silence persisted.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Dad,” she said. “I know she meant a lot to you.”

Another silence. And then:

“Dad, I really have to go, we want to get to the Circle before all the shops close. I love you heaps, Dad, and thanks a lot, you don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

“I love you too, honey.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll talk to you Monday, then, okay?”

“Have a nice time, honey.”

“’Bye, Dad,” she said, and hung up.

I put the receiver back on the cradle, and sat staring at the phone. I had to call Veronica, of course, but not to tell her that my plans had changed for the weekend and I was now available. I was not a criminal lawyer, but I knew what compounding a felony was, and besides, I had too much respect for her to offer a last-minute prom invitation because the girl I’d originally asked had backed out.

I called only to inform her of the latest development on the land her son had contracted to buy. Her voice was cool and distant when she realized who was on the phone. She listened patiently while I told her about the release Burrill’s daughter had signed. She consulted her calendar when I asked if she could come into the office on Monday morning to sign the papers and have her signature notarized. We settled on ten o’clock. She thanked me politely for having called, and then hung up.

I had dinner alone.

I drank two martinis before the meal, had a half-bottle of red wine with the meal, and then sat sipping cognac and reading the newspaper. It was still only eight o’clock, and I was all dressed up with no place to go. There used to be two daily newspapers in Calusa: the
Herald-Tribune
in the morning and the
Journal
in the afternoon. They were both owned by the same man, and the editorial viewpoint was identical. In fact, except for the comic strips, they seemed to be carbon copies of each other. Maybe that was why the owner stopped publishing the afternoon paper and sold the morning paper to
The New York Times
. The paper hadn’t changed much since the purchase, except that it now carried book reviews originally published in the
Times
. This meant that a greater number of people (including my delighted partner Frank) could be treated to literary criticism, New York style. I skipped over the book review, read the movie ads, and then turned to an item headlined
LAW OFFICERS LIST ARRESTS
.

“Calusa County law enforcement authorities announced the following arrests for Wednesday and Thursday,” the article began, and then went on to list the names, ages, and addresses of the men and women who’d been charged with an assortment of crimes ranging through armed burglary, dealing in stolen property, grand theft, possession of marijuana, leaving the scene of an accident, battery on a police officer, possession of cocaine, assault, possession of cocaine again, grand theft again, possession of marijuana again...and again...and again...

Calusa was getting to be a busy little city.

I left the restaurant at eight-thirty. It was already dark as I drove back to the house. I spotted the red Porsche in my driveway when I was still only halfway up the street.
Sunny
, I thought, and remembered what she’d said to me the first time we met—“I’m
as mean as a fuckin’ tiger, mister”—and wondered if this was an example of the meanness, coming here instead of going home to her mother. And then it occurred to me that the Porsche may have been driven here by Veronica instead. Maybe Sunny
had
gone home after all, and maybe Veronica was here now to tell me the good news. I pulled the Ghia in behind the other car, let myself into the house through the kitchen door, and then turned on the house lights and the pool lights. I pulled open the sliding door then and stepped out onto the terrace, ready to welcome either the lady or the tiger.

It was Sunny, and she was in my pool again.

She wasn’t naked this time. She was wearing instead a purple dress that billowed around her like a cloud of ink.

She wasn’t swimming, either.

She was lying face downward on the bottom of the pool.

Two police divers wearing scuba tanks, face masks, and wetsuits went down after the body. I did not think the wetsuits were necessary, since the thermometer in the pool registered the water temperature as eighty-eight degrees. But perhaps the Calusa PD had its own set of regulations about the proper attire for recovering a dead twenty-three-year-old girl from the bottom of a swimming pool.

Captain Hopper supervised the operation.

The divers brought Sunny to the surface, carried her up the steps at the shallow end, and then placed her down gently on the terrace tiles. The purple dress clung to her. There was a hole in her forehead, and another hole in her left cheek. Bone splinters showed jaggedly behind the hole in the cheek.

“Shot her first,” Hopper said at once, and looked at me. “What time did you say you found her?”

“Just before I called the police,” I said. “Quarter to nine, something like that.”

“And you say you were out having dinner before then?”

“Yes.”

“Anybody with you?”

“I was alone.”

“And you came back here—”

“Yes.”

“—turned on the pool lights—”

“Yes.”

“—and spotted the body.”

“Yes.”

“Why’d you turn on the pool lights?”

“I’d seen the Porsche, I thought someone might be out on the terrace.”

“You thought the girl might be out on the terrace?”

“Or her mother. I thought it could be her mother.”

“Why’d you think that?”

“I know her mother.”

“You know the girl too?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Pretty girl,” he said, looking down at her. He raised his eyes to mine again. “Anybody else here when you arrived?”

“No.”

“Didn’t see anybody, hear anybody?”

“No.”

“Just turned on the pool lights and saw the girl, right?”

Bloom came out onto the terrace.

“I just phoned the mother,” he said. “She’ll be here as soon as she can. The ranch vehicles are both gone, she’s got to find transportation.”

“Gone?” Hopper said. “What do you mean? Stolen?”

“No, sir,” Bloom said, “it’s just they’re being used by the people she’s got working for her.”

“Why didn’t you tell her you’d
send
a car?”

“Be a two-way trip that way, sir, out and back again. I thought we ought to get her here as soon as possible.”

“How well do you know her?” Hopper asked me. “The mother.”

“We’re good friends, you might say.”

“Might I?” Hopper said, and stared at me. “How well did you know the
girl
? Was
she
a good friend too?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I knew her only casually.”

“But not the mother. The mother you know
more
than casually, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s the ME,” Bloom said.

The medical examiner was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a wild Hawaiian print. He looked oddly out of place in the company of police officers who were wearing either uniforms or business suits. He was a short man with a very red face that clashed violently with the predominant greens and yellows of his shirt. He looked like a neon sign. He nodded curtly, said, “Captain,” and then knelt over the body.

“Plain to see she was carried here and dumped,” Hopper said. “Those are gunshot wounds in her face.”

“Well, let’s see,” the ME said.

“I seen enough gunshot wounds to know a gunshot wound when I see one,” Hopper said.

The ME didn’t answer.

“Criminalistics ain’t here yet,” Hopper warned. “You want to be careful.”

The ME looked up.

“They’ll want to see there’s anything on that dress. The girl didn’t
walk
here, that’s for sure. Whoever done this had to’ve carried her.”

“I’m only here to ascertain that she’s dead,” the ME said dryly.

“Take a genius to ascertain that,” Hopper said. “You want to show me around the house, Mr. Hope?”

I showed him around the house. He was very careful not to touch anything. Bloom followed us like a shadow. The Ford Econoline van arrived some five minutes later, and the technicians from the Criminalistics Unit went out to the terrace. By that time the ME was through with the body. He told Hopper the girl was indeed dead and suggested that the cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. I supposed that in forensic reports, anything more than one was multiple.

“
Gunshot
wounds?” Hopper asked. “No kidding?”

The ME looked as if he’d come straight here from an outdoor barbecue and was eager to get back to it.

“Better take her to Good Samaritan,” he said. “Southern Medical’s backed up.”

“I was there last week,” Hopper said. “They’ve got six stiffs decomposing in the freezer room. Place stinks like a Chinese whorehouse.”

The state’s attorney—Skye Bannister himself, and not one of his assistants—came into the house a few minutes after the ME had left. He was an exceptionally tall man, perhaps six-four or -five, with the appearance of a basketball player, reedy and pale, with wheat-colored hair and eyes the color of his name.

“Hello, Matthew,” he said.

“You know each other?” Hopper asked, surprised.

“Old friends,” Bannister said, and shook my hand; I guess Hopper stopped thinking of me as a suspect in that moment. “Three in a row, huh?” Bannister said. “Looks like an epidemic.” He turned to Hopper. “Anything I should know, Walter?”

“Two gunshot wounds in the face,” Hopper said. “Mr. Hope here found the body at the bottom of his pool. The red Porsche outside is the girl’s—”

“It’s registered to the ranch,” Bloom said, correcting him.

“What ranch?” Bannister asked.

“The M.K.,” Bloom said. “Out on Timucuan Point. The mother of the two victims, the McKinney boy, and now—”

“Right, I remember now,” Bannister said. “Gunshot wounds, huh?”

“Like the bean farmer,” Hopper said.

“But the boy was stabbed, wasn’t he?”

“Fourteen times,” Hopper said, and nodded.

“Think we’re dealing with the same customer?”

“Ballistics won’t even have a shot,” Hopper said, making an unintentional pun. “There’s exit wounds at the back of the girl’s head, so we ain’t gonna find no bullets inside her. And if she was carried here and dumped, which it looks like, we won’t find no spent cartridges, neither, if it was an automatic weapon.”

“Maybe the size of the wounds’ll tell us something.”

“A long shot, though,” Hopper said, making another unintentional pun. “I never yet seen a ballistics make from the size of a wound.”

“Any powder burns?” Bannister asked.

“Her face is clean as a whistle,” Hopper said. “Pretty girl. It’s a damn shame.”

“Any blood? From where she was carried? Or dragged?”

“None around the pool. Criminalistics’ll be checking the car and the driveway. They just got here a little while ago.”

“Any other marks on her?”

“None I could see. Bloom? You see any?”

“No, sir.”

“Why’d he carry her
here
?” Bannister asked.

“Dumb,” Hopper said, shaking his head. “Maybe he figured Mr. Hope here’d be blamed for it.”

He seemed to have forgotten all the questions he’d asked me not twenty minutes ago.

“Pretty risky, though,” Bannister said. “Driving here with a stiff in the car.”

“Most of the people driving cars down here are half dead already,” Hopper said. “Who the hell would notice?”

They all laughed.

“Got away on foot, then, huh?” Bannister said. “If he drove here in the Porsche...”

“Way it looks,” Hopper said, nodding. “I’ve got men out canvassing the neighborhood now. It’s a quiet street, maybe somebody noticed him coming or going.”

“You don’t think a
woman
could’ve carried her, huh?”

“I ain’t ruling it out, but it’s unlikely. She’s a big girl.”

“You get somebody who just done murder,” Bloom said, “they got the strength of an ox sometimes.”

“I’d sure like to get some real meat on this,” Bannister said.