until a silent picture appeared on the screen. It was Captain Kangaroo. Nimmo turned up the sound for the benefit of any nosey-parker neighbours. Felons involved in committing a burglary seldom watched early-morning television shows for children. B&E always made Nimmo nervous so the very next thing he did was use the toilet. Sitting there, in Tom Jefferson's bathroom, he quickly scanned the rest of the paper, and saw that Tony Accardo had been sentenced to six years in jail, and fined $15,000 for income tax evasion. It was, he reflected, while washing his hands, as Benjamin Franklin had observed, that in this world nothing was certain but death and taxes. Except maybe when they paid you in cash. Putting his gloves back on, he flushed the toilet, and began to search the house in earnest.
Nimmo was a thorough man, searching the house as an experienced book-keeper might scrutinise a set of accounts. He rifled through drawers, turned out closets, ripped up rugs, tore apart upholstery, jimmied up floorboards, and ransacked wardrobes. And when he found some small thing he thought might have significance, he placed it into an empty cardboard box: notepads, scraps of paper, matchbooks, tapes, ticket receipts, a bullet, photographs of the dead woman, maps, spare keys, library cards, newspaper cuttings, and the business cards of various local tradesmen.
After an hour had passed, and Captain Kangaroo had given way to Huckleberry Hound, the box was still two- thirds empty and it was clear to Nimmo that Sam Giancana had not exaggerated. Tom Jefferson had certainly disappeared. There was no trace of his clothing or anything of obvious importance he might have owned. No documentation, no insurance policies, no correspondence, no cheque-stubs, no address-books, no diaries - there was nothing that might have given Nimmo a clue as to where the man had gone. It was becoming increasingly obvious to Nimmo not only that Jefferson had disappeared, but that the man had covered his tracks very carefully. The attic contained nothing but dust. The bureau had been cleaned out of everything except loose change and paperclips. Even the garbage cans were empty.
Nimmo went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water, and it was now that he noticed the small can of kerosene behind the back door. Instinctively, he went out into the back yard and, walking its length, discovered a blackened brazier that told the story of Jefferson's last hours on the property eloquently enough. Squatting down, he removed a glove and stirred the surrounding ashes, as if he half-expected to find a phoenix or, at the very least, a salamander or two. But the ashes were quite cold. Standing up again, he placed a foot on the side of the brazier and pushed it over. It fell on to the dry grass with a dull clang, sending a miasma of dust and ashes into the warm morning air. He waited a minute until the air had cleared, and then, replacing the glove, poked at the bottom of the brazier in search of some legible fragment or informative shard that might have escaped the trail-consuming flames. But there was nothing. Zippo.
Nimmo came back up the yard and went into the garage where a blue 1950 Chrysler Windsor was parked. He searched the car and found only the few odds and ends he needed to confirm that it had belonged to Mary Jefferson.
Returning to the house, he began to pay closer attention to the small box of items he had collected. First, he listened to the tapes on a little Phonotrix portable recorder. Mostly these were recordings from television, cultural stuff like Open End and Play of the Week, but there was one tape that featured a woman reading the speeches of John Kennedy. Since Mary Jefferson had worked for the Democrats in Miami, Nimmo guessed that the voice on the tape belonged to her, although it quite escaped him why she should have wanted to record herself, or, for that matter, the speeches in this particular way. Of greater interest to him was a folded piece of paper he had found underneath the bed. On it Tom Jefferson had written ten sets of initials: W.H./P.B./H.H./B.M./G.D./S.M./M.V./H.P./N.Y./J.C.
Nimmo knew this was Jefferson's handwriting because he had another example of Jefferson's hand from a note the missing man had left beside the telephone, with the number of the La Casa Marina Hotel, in Key West.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost midday. The rest of the stuff in the box could wait. There was none of it looked like much anyway. He turned off the TV and, tucking the box underneath his arm, prepared to go and speak to the neighbours. The last thing he did before leaving the house was to fill the box with all the medicine bottles he could find on the floor, and in the bathroom cabinet, for the sake of verisimilitude: the neighbours would expect someone to be investigating Mary Jefferson's death, and the medication would add a nice touch of authenticity. Coming out of the front door, Nimmo straightened the little Stetson hat on bis sweating head, and then took out the black leather wallet that contained his badge.
In the Bible it said that a lawyer had asked Jesus, Who is my neighbour?' It was not a question Jimmy Nimmo thought he could have answered himself. The surname of any one of his neighbours in Keystone Islands would have been a mystery to him. He even had to think hard to remember their Christian names. This apparent lacuna in Nimmo's social graces did not cause him to feel any shame, no more than it bothered him that he had so few friends. It was, he told himself, an occupational hazard. He had nothing against Jesus, or Christians, or anyone trying to live a decent life. But he figured he would have told that fucking smartass Jewish lawyer, Who gives a shit?' Neighbours were for regular people with three kids, a dog, and a station wagon, not for guys like him with guns and ulcers and guilty secrets.
Before he died, Nimmo's dad, a Baptist lay-preacher, had traced his family tree back to Scotland, and it turned out that his people were descended from French Huguenots who, fleeing the persecution of the Catholic King Louis XIV, had wanted to keep their names a secret. The name Nimmo was a corruption of the Latin ne mot, meaning no one, nothing to say, no name, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. You couldn't get more unneighbourly than that.
Nimmo was the kind of man who kept himself to himself the way some guys kept pigeons. It was as if he had trained himself not to stop and exchange more than a few words with any of his neighbours until he was back in his own coop. So he was not surprised that the Jeffersons' neighbours knew so very little about the couple except that he was often away on business, and she frequently worked late, and they were never around to get to know really, and they didn't seem to have any other friends to speak of anyway. Thirty minutes and four sets of neighbours later, and having fielded a dozen or so enquiries as to whether or not she had committed suicide, Nimmo gave up and went back to his car with what he considered was a pathetically small haul of information for several hours' work. Earning Sam Giancana's twenty-five thou already looked harder than it had seemed back in Chicago.
From Miami Shores he drove south, to Brickell Avenue, and across the Rickenbacker Causeway to Key Biscayne and the expensive hotel where Johnny Rosselli was staying. Key Biscayne was a whole world of no concerns. The ups and downs of normal life did not travel across the bridge. Or at least the downs didn't. They stayed put on the other side of Tollkeeper's hut, with the blacktop and the trash in the gutters. After New York, Miami seemed quite unreal enough to Jimmy Nimmo, but he fancied that Key Biscayners probably thought vicissitudes were a set of no-account islands in the stream, just a few miles west of the adversities.
In Rosselli's enormous ocean-front suite, the silver-haired gangster was cooking lunch in the kitchenette.
Jesus, I thought you'd never get here,' said Rosselli. You want some lunch? It's linguine primavera.'
Nimmo, who knew Rosselli of old, told him he had been to Jefferson's house for a snoop around.
Find anything?'
Maybe,' shrugged Nimmo. I dunno. Not much probably. Linguine sounds good though. I could eat a wooden horse.'
Rosselli poured Nimmo a large glass of cold Frascati, and waved at another man walking in off the big balcony. Jimmy? Say hello to Frank Sorges.'
The two men grunted at each other. Rosselli started to serve up the linguine.
Frank was with that sonofabitch right up until the time he disappeared.'
So where the fuck is he?' asked Nimmo, grinning.
Search me. I looked all over for that guy. Every fucking bar-rail in this town. At first, I thought he was just out on a bender in memory of his wife. But when I saw the guy's clothes had gone from his closet, I figured he'd lit out someplace.'
Lit out for the territory ahead of the rest,' said Nimmo. Just like Huckleberry Finn, eh?'
I never read that,' said Rosselli. Wish I had. I hadn't much time for reading as a kid. It was too crowded at home and I was always helling around. Not like now. I read a lot these days.'
Nimmo smiled patiently. He's ahead of us for now,' he said confidently. But we'll find him.' He snapped the head of a match with his thumbnail and held it over the bowl of his pipe. I'm going to want to talk to you in detail,
