'Sparkle's wrong.'
'I've got the poem right here, it says—'
'Oh, I know that's what I wrote,' she said, 'but it's wrong. I'll have to change it. I think. What about the line?'
'Where did you get the green glass from?'
'From the shattered wine bottles.'
'Why green glass on her hand? What's it a reference to?'
'Oh,' she said. 'Oh, I see what you mean. Her ring.'
'She had a ring with a green stone, didn't she?'
'That's right.'
'How long did she have it?'
'I don't know.' She thought it over. 'The first time I saw it was just before I wrote the poem.'
'You're sure of that?'
'At least that's the first time I noticed it. It gave me a handle on the poem, as a matter of fact. The contrast of the blue of her eyes and the green of the ring, but then I lost the blue when I got working on the poem.'
She'd told me something along those lines when she first showed me the poem. I hadn't known then what she was talking about.
She wasn't sure when that might have been. How long had she been working on one or another version of the poem? Since a month before Kim's murder? Two months?
'I don't know,' she said. 'I have trouble placing events in time. I don't tend to keep track.'
'But it was a ring with a green stone.'
'Oh, yes. I can picture it now.'
'Do you know where she got it? Who gave it to her?'
'I don't know anything about it,' she said. 'Maybe—'
'Yes?'
'Maybe she shattered a wine bottle.'
To Durkin I said, 'A friend of Kim's wrote a poem and mentioned the ring. And there's Sunny Hendryx's suicide note.' I got out my notebook, flipped it open. I read, ' 'There's no way off the merry-go-round.
She grabbed the brass ring and it turned her finger green. Nobody's going to buy me emeralds.' '
He took the book from me. 'She meaning Dakkinen, I suppose,' he said. 'There's more here.
'Nobody's going to give me babies. Nobody's going to save my life.' Dakkinen wasn't pregnant and neither was Hendryx, so what's this shit about babies? And neither one of them had her life saved.' He closed the book with a snap, handed it across the desk to me. 'I don't know where you can go with this,'
he said. 'It doesn't look to me like something you can take to the bank. Who knows when Hendryx wrote this? Maybe after the booze and the pills started working, and who can say where she was coming from?'
Behind us, two men in plainclothes were putting a young white kid in the holding cage. A desk away, a sullen black woman was answering questions. I picked up the top photo on the stack and looked at Kim Dakkinen's butchered body. Durkin switched on the razor and finished shaving.
'What I don't understand,' he said, 'is what you think you got.
You think she had a boyfriend and the boyfriend gave her the ring.
Okay. You also figured she had a boyfriend and he gave her the fur jacket, and you traced that and it looks as though you were right, but the jacket won't lead to the boyfriend because he kept his name out of it. If you can't trace him with a jacket that we've got, how can you trace him with a ring that all we know about it is it's missing? You see what I mean?'
'I see what you mean.'
'That Sherlock Holmes thing, the dog that didn't bark, well what you got is a ring that isn't there, and what does it prove?'
'It's gone.'
'Right.'
'Where'd it go?'
'Same place a bathtub ring goes. Down the fucking drain. How do I know where it went?'
'It disappeared.'
'So? Either it walked away or someone took it.'
'Who?'
'How do I know who?'
'Let's say she wore it to the hotel where she was killed.'
