Victor looked at me.
“Nothing for me,” I said.
Victor left. Elisabeth and I listened to his footsteps on the stairs.
“Gerall’s your boyfriend?”
“I wish,” she said eyes looking upward.
“You told Greg Legerman and Winn Graeme about me.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Greg is kind of electric-cute, super-smart, dancing around, adjusting his glasses, a walking public service ad for hyperactives anonymous.”
“He get in a lot of fights?”
“No. He just talks, makes people nervous. Winn is his only friend. He takes a lot from Greg.”
“But they stay friends?” I asked.
“Go figure,” she said.
“Greg talks. What does he talk about?”
“You think I pay that much attention to Long-winded Legerman?”
“I think you pay attention to a lot of things.”
She gave me a questioning look.
“That’s a compliment,” I said.
The quizzical look was replaced by a minimally appreciative smile.
The door opened. Victor and Ames entered together. Victor moved to my desk with an offering of Diet Coke for Elisabeth who said, “Thank you.”
“It’s warm,” he said.
I knew a twelve-pack of Diet Coke was in the back of his car.
“That’s okay,” she said.
She popped the tab and drank from the can.
Victor went back to his bedroll and Ames leaned against the wall.
“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.
“About what?” she said, looking over her shoulder at Ames and Victor.
“Greg, Winn, Ronnie, Horvecki. A man named Blue Berrigan.”
“Blue Berrigan? I can tell you about him. I have his three CDs. Haven’t listened to them in a long time. I was a big fan. I’ve still got my Blue Bunny night slippers, but if you tell anyone, I’ll come back here and claim you raped me.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said.
She took a big gulp from her Diet Coke.
“Hot Coke is gross. Am I through?” she asked, placing the can on the desk.
“How’d you get here?”
“Walked from school. I can catch a bus home.”
“Victor can drive you home.”
She looked at Victor who had returned to his place in the corner.
“No, thanks,” she said, looking at the man who had called himself a murderer.
“Ames can give you a lift on the back of his scooter.”
I looked at Ames. He had a strong avuncular feeling for children.
“Has he murdered anyone?” she asked.
“Not recently,” I said.
“I’ll take the scooter.”
“Do you know the first line of a book, any book?”
“ ‘The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. Darwin, and some of the physiological writers of German, as not of impossible occurrence.’ ”
I asked her to repeat it slowly. She did, while I wrote on a pad from my desk drawer.
“The book?” I asked.
“ Frankenstein, ” said Victor.
“That’s right,” said Elisabeth. “We had to memorize a paragraph from a novel on our reading list. I picked Frankenstein.”
“Because it’s scary?” I tried.
“Because it was written by a woman,” she said.
“You want to be a writer?”
“I want to be an FBI agent,” she answered. “But don’t-”
“Tell your father.”
“He’s not ready for it,” she said. “And I might change my mind.”
I got up to show I had nothing more to ask or say. She stood and headed for Ames and the door. She paused at the door and said, “You won’t tell my-”
“I won’t tell,” I said.
Ames and the girl left. I was making some assumptions. I assumed the timing was such that my investigation of the Horvecki killing, the bullet through the window of Augustine’s car, the shooting of Darrell Caton, and the murder of Blue Berrigan were all tied together. What if I were wrong? I had two suspects I hadn’t yet spoken to, Essau Williams, the cop in Venice, and Jack Pepper in Cortez Village-two people whose names were in files in a cabinet in the mobile home of an ex-Cincinnati cop named Pertwee. Both had sworn to make Philip Horvecki pay for what he had been accused of, the rape of Essau’s mother and aunt when they were young girls and the attempted rape and beating of Pepper, whom Horvecki had tried to sodomize. Pepper lived north, just outside of Cortez Village, and Williams south, in Venice.
When night came, I lay in bed silently for I don’t know how many minutes listening to traffic on 301, thinking of something I could say or do to induce Sally to stay.
I had nothing to offer. Armed with addresses that I had gotten from Pertwee’s files, I got up just before six in the morning and asked Victor, who was cross-legged on his bedroll reading a book, to tell Ames I was going to Cortez Village and that I’d be back in a few hours.
There are no hills in Florida south of Ocala unless we’re talking about man-made ones. Construction is constantly going on in Sarasota-streets torn up and widened, new streetlights, hotels, mansions, developments, high-rise apartments, new malls. From time to time a pile of dirt resembling a fifteen-foot hill will rise and occasionally a dazzled teen or preteen will climb up and be knocked down or even buried in a small dust-raising avalanche. The flat landscape of Sarasota County is paled over with nonnative palm trees and trees that thrive on enough water to drown most other fauna and with tall, sometimes fat condominium buildings that present a view of heavily trafficked roads and other condos.
I passed a mess of construction heading north on Tamiami Trail. Wooden yellow-and-black traffic horses and dingy red cones created a minor maze that slowed vehicles and made ancient drivers, pregnant mothers, and slightly drunken men mad with the challenge.
It took me almost an hour to make the trip to Cortez Village. Ames had installed a third-hand junkyard radio in the car. It worked just fine, so I was accompanied by the soothing voice of a man with a Southern accent. The voice wasn’t strident; he was confident and sounded as if he were smiling as he spoke. I had been told when I called Jack Pepper’s phone number that he was at the studio doing his show. The woman told me the address of the station’s studio and number on the dial where WTLW could be found. I found it and listened as I drove.
“You know, friends,” the man said, “the Jewish people are holy. They are the people chosen by God to redeem the land of Israel, the sacred land of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must support the Jewish people in their quest to survive against heathen hordes. Palestine does not belong to the Arab. Palestine comes from the Biblical word Philistine. The Philistines were neither Arab nor Semite. The Emperor Hadrian designated the land as Palestine. The Arabs can’t even say the word. They call it ‘Palethtine.’ ”
He almost sounded as if he were crying.
“We can’t let the Jewish people be pushed into the sea. We cannot let the land of Israel once again go into the hands of those who would make of it an unholy land. If there need be another Crusade, we must march in it
