sidewalk. Trees and bushes swayed in the cool wind from off the Gulf.
Winn saw my car, adjusted his glasses, and headed toward me. He walked along the sidewalk, back straight, carrying a blue gym bag. He walked like a jock and looked like a jock.
He opened the passenger side door and leaned over to look at me before he decided to get in. The door squeaked. He placed the gym bag on the floor in front of him.
“I have soccer practice in half an hour,” he said, turning his head toward me. “Someone is picking me up.”
“We shouldn’t be long,” I said. “You have a car?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s in the garage. Why?”
“Early this morning,” I said. “Say about two o’clock. Where were you?”
“Why?”
“Darrell Caton,” I said. “The hospital.”
Winn Graeme took off his glasses, cleaned them with his shirt and looked through the front window into a distance that offered no answers. Then he nodded, but I wasn’t sure whether he was answering my question or one he had asked himself.
“Is he going to be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re fragile creatures,” he said.
“You told him you were sorry. Sorry for what?”
“For not stopping what happened.”
“Greg shot Darrell, right?”
No answer from Winn, so I went on.
“He was aiming at me, but Darrell got in the way.”
Still no response.
“Okay, not Greg. You shot Darrell.”
Now he looked at me, and I at him. I saw a boy. I wondered what kind of man he was looking at.
“To scare you into stopping your investigation,” Winn said.
“First he hires me and then he tries to stop me,” I said.
He said nothing, just nodded, and then, after heaving a breath as if he were about to run a hundred-yard dash, he spoke.
“He found out something after he hired you, something that made him want you to stop. Firing you didn’t work. You found someone else to pay you. So he tried to frighten you into stopping. He hoped you would weigh your safety and possibly your life against the few dollars you were getting. He only made it worse.”
“He shot at me in the car with Augustine, and then he shot Darrell.”
“Who’s Augustine?”
“Cyclops.”
Winn looked out his window. A woman was walking a small white dog. She was wearing a business suit and carrying an empty poop bag. Winn seemed to find the woman and dog fascinating.
“Both times he shot at me he sent someone else to the hospital,” I said.
“Your life is charmed.”
“No, Greg’s a terrible shot.”
The god of irony was at it again.
“Blue Berrigan,” I said. No response, so I repeated, “Blue Berrigan.”
“The clown,” he said softly.
“He wasn’t a clown.”
“Greg didn’t do that.”
“Horvecki?”
“Greg didn’t do that. We weren’t unhappy about it, but he didn’t do that.”
“Did you?”
“No,” he said.
A yellow and black Mini Cooper turned the corner and came to a stop in front of the Graeme house.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I told you all this because I’m sorry that I didn’t do anything to stop Greg. He’s my friend. Whatever I’ve said here I’ll deny ever saying.”
“Why?” I said though I knew the answer.
“Why what?”
He had the door open now.
“Why is he your friend?”
“We need each other,” he said as he got out of the car. “Greg didn’t kill anybody.”
He closed the door, crossed the street and raised his hand in greeting to the boy who leaned out of the window of the Mini Cooper.
The boy in the car was Greg Legerman.
Greg looked back at me and ducked back through the window. Winn Graeme crawled in on the passenger side, and they drove off.
I could have confronted Greg Legerman, but sometimes it’s better to let the person you’re after worry for a while. I had learned that as an investigator with the state attorney’s office in Chicago. Patience was usually better than confrontation, especially with a nervous suspect, and they didn’t come any more nervous or suspicious than Greg Legerman. I wasn’t afraid of Greg’s not talking. I was afraid that he wouldn’t stop.
I did follow the little car down Midnight Pass and off the Key, but I kept going straight when they turned left on Tamiami Trail.
My cell phone rang. I considered throwing it out the window, but I answered it.
“Lewis, I have a death in the family,” said Ann Hurwitz.
“I’m sorry.”
“My cousin Leona was ninety-seven years old,” she said. “She’s been in a nursing home for a decade.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Lewis, you are one of the few people I know whose expression of sorrow over the death of a very old woman you don’t know I would believe. I must cancel our appointment tomorrow so I can attend the funeral in Memphis.”
“All right.”
“But I have an opening today,” Ann Hurwitz said.
“When?”
“Now.”
“I’m on the way.”
“You did your homework?”
My index cards were in the notebook in my back pocket.
“Yes.”
“Good. Decaf with cream and Equal. Today I feel like a chocolate biscotti.”
“With almonds?”
“Always with almonds,” she said and clicked off.
Fifteen minutes later I picked up a pair of coffees and three chocolate biscotti from Sarasota News and Books and crossed Main street. I was about to go through the door to Ann’s office on Gulfstream when he appeared, mumbling to himself.
He was black, about forty, wearing a shirt and pants too large and baggy for his lean frame. His bare feet flopped in his untied shoes. He looked down as he walked, pausing every few feet to scratch his head and engage himself in conversation.
I knew him. Everyone in this section of town near the Bay knew him, but few knew his story. I’d sat down with him once on the park bench he lived under. The bench was across the street from Ann’s office. It had a good view of the small boats moored on the bay and the ever-changing and almost always controversial works of art erected along the bay. He had been evicted from his bench in one of the recurrent efforts to clean up the city for tourists. I didn’t know where he lived now, but it wasn’t far. Even the homeless have someplace they think of as
