"Why would you keep doing it, if I don't want you to?"
"I guess because I sort of have to," I said. "There are too many hornets, and they're too stirred up."
"Hornets? Why are you talking about fucking hornets?"
I saw Paul set his face a little tighter.
"Since I started this thing," I said, "people have tried to kill me on two occasions."
"But why?"
"I don't know exactly, but it has to do with investigating your mother's death."
"How can you be sure?"
"And on two other occasions, people have warned me to stop investigating your mother's death."
"They said that?"
"There are several people, it seems, that have pressing reason to want your mother's murder left unsolved. They aren't going to take my word, or yours, that I've stopped."
Daryl sat and stared down at her clenched fists. She shook her head slowly.
"I don't want this," she said. "I don't want any of this."
Nobody said anything.
"I don't want this," she said again, her head down.
"Daryl," Paul said. "This isn't just about you anymore."
She stood up suddenly.
"Well, fuck you," she said. "Fuck all of you."
And she turned and marched out of my office. Her swift passage made dust motes hover momentarily in the sunny rhomboids splashed across my office floor. Hawk dog-eared the page and folded his book shut.
"Fuck all of us?" he said. "What'd I do?"
"Wrong place, wrong time," Paul said.
44
She's probably angriest at her mother," Susan said. We were in a new restaurant called Spire. Susan was barely drinking a Cosmopolitan.
"I would have said she was angriest at me," I said.
"You were handy," Susan said. "Her mother died on her and left her to be raised by her hippie-dippie father."
"And she was probably angry at the person who killed her mother and left her to be raised by the hippie-dippie dad," I said.
"But she also, I suspect, wanted you to reinforce the fantasy she'd created."
"That if her mother hadn't been killed, the fantasy childhood would have been true."
"Maybe," Susan said. "Remember The Great Gatsby. James Gatz's imagination had never really accepted his parents?"
"So," I said, "he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent."
"And to that conception," Susan said, "he was faithful to the end."
We were quiet for a moment. I was drinking a Ketel One martini on the rocks with a twist. It was nearly gone. Out of the corner of my eye, I located the waitress. Didn't want to wait until it was all gone. She met my eye. I nodded at the near-empty glass. She smiled and nodded, thrilled to serve me, and scooted toward the service bar. I looked at Susan.
"And?" I said.
"She changed her name," Susan said. "Lot of actresses do that."
"If her name had been Lipschitz, that would make sense. She might have taken her mother's name, of course. Young women sometimes do."
"Gold," I said. "And Silver is close."
"But still not the same," I said. "Let's assume you're right? Why hire me?"
"I would guess," Susan said, "that she hired you to enhance the family history, which she invented."
"And the opposite happened," I said.
"Something like that."
"Her mother was consorting with a convicted felon. Maybe part of a criminal enterprise."
Susan nodded.
"You ruined it," she said.
"But she knew when she hired me," I said, "that the fantasy childhood was false."
"People often know things that are mutually exclusive."
I saw the waitress coming with my second martini. I finished off the first, so as to round everything off nicely.
"I still can't just walk away," I said.
"No," Susan said. "You can't."
I looked at her across the table. Nobody looked quite like Susan. There were women as good-looking, though they were not legion, and there were probably women who were as smart, and I just hadn't met them. But there was no one whose face, carefully made up and framed by her thick, black hair, glittered with the ineffable femaleness that hers did. She was informed with generosity and self-absorption, certainty and confusion. She was subtle and literal, fearless, hesitant, objective, bossy, pliant, quick-tempered, loving, hard-boiled, and passionate. And it all melded so perfectly that she was the most complete person I'd ever known.
"What are you thinking about?" she said.
I smiled at her. "What would be your guess?" I said.
"Oh," she said, "that."
"In a manner of speaking," I said.
"Could we finish dinner first?"
"I suppose we have to," I said. "If we ever want to eat here again."
45
The Registry of Motor Vehicles told Quirk that Sarno Karnofsky had two Mercedes sedans and a Cadillac Escalade, registered in Massachusetts. Quirk told me and gave me the plate numbers. I had the three numbers written on a piece of paper taped to my sun visor as Hawk and I sat in my car with the motor off and the windows open to let the sea breeze in. Hawk had parked his car beside me and come to sit in mine. We were in a parking lot along with maybe fifty other cars, at a public beach, on the mainland end of the causeway that connected Paradise Neck with the rest of the town.
"So we going to sit here," Hawk said, "until hell freeze over or one of Sonny's cars comes off the Neck."
"Exactly," I said.
"And then we follow the car until we find Bonnie."
"Right," I said.
"You think that'll work?" Hawk said.
"I have no idea," I said.
"So why we doing it?"
"Because I don't know what else to do," I said.
Hawk was wearing black Oakley sunglasses and a white silk T-shirt. He watched a tanned young woman in a small black bathing suit walk toward the beach.
"That be your version of Occam's razor," Hawk said. "I'll do it because I don't know what else to do."
"Occam's razor?" I said.
Hawk shrugged, his eyes still following the woman in the meager bathing suit.
"I read a lot," Hawk said.
I nodded. The young woman sat down on a blanket near another woman in an equally insufficient bathing suit.
"You got a better suggestion?" I said.
"No."
"Then you agree we might as well do this."
"Yes."
An overweight woman wearing flip-flops and one of those two-piece suits with a little skirt walked by. She was pale-skinned. Her stomach sagged. Her hair was very blond and very teased. We watched her pass.
"The lord giveth," Hawk said, "and the lord taketh away."
"Have you ever thought we might be guilty of sexism here," I said.
"Yes," Hawk said.
A silver Mercedes sedan cruised past us, coining from the Neck. We checked the plates. It didn't belong to Sonny.
"For all you know," Hawk said, "Bonnie moved to Scottsdale twenty years ago to work on her tan."
"Sonny's going to all this trouble to cover her up," I said. "He might want her close."
"Or he might want her far," Hawk said.
"Well, yes," I said. "That too is a possibility."
"So we could be wasting a lot of time."
"Remember Occam," I said.
To watch the causeway, we had to sit with our backs to the ocean. But we could hear it and smell it and feel the breeze coming off it. Across the causeway, we could see the harbor, where the masts of the pleasure boats stood like marsh reeds. Herring gulls wheeled and squawked and got into a loud scrum over a remnant of hot dog roll on the edge of the street in front of us. A red Porsche Boxster went by with the top down. A slate gray Lexus SUV came by in the other direction. Then nothing. Then, after awhile, a blue Subaru Forester.
"Probably a servant," Hawk said.
"Can't be sure," I said. "The Yankees are a thrifty lot."
A black BMW came by, and a dark brown Mercedes sedan. Wrong license number. We could smell hot dogs cooking in the snack bar in back of the beach house. At 2:30, Hawk took action. "Want a hot dog?" he said.