Davis’s house was small and constructed of wood shingles painted green. The front lawn was patchy and strewn with what appeared to be the overflow debris of the junk piled against the side of the house and visible in the backyard, a flotsam-and-jetsam collection of automobile parts and radiators and refrigerators and bottles and lawn furniture and plumbing fixtures and you-name-it, Lloyd Davis seemed to have it. A dog of uncertain origin sat on the rickety front porch of the house, scratching his ear. He barely glanced at me as I mounted the steps and approached the screen door.
A record player was going someplace inside the house — Billie Holiday singing the blues. There was no doorbell. I rapped gently on the wooden frame surrounding the tattered screening. There was no answer. I rapped again, and then called, “Hello!”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice said.
“I’m looking for Lloyd Davis,” I said.
Billie’s voice reached for a high note, found it, teased it, slid down the other side of it.
“Hello?” I said.
“Just a minute,” the woman answered.
The record ended. I heard only the sound of the needle caught in the retaining grooves, clicking endlessly, and then silence. I waited. She appeared suddenly behind the screen door, a woman of about thirty, I guessed, wearing a faded silk wrapper, her hair done up in rags, her eyes studying me suspiciously.
“You here about the bike?” she asked.
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m a lawyer representing George Harper,” I said. “I’d like to see Mr. Davis, if that’s possible. Is he home?”
“He’s out back. In the garage,” the woman said. “I’m his wife.”
“All right for me to go back there?”
“Don’t see why not,” she said.
“Mind if I ask you a few questions first?”
“What about?”
“About Mr. Harper’s visit here on the fifteenth.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
She did not open the screen door. She stood just inside it, a vague filtered figure in the gloom beyond.
“Was he here?”
“He was here.”
“Looking for your husband?”
“Looking for Lloyd, yeah.”
“What time was this, would you remember?”
“Sometime in the morning.”
“Can you be more exact about that?”
“Around eight o’clock, I guess it was. Eight-thirty. Around there.”
“How long did he stay?”
“Five minutes, is all. Said he wanted to see Lloyd, told him Lloyd was off with the army.”
“Did he say where he was going next?”
“Nope. Just said thanks and went on his way.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Davis,” I said.
She did not answer. One moment she was there, and the next she was gone again, disappearing as suddenly as she had materialized. As I walked toward the garage at the back of the house, I heard the Billie Holiday record starting again.
Lloyd Davis was a man in his late twenties, I guessed, some six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, give or take. He was wearing blue jeans and a white tank-top shirt, his chest and arm muscles bulging as he carried a Franklin stove from one section of the garage to another. Despite the obvious weight of the cast-iron stove, he moved as effortlessly as a quarterback through an ineffective defensive line, gingerly picking his way across the cluttered garage floor, setting the stove down with a grunt, and then turning to face me with a sudden and surprising smile. A fine sheen of perspiration glistened on his handsome face, highlighting the distinctive cheekbones and almost patrician nose. His skin was as black as Harper’s, the color of bitter chocolate, his eyes the color of Greek olives. The teeth behind the wide smile were even and white.
“You the man who called?” he asked.
“What?” I said.
“About the motor bike?”
“No,” I said. “I’m Matthew Hope. George Harper’s attorney.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, how are you? I’m Lloyd Davis, nice to meet you.” He extended his hand, took mine in a firm clasp. “Would you like a beer? I’m dying of thirst here.”
“Thanks, no,” I said.
He went across the garage to where three old refrigerators were standing side by side against the far wall. Unerringly, he opened the door of one that was plugged in, and reached inside for a can of beer. The garage was littered with the same sort of debris that cluttered the driveway and part of the front lawn: ancient lawn mowers, yellowing toilet bowls, gutters and leaders, lampshades, bridge tables, radios, copper pipes, brass couplings, bikes with and without wheels, roller skates, clay pots, a typewriter, a set of battered leather luggage, a floor lamp with a metal base, and more miscellaneous crap than I could hope to count in a month of Sundays, all of it vying for floor or shelf space with an assortment of cardboard cartons containing everything from old magazines to beads and souvenir ashtrays to — in at least one instance — what appeared to be a priceless collection of soiled rags.
“I thought you were the guy coming for the bike,” he said. “He called ten minutes ago, said he heard I had a good used bike for sale. It is, too.” He ripped the tab from the beer can, brought the can to his lips, and drank deeply. “Mmm, I’ve been craving this,” he said. He set the can down precariously on what appeared to be an upended plaster-cast statue of a lion or a seal or perhaps the Venus de Milo, difficult to determine since it was missing its head and all of its appendages. “So Georgie got himself in trouble, huh?” he said.
“It looks that way.”
“From what I can gather, he’s using Miami as an alibi, right? Says he was here in Miami when it all happened.”
“Well, he was, wasn’t he?”
“He was here Sunday morning a week ago, is what he was. Spoke to Leona — my wife — and then left. I don’t know where he was after that.”
“But you didn’t see him, is that right?”
“Nope. I was off with the reserve. Got to put in my drill hours, you know, if I want to keep my rating and pay. Sixteen hours a month, plus another two full weeks a year, usually sometime in the summer. Takes me away from my business, but what can you do? Anyway, I’ll be finished with it come January.”
“Exactly what sort of business are you in, Mr. Davis?”
“It’s a perpetual tag sale here, is what it is,” Davis said. “There’s nothing retired old farts like better than a tag sale. Think they’re getting something for nothing, you know? Every Saturday and Sunday, they come in here like I’m giving my stuff away. Nothing to do with their time, they go looking for crap they can clutter up their trailers with. I’ll be open Thanksgiving Day, ought to be a good day for me.”
“Had you known Mr. Harper would be here on the fifteenth?”
“Nope.”
“He didn’t call you beforehand?”
“Well, he never does. He loads up his truck, comes on down to see if there’s any crap I’d like to buy. He’s got a few other dealers down here, too, but I’m his main customer.”
“Who are the other dealers, would you know?”
“Nope. Georgie’s kind of closemouthed when it comes to business. When it comes to anything, for that matter. You sure you don’t want a beer?” he asked, and picked up the can again.