I moved out of the kitchen and into the entry hall again.
The mail, a dozen envelopes or so, still lay on the floor, touched by a slanting beam of sunlight swimming with dust motes. I moved down the hallway and into a small living room on the left. A sofa and two easy chairs. A green carpet. The drapes open to let in more sunlight than had been in the hallway, the same silent dust motes. Over the sofa, a framed oil painting of a pair of Scottish terriers like the ones in the Black & White whiskey ads, heads cocked, quizzical looks on their alert little faces. I leaned over the sofa and looked for a signature. None. The painting looked like the sort of badly executed representational art one could buy for five dollars or so at any of Calusa’s street fairs during the months of March and April, when the tourists were thickest and the suckers were born one to the minute. Had Sally Owen been an art lover with poor taste? An animal lover who favored dogs? An animal hater who preferred even a lousy representational painting to the real live objects scurrying underfoot and shitting around the house? Or was she a Scotch drinker, and did the painting of the two adorable mutts, one white, one black, serve to remind her that Happy Hour came to Calusa at four-thirty each and every afternoon, rain or shine?
The bedroom was just across the hall.
An unmade water bed. At the foot of the bed, a mattress covered with a rumpled sheet. On the walls, more paintings, undoubtedly by the same untalented artist in the same distinctive style. All of them unsigned. Some of them unframed. Canvases varying in size from what appeared to be three-foot squares to several smaller and several larger rectangles, all of them oils. The subject matter was as banal as the style. Hanging over the water bed was an unframed canvas I estimated to be some four feet wide by six feet long and depicting, of all things, a salt shaker and a pepper shaker standing side by side and magnified a hundred times life-size. To the left of the window on the wall adjacent to the bed was a smaller painting of a pair of chess pieces, one white, one black, intended as the king and queen, if the badly executed crowns were any clue. To the right of the window was another masterpiece by the same artist, this one showing a pair of penguins on an ice floe. On the wall opposite the water bed was another painting executed in the same larger-than-life style as the salt and pepper shakers, this one depicting a pair of dice standing side by side and blown up to some three feet in height. Several unframed canvases were leaning against the wall just inside the entrance door. The top one showed a pair of birds, one presumably a crow, the other a dove. The one under that was a badly rendered painting of a pair of zebras. Over the dresser on that same wall, there was a mirror in a black frame and — just alongside it — a framed and glass-covered copy of the front page of the Calusa Herald-Tribune, the bold headline announcing BLACK BUSINESSMAN SLAIN. I leaned over the dresser and read the story under the headline.
Early in August last year, a cruising Calusa cop had noticed a car parked on the access road to the airport. The time was 6:00 A.M. The cop made a pass at the car, noting the license-plate number, and then radioed in for a check with Tampa. The message came back to him that the car was a stolen one. He drove around past the airport and then back onto the access road again, where the reportedly stolen car was still parked, the driver slumped over the wheel, his head on his folded arms. The cop drew his gun, rapped on the window, and asked the driver for his license and identification. The driver rolled down the window, said, “Leave me alone,” and then — as an apparent afterthought — reached over to thumb open the glove compartment. The cop shot him twice in the head.
The rest of the story, as it was later revealed — and as I recalled it now because the subsequent hearing caused quite a stir in Calusa’s legal community — was that the slain man was the owner of a carpet-cleaning business on US 41, and that he’d been informed the night before of his sister’s death. The sister lived in Chicago; he was driving to the airport to catch an early-morning flight out. But, apparently grief stricken, he had pulled over to the side of the airport access road, and was weeping, slumped over the wheel, when the cop approached. The stolen-car report from Tampa had been erroneous; the car belonged to the man driving it. But the cop, believing he was dealing with a criminal, automatically assumed the man was reaching into the glove compartment for a weapon. The story had an unhappy ending: the cop was exonerated of all charges against him. But the front page of a sixteen-month-old newspaper was framed and hanging behind glass on Sally Owen’s bedroom wall, together with her priceless collection of representational art.
I did not know what I’d expected to find here. Perhaps proof that George Harper couldn’t possibly have killed her. It seemed to me that I hadn’t found very much. The cop outside was smoking a cigarette when I came out of the house. Apparently, he still believed I was from the State’s Attorney’s Office; he ground out the butt the moment he saw me.
“Get what you need?” he asked.
“Thanks,” I said.
Bloom was waiting for me at the Harper house down the street, sitting in a Calusa Police Department car, a white Calusa cop at the wheel. He opened the door on the curb side as he saw me coming down the street, and then extended his hand as I approached.
“See the house?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, “thanks.”
“What’d you make of the paintings?”
“Lousy,” I said.
“For sure. Sally did them herself.”
“How do you know?”
“Didn’t you go in the garage?”
“No.”
“Easel set up in there, unfinished painting on it, long table with tubes of paint and a palette. Neighbor on the left — the woman who found the body — says Sally was all the time painting up a storm.”
“What’d the painting in the garage look like?”
“Same as the others. Terrible.”
“I mean the subject matter.”
“A pair of Dalmatians. The dogs you see around all the firehouses. Had her inspiration on the worktable, a photograph clipped from a newspaper. By the way, what’d you think of that newspaper on her bedroom wall?”
“I don’t know. I guess the incident meant a lot to her.”
“Oh, sure. Son of a bitch shoots and kills a guy headed for a funeral, if I was a black man in this town I’d have burned down the police station. Had it framed, huh?” Bloom said. “Nice piece of glass over it. To remind her, I guess. Everything there in black-and-white where she could read it whenever she put on her lipstick. Why do you suppose she kept that mattress on the floor?”
“Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“Thought you might have some insights.”
“Not a one.”
“King-sized water bed could sleep the Russian army. So why did she need a mattress on the floor?”
“I have no idea.”
“Me neither. Things like that bother me. Don’t they bother you?”
“What bothers me is that black businessman who was killed by a trigger-happy cop. That’s what bothers me.”
“Bothered her, too, apparently.”
“Sally Owen didn’t have a client on the run out there.”
“Well, maybe that’ll change after you go on television. I set it all up, by the way. You have to be at WSWF at five-thirty, you know where it is?”
WSWF was Calusa’s own Channel 36, the “SWF” in the call letters standing for Southwest Florida. I did not know where the station was; I told Bloom I did not know where it was. I was still feeling rotten, only now the lightheadedness had dissipated and only the crankiness remained.