“Two miles east of Spinnaker, on Old Redford,” Bloom said. “Immediately on your left, you’ll see a white building with a dish antenna on top of it. You’ll be going to Tampa right after you do your number here, so maybe I ought to have somebody drive you both places, wait for you outside, is that all right with you?”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“You seem very perturbed today,” Bloom said.
“I am.”
“So am I. There’s a lot I don’t like about this case, Matthew, I’ll be honest with you. That’s one of the reasons I’m eager to get Harper back in, few more questions I’d like to ask him. Like, for example, how could he have been so fucking stupid? I mean, once okay, I can accept that. You kill somebody, you forget to wipe your fingerprints off the murder weapon, okay. But twice? Even a trained flea knows enough to wipe off his fingerprints. Doesn’t that bother you, Matthew?”
“It bothers me.”
“Me, too.”
“We’re on opposite sides of this one, Morrie.”
“Who says? I want to make sure we’ve got the right customer. I don’t like shooting fish in a barrel, and I don’t like frying innocent people in the electric chair, either.”
“So now you think he’s innocent, huh?”
“I’m not saying that. On the evidence, we had to arrest him and charge him. But he’s not guilty until a jury says he is. That’s the way it works, right, Matthew?”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
“That’s the way I’d like it to work,” Bloom said. “Otherwise I picked the wrong job. I’m not eager to pin a rose on your man unless he actually killed those two people. There are things that bother me, like I said. I want some answers from him. Do your best tonight, will you? Convince him to come in.”
“I’ll try.”
“Okay. You want to see this garage, or not?”
We walked up toward the Harper house. It was similar to Sally Owen’s house down the street, obviously built by the same contractor, but it was painted gray rather than white and there was no fence around it, a low line of shrubs defining the property instead. Bloom pulled a key ring from his pocket. “Had to sign a receipt for these, can you imagine? A police officer,” he said, and shook his head. “I had to take the whole ring ’cause I don’t know which of these is for the house. Guy’s got more keys than a jailer.” He tried several keys on the garage-door lock, finally found the one that fit, unlocked the door, and then reached down to yank on the handle. The door rattled up over our heads.
The garage, in contrast to Lloyd Davis’s in Miami, and considering the fact that he and Harper were in virtually the same business, was a model of neatness. Here, too, every inch of floor and wall space was covered with merchandise Harper presumably hoped to sell, but whereas Davis’s garage and its adjacent lawn and driveway areas had been a cluttered, jumbled mess, Harper’s garage gave the impression of a carefully catalogued storeroom. Radios were with radios, picture frames with picture frames, plumbing fixtures with plumbing fixtures, everything with its mate or mates, a veritable Noah’s ark of organization. Alongside one wall was a rack hung with women’s dresses and topcoats on wire hangers. Adjacent to it, on the same wall, was a rack bearing men’s suits and sports jackets. Used books were arranged in alphabetical order, by title, in a corner bookcase. Old magazines were stored in cardboard cartons onto which Harper had hand-lettered (and often misspelled) their different names: NEW YORKER, NATIONAL GRAPHIC, LADY’S HOME JOURNAL, HARPER’S BAZAR, TIME, PLAYBOY. Even Harper’s personal workbench was backed by a large piece of pegboard fastened to the wall and painted with the outline of each tool hanging on it, undoubtedly his personal possessions and not for sale. Conspicuously absent was the hammer that should have been hanging over the painted outline on the board.
“Neat person,” Bloom said.
“Yes,” I said.
“So why does he go around leaving his fingerprints all over the place?”
On a shelf over the workbench was an assortment of lidded jars in various sizes, separately containing nails of different weights, screws of different lengths, washers, nuts, bolts, latches, and hinges. A second shelf contained a can of turpentine, several cans of paint and varnish — and an empty space that could have accommodated a five-gallon can of gasoline. A power lawn mower, looking oiled and spotlessly clean, not a blade of grass clinging to its cutting edges, stood against the wall near the workbench. And alongside that, a tarpaulin covered something angled in against the wall. Bloom lifted the tarpaulin.
We were looking at a stack of oil paintings. The one in the forefront of the stack was a Sally Owen original, unmistakable in style. The content, however, was somewhat startling. The painting depicted a black man and a white woman in passionate embrace. Bloom and I looked at each other. The unframed canvas behind it was another oil, a crude portrait copied from Rembrandt’s The Man with the Golden Helmet. Behind that was a painting of a fishing skiff. And behind that what was supposed to be a glorious sunset. Only the first canvas seemed to have been painted by Sally; the others were in varying, equally lousy styles, but definitely not hers, not from her distinctive hand.
“Think it’s supposed to be Harper and his wife?” Bloom asked.
“Doesn’t look much like them.”
“Doesn’t look much like anyone,” Bloom said. “Just a black guy kissing a white woman.”
“Maybe he bought it for her,” I said.
“Or maybe it was a gift from the artist,” Bloom said, emphasizing the word so that it became a critical judgment.
He replaced the tarpaulin, and we went out of the garage and into the backyard. Lumber piled in orderly stacks, by length and width. Three chairs painted green, standing side by side against the back wall of the garage. A pair of stripped-down chairs beside them. Four ladders leaning against the wall, one against the other. A bathtub, and alongside it a ceramic washbasin in a matching shade of blue.
“You sometimes get these big guys,” Bloom said, “they’re very neat people, like fat guys who are light on their feet, you know? My uncle Max, may he rest in peace, he must’ve weighed three hundred pounds, but he was as delicate as a butterfly, I mean it. Organized? Like a clock. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Gentle, too. A very gentle person.”
“Harper’s been described that way to me.”
“By who?”
“A friend of his. Sally’s former husband.”
“Oh?”
“Said it would pain Harper to take a hook out of a fish’s mouth.”
“But not to set fire to somebody, huh? Or to bash in somebody else’s skull.”
“You’re changing your tune again,” I said.
“I’m only trying to understand it,” Bloom said gently. “Are we finished here?”
“One thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Will you have your people look for a spare key outside the house someplace?”
“First thing in the morning,” Bloom said.
A police car picked me up at the office at a quarter past five, and we drove over to Channel 36, Calusa’s own WSWF. The news team’s anchorman told me I would have to be made up before I went on. I told him I had once read an interview with Alfred Hitchcock in which the master, in talking about actors, had said something like, “How can anyone respect a person who makes a living by putting makeup on his face?” The anchorman did not find this amusing or informative. He said I would have to wear makeup because if I didn’t then the rest of the team would, by comparison, look as if they were wearing makeup. I failed to understand his logic, but I followed him nonetheless into a small room where a rotund little lady wearing a smeared blue smock was standing behind a seated blonde, whom I recognized as WSWF’s Weather Lady, brushing out her hair.