“I’m afraid I can’t comment on that at this time.”
“Is rape a consideration in this case, sir?”
“No comment.”
“Does that mean yes?”
“It means no comment.”
I turned away from the bar. Susan was already moving into the crowd, drink in hand, toward where Leona and Frank were standing near the buffet table. Leona was wearing a black pants suit, the jacket of which was slashed to her navel. Frank referred to her somewhat exuberant breasts as “the family jewels,” and maintained that Leona’s penchant for wearing revealing garments at every Calusa social event was akin to tossing “pearls before swine.” Frank himself was wearing a brightly colored long-sleeved sports shirt, and what I recognized at once as his Italian pants. He had bought them in Milan two years ago, and wore them so often that I once accused him of having only two pair of pants — the ones he wore to the office with a ratty sports jacket, and the Italian pair he wore to parties. The Italian pair had only one pocket, on the right hip. As a result, Frank wore a little leather purse, which he’d also bought in Milan, attached to his belt. I signaled to him, and started across the room. Susan had already reached them. She was hugging Leona now, kissing Frank on the cheek at the same time.
Someone stopped me, a man I’d met casually at another party, I couldn’t remember his name. He asked if I knew I’d been mentioned on television tonight in connection with the Purchase murder case. Said one of the reporters asked who the boy’s lawyer was, and the State’s Attorney said he believed it was Matthew Hope. He began giving me his own ideas on the case then, constantly referring to it as The Purchase Murder Case, capitalizing it like the title of a novel or a film — THE PURCHASE MURDER CASE — and I realized all at once that he was treating it like a suspense story, which it certainly was not. Not to the victims. Not to Jamie or his son. Not even to me. But to this man, the tragedy was only a murder mystery, and he recounted it to me as such now, reducing it to the level of a whodunit.
This is the cast of characters: a father, a son, a stepmother, and two half sisters. This is the plot: the father comes home from a poker game to find his wife and daughters slain. The son later confesses to the crime. Open and shut, the State’s Attorney says. Next case, the judge says. But, ah, that wasn’t enough. The man who had hold of my elbow and my ear, the man sipping champagne here from a stemmed plastic glass, needed something more. I could not imagine what essential ingredient was missing. Perhaps he only wanted another body to float up from the bayou behind Jamie’s house, which the State’s Attorney had mentioned by name, I was now informed, and which name — Fairy Bayou — caused my unknown friend here to comment that it was undoubtedly named after a closet queen up the street. He guffawed at this, and I seized the opportunity to drift away from him on the crest of my own mirthless laughter.
The talk everywhere around me was of the murders on Jacaranda. Lacking another body, or another spate of bodies, lacking even another suspect — no butler to cast long menacing looks, no lady in a black raincoat running for the misty heath, no crazy old uncle in the tower room babbling about what he’d seen — why then the obvious questions had to be asked about the facts that existed. And the people here at the party seemed to find the facts questionable at best. I heard someone ask whether Jamie Purchase was really at a poker game the night before, as had been mentioned in the newspapers, though not in the State’s Attorney’s interview. Or had he possibly left the poker game early, and gone back home to kill his own wife and children? This particular cynic, of course, did not know that Jamie had indeed left the poker game early, or that he’d gone not home but to the bed of his loving surgeon’s wife. Or so Jamie claimed, an alibi that Catherine Brenet had already effectively demolished, dear loyal Kate. The Calusans gathered here to honor the Italian painter knew nothing of Jamie’s love life, however, and so they only guessed he might have been somewhere else, the parlor game of murder becoming pallid if one could not speculate on intrigue and romance, poison rings and stilettos.
Which brought the partygoers to the matter of the murder weapon itself, the very same weapon the State’s Attorney had described on television as having been thrown in the Gulf. Well, no one here expected the police to drag an ocean in search of a bread knife, or whatever kind of knife it was — the newspapers simply described the murder weapon as “a big kitchen knife,” information presumably given to them by the Police Department, or the State’s Attorney’s office, or both. But it seemed to almost everyone present, judging from what I could overhear, that a knife of that size and weight, even if it sank to the bottom when it was first thrown in the water, would by this time have been washed ashore, the tide having come in — as one expert sport fisherman was quick to ascertain — at 12:59 P.M. this afternoon.
I heard the Italian artist telling someone in broken English that he had been flown from Naples, Italy, to Rome and then New York and Miami, and had been driven from there to Naples, Florida, because the big promotional idea was “Da Napoli a Napoli, from Nepples to Nepples, you unnerstan?” But the gallery opening there had been a huge disappointment, largely due to the fact that his work was far too young and vigorous for the Florida Neopolitans — “gli anziani,” he called them. So he’d come up here to Calusa, there had been a nice crowd at the show tonight, nice-dressed people, plenty of money, and what did they talk about? They talked about murder! His host assured him that this was an unusual circumstance, there were hardly ever any murders in Calusa. The Italian rolled his eyes and said, “Allora, perche me? Why he dinna wait some other time?”
Susan looked spectacular.
She was wearing a white silk jersey tunic, belted at the waist with a golden rope and draped over a long white matching skirt. Gold sandals and gold hoop earrings, a hammered-gold cuff-bracelet on her right wrist. Her hair was pulled tightly to the back of her head, held there with a golden comb. She looked altogether sleek and sinuous, somewhat Grecian, her mouth slightly pouting as always, that spoiled sullen cast to her face, the brown eyes challenging falsely.
The glances she flashed about the room were only distant relatives of what had been her mother’s direct and honest look, Susan took the legacy and wasted it. The look became calculated, she used it to foster an aura of boldness, lips slightly parted to simulate surprise or anticipation, a breathlessness accompanying the direct eye contact. She flirted outrageously, my darling wife, and later denied it, outraged. Over Leona’s shoulder, she met the Italian painter’s eyes now, and when his own eyes sparked with interest, she cut him dead with a sudden lowering of long lashes and a faint superior smile. The first time I’d seen her years ago I especially wanted to take her to bed because she looked so damn superior. I wanted her to groan beneath me. I wanted her to whisper gutter talk in my ear. She could still excite me, I realized. She was wearing no bra, her gown clung to her breasts; as I approached her I actually found myself trying to peek into its low-cut front.
I shook hands with Frank, and a pair of cross-conversations immediately developed, Frank filling me in on what had happened at the office after I left today, Susan telling Leona about Sebastian’s accident. True, most everything she said or did managed to annoy me lately, but this annoyed me particularly. It seemed to me that she was using the death of the cat to solicit sympathy and solace or — even more unforgivable — to call attention to herself as someone grieving and bereft. So I listened partially to what Frank was saying, and partially to what Susan was saying, and I heard Leona’s clucking little sounds of condolence, and then somewhere on my left I heard a woman talking about the murders. It was the woman’s question that captured my full attention.