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“Was he angry enough to kill Kramer?”

Fielding reflected upon this for a moment “Kettering,” he said slowly, “was a good hunter because he liked to kill. I don’t hold with that kind of thinking, but that didn’t make him any less a good hunter.” Fielding paused. “Has Sy Kramer been killed?”

“Yes,” Hawes said.

“When?”

“June twenty-sixth.”

“And you think possibly Kettering waited all this time to get even for an argument that happened in September?”

“I don’t know. You said Kettering was a hunter. Hunters are patient people, aren’t they?”

“Kettering was patient, yes. How was Kramer killed?”

“He was shot from an automobile.”

“Mmm. Kettering was a damn good shot. I don’t know.”

“I don’t, either.” Hawes rose. “Thank you for the drink, Mr. Fielding. And thank you for the talk. You’ve been very helpful.”

“It’s been a pleasure,” Fielding said. “Where are you off to now?”

“Back to the city,” Hawes said.

“And then?”

“And then we’ll talk to the four men who were here with Kramer. It’d save us a little time if you had their addresses.”

“I’ve got registry cards on all of them,” Fielding said. “It doesn’t take a cop to know which one you’ll look up first.”

“No?” Hawes said, grinning.

“No, sir. If I were Phil Kettering, I’d start getting a damn good alibi ready.”

11.

SAND’S SPIT WAS A suburb of the city.

There was a time when the long finger of land served only two interests: that of the potato farmers and that of the East Shore estate owners. The farms covered most of the peninsula, rushing east and west almost to the water’s edge. The estates crowded the choice waterfront sites. The farmers sowed their crops and the estate owners sowed their oats. The farmers were interested in reaping, and the estate owners were interested in sleeping. Day and night, the estates reverberated with the sound of revelry. The current Stem musical star, the tight-lipped star of silent films, producers, directors, artists, tennis players, all were entertained daily on the estates. The stars enjoyed the good clean fun on the estates. The farmers toiled in the potato fields.

And sometimes, after the sun had dropped its molten fire into the black waters of the ocean, when the potato fields rested black and silent under a pale moon, the farmers would walk down to the beach with blankets. And there they would lie on the sand and look up at the stars.

And sometimes, after the sun had dropped behind the Australian pines lining the farthermost hundred acres of an estate, after the guests had drunk their cognac and smoked their cigars, the estate owners would walk down to the beach with their guests. And there they would lie on the stars and look down at the sand.

All this was long, long ago. When the war came and it was no longer an easy thing to get help to run the twenty-five-room houses, when it was no longer an easy thing to get fuel to heat the twenty-five-room houses and the indoor tennis courts, the owners began to sell the estates—and began to discover there were no buyers for them. And shortly after the war, the potato farmers discovered they were not sitting on potato land; they were sitting on gold. An industrious builder named Isadore Morris bought the first two hundred acres of potato land for a song and built a low-cost housing development for returning veterans, naming the development “Morristown.” Isadore Morris started a boom and a way of life. Other builders leaped onto the Morris bandwagon. Land that originally was priced high at two hundred dollars an acre was now going for ten thousand dollars an acre. The builders subdivided the acreage into sixty-by-a-hundred plots, and the exodus from the city to Sand’s Spit was on.

Today, Sand’s Spit was divided and subdivided and then divided again into small plots with small houses. The congregate Sand’s Spit was a middle-income slum area with clean streets and no juvenile delinquency.

Phil Kettering lived in a Sand’s Spit development known as Shorecrest Hills. There was no shore near Shorecrest Hills, nor was there the crest of a hill or even the suggestion of a hill. The development sat in almost the exact center of the peninsula on land that had once been as flat as a flapper’s bosom. It was still flat. It was treeless except for the spindly silver maples the builder had magnanimously planted in the exact center of each front lawn. Shorecrest Hills. It was like calling a grimy soot-covered tenement in the 87th “Ash-grey Towers.” Of such titles are million-dollar movies made.

The Kettering house was a ranch. Lest a Texan become confused, there was nothing even suggestive of a ranch about a Sand’s Spit ranch. Some architect, or perhaps some builder, or perhaps some real estate agent had decided to give the title “ranch” to any house that had all of its living space on one floor. The Sand’s Spit ranches did not have cattle or sheep or horses. They had, usually, three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and a bathroom. Phil Kettering lived alone in one of these Sand’s Spit ranches in the development called Shorecrest Hills.

Phil Kettering, in an attempt to defy the sameness that pervaded each house in the development, had done something radical with the front yard of his house. Instead of the conventional manicured lawn, he had arranged the ground leading to the entrance doorway in a series of white gravel squares and alternating ground cover. The idea was entirely practical. Lawn mowers were going heatedly up and down the block when Carella and Hawes pulled up in the police sedan. But there was no lawn mower clicking away in Kettering’s front yard—and there never would be need for a lawn mower. You can’t mow gravel, and Pachysandra doesn’t need trimming. Kettering had successfully reduced his yard maintenance to zero. The only thing he had to do to it was enjoy it.

On Thursday morning, July eleventh, Phil Kettering was not around to enjoy his front yard. The house was locked tighter than a miser’s fist, the drapes drawn, the windows shut.

“He’s probably at work,” Carella said.

“Mmm,” Hawes replied.

They rang the front doorbell again. Across the street, a woman looked up from her lawn mower, studying the strangers with open interest.

“Let’s try the back door,” Hawes said.

Together, they went around to the back of the house. The yard there was arranged in the same gravel-and-ground-cover squares. The yard was clean and still. The back door had a buzzer instead of a bell. They could hear it humming inside the house when they pressed the button. No one answered the door.

“We’d better check his office,” Carella said.

“We don’t know where he works,” Hawes reminded him.

They came around to the front of the house again. The woman from across the street was now standing near the sedan, looking into the window. The radio was on, and the voices that erupted from it were unmistakably giving police calls. The woman listened intently, her hair in pincurls, and then backed away from the open window as the detectives approached.

“You cops?” she asked.