I looked everywhere as I raked and bagged any trash I found. An hour later, Cam was almost at the end of the hedgerow bordering the Mateer driveway, and my work shirt was drenched with sweat. On the lawn in front of me lay rolls of hedge clippings, like hoagies on a party tray. I had collected two more gum wrappers, both Doublemint, and yet another cigarette butt. Either it was a trashy backyard or a killer with a major oral fixation.
Picture time. I glanced around to make sure I wasn’t being watched, but everybody had gone to buy more things they didn’t need. I took some shots of the Mateer house from the vantage point of the carriage house, snapping away like a hungry realtor. When I looked through the square window of the Canon, I saw Cam, waving at me with his arm.
What a ham. I snapped the picture he was begging for and shifted the camera to get a better view of the Mateer house. Cam kept waving. It was a cute photo, but I didn’t think it would enlighten the jury. I took another picture of the Mateer house, showing how the view from the kitchen window was partially obstructed by the trees.
“June, June!” I heard Cam shout. It was the alias we’d agreed upon for me, since it was, after all, June. Plus I liked sounding like a centerfold for a change. “June!”
I looked at him over the camera.
Cam was waving again, but something in his movement was odd. Jerky. Either he’d found something or he was having dyspepsia. I looked through the lens and zoomed it up to telephoto so I could see his face. It was streaked with grime, strained and anxious. He was pointing excitedly to the ground at his feet.
Baby, baby. I broke into as subtle a sprint as possible, the camera swinging around my neck. Cam was standing on Mrs. Mateer’s asphalt driveway, where the end of the hedge reached the white stucco of the house.
“Rita, look,” he said, in a hushed tone.
I looked. Nestled among the hedge trimmings, a soggy green tennis ball, and a chubby pink begonia was a knife.
I blinked, but it was still there. I’d handled more than my share of knives in my father’s shop, but I didn’t know what kind of knife it was. It had a dark brown handle and its dull bronze blade was scarred by brownish stains. The stains could have been any kind of goo, but what it looked most like was dried blood. I couldn’t believe my eyes, neither could Cam. We stood over the knife like kids who’d found a garter snake in the backyard. Too afraid to touch, but too amazed to turn away.
“Way to go, Camille,” I said.
“I’m lucky today, kid. Maybe I shoulda gone to the track.”
“Then you would’ve missed playing junior detective.”
“You mean senior detective.” He smiled, then stared down at the knife. “What are you gonna do?”
An excellent question. Should I bag it? Should I call the cops? Can you pluck a knife with an eyebrow tweezers? “Damned if I know. Garfield I can handle, but this?”
“We can’t take it, can we?”
Hmmm. “Let me think about that.” Meantime, I grabbed the camera and fired off shots from every angle. From close up, from far away, I finished an entire roll on the knife alone. And the more I looked at the knife, through the white viewfinder inside the camera lens, the more I believed Cam had found what I hadn’t dared hope we’d find. The knife that killed Patricia Sullivan.
But I needed to learn more about the knife, so I could draw some conclusions about its owner.
As it turned out I knew a knife expert, rather well.
23
My father, propped up slightly in his hospital bed, squinted through his bifocals at the photo. “It’s a knife.”
My expert. “I know that, Dad. What kind of knife is it?”
“All-purpose, like a buck knife.”
“But it’s not a buck knife?”
He held the photo closer. “No.”
“Told you,” Cam said, sitting on the other side of the bed, still in dirty gardening gear.
“Could it kill someone?” I asked.
“This knife? In a New York minute.”
It sent a shiver through me. “Who would own this kind of knife, Dad? What would it be used for?”
“Anything, everything.”
“Like what?”
He peered at the picture. “Hunting, fishing, working in the garden or somethin’. Even around the garage. You could cut boxes with it, maybe wire. Anything.”
My heart sank. “Really, anything?”
“General purpose.” He set the photo down on his tummy and picked up the next one by its edges. “You think it’s the killer’s knife?”
“Yes. Who would have this kind of knife around?”
“Anybody.”
“Shit.”
He wet his lips, which looked parched. “It’s a good knife to have around, what can I say? I have one just like it in the back kitchen, even old like this. I use it on the fig tree, to trim it.”
“I never saw it. You never pointed it at me.”
He smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s not the murder weapon.”
“It looks like blood to me,” I said, gathering up the photos. “What do you think? You’re the hematologist here.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He closed his eyes, suddenly fatigued. “What’d the cops say?”
Cam laughed. “We didn’t wait around, Vito. We hadda see a man about a horse.”
It had taken an hour to get the pictures developed but far less than that to summon the Radnor police to the Mateer property. I had called them from the flip phone but opted not to stay on the scene until they arrived. No need to tell them I was perpetrating a fraud in a work shirt, not to mention corrupting the morals of a major.
“What I don’t understand is why the cops didn’t find it,” Cam said. “It was right there.”
Which is what was bothering me. Cam and I had gone back and forth about it in Thrift Drug, while we waited for the pictures. The technician kept looking at us funny, he didn’t hear many conversations about murder weapons in front of the Midol.
“I mean,” Cam continued, “how come I could find it and they couldn’t?”
“You found it?” my father asked. “With your eyesight?”
Cam looked offended. “My eyes are good. Right, Rita?”
“Right, Cam. It’s your hearing that sucks.”
“Bullshit,” my father said. My heart warmed to hear him regain his profanity. “Your eyes are lousy. Half the time you’re asking Herman whether it’s a club or a spade.”
“I did that once,” Cam corrected.
“Come on, more than once.”
“I can still see better than you, Vito.”
“That’s not saying much,” I said, and my father nudged me with his foot. His color had improved and the nudge felt strong, but I noticed his lunch had barely been touched. He felt terrible that he couldn’t go to LeVonne’s funeral. It had been set for tomorrow because the coroner had just released the body. “So why do you think the cops didn’t find it, Pop?”
He set the photo on his belly with a sigh. “Who knows? Cops. They can’t find who killed LeVonne either, even though I gave ’em a good description.”
“Still no leads?” Cam asked.
“That’s what Herman says. He calls ’em all the time, the detectives. He gives ’em hell.”
Cam chuckled, but my father didn’t. He sank deeper into the thin pillows. I worried he was becoming depressed. “You sleeping okay, Dad?”
“Fine.”
The nurses had told me he slept only off and on. “You eating okay?”
“Like a horse.”
What a load. “The nurses say you’re not.”
“The nurses think they know everything,” he said, his eyes still closed. “They love to boss you around. Except that little one with the red hair that Sal likes. Betty.”
“Are people still named Betty?” I asked.
“This one is,” Cam said. “Madonne, she’s a tomato.”
Va-va-va-voom. “Do men still say that?
What is this, a time warp?”
My father smiled. “Sal likes her, but he’s too chickenshit to talk to her.”