The house, as it turned out, was not on the bay. Instead, it was on a lagoon some two miles from the spot Sylvia had described. Neither was it on the mainland approach to the north bridge. It was across the bridge, a good way across the bridge, in fact, on Whisper Key itself. Sylvia’s only valid memories were of the mobile homes and shacks bordering the lagoon — but it took Rawles and Bloom three days to find those shacks and the stilted house nestled among them.
The apartment Tracy Kilbourne had apparently been living in until sometime in July of last year was now occupied by a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Joyce Epstein, who had been living in New York until February, when she came down here on vacation, fell in love with Calusa, and decided to make her home here. In New York she had worked as a receptionist at a publishing house; in Calusa she was selling real estate, not a particularly lucrative occupation at the moment, since mortgage interest rates were so high and nobody was buying. In New York she had lived on the second floor of a tenement on Eighty-Third Street, near First Avenue. In Calusa she was living in a ramshackle wood-frame house overlooking what was surely one of the most beautiful lagoons in the world. Herons elegantly stalked the shallow waters outside her windows as the detectives talked to her. A pelican perched on the railing of her deck. Her apartment in Manhattan, she told them, had been far more spacious than this, but when she looked out her window there, all she saw was alternate-side-of-the-street parking. Here — and she gestured grandly toward the lagoon — she had “the Garden of Eden” on her doorstep. I remembered thinking, as Bloom related this to me, that Joyce Epstein should have a long talk with my partner, Frank.
Joyce did not know anyone named Tracy Kilbourne.
The former tenant here had been a man named Charlie something-or-other. She’d met him only once — when he was moving in and she was moving out. He’d told her he was going back to Cincinnati because he couldn’t stand all the goddamn birds out there on the lagoon. “As the old maid said when she kissed the cow,” Joyce told the detectives, and shrugged. Rawles didn’t know what she meant. He asked Joyce what she meant. “It’s all a matter of taste,” Joyce said, and smiled. Rawles said, “Oh,” and figured it hadn’t been worth his time asking the question. In any case, Joyce didn’t know Tracy Kilbourne, and that was that. Her phone was ringing. “Maybe somebody wants to buy a house,” she said, and ran to answer it.
The man who lived next door was sitting outside his mobile home and sipping a can of beer. He was wearing a white tank top undershirt and blue shorts. He told the detectives his name was Harvey Wallenbach — “they call me Harvey Wallbanger” — and asked how he could be of assistance. Rawles asked him how long he’d been living here.
“Three years now,” Wallenbach said.
“Were you living here last July?” Bloom asked.
“If I been living here three years, then I was living here last July, ain’t that right?” Wallenbach asked Rawles. He was somewhere in his sixties, Rawles guessed, a scarecrow of a man with unkempt white hair and nicotine-stained teeth and fingers. The door to his mobile home was open, and a television set was going inside. Rawles couldn’t see anyone watching it. A soap opera was unfolding on the screen — one of Rawles’s mother’s favorites. Something about doctors and nurses. Big heads talking about an illegitimate child. On the soap operas, everything was big heads and illegitimacy. You never saw a long shot on any of the soap operas. You never saw anybody who wasn’t a bastard on any of the soap operas. Daytime serials, they called them. Like calling a garbage man a sanitation engineer.
“Did you know a girl named Tracy Kilbourne?” Bloom was saying. “Used to live next door here?” He gestured to the house on stilts. Joyce Epstein was running out toward her car. She waved at the detectives. A lead, Rawles thought. “Blonde girl,” Bloom said. “Supposed to be very beautiful. Lived here last year from around May to July.” Joyce’s car started with a roar. Smiling, she waved again at the detectives and pulled out of the gravel driveway.
“That her name?” Wallenbach asked. “Tracy Kilbourne?”
“That’s what we have,” Bloom said.
“Never knew her name... if she’s the one you’re looking for. Big blonde job, maybe five-nine, five-ten. Blue eyes. Tits out to here. Wheels like Betty Grable. You remember Betty Grable?” he asked Rawles. Rawles nodded. “That the girl you’re looking for?” Wallenbach said.
“Sounds like the one,” Bloom said. “Do you remember telling a girl who came here asking about her — this was in July sometime — that Miss Kilbourne was gone?”
“I mighta done that,” Wallenbach said, looking suddenly crafty and suspicious. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“Told her Miss Kilbourne drove off in a big, expensive car?” Bloom said.
“Mighta,” Wallenbach said.
“Black chauffeur picked her up, helped her take her clothes out?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Wallenbach said.
“Yes or no?” Rawles said. “Did you see her leaving here?”
“Got to know what this is all about first,” Wallenbach said.
“Don’t tell them nothin’,” a woman’s voice said from inside the trailer.
“Shut up, Lizzie,” Wallenbach said.
“It’s all about Miss Kilbourne being dead,” Rawles said.
“I told you not to tell them nothin’,” the woman inside the trailer yelled.
“I didn’t even know her name,” Wallenbach said.
The woman came out of the trailer, her hands on her hips. She was wearing a pink slip and scuffed house slippers. She was perhaps fifty years old, a stout woman with bleached blonde hair and a face that must have been pretty thirty years earlier. She squinted against the sun, and then shaded her eyes to look the detectives over.
“You even ask to see a badge?” she said to Wallenbach.
“Shut the hell up, Lizzie,” Wallenbach said. “I’m handling this my ownself.”
“On’y thing you know how to handle is your twinkie,” Lizzie said. “Let me see your badges.”
The detectives showed her their identification.
“I ain’t surprised she’s dead,” Lizzie said. “What was she? A hooker or something? Came in all hours of the night, she musta been a hooker.”
“Ma’am,” Bloom said, “what we’re trying to do here is identify the car that picked her up. Your husband told a woman named Sylvia—”
“He ain’t my husband. And whatever he is, he’s got a big mouth.”
“I’m the one with the big mouth, huh?” Wallenbach said.
“We don’t wanna get involved in no hooker got herself murdered,” Lizzie said.
“Did you tell anyone that an expensive car picked up—”