“Did you love her more than Susan?” she asked.
“I thought I did, yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I haven’t seen Aggie in years,” I said.
“Is that what you called her? Aggie?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very pretty, Aggie. Was she as pretty as her name?”
“I suppose so.”
“What color hair did she have?”
“Black.”
“But blondes have more fun, don’t they?” she said, and grinned. “Especially in the booby hatch. Tell me what happened after the divorce. Do you have any children? Do they live with you? Where do you live?”
So I told her about my daughter, Joanna, and the trouble I was having right now because Susan wanted to send her off to a school in Massachusetts...
“How old is Joanna?” she asked.
“Fourteen,” I said.
“Oh my,” Sarah said. “Almost a woman.”
“Almost,” I said.
“What color hair does she have?”
“Would you mind telling me what this fascination with hair is?” I said.
“Well, your wife Susan had brown hair...”
“Still does.”
“And your girlfriend Aggie had black hair...”
“Yes?”
“So what color hair does your daughter have?”
“Blonde,” I said.
“Ah. Like me.”
“Yes.”
“Is she pretty?”
“I think she’s beautiful.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?”
“I think you’re very beautiful.”
“Am I more beautiful than Joanna?”
“you’re both very beautiful.”
“Who else do I have to worry about?” she said.
“You don’t have to worry about anyone,” I said.
“Not even Joanna?”
“Of course not. I want you to meet her one day. Once this is all over with—”
“Oh, I’d love to meet her,” Sarah said, and suddenly she kissed me.
I didn’t know whether Jake was watching us or not.
I didn’t care.
I knew only that I had never been kissed like that in my life. Not as a boy, not as a man. There was fierceness in that kiss... urgency... anger... unimaginable passion. I felt for a moment as though a succubus had attached itself to my mouth, trying to draw the very breath of life from me. Sarah’s hands were at the back of my neck; I could feel her fingernails digging into my flesh, feel her teeth on my tongue. I fully expected to taste blood in my mouth. And then she pulled away from me.
And smiled.
And said, “You’d better be true to me, Matthew.”
11
On the day I was to accompany Sarah to Southern Medical, it occurred to Bloom that he had overlooked something obvious.
Both he and Rawles had been working on the assumption that someone who owned a chauffeur-driven Cadillac had sent his or her car and driver to pick up Tracy Kilbourne on the day she’d moved out of her shack on stilts.
But, instead, why couldn’t Tracy have done a very simple thing?
Pick up the phone — she still had a phone when she was living next door to Harvey Wallbanger and his charming lady Lizzie — dial one of the limousine-rental services in Calusa, and ask for a chauffeur-driven car to pick her up.
“Smart, smart, dumb,” Bloom said out loud, and once again both detectives hit the telephone book.
There are only three limousine-rental businesses in all of Calusa. Maybe there aren’t very many funerals down here, an unlikely conjecture when one considers the age of many of the citizens. But surely there are weddings galore, although my partner Frank maintains that rednecks never marry, they merely mate. Nonetheless, there are only three limo services, and one of these is called Luxury Limousine, and the man Bloom spoke to there was named Arthur Hawkins. Hawkins’s telephone voice sounded either British or affected, Bloom couldn’t tell which. When advised that Bloom was working a homicide, Hawkins said, “Oh dear.”
Bloom filled him in.
He was trying to locate a black Cadillac limousine that had picked up a girl named Tracy Kilbourne at 207 Heron Lagoon at 10:00 a.m. on the morning of July 5 last year.
“Oh dear,” Hawkins said. “That was quite some time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bloom said, “but I was hoping—”
“Oh, we have records, indeed we do,” Hawkins said. “Hillary!” he shouted. “Might I have the file for last July, please? Could you hold on a moment?” he said into the phone and again shouted, “Hillary!”
Bloom waited.
When Hawkins came back on the line, he said, “Yes, indeed.”
There was a long silence on the line. Bloom continued waiting. Had Hawkins’s “Yes, indeed” meant that he had found what Bloom was looking for, or merely that he was now in possession of last July’s file?
“A Miss Tracy Kilbourne,” Hawkins said at last. “Two-oh-seven Heron Lagoon. Ten a.m. last July fifth. She requested a stretch limo, said she had a lot of luggage. That the one?”
Bloom took a deep breath.
“Where did you take her?” he asked.
In the state of Florida there are undoubtedly eight thousand condominium developments called Seascape. The one on Whisper Key in Calusa was relatively new. It had been completed for occupancy only last April — three months before a car from Luxury Limousine had deposited Tracy Kilbourne and her luggage on its doorstep. Situated on a full two hundred feet of choice Calusa shoreline, it offered a white-sand beach that ran the length of the property, an almost Olympic-size swimming pool, six tennis courts, a shopping arcade, an on-premises gourmet French restaurant, and a price tag of $625,000 for a two-bedroom apartment like Tracy’s, which was located on one of the choice floors. The quarterly maintenance fee on this apartment was $1,813.12. The smallest apartment here — a one-bedroom broom closet — went for $300,000. All of this Bloom learned from the managing director, a startlingly beautiful black woman named Tabitha Hayes, with whom Cooper Rawles fell immediately in love.
It is easy to fall in love on the first day of May in the state of Florida.
Tabitha Hayes kept licking her lips as she talked to the two cops; Rawles later referred to her as Candy Lips. Rawles wasn’t married, so Bloom guessed it was okay, his falling in love so fast and so hard. Tabitha told them she knew Tracy Kilbourne personally, but she hadn’t seen her around for some time now. It was her guess that someone as wealthy and beautiful as the resident in 106 undoubtedly had condos or villas or yachts or whatever all over the world, and rarely spent much time in any one place.
“What makes you think she was wealthy?” Bloom asked.
“She arrived in a big stretch limo,” Tabitha said, “even though she owns a nice little Mercedes-Benz convertible.”
“She owned a car?” Rawles said, surprised. Their check with Motor Vehicles had indicated no automobile registered in Tracy Kilbourne’s name.
“Still here, if you’d care to see it,” Tabitha said. “Any resident at Seascape has his own two-car garage. Miss Kilbourne’s has been in the garage for months now.”
“How many months?” Bloom asked.
“Six, seven? As I said, I haven’t seen her in a long while.”
Tabitha’s eyes reminded Rawles of coal. Rich, loamy, bituminous coal. She rolled those eyes at him now and asked, “What’s the problem, anyway? Why are you looking for her?”