"And drowned.”
"Yeah.”
"Is what Davey Fames told us," Brown said.
"We were long gone when it happened," Roselli said. "We didn't find out about it till the next day. Calusa cops came around, wanted to know if we'd seen anything, heard anything, you know how cops are.”
They were sitting not far from a small inflatable plastic pool behind Roselli's development house on Sand's Spit. His two little girls were in the water, splashing around. Brown was wondering why there had to be kids making noise every time they talked to somebody. Roselli's wife, a somewhat overweight brunette wearing wedgies and a brown maillot, had gone into the house to mix some lemonade.
Roselli was wearing one of those skimpy swimsuits that made it look like all he had on was a shiny black jockstrap. Brown wondered how he had the balls, so to speak, to wear such a suit in front of his two little girls, couldn't have been older than two or three. Roselli seemed oblivious. Black hair curling on his narrow chest, sweat beaded on his forehead under matching curly hair, he reclined in a lawn chair, smiling at the day. Brown wondered if he'd done a few lines just before they arrived. He had the look of a man serenely oblivious.
"How come you didn't mention it when we were here?" he asked.
"I didn't think it was important," Roselli said, and shrugged.
"Man drowns, you didn't think it was important?”
"It had nothing to do with us. We were transients. Play the music, take the money, go our merry way.”
"How many places you been where a man drowned?" Brown asked.
"Not very many. Not any, in fact.”
"But you didn't think it was important enough to mention?”
"I'm sorry. I just didn't think of it.”
"Did the drowning have anything to do with Katie's decision?" Carella asked.
There was a slight edge to his voice; he didn't like Roselli's choice of swim wear either. "What decision was that?”
“To leave the band.”
“To call it quits.”
"To go back to the order.”
"I have no idea what prompted her decision," Roselli said "Josie!" he called. "No splashing, honey.”
His wife was coming out of the house, carrying a tray with a pitcher and several glasses on it. The screen door slammed shut behind her.
She put the tray down on the table, said, "Help yourselves, please,”
and then went to sit in a plastic folding chair near the pool where her daughters splashed and squealed. Occasionally, she glanced back to where the detectives and her husband were sitting, a concerned look on her face. They figured their presence here a second time was making her nervous. The daughters seemed a little skittish, too. Altogether, Brown and Carella sensed an almost palpable air of tension around the pool.
But four years ago a man had drowned.
And a week ago Friday a nun had been strangled in the park.
"You said you were long gone when it happened," Carella prompted. "Can you tell us ... ?”
"I'll try to remember the sequence," Roselli said. Odd choice of language, Carella thought. Sequence. "We played three shows that Thursday night," Roselli said. "That was because Charlie ran some ads.
And also because we were damn good, he said modestly, but we were, truly. After that tour, if Katie hadn't left the band ... but that's another story. What's done is done, what's gone is gone.”
He lifted the pitcher, poured lemonade for all of them. From the pool, Mrs. Roselli and the little girls watched. Brown felt the way he had in Dr. Lowenthal's office, when the woman in the green hat kept staring at them.
"The last show ended at two in the morning. We'd planned to drive up to Calusa the following day, sometime in the afternoon, set up when we got there. This was the Friday before Labor Day, we were scheduled to play that whole long weekend in Calusa, and then head north again. But we were all so high none of us could sleep," Roselli said. "Well, except for Tote, he could sleep through World War III. He went back to his cabin, but the rest of us couldn't stop jabbering. Have you ever felt that way? Where everything was so exciting, you just couldn't calm down afterward?”
Like after a shoot-out in a bank, Brown thought. You answer a 10-30, and there are six guys in masks holding Uzis on the tellers, and all hell breaks loose. Like after that. When you're drinking saloon beer with the other guys and you can't go home, you can't even think of going home, this is where it is, this is what you shared. Like that.
"It was Davey who suggested that we pick up our pay, pack the van, and drive up to Calusa right then. Two-thirty, three in the morning, drive the hundred and fifty miles, whatever it was, go straight to sleep when we got there. We all thought it was a terrific idea. So Alan and I started packing the van ... he's dead now, you know. Died last month.
Of AIDS. We all went to the funeral. Not Katie, of course, who the hell knew where she was? Disappeared from the face of the earth. Well, sure, a nun. Sister Mary Vincent. But who knew that?”
"So you and Alan were packing the van," Brown said. "Yeah. Carrying the instruments out while Davey and Katie went to get our pay. What a lot of these club owners did, they paid the musicians in cash. We'd been there a full week, there was a sizable amount of money due. This was now close to three in the morning, the parking lot was empty, you could hear the night insects racketing down by the water ...”
From where he and Alan are loading the instruments into the van, Sal can see Davey and Katie going into Charlie Custer's office. The air here in the Everglades is always laden with moisture; the two musicians are sweating heavily as they carry gear from the bandstand to the van.
Down here in Florida, they've been performing in blue slacks and identical T-shirts with alternating blue and white stripes. Katie wears a blue mini and the T-shirt without a bra, the better to demonstrate her singing prowess. They are wearing the uniforms now, the trousers wrinkled, the T-shirts stained with perspiration as they pack for the trip north.
Over the past several months, they have learned how to pack the van most efficiently, fitting in the drums, the speakers, the amps, the guitar cases, and the keyboard like pieces in a Chinese box. Davey's drums are the biggest problem, of course. They take up the most room.
Besides, he is enormously fussy about how they are handled and usually insists that he himself be the one to pack them. Back and forth the pair of them go, Alan and Sal, from bandstand to van, Sal and Alan, to the rooms for the suitcases, Alan and Sal knocking on Tote's door to wake him up, and lastly going to the kitchen to make sandwiches for the long drive north. Out on the water, they can hear the splash of an alligator.
It takes them perhaps half an hour to finish all they have to do. Alan gets behind the wheel and honks the horn. In the stillness of the night, it sounds like the cry of one of Charlie Custer's swamp critters. Tote comes running out of his cabin and tosses his suitcase into the back of the van. A moment later, Davey and Katie come out of Custer's office. Alan starts the car. Climbing onto the back seat, Davey says, "Got the bread, let's go." Katie sits beside him and pulls her T-shirt away from her body, encouraging the cool flow from the air conditioner.
"We made it to Calusa in an hour and forty minutes," Roselli tells them now. "That afternoon, we found out Charlie had fallen in the river and drowned. And got eaten by alligators?”
They did not reach Davey Fames again until nine o'clock on Monday morning. He explained that he'd been at the beach all day yesterday, and had gone directly to dinner afterward "I like to check on the competition," he said. "Didn't get home till around ten. Were you trying to reach me?”
"On and off," Carella said. "I wonder if we can stop by now.”
"Oh?" Fames said. "Something come up?,”
"Just a few questions we'd like to ask.”