“Isn’t it great? There’s a sleeping loft upstairs, if you want to take a look.”
The bed was unmade, but she paid little notice to that. What she noticed were the skylights. Even more light. She could not imagine what it would be like to live here. Sketching every morning by the dawn’s pure light. Jogging on the private beach. Compared to this, her house was like being locked inside a cave.
“Yum, I could get used to this way fast,” she commented as she descended the narrow staircase.
“So bring your sketchpad with you next time. Stay a while.”
She stiffened, narrowing her eyes at him. “You just said what?”
“You do sketch, don’t you?”
Des cocked her head at him, hands on her hips. A pose she did not like. It was strictly Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son. She crossed her arms instead and said, “Now how did you know that?”
“The charcoal under your middle fingernail. You dig your nail into the stick. My wife did that, too. Same nail.”
She glanced down at it. It was barely noticeable. This was one very observant white man. Scarily so.
“I’d like to see your work sometime,” he said with genuine interest.
“It’s just something I do for myself,” she responded guardedly.
“That’s generally the best stuff, don’t you think?”
She let his comment go by, at a loss for how he had suddenly made her feel so off balance and exposed. She did not like this feeling. She did not like it at all. She edged over nearer to the fire.
“Can I get you a sweater?” he asked, following her. “Nice warm sweater?”
“Naw, I’m fine.”
“You are not. You’re shivering. It can get really damp out here. Gets right into your bones. How about a cup of coffee?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Berger.” Now he was making her feel girlish and helpless. Something else she really did not like.
“Suit yourself. But if you catch cold, don’t blame me.”
“I never get colds,” she said sharply, seizing back control of the interview. “I understand you work for a newspaper.”
“That’s correct,” he said, flopping down in a worn armchair.
“You planning to write about the discovery of Niles Seymour’s body?”
He shook his head. “I’m not that kind of writer-I’m a film critic.”
“Is that right? I don’t believe I’ve ever met a film critic before.” She showed him her dimples, anxious to get him talking. “How does someone end up in that line of work?”
“I get asked that fairly regularly,” he replied. “I don’t know how. Or why. I only know that something very unusual happened to me the very first time I walked into a movie theater.”
“That was what, Mr. Berger?”
“I discovered that I come alive in the dark,” he said. “Not so much like a vampire but more like an exotic form of fungus. A darkened movie theater is my natural habitat. I spent my entire childhood there. Everything I know in life I found out in movie theaters. James Cagney showed me what nerve was, Cary Grant charm, Audrey Hepburn grace. Marlene Dietrich taught me how to bend the rules. Robert Mitchum taught me how to break them.” He paused now, glancing around at his little house of light. “This place here, this is not me. My being on this island is what screenwriters call Imposed Behavior.”
“Imposed Behavior?” she repeated. “What does that mean?”
He stared at her blankly. “You never heard of Imposed Behavior?”
“What I’m saying.”
“That’s when a character purposely makes himself do something that goes against his nature because, for some vital personal reason, he thinks he needs to. Like when Joel McCrea became a hobo in Sullivan’s Travels.”
“Never saw it.”
“You never saw it?” he exclaimed excitedly. “God, are you in for a treat! It’s one of the great screwball comedies of all time. And then it becomes unbelievably sad. And then it becomes unbelievably funny again. Preston Sturges directed it. That scene in the black church near the end, when they roll the cartoon, I sob uncontrollably every time.”
Des raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m standing here thinking I’ve never met anyone like you before.”
He smiled at her. “Already we have something in common-I’ve never met a woman who’s a lieutenant in the Major Crimes Squad before. I really like your locks. You probably hear that all the time.”
“All the time,” she said brusquely. He was trying to do it again-turn the conversation back on her. “Were you acquainted with Niles Seymour?”
“Never met him. Heard a lot about him, though.”
“Such as?”
“Such as he was a virtual prick. Everyone on Big Sister hated him.”
“Including Mrs. Seymour?”
“He ran off on her, didn’t he? Or at least she thought he had.”
“Were you acquainted with Mrs. Seymour before you moved in here?”
“Yes, I was.”
Des raised her chin at him. “For how long?”
“I met her several days before-when she showed me the place.”
She stared at him stonily. Now he was jamming her. “Are you two involved?”
“I’m not involved with anyone,” he stated quietly.
“Uh-hunh. In the short time that you’ve been here, has anything struck you as curious or out of the ordinary? Anything at all?”
“Well, yeah,” he replied, leaning forward in his chair. “A couple of things.”
“Such as…?”
Mitch Berger told her that someone had purposely locked him in the crawl space under the house. He opened the trap door for her and flashed a light down there. It was a dark, shallow earthen pit. A horrible place to be confined in.
“Maybe Seymour’s killer was trying to get me to leave,” he suggested. “Scare me off because he was scared I’d dig up the garden and find the body. I did ask Dolly if I could have a garden when I first looked at the place. There’s no telling who she…” He trailed off a moment, scratching his head. “Bud Havenhurst… Of course!”
“What about him?”
“He was dead set against me moving in here. He even told me that he’d tried to talk Dolly out of renting me the place.”
“Interesting,” she said, nodding her head. “And what about Tuck Weems? Would he have known that you intended to dig up the garden?”
“Most likely. This is the kind of place where if one person knows something everybody knows it.”
You said there were a couple of things, Mr. Berger.”
“Seymour’s prescriptions. He left them behind. I noticed them there in Dolly’s bathroom. I thought it was a little strange. If you had left town for good, wouldn’t you have taken your pills with you?”
“Which bathroom was this?”
“Top of the stairs.” After a moment’s hesitation he added, “Dolly is on some serious medication.”
“Such as?”
“Such as lithium…”
Des waited, watching him carefully now. He had more to tell her. She sensed it. She knew it. “Something else, Mr. Berger?”
He started to respond but instead shook his head at her, unwilling to spill it.
She wondered what it was. And why he’d clammed up. But she did not press him, convinced that she would get no more out of Mitch Berger, New York film critic, at the present time. She merely thanked him for his time and started for the door.
“Do you think one of the islanders killed him, Lieutenant?” he asked her.
“I don’t do that.”
“You don’t do what?”
“Spitball.”
“But you must have a gut feeling.”
“I must. I do. Only I don’t share my gut feelings with members of the working press.”
“But I told you-I’m not a reporter. I’m just curious.”
Des paused at the door, gazing at him intently. “Mr. Berger, what we have here is a situation where someone has lost control, okay? It has been my experience that when an individual loses control once he or she may very likely lose control again. Consequently, my advice to you is this…”