He walked down to the nurses' station.
"That was quick," she remarked.
"I'm known for it. You're sure about that dinner invitation? I know a place where they do the world's most aphrodisiac tamales."
"I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I went to a palmist recently, and she made it quite clear that my future doesn't include Mexican meals with law enforcement officers."
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"That's because she was predicting the wrong line. She was predicting your head line instead of your heart line."
"No, she wasn't. She was predicting your cheesy pickup line."
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CHAPTER FOUR
Decker drove back to the Maitland house. Hicks was standing under a battery of floodlights outside with three uniformed officers and two more detectives from Customer Service Zone Central, John Banks and Newton Fry. The television trucks were still there, as well as scores of milling spectators. The evening was sticky and warm and smelled of live oaks and traffic fumes.
Decker ducked under the POLICE LINE tape. "So . . . no weapon yet?"
Hicks wiped a white smudge of plaster dust from the end of his nose. "I just don't get it. We've pretty much demolished the whole house and I'm damned if I can understand how Maitland got rid of it."
"I still think there must have been a third person present," Banks said. He was short and squat with a chest like a pit bull terrier. "I know Maitland insists that there wasn't, but what kind of mental state was he in? Or maybe he's covering for somebody."
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Hicks shook his head. "We didn't find any footprints or handprints, apart from Mr. and Mrs. Maitland's. If there was a third person, how the hell did he or she get out of the house without leaving any tracks?"
"Maybe they got out before the blood started spraying around too much. Two-foot-long knives don't just disappear into thin air, do they?"
Decker checked his watch. It was 7:46 already and he was supposed to be meeting Mayzie at 8:00. "Look," he said, "let's call it a night and get back on to it in the morning. We need to question Maitland again before we can take this any further, and right now he's not exactly compos mentis."
He was just about to leave when a uniformed officer came up to him and said, "Excuse me, Lieutenant. There's a lady here wants to talk to you."
"Oh yes?"
"Says she was walking past here just after two o'clock this afternoon. Says her daughter saw somebody coming out of the house."
"Really?" Decker frowned shortsightedly at the crowd. "Bring her over, would you?"
The officer lifted the tapes and ushered over a middle-aged woman in a green flowery dress. She had fraying gray hair that even a dozen frantically crisscrossed bobby pins had failed to secure in a bun. She was accompanied by a plump teenage girl with Down's syndrome. The girl was dressed in a tight beige cardigan and a brown pleated skirt and she clung to her mother's arm.
"Hi," Decker said. "My name's Lieutenant Martin. My officer tells me that your daughter may have witnessed somebody coming out of this house this afternoon."
The woman gave an enthusiastic nod. "We didn't think anything about it until we saw it on the news, did we, Sandra?"
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The girl covered her face with her hand so that only her milky blue eyes looked out. "Sandra can be very shy sometimes," the woman explained.
Decker said, "What time did you see this person exactly?" "Just past two o'clock. I come to collect Sandra from her
art class at two and we always walk back this way." "Can you describe him?"
"Well, no. I didn't see him. Only Sandra did. She tugged my sleeve and said, 'Look at that man, Mom, don't you think he's so scary?' "
Decker frowned. "Sandra saw him but you didn't? How come?"
"Not didn't, Lieutenant. Couldn't."
"Excuse me, Mrs.—"
"Plummer, Eunice Plummer. And it's Ms."
"Okay, I'm sorry, Ms. Plummer. I don't think I'm quite following you here. Sandra said, 'Look at that scary man,' but you couldn't see him?"
"I can't always see the people that Sandra sees. I don't have her gift."
Decker thought, Oh, shit. Another psychic. He thought they ought to make it illegal for impressionable people to see movies like The Others and The Sixth Sense.
He took off his glasses and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. "Does Sandra see people very frequently, Ms. Plummer? I mean, people that you can't see?"
"Not often, no. She saw a preacher once, outside St. John's Church, in the graveyard. And then she saw a black woman in a funny hat, by Mason's Hall."
"I see. Has she talked to her doctor about this?"
Eunice Plummer looked puzzled. "Why should she talk to her doctor about it?"
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"Well . . . it must be some kind of a symptom, right?" "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. A symptom of what, exactly?" Decker tried to put it diplomatically. "Seeing things, you
know, having hallucinations . . ."
"Lieutenant, Sandra doesn't have hallucinations. She sees people that others can't, that's all. It's a facility, not a deficiency. It's like dogs hearing very high notes that are way beyond the range of the human ear. Not that I would ever compare Sandra to a dog."
"Of course. Well—I'd just like to thank you and Sandra for being so public-spirited."
"Don't you want to know what he looked like?"
"I'm sorry?"
"The man," Eunice Plummer insisted. "Don't you want to know what he looked like?"
"I, ah ... I don't really think that a description is going to be necessary at this stage. Thanks all the same."
Sandra slowly lowered the hand that had been covering her face. Her cheeks were flushed and there was a large thumbprint on her glasses. "He was dressed all in gray," she blurted out.
Decker didn't know what to say, but Eunice Plummer coaxed her. "Go on, Sandra, tell Lieutenant Martin exactly what the man was wearing."
"He wore a gray hat like a howboy hat and a gray hoat with wings on. And he had a big black beard."
"I see," Decker said, with a tight, embarrassed smile. "That's very helpful, Sandra."
"And he had boots."
"Boots, terrific."
"Aren't you going to write this down?" Eunice Plummer asked. "She saw him, you know. She saw him as plain as day."
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"Oh, sure," Decker said. He took out his notebook and a ballpoint pen that he had liberated from the Berkeley Hotel. While Eunice Plummer watched him, he jotted down Gray. Hat. Coat. Wings?? Boots.
"Big black beard," she added.
"Big black beard," Decker acknowledged.
"And a sword," Sandra put in.
Decker looked up. "Sword?"
"He had a sword. He wasn't carrying it. It was hanging down." She indicated with a little hand play that it had been suspended from his belt.
Decker closed his notebook. Sandra was staring at him and her expression was so fierce and unblinking that he almost believed her.
"When you first saw this man, where was he?" he asked. Sandra pointed to the porch. "He walked through the door."
"So the door was actually open?"
She vigorously shook her head.
"Sandra—how did he walk through the door if it wasn't open?"
"He walked through the door," she repeated. She pronounced it, emphatically, har000.
"All right . . . he walked through the door and then what?"
"He went down the steps and then he went that way." She pointed westward, toward North Twenty-sixth Street.
Eunice Plummer said, "She never lies, Lieutenant. She's incapable of telling any untruth, even if she knows she's going to get punished."
Decker said, "You go to art class, Sandra? Do you like to draw?"