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“How long before he died?”

“Really” — she tossed her head—” I think we’ve talked about it enough. Let’s talk about you and me some more.”

“Quit asking for me to slap it out of you, Rachie. I’ll take the other alternative and let the cops talk to you.”

“About Ichiro?”

“What else?”

“Oh, be immovable, you big, ugly cluck! You stink of sweat anyway.”

“Ichiro,” I said, an edge in my voice.

“He came by my house the day he was killed. Wanted to know if I was going on a yachting party the next day, Sunday. That’s all there was to it. Are you satisfied?”

“What time was it?”

“Afternoon.”

“He say anything about how he was going to spend the rest of the day?”

“Nope. He had the fidgets. I gathered he was going to meet somebody.”

“Where?”

“How should I know? Next thing I heard of him, he’d been killed at the Yamashita beach house a few hours later.” She put her hands on her hips and tilted her head. “You know, maybe I got my wires crossed about you. Maybe, after all, you’re just a square, inhibited, puritanical cluck.” She giggled. “And all the time I was thinking of you the way some of the creamy women of ancient Rome must have thought of the big barbarians who came sweeping out of the north.”

“We were talking about Ichiro.”

“Yes, and I’m bored.”

“Jail would be a lot more boring.”

“How could you put me in jail?”

“On a charge of soliciting,” I said. “All I have to do is pick up the phone.”

“Great,” she said with enthusiasm. “Sounds like a real diversion. Go ahead and call your cops, Ed.”

I stood fingering the lobe of my ear. No wonder Victor Cameron was gray with defeat.

Mentally, I sighed.

Then I slapped the hell out of her.

She fell against the day bed and half-lay, her arm supporting her, her skirt tight about her knees. She held her reddened cheek, and I said, “You ever see Ichiro with a blonde woman?”

“Yes, Ed.”

“When?”

“Two times, I think.”

“He bring her to parties?”

“No, he was alone with her both times. I just happened to see him. Once, driving with her in his car, the second time in a restaurant one night.”

“Who was she?”

“I don’t know. Honest, I don’t.”

“Did anything happen to her?”

“In what way?”

“Did she die or get killed?”

“Not that I know of.”

She sat up and looked at me meekly. “Why do you ask a question like that, Ed?”

“I was thinking of a hair from a dead woman’s head,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.”

“Yes, Ed.”

“Would you know this woman if you saw her again?”

“Isn’t she dead? You just said—”

“In the event she’s still alive, would you recognize her?”

“I think so.”

“You know the places Ichiro frequented?”

“Some of them.”

“Fine. Go powder your nose and comb your hair. We’re going out. To some joints.”

“Yes, Ed.”

We went from the sibilant rattlesnake rasp of maracas to the neurotic wailing of an alto sax to the frenzied throb of Dixieland drums. From a tiny cellar club in Ybor City to the penthouse club in a fine hotel. In every smoky hole we looked at blondes, all shapes and sizes, from bleached, leathery-faced sluts to pretty, vapid, misty young things. I had the small, clear picture of Ichiro which I’d copped from the Yamashita summerhouse. One by one, managers, waiters, bus boys shook their heads. Whether they’d known the pictured man or not, the answer was the same. None remembered him in the company of a blonde.

The night indicated that the blonde for whom we were looking didn’t exist.

But a ball game isn’t finished in the first inning. I knew she did exist, alive or dead.

She had existed for Ichiro, but for some reason he had hidden her existence with care. The possible number of reasons offered a big, new headache. She might have been respectably married. Or hiding from something, afraid. Or staying under cover because she was part of a thing Ichiro didn’t want broadcast from the rooftops, a thing he was planning or a thing he’d already done. Or it could be the other way, and Ichiro could have been part of a thing she didn’t want broadcast.

Maybe the reason for the discretion had brought them together. Again, the opposite could be true, with the reason developing only because their lives had come together.

Three A.M. The heat lay sticky over the city and a mist rose like the breath of a torpid swamp as I drove the rented car across the Hillsborough River.

I took Bayshore Boulevard, and when I turned off on the spur and bridge that led to Davis Islands, Rachie said, “I don’t want to go home.”

“It’s late.”

“Oh, no. It’s early. Nice and early in the morning. I’m just getting my energy up.”

“Well,” I said, “you can swim it off when you get home.”

Her breath hissed at me. I felt her eyes, angry and hot with rebellion, study my face in the dim glow of the dash lamp.

She decided I meant what I said.

When I braked the car in front of her house, she slammed the door open. “Now I know.”

“Do you?”

“Sure. My first impression was all wrong. You’re a washed-out, tired old man.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“I don’t care if I never see you again.”

“Good night, Rachie.”

“You go to the devil!”

I waited until she was inside the house. As I reached for the ignition key, a male voice said, “Rivers.”

He came from the shrubbery lining the driveway. In the wan moonlight, his face was the gray ghost of a face that had belonged to a one-time man who’d called himself Victor Cameron.

His slow steps carried him the short distance to my side of the car.

“I was waiting up,” he said. “I saw the headlights of the car and had time to step behind the shrubs.”

I waited.

“You’ve had her out a long time, Rivers,” he said.

“I didn’t ask her out.”

“I guess not,” he said heavily. He wiped the back of his hand across his face. “But the rest of us — we have a responsibility for a person like her.”

“I brought her home unsullied, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Do me a favor, Rivers, and stay away from her.”

“You do me one,” I said, “and keep her away from me.”

He looked at me dully. Then he turned toward the house, moving with the attitude of a man whose flesh can repeat a long journey but whose spirit cannot.

Later, stretched in my shorts while my sweat puddled the day bed, I forgot Victor Cameron and sick daughter. I wondered if Nick Martin were sleeping. Nights, sometimes, were when pain came slipping through the hell gates war had opened in his flesh.

Marvel as I might at his endurance and self-mastery, I knew that each passing hour without some word of hope brought the final breaking point that much nearer.

Nick had managed to remain a relative stranger to self-pity, regret, bitterness. But no man is shut alone in a cell. He’s caged by more than steel. He’s trapped in a timeless void with all the shadows he’s accumulated during his life.

If Nick was to be helped, it must be soon.

Chapter 10

There are about a million people in the Greater Tampa Bay area. They work in stores, offices, or the light, airy, air-conditioned, smokeless factories industrial commissions have wooed to Florida. They play in water that sparks with frosty phosphorescence at night, on white beaches where the sand is as fine as talc, in cool cocktail lounges and pastel stucco and glass homes. The dregs among the million live in a squalor and filth Mr. Average American is likely to associate with the backward areas of Puerto Rico or Mexico, but never with the rich, well-fed giant of the United States.