She was glad that Leona had left the door unlocked.
Glad when she saw Leona walking away from the car without so much as a backward glance or a fond fare-thee-well.
The name on the mailbox outside the house was COLMAN.
The time on Toots’s dashboard clock was three minutes to eight.
The meeting of the League to Protect Florida Wildlife was scheduled to begin at eight o’clock.
Toots waited until a quarter past eight, and then she approached the green Jag, looked up and down the street, and swiftly opened the door on the driver’s side.
She reached under the dash at once, and pulled the hood release, lever.
She closed the car door, looked up and down the street again, walked to the front of the car. unsnapped the hood, and lifted it.
It took her three minutes to splice her wires into the car’s electrical system.
It took another three minutes to run them back to the panel behind the dash and feed them through into the car.
Her heart was racing.
Gently she lowered the hood, pressed firmly down on it to lock it, and then got back into the car.
She fished under the dashboard for the ends of her wires.
She attached them to the tiny microphone and fastened it in place under the center of the dash.
Unlike the FM transmitters she had planted m the Summerville house, the bug shed just planted would not require a battery change every day; the battery it used for its power was the cars own. In dense city traffic — which one sometimes ran into in Calusa at the height of the season — the effective transmitting range of the bug was a bit more than a block. On the open road. Toots could figure on at least a quarter of a mile.
She did not get a chance to test the equipment until a bit more than an hour later.
Leona Summerville left the meeting at nine thirty-seven by Toots’s dashboard clock. When she got into the Jag, the receiver in Toots’s car picked up the sound of the door closing. When she started the car, the receiver picked up this. too. Several seconds later, when Leona turned on her radio. Toots heard a disc jockey doing a commercial, his voice coming over sharp and clear. She smiled; the bug was working. She smiled again when the music began; the DJ was playing one of her favorite songs, the theme from The Summer of ’42.
Leona seemed in a hurry to get someplace, driving far too fast for a residential neighborhood. Good. Toots thought. Let’s get there. When the Jag hit U.S. 41. Toots closed in behind it. She dropped back a bit when Leona pulled into the parking lot at Southway Mall. Kept driving through the lot to the very end, and then swung around to the back of the E.G. Daniels department store. Toots eased up on the accelerator. The store’s own lot back here. Not as well lighted as the main lot out front. Haifa dozen of the store’s huge delivery trucks angle-parked against the rear wall of the building. Near one of the trucks, parked in its shadow, a black Corvette.
Leona was parking her car.
Toots drove on by.
She caught just a glimpse of a man sitting at the wheel of the Corvette.
In the rearview mirror, she saw Leona running toward the Corvette, skirts flying.
She drove the Chevy around toward the front of the store, circled back, and picked up the Corvette just as it came around the side of the building. She did not close on it too quickly. Kept her distance. But she didn’t want to lose it, either.
The Corvette nosed through the night like a submarine, running silent, running black, running fast.
Heading toward Sarasota.
Whenever oncoming headlights struck the car’s windshield, Toots saw the silhouettes of two heads, one male, one female. The woman’s head — Leona’s — was turned in profile toward the man’s.
Picking up speed now as the traffic thinned on the outskirts of the city.
Toots’s dashboard clock read a quarter to ten.
Five minutes later, the Corvette pulled into a roadside motel called CaluSara, presumably because it was midway between Calusa and Sarasota. Toots drove right on by. Kept driving for half a mile, made a left turn into a hot-dog joint, moved out onto 41 again, and approached the motel from the opposite direction. Made a cautious left turn into the motel parking lot. The black Corvette was parked outside room 27. Nobody in the car now.
Toots drove past it.
There was an MD plate on it.
Toots memorized the number.
She drove all the way to the far end of the lot, and then turned the car so that it was facing 41.
She wrote down the number.
Her dashboard clock read ten o’clock sharp.
At twenty minutes past ten, Leona and her doctor friend — else how come the MD plates? — came out of the room and walked swiftly to the Corvette.
Doors slammed.
The car started.
Toots followed them back to the E.G. Daniels parking lot, where Leona got into her own car and then drove directly home.
Toots wondered why Leona — with the alibi of a wildlife meeting tucked safely in her bonnet — had squandered the night on a quickie.
11. This is the house that Jack built…
Warren was appalled.
“You did what?” he said into the telephone.
Toots told him again about the bugs she’d planted in the Summerville house and in Leona’s car. She seemed very proud of herself.
“You are not to go back inside that house again,” Warren said.
“I have to go back in. The recorder…”
“I don’t care if the recorder rots and rusts on that shelf, you are not to go back inside that house again, do you understand me?”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Grunt once if you heard me,” Warren said.
He was very tired. He would never be able to understand why a snowstorm in Denver could cause departure delays in New York. It simply did not make sense to him. If an airplane got snowed in out there in Colorado, why should that affect a flight going from New York to Tampa? Did the airline have only one plane? Did they use that same plane for all their flights? In which case, snow in the Rockies would naturally cause a three-hour delay on the Eastern seaboard.
Warren had got to Tampa at two in the morning.
It had taken the taxi another hour and a half to get him to Calusa.
At a quarter to four, he called Matthew, waking him up to tell him what he had learned from Lucy Strong. Matthew was pleased that Warren had called him in the wee small hours of the morning. He thanked Warren profusely. Warren then called Toots, who did not like being awakened at ten minutes to four in the morning. Maybe that was why she immediately told him shed broken into the Summerville house and planted a few hundred bugs inside there.
He waited.
“Toots?” he said.
“Yeah.”
Petulantly.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” she said.
“No, I am not pleased.” he said. “You are not to go back in there for those tapes.”
“Those tapes might tell us who the doctor is. Save us the trouble of…”
“What doctor?”
“She got in a car with MD plates last night. A black Corvette. They drove to a motel called CaluSara, spent almost a halt-hour in there together.”