But it was the cops: 'Ms Batory. Lieutenant Wyatt.'
'You're working late,' Anna said.
'We're just wrapping up here,' he said.
'Wrapping up? Did you find out who did it?'
'Afraid not. We did locate his apartment, not much there. Unless we get a break, we're not gonna be able to do much with it. it looks like dope, or just random.'
'So you're giving up?'
'Nobut right now, we've got nothing,' Wyatt said. 'We checked out the ShotShop and I think he might have been killed there. He could've been dropped right out the back window into the water, and the window was unlocked, which it wasn't supposed to be.'
'Was there any blood? He was pretty beat up.'
'Not visible blood, but there was a roll of photo paper in the backyou know, one of those printed scene things?'
'Yeah.'
'Anyway, the owner said it was back there, half unrolled, and now it's gone. Maybe he was killed on the paper, and the paper was thrown out the window. It would've sunk. So we've got crime scene guys looking for blood, and checking around to see if the paper's under the pier, but even if we find it, it won't be much. We're looking for anyone who saw anything, but we haven't found anyone so far.'
'Did you talk to the fishermen out there? There are always a few.'
'Yeah, yeah, and we'll talk to more of them tonight. But listenI didn't call to update you. We found O'Brien's next of kin, an aunt and uncle out in Peru, Indiana. I don't think they're too well off, but, uh. They'd like to talk to you.'
'Me? What for?'
'I think they'd like you to make the arrangements for a funeral and so on.'
She rubbed the back of her neck: 'Aw, jeez.'
'Well, you're the only friend we can find,' Wyatt said. 'There was nothing of value in his apartmentsome electronic gear and an old bike, clothes. Anyway, I didn't want to give them your unlisted phone number, but told them I'd ask you to call back.'
'All right, give me the number.'
Nancy Odum answered the phone in Peru and passed it off to her husband, Martin. Martin Odum said, 'We don't fly, and it's a long way to come to get a stereo set. If you could handle the arrangements, we'd be happy to pay you somethin' for your time.'
'No, that's okay,' Anna said, thinking, No it's not. She'd never arranged a funeral, and hoped she'd never have to.
Martin Odum continued in the same glum tone: 'His mother and father are buried here in Peru, we thought maybe. cremation? We could sprinkle the ashes on their graves. If that'd be okay with you?'
'I'll take care of it,' Anna said. 'He had a few hundred dollars coming from my company, I'll use that for the cremation and to ship the remains. Uh, his stuff, do you want me to sell it? I don't know how much I'd get, but I could send you whatever it is.'
'That'd be nice of you, ma'am.'
They worked out the rest of the melancholy details, the phones making funny satellite sounds; and the Odums sounded as morose as Anna felt. When they were done, she hung up, mixed another drink, thought about making it a double and did.
Back outside, sitting in the canvas chair, she let her mind drift: and it drifted, under the influence of the alcohol, to the last funeral she'd been to, so long ago.
Anna had grown up on a farm in south-central Wisconsin, a 480-acre corn operation that lay in the crook of the Whitewater River, not far from Madison.
Her mother was a piano teacher, and she'd died in an automobile accident when Anna was six. She could still remember the melancholy, almost gothic circumstances of the funeral at the small Baptist church, and the slow procession to the tiny graveyard down the dusty gravel road: how bright and warm the day had been, the red-winged blackbirds just beginning to flock, one particular bird perched on a cattail, looking her in the eye as the procession passed.
Death and music.
Anna was the best pianist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the year she graduated. She moved to UCLA, and the year she took her MFA, she was one of the best two or three in the graduate school. Not good enough. To make it as a concert pianist, she would have had to have been the best in the world, in her year and a year or two before and after. As it wasone of the best at UCLAshe got session gigs movie music.
She still played the hard stuff, out of habit, and, really, out of a kind of trained-in love. But in her one last semiregular gig, Sunday nights at the Kingsborough Hotel, she played a dusty, romantic, out-of-date jazz.
Her mother's music: they'd played a piece of it at her funeral, and all those Wisconsin farm folks had thought it was a wonderful thing.
Too early, half-drunk, Anna went to bed.
Alcohol never brought sleep.
Instead, it released unhappy images from some mental cage, and they prowled through her dreams, kicking old memories back to life. From time to time, half-awake, she'd imagine that she'd just groaned or moaned. At three in the morning, she woke up, looked at the clock, felt herself sweating into the sheets.
At three-fifteen, she heard a noise, and was instantly awake. The noise had a solid reality to it.
Not a dream noise.
Anna slept in a pair of Jockey underpants. She slipped out of bed, groped around for a T-shirt that she'd tossed at a chair, but hadn't found it when she heard the noise again. She moved silently to the head of the stairs, listened.
Tik-tik. scrape.
Back door, she thought. Definitely real. She was getting oriented now, stepped to the nightstand, found the phone. When she picked up the receiver, the dial lighted and she pushed a speed-dial button. Two rings and a man answered on the other end: Jim McMillan, from next door, groggy with sleep. 'What?'
'Jim, this is Anna. We got one: he's right outside my back door.'
'Holy cow.' Then she heard him speak to Hobie: 'It's Anna, she's got one outside her back door,' and Hobie: 'Okay.'
Jim said to Anna, 'We'll call the cops and start the web. You lay low.' A little excitement in his voice now.
'Yeah. Be careful.'
Life in Venice was getting better, but there'd been some tough times; still were. Their version of the Neighborhood Watch was a little heavier-duty than most, knowing that the cops would always take a while to get there. Jim would start a calling tree, which would branch out over the surrounding two blocks, and in five minutes there'd be people all over the street.
But she had to get through the five minutes.
Anna had both a handgun and a fish-whacker in the bedroom. There'd be people around, so she went for the whacker, which she kept against the back side of the chest of drawers. On the way, in the dark, she stepped on the T-shirt, picked it up, pulled it over her head. She found the whacker. and heard a windowpane break.
Quietly. Like somebody had put pressure against it to crack it, and then tried to pick out the piecesbut at least one piece had fallen onto the kitchen floor.
Damn them. They'd hurt her house.
Anna went to the stairs, began to creep down. The whacker was made of hickory, looked like a dwarf baseball bat, and was meant to put ocean game fish out of their misery. Creek had drilled out the business end, melted a few ounces of lead sinker on his barbeque grill and poured the lead into the bat. If anyone was hit hard with it, surgery would follow.
At the bottom of the stairs, Anna heard another piece of glass crack. She moved to the open arch between the living room and the kitchen, risked a quick peek. The obscure figure of a man hovered outside the back window, three feet to the right of the door. He'd done something to the window, and had then broken out a piece. As she watched, a hand came through the broken pane, and a needle-thin ray of light played across the inside of the door. He was trying to see the lock.
Even if the posse arrived in the next couple of minutes, she didn't want to be trapped inside the house with some crack-smoked goof. She bunched herself in the arch, eight feet from the door. The hand with the light disappeared, and then, in the near darkness, she saw another movement. He was reaching far inside, trying to get to the deadbolt. She waited until the hand was at the door, then launched herself across the room, one big step with the whacker already swinging, and Whack!