“Nope.”
“I wanted to apologize, first of all, for our little misunderstanding the other day. I can see how…”
“Okay.”
The man was a monosyllablist.
“I can see how a person who looked as if he was trying to break into the house…”
“I said okay.”
Three words this time. Not bad. Warren wondered if he’d like to try for four.
“If you’ve got a minute…”
“Sure.”
“… there are a few questions I’d like to ask you.”
“Sure.”
“Mr. Weaver, had you ever known Mr. Leeds to take his boat out for a little moonlight spin?”
“A what?”
“A little moonlight spin.”
“Sure. All the time.”
“You understand what I mean, don’t you?”
“Sure. A little moonlight spin.”
Good. He’d repeated the exact words Stubbs had heard on the telephone. A little moonlight spin. He was making remarkable progress, having come as far as five full words in a row. If Warren could get him up to six, or maybe seven, or maybe even a complete sentence with a subject and a predicate, and from there to a full paragraph — the possibilities were limitless, the horizons boundless.
“What time would you say he went out for these little spins?” he asked.
“Varied.”
Back to single syllable utterences again.
“Seven-thirty?”
“Later.”
“Eight-thirty?”
“Sometimes.”
“What time would you say?”
Say ten, ten-thirty, Warren thought. Say the words ten, ten-thirty.
“Eleven, eleven-thirty,” Weaver said. “That’d be a moonlight spin, around that time. If there was a moon, of course.”
Little bit of humor there. Little bit of jailhouse jokery. And certainly more words than Warren had heard from him since they’d started talking. But Weaver hadn’t said the words Warren wanted to hear, which would have been nice, since ten, ten-thirty was the e.t.a. the caller had given Stubbs on the telephone.
“You weren’t worried when he took the boat out at night, were you?”
“Nope.”
“It being dark and all,”
“Not with a moon.”
More jailhouse jollity. Must’ve been a card out there on the yard, young Ned.
“But when there wasn’t a moon, if he took the boat out for a little moonlight spin when there wasn’t a moon — would that have alarmed you?”
Say the word, Warren thought.
“Alarmed me?”
Bingo.
“Yes. Would that have alarmed you?”
“Nope.”
“How come? You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”
Say it again for me, Warren thought.
“Sure,” Weaver said. “Would I be alarmed.”
Thank you, Warren thought.
“Yes,” he said. “Him being out in the dark and all.”
“Man knows how to run a boat, don’t he?” Weaver said, and Warren could visualize him shrugging on the other end of the line.
“Well, thanks for clearing that up,” he said. “We were a little concerned about it.”
“Why?” Weaver asked.
“Something in the papers the State Attorney sent over,” Warren said.
“Oh,” Weaver said.
“So thanks again, you’ve been a big help.”
“Yeah,” Weaver said, and hung up.
Now, you little prick, Warren thought, let’s see if you were making any phone calls on the night of August thirteenth.
In Chicago when he was a boy, Matthew used to run along the lake, hoping one day to be fast enough to qualify for the track team at school. He’d never got fast enough. Too light for football, too slow for track, he’d opted instead for ice hockey and had broken his leg — or, rather, had it broken for him — during the first game of the season. The leg still hurt when the weather was bad. Like today. Running around the track at the police gymnasium, undisputed and unlimited admission courtesy of Detective Morris Bloom, the leg hurt like hell. But he could feel the pounds melting away.
This morning at eight, after he’d swum a hundred laps in the pool — and in the rain — he’d weighed a hundred and eighty-four pounds. That was close to eighty-four kilos in Rome, where he’d put on some of the weight, and a bit more than thirteen stones in London, where he’d stopped on the way home to see a lawyer friend of his who now spent much of the year in Hawkhurst, Kent. Tomorrow morning, if it didn’t rain, he had another tennis lesson with Kit Howell, who had demolished him last Saturday. This time, Matthew hoped to be at least six pounds lighter and a lot faster on his feet.
The steady pounding of his sneakers on the track’s synthetic surface, rather than lulling him to sleep, provided a rhythmic background to his thoughts. It worked the same way whenever he was at a concert. He wondered why this should be so. Why mindless physical exertion stimulated thought as effectively as sitting in a concert hall with wave after wave of sound washing over him. There were two other runners on the track ahead of him, one a tall, hefty man wearing a black warmup suit, the other a slender man some five feet nine inches tall, wearing a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants, a blue watch cap pulled down over his ears. Matthew did not try to pass either of them. Nor did either of them seem intent on breaking any speed records. The hefty man was out in front, the smaller man some thirty feet behind him, Matthew some thirty feet or so in the rear. They kept up the steady pace, the regular distance between them, like strangers in a big city on a cinder track in a park. But this was indoors at the police gym, with the rain still drilling the streets outside.
He wondered why Trinh had been killed.
This was the single most significant development in the case, the murder of the man who had seen the killer entering an automobile parked at the curb outside Little Asia. This information had been reported in Calusa’s own lovely rag, the Herald-Tribune: Trinh Mang Duc, one of the key witnesses in the Stephen Leeds murder case, is reported to have seen the license plate on the automobile allegedly driven by the murderer. There it was. An invitation to slaughter. And good enough reason to petition for a change of venue.
But then why hadn’t the murderer also gone after Tran Sum Linh, who’d shared a smoke on his front step with one of his many cousins, and who’d seen a man in yellow running through the moonlit night toward the house the victims shared? He, too, was a witness, the essential before to Trinh’s after. Why go after one and not the other? Or was Tran next on the killer’s list?
The runners ahead were picking up the pace.
Matthew increased his own pace, keeping the same steady distance between himself and the nearest runner; the man in the blue woolen cap was now drenched with sweat, great black blots spreading over the back of his grey sweatshirt and the backs of his thighs in the grey sweatpants, sneakered feet pounding the track. Matthew was similarly soaked, contentedly awash in perspiration. Tomorrow morning, he would step out on that tennis court as svelte and as swift as Ivan Lendl. Whack, his racket would meet the ball, and swisssssssh the ball would zoom over the net — and it’s yet another ace for Matthew Hope, folks, the fourth in this exciting set. Fat Chance Department.
It had to have been the license plate.
Trinh seeing the plate.
Seeing it erroneously, as it turned out, but seeing it nonetheless. Because otherwise, if the killer was covering his tracks, he’d be going after all the witnesses: Tran, who’d seen him at a little after eleven, and the woman they’d named in yesterday’s paper — this time after Matthew had received from the S.A.’s office her name and sworn statement, thank God for small favors — someone named Sherry Reynolds who worked at Kickers and who claimed to have seen the ubiquitous man in the yellow jacket and hat getting off a fifty-foot Mediterranean, which happened to be the very sort of boat Leeds owned. Saw him disembarking at ten-thirty that night and getting into a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, which later on turned up in Little Asia, bearing the license plate Trinh and only Trinh had seen, which was an impossible plate in the state of Florida.