The 381 prefix told him that Fiona lived on the mainland. He tore the page from the pad and tacked it to the bulletin board, just under the alphabet Mai Chim had Xeroxed for him. When he was in college at Northwestern, a friend of his began dating a Chinese girl whose father ran a restaurant on La Salle. The guy’s name was Nathan Feinstein, the girl’s name was Melissa Chong. Nathan and Melissa shared what Nathan called an Eemie-Wess relationship, which was shorter and easier to say than an East-Meets-West relationship, a tongue-twister on anybody’s lips.
Matthew picked up the pencil alongside the pad and wrote:
He looked at the hyphenated word. It conjured a multimillion-dollar film starring Le Mai Chim and Matthew Hope — not necessarily in that order. The first scene would open with a shot of a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme parked under a pepper tree outside Little Asia in lovely downtown Calusa. A couple would be necking on the front seat. They would be our hero and heroine, Leslie Storm and Lotus Blossom Wong, as their names were in the picture. The camera would cut away from a close shot of their torridly joined lips to an antiseptic close shot of an orange-and-white Florida license plate over the rear bumper. The numbers and letters on that plate would read 2AB 39C.
On the pad, Matthew wrote:
He looked at what he’d written. And then he wrote it again:
And again and again and again and again…
And kept writing it over and over again, faster and faster and faster until the last several times he wrote it…
… the numeral 2 resembled…
There’s no F, J, or W. No Z, either.
His eyes darted to the alphabet pinned to the board.
a ã â b c d đ e ê g h i k l m n o ô σ p q r s t u ú v x y
No Z in it. But a 2 in the language, for sure, Oh, yes, our numbers are Arabic. No Z, but a 2! And if you were seeing a Z through a screen door at night, and you didn’t know what the hell a Z looked like in the first place, then you could easily mistake it for a 2! Ike and Mike, they look alike, a Z and a 2! Trinh had seen ZAB 39C, but his eye and his brain had automatically translated it into something familiar, 2AB 39C.
Matthew yanked the receiver from its cradle and dialed the number Warren had left him. It rang once, twice…
“Hello?”
“Miss Gill?”
“Yes?”
“This is Matthew Hope…”
“Yes, Mr. Hope.”
“I’m sorry to be calling at this hour…”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Is Warren there yet?”
“No, he isn’t.”
“I wonder if you’d ask him to call when he… as a matter of fact, maybe you can help me.”
“Happy to.”
“Are there any license plates in Florida that begin with the letter Z?”
“Oh, yes,” Fiona said, “Y and Z both. Those are the letters we set aside for rental cars.”
“Rental cars?”
A rental car, he thought. A goddamn rental car! No wonder the killer had to…
“Hertz, Avis, Dollar, what-have-you,” Fiona said. “The plates on all those cars begin with either a Y or a Z. Check it out.”
“I will,” he said. “Thank you very much. Miss Gill, I really appreciate this.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Did you still want Warren to call you?”
“Not unless he wants to.”
“I’ll tell him. Good night,” she said.
“Good night,” he said, and put the receiver back on the cradle.
A rental car, he thought. That’s how those mind readers knew what I was driving, they looked at the license plate. He pulled the telephone directory to him, opened it to the yellow pages, and was running his finger down the page with the listings for Automobile Renting & Leasing when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Warren?” he said.
“Mr. Hope?” a man’s voice said.
“Yes, who’s this, please?”
“Charlie Stubbs. I’m sorry to be bothering you at home, but I tried to reach that other feller and there’s no answer there. I remember now who that voice sounded like. Remember I said it sounded like somebody famous? Or did he tell you?”
“Yes, he told me.”
“Well, I remember who it was.”
“Who was it, Mr. Stubbs?”
“John F. Kennedy,” Stubbs said.
12
He lived in one of those little shacks up on stilts that lined the beach just north of Whisper Key Village. At this time of year, and especially at this time of night, there was a ghostly silence shrouding the strip of wooden structures standing in a row on the edge of the sea. During high season, there would be music into the empty hours of the night, laughter, the sounds of young people flexing their muscles and their hormones. Tonight, all was still. The shacks stood on their stilts like tall wading birds, silhouetted against the shoreline sky. It was almost midnight, but a light was burning in the second-story apartment. Matthew climbed the steps and knocked.
“Who is it?”
The distinctive voice, plainly evident when you were listening for it. The John F. Kennedy voice.
“Me,” he said. “Matthew Hope.”
“Just a minute, please.”
Puzzlement in that voice now; it was almost midnight.
The door opened.
He was wearing only tennis shorts. Barechested, barefooted. Forty-one years old, but still looking like a boy, the way many athletes that age looked, the well-defined muscles on his arms, legs, and chest, the tousled blond hair, the welcoming grin. Your average, garden-variety All-American Boy. Who had only done murder five times over.
“Hello, Kit,” Matthew said. “Sorry to be stopping by so late.”
“No, that’s okay,” he said. “Come on in.”
Matthew stepped into the apartment. A studio with a tiny kitchen area and a closet space defined by a rod with a hanging curtain on it. Double bed against the windows on the ocean side. Framed photographs on the walls. Most of them of Christopher Howell in action on a tennis court. One of them of Christopher Howell in an army uniform, posing with half a dozen other American soldiers, all of them grinning into the camera, all of them wearing combat helmets and bandoliers, some of them holding assault weapons. In the corner, several tennis rackets stood on end against the wall. There was a thriftshop easy chair slip-covered in a paisley pattern. A telephone on a nightstand beside the bed. A lamp on the nightstand. The lamp was on. There was no air conditioning, the windows were wide open. Outside, the ocean rushed in against the sand.
“I think I’ve worked out a game plan,” Matthew said.
Howell blinked.
“Would you like to hear it?”
“Well…”
This is midnight, his face said.
“Sure,” he said.
“Did you know,” Matthew said, “that in the state of Florida, all rental-car license plates begin with either a Y or a Z?”
Howell looked at him.
“No, I didn’t know that,” he said.
“A little-known fact,” Matthew said, and smiled. “But true.”
“I see,” Howell said.
“Did you further know that rental-car companies keep records on all the cars they rent? Names of renters, addresses, and so on.”
“Uh… excuse me, Mr. Hope,” Howell said, “but it is late, and…”