Paz and Barlow walked to the front door, past a flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes crackled in the breeze. The terrace was nearly as large as a football field and formal in design, with neat, bright flower beds, and lozenges of lawn cut by graveled paths. A group of workmen in khaki were doing some repairs on the stone balustrade that enclosed it. The front door was iron-bound, thick-planked dark wood, pierced by a small diamond window.
Paz pulled the bell. The door opened?a young woman, rounded, pretty, with pale blond hair done up in a bun, her face pink and damp from some distant kitchen. She wore a white uniform and a pin-striped apron over it. Paz goggled; he had never seen a white servant before, except in movies depicting foreign nations or earlier ages. Barlow displayed his shield.
“Miss, we’re police officers. From Miami, Florida? We’d like to see Mr. John Francis Doe.”
She said, calmly, as if police visits were routine at Sionnet, “Oh, uh-huh, Mr. D. said you’d be by. He’s over there, you must have walked right past him.” Here she pointed at the work crew at the balustrade. “He’s the tall one in the Yankees ball cap.”
The four men were replacing a copper gutter that ran along the pedestal of the balustrade. Doe seemed to know what he was doing, as did the three men?all young, two white kids and one who might have been Latino. Doe stood up and looked the detectives over. He looked a little longer at Paz than at Barlow, and Paz knew why. Barlow made the introductions and Doe shook their hands, saying, “Jack Doe.”
The man was taller than either of them by a good few inches, late fifties, with a leathery, bony face and a jutting square chin, his skin burned a few shades darker than the bricks of his home. He had sad, deep-set eyes the color of Coke bottles. “Let’s go sit out back,” he said.
Doe led them through a breezeway, across a pebbled courtyard, past a white wooden gate, and out to the rear of the house. Below them there was another terrace with a long green swimming pool on it, and beyond that, a lawn that sloped down to a two-story white boathouse and a dock. Doe flung his long frame down in an iron lounge chair covered in faded green canvas and motioned the others to similar seats around a white metal table, under a patched dun canvas umbrella. He offered them iced tea. When they accepted he pressed a button set into a patinaed brass plate cemented into the wall behind him. Paz thought about that, just a detail, what sort of person you had to be to have a buzzer for calling servants set in an old brass plate cemented into a stone wall on your terrace overlooking your pool.
A man came out through French doors. He was older than Doe, silver haired, and he wore a tan apron over navy blue trousers, a white shirt, and a striped tie. Again, Paz had the peculiar sense that he had fallen out of regular life. A butler was going to bring him iced tea. This soon arrived on a silver tray, in tall, sweating glasses, which Paz was certain were never used for anything but iced tea. There was a long silver spoon in each glass, and a straw made out of glass, and there was a fat round of lemon stuck on the lip of the glass, as in advertisement illustrations. The tea was strong and aromatic.
They exchanged small talk?the nice weather, the pleasant temperature, Florida, the fishing in the Keys. Both Barlow and Doe had been bonefishing down there. The cops studied Doe and he seemed to study them. Barlow said, “This is a fine place you got here, Mr. Doe. I take it your people have been here a good while.”
“Yes, since 1665. On the land, that is. This house dates from 1889. Before that, there was a wooden structure from 1732, which burned. That barn you can see from the front of the house is preRevolutionary, 1748. I keep my car collection in it.”
“My, my,” said Barlow. “And you and your missus live here all by yourselves?”
A pause, long enough for one intake of breath and an exhalation. “No, my wife is unwell. She lives in a care facility in King’s Park, not far from here. So I’m on my own, except for the help, of course. They’re all students. We put them through school, any college they can get into, graduate school, whatever they want, and in return they put in some time here. Except for Rudolf, who brought the tea, and Nora, who was my children’s nurse and has a room here. And, of course, when I go, the state’ll get the whole shebang. A museum, I guess. And that’ll be that.”
“End of an era,” said Paz. Doe nodded politely, and Paz felt like a jerk. After a brief silence, Barlow said, “Mr. Doe, as we told you on the phone, we’ve had some trouble down our way, and the FBI believes that the fella who killed our victims is the same man who murdered your daughter Mary. So, painful as it must be to you, we’d really like to hear anything you can tell us about the circumstances surrounding your daughter’s death.”
Doe rubbed a big gnarled hand across his face. Paz noted that the fingernails were cracked and dirty. It was not what he had thought a rich man’s hand ought to look like.
“We all left for the car show in Port Jefferson just after lunch,” Doe began, “me and my two sons-in-law, Witt and Dieter.” He had a deep, soft voice and Paz had to strain to hear him over the hiss of the breeze and the gulls’ calls. “The girls didn’t want to go?I mean Jane didn’t; Mary and Lily?my wife, I mean?never were much interested in the cars. Jane was?she used to help me fix them when she was a kid. Anyway, we got there around ten of two. There was a Pierce-Arrow they were showing I wanted to take a look at, a 1923 Series 33 with the Demorest body and the 414-cubic-inch six. A heck of a car, all custom made. It was blue …”
Here he stopped and shook himself slightly and a little light that had started up in his eyes faded out. “So, we were there for, oh, maybe four hours, for the auction, and I got the Pierce. Never actually took delivery on it. I kind of gave up on the cars, after. We got back around five. Jane was right here, right in this chair here, sleeping, with a book on her lap. Dieter went up to their room to check on Mary, and we heard him yell. And I called the police.”
Paz said, “So you all, you three men, were all together all the time at this show? Neither of you were out of the sight of the others for the whole four hours?”
Doe sighed. “Yes, they asked me that. I guess you have to ask questions like that. It’s part of your job. And I know people do terrible things in their families. Lizzie Borden and all. So … it was a big lot, there at the show, and we wandered around a good deal. Dieter was taking pictures. Were they with me every minute? I can’t swear to that. So it’s remotely possible that Dieter could have slipped off, driven back, done it, and come back to the car show. Or I could have, for that matter, although I talked to enough people who knew me to give myself an alibi.”
“What about your other son-in-law?Mr. Moore?” asked Paz.
“Oh, Witt didn’t drive. Didn’t even have a license. Jane tried to teach him a couple of times, but it just didn’t take. It was hard enough showing him how to ride a bike. But, you know, that’s just so far-fetched …”
Barlow said, “We know that, Mr. Doe. Like you said, it’s part of our job. Where is Mr. Von Schley now, do you know?”
“Back in Germany. Berlin. We keep in touch. A nice kid, really. I hate to say it, but I was surprised he was so decent, the people Mary used to pal around with. Eurotrash, I think they call them, and being so pretty and going into modeling at such a young age, she had a lot of temptation to have the kind of life I wasn’t comfortable with. And we thought she kind of settled down, with the baby coming and all.” A long pause here. “Witt keeps in touch, too. He’s in New York.”