“Up on the North Trail?”
“Yes.”
“Good movie,” he said.
“Very romantic,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“Mrs. Nettington,” he said, “do you think your husband knew he was being followed?”
“I have no idea.”
“He didn’t say anything to you about it, did he?”
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t accuse you of hiring—”
“No.”
“Didn’t hint that he knew—”
“No, nothing like that,” she said, and then, in sudden realization, “You’re asking exactly what they’ll ask, aren’t you? Daniel will be a suspect in this, won’t he? Because he was being followed by the man who was killed!” She swung her long legs over the side of the chaise, facing him now, lips compressed in a tight angry line, sunglasses reflecting the approaching storm clouds, towers of storm clouds hiding her green eyes, a cool wind blowing in suddenly off the bayou. “They’ll ask Daniel where he was Sunday night, and Daniel will want to know why they want to know, and they’ll have to tell him that a private investigator was killed, and my husband will ask what a private investigator has to do with him, and they’ll say he was being followed by this man who was killed, your wife hired this man to follow you — and there goes my goddamn marriage down the drain!”
“Mrs. Nettington,” Matthew said, “I thought the reason you came to me—”
“Not because I wanted this to happen!”
“But... you told me... I’m sorry, but you said you were thinking of a divorce. You said that if your husband was in fact—”
“Never mind!” she said sharply.
Matthew almost flinched.
“Forget it,” she said. “Thank you very much, Mr. Hope, please send me your man’s report, and the tape, and of course your bill.”
He looked at her, still puzzled.
“Go now, would you? Leave me alone, okay?”
“Mrs. Nettington...”
“Would you please go?” she said.
Two men were sitting in Kate Carmody’s living room when she got home from work that Tuesday afternoon. Both of them Hispanic. One of them clean-shaven and as slender as a toreador, the other one a huge man with a slick little mustache. The clean-shaven one was reading a copy of People when she came in. The one with the pencil-line mustache was cleaning his fingernails with a switchblade knife. Kate took one look and turned to run out of the apartment.
The one with the knife was off the couch in a wink.
He grabbed her shoulder, spun her away from the door, hurled her back across the room, and closed and locked the door. The other one put down the magazine and said, “Miss Carmody?” Heavy Spanish accent. She immediately thought Miami. She next thought Alice. This had something to do with her dumb junkie sister in Miami.
“What do you want?” she said. “Who are you?”
“Ernesto,” he said, smiling. And then, indicating his pal, “Domingo.”
The one with the knife said nothing, and he didn’t smile, either. He was the one who bothered her.
“So what do you want here?” she said. She was frightened — two strange spics in her house, a knife that looked like a saber — but she was also annoyed. Come home after a day with Mickey Mouse, you wanted to grab a beer, change into some shorts and sandals. She was living in this really tiny place — closet-sized living room, kitchen too small even for roaches, a bedroom the size of a shoebox — six miles from Disney World, where she worked as a ticket taker for Jungle Cruise. She did not like working for Disney World, and she didn’t like Orlando, Florida, either, but she kept telling herself this was only temporary. Florida was supposed to be water and boats, not the middle of a damn desert like Orlando. Wasn’t for Disney World, nobody would’ve ever heard of Orlando. Orlando sounded like some kind of magician doing tricks in a sideshow. And now, ladies and germs, we are proud to introduce the Great Or-lan-do! Plus his two assistants, Ernesto and Domingo, who will show you how to break and enter a small apartment without using brute force. “How’d you get in here?” she asked Ernesto.
“Jenny Santoro,” he said. “Your sister.”
Accent you could cut with a machete. Jenny came out “Henny” and sister came out “seest’.”
“What about her?” Kate said. “Jenny, you mean? What about her?”
“Where is she?”
“How the hell do I know?” she said, and was starting to walk into the kitchen when Domingo stepped into her path.
“I’m only going for a beer,” she said. “You want a beer? Una cerveza,” she said. “You want one?” She turned to Ernesto. “How about you? You want a beer?”
“I want to know where your sister is. Jenny Santoro. That is her name?”
“Give or take,” Kate said, thinking Jenny, Henny, six of one, half a dozen of the other. She went to the refrigerator, opened the door, took out a bottle of Bud, twisted off the cap, and drank straight from the bottle. “And she’s not my sister, she’s my stepsister. Mi hermana política.”
Not many Anglos knew the Spanish word for stepsister. Ernesto looked at her admiringly and then said, “Usted habla español correctamente.”
“I picked some up in Puerto Rico,” Kate said in English — no sense showing off and making mistakes. “I used to be a cocktail waitress in a casino down there.”
Ernesto nodded. Domingo was looking her over, appraising her legs, her ass, her breasts, his eyes roaming insolently. Ernesto hoped Domingo wouldn’t cut her the way he had the other one. He was thinking she had no idea her sister was dead. Maybe this could be useful, her ignorance. He didn’t know how yet, but he thought perhaps it could be.
“You have two sisters, verdad?” he said, testing her.
“Two,” she said, nodding. “But only one of them’s my real sister. Mi propia hermana. Alice. She lives in Miami Beach. The other one, I don’t know where she is. Last I heard, it was LA. Why?” she said, and looked first at one and then at the other.
“We have to find your hermana política,” Ernesto said.
“That’s the one in LA. Have you tried LA?” she asked, making a joke — LA was so far away — but nobody smiled. “I haven’t seen her in six years, it has to be. She left Miami when she was sixteen, went to New Orleans, I heard, and then Houston, and then LA is what my mother told me. Seven years, in fact.”
“Where does your mother live?” Ernesto asked.
“In Venice.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Not Venice, Italy,” Kate said. “Venice, Florida. Near Sarasota. About fifteen, twenty miles south of Sarasota.”
“Does she know where your sister is?”
“Jenny? I got no idea.”
“But she was the one who told you Jenny was in Los Angeles, verdad?”
“Yes,” she said. He pronounced it so pretty. Los Angeles. The Spanish way. Los to rhyme with “gross,” the first syllable of Angeles sounding like “ahn,” all of it so pretty. But the other one had a knife.
“Did she also tell you when your sister was in Houston?”