Heading for her eight o’clock wildlife meeting, thank you, Brünnhilde, you have a good strong voice that carries far, and you also run one hell of a vacuum cleaner. Tomorrow morning, when everybody went off to work or exercise or wherever the hell they’d be going, Toots would break into the house again to check the tape recorder. This time, however, she’d get there at a little after nine, which was when Brünnhilde had come in this morning, and she’d make damn sure Brünnhilde’s car wasn’t parked outside.
Tonight, she would follow Leona Summerville to Mrs. Col-man’s house, wherever that might he, and she would pray that Leona wouldn’t lock the car while she was in there listening to plans on how to protect and preserve the rare Calusa Cooze.
Lucy Strong was quite impressed.
Man flying all the way up from Florida to talk to her.
She was a woman in her early fifties, looking a great deal younger — she told Warren — because she still led an active and rewarding life. Oh, yes. Still worked at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. Still worked on the maternity ward, loved babies, didn’t Warren just love babies?
Warren did not love babies, but he didn’t tell this to Lucy Strong.
He simply nodded and smiled.
He was wondering if it would start snowing again. He had already missed the last flight back to Calusa tonight, but he could still catch any one of several planes to Tampa. Provided Kennedy did not get snowed in. Warren hated snow. Snow was one of the reasons he’d left St. Louis. The other reason was St. Louis itself.
“So what is this all about?” Lucy asked. “This must be pretty important, a policeman flying all the way up from Miami.”
“Calusa, ma’am,” Warren said. “And I’m not a policeman.”
“What are you then? FBI?”
“No, ma’am. Definitely not FBI.” Not when impersonating a federal agent could get you three years in the slammer. “I’m a private investigator, ma’am. Doing research on a murder case for the attorney who’s…”
“That’s what made me think a policeman,” she said. “When you told me this was a murder case. On the phone.”
“Yes, ma’am, probably.”
“Or an FBI agent,” she said.
“Here’s my card,” he said, “I’m just a private detective.”
“I see,” she said, and took the card and looked at it and nodded, and then handed it back to him.
“Miss Strong,” he said, “on the telephone you told me you were there in the summer of 1969 when…”
“Yes, at Lenox Hill…”
“Yes, when a woman named Elise Abbott gave birth to…”
“Well, I wasn’t there the moment she gave birth.”
“No, what I meant…”
“I was on the maternity ward, yes. She was one of my patients. Elise Abbott.”
“This would have been in August of 1969.”
“Yes.”
“According to what I have, the baby was born on August nineteenth.”
“Well, as I say, I wasn’t there at the actual birth.”
“But Elise Abbott was one of your patients.”
“Oh, yes, I remember her very well. A beautiful young girl, but there was… such a… a sadness about her. I don’t know what it was. So young, so beautiful, why should she have been so sad? And married to such a handsome young man! Both of them blond, her with green eyes, him with blue. He was a good deal older than she was, an Englishman, you know. Spoke the way the English do, funny, you know? His name was Roger, I think. Or Nigel. Something like that.”
“How about Charles?”
“Charles? Well, yes, it could have been. Charles does sound English, doesn’t it? Their prince is named Charles, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Warren said.
“Charles Abbott,” Lucy said, and nodded. “Yes, that sounds right.”
“Was it Mr. Abbott who took those pictures we talked about on the phone?”
“Oh, no.”
“You said a man had…”
“Yes, but not her husband. I thought it was her brother. The same coloring, you know. The blond hair and the blue eyes. Sometimes a woman will marry a man who looks just like her father or her brother, have you ever noticed that? I see a lot of it at the hospital. The girl’s father’ll come to visit, and he’s a dead ringer for the husband. It’s amazing.”
“This man who took the pictures… are you saying he resembled Charles Abbott?”
“No, no. Just that they were both blond and blue-eyed.”
“How old was he? ”
“The one who took the pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Young. Twenty? Twenty-one? Young.”
“When was this?”
“A few days after the baby was born, I think. She was nursing the baby, I remember. Which I thought was a little odd, even if he was her brother. I mean, her breast exposed and all. Very casual about it. The baby lying on her breast, nursing. I just came in on them, just checking, you know, making sure everything was all right in the room, and there he was with the camera to his eye, taking pictures. Baby on her mother’s breast, nursing, the cutest little thing, her little hand resting on the breast, the little bracelet on it. I told him to stop taking those pictures right that minute! I don’t know how many he’d taken by then, but he was using a flash attachment, and I thought it might harm the baby’s eyes or something. You can’t be too careful when they’re that young, you know. He was very nice about it, of course, a nice young man. He put the camera away, introduced himself, a perfect gentleman.”
“What was his name?”
“Jonathan Parrish. Same as I told that other fellow who was up here last month.”
“What other fellow?”
“Man named Arthur Hurley. He was very surprised to learn about those pictures.”
“I’ll b&t he was,” Warren said. “But you say the baby was wearing jewelry, huh?”
“No, no. Jewelry? What do you mean?”
“I thought you said she had…”
“Jewelry? How could a baby be wearing…?”
“You said there was a bracelet…”
“Oh. Yes.”
“On her…”
“Yes, her wrist. But that wasn’t jewelry.”
“A bracelet wasn’t…”
“Not jewelry at all.”
“Then what was it?”
“Identification.”
“Identification?”
“Yes. The baby’s name. Spelled out on the beads.”
“Beads?”
“Yes. They used to string these little beads and put them on a baby’s wrist.”
“What kind of beads?”
“Little white beads with blue letters on them. Nowadays they use a plastic strip with the name on it. But back then, it was beads. Ask your mama. I’ll bet she still has your baby beads.”
“I’ll bet she does,” Warren said.
He was thinking he could not wait to tell this to Matthew.
The moment Toots saw Leona getting out of her car, she knew she wasn’t going to lock it.
Most people — even down here in sunny Florida — if they parked the car in a parking lot outside a movie theater or a mall, or if they left it parked at the curb outside a restaurant or a store, they locked it. But rarely did they lock the car when they parked it outside the house of a friend or a relative. Parking outside these houses was cozy and safe. But if these people knew how many cars were stolen each year outside the safe, cozy house of a dear friend or a cherished relative they’d have locked the car fore and aft, top and bottom, and they’d have left a two-thousand-pound gorilla sitting behind the wheel growling.
Toots knew how to get into a locked car.
She even knew how to start one without a key.
But all that took time.
Besides which, she didn’t particularly feel like getting busted for a car thief. A car thief could spend a lot of time in jail. Judges in the state of Florida did not look kindly upon car thieves because a great many expensive Cadillacs and Mercedes and BMWs and Jags were stolen to order down here and then shipped up north for redistribution hither and yon across these United States. Toots shuddered when she thought of some redneck trooper from the Sheriffs Department cruising on up and saying, “Excuse me, Miss, but why are you working on that window with a wire hanger?”