“With a family named Vidrine.”
Her eyes burned into his face. “She saw your car?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give her your name?”
“Just Smiley. Not my real name.” He looked at a thought inside his mind, a memory, a dark cloud that shouldn’t have been there. He blanched with guilt. “I said I had a friend named Miss Emmeline.”
A twisted cough came out of her chest. “You gave her my name?”
“She asked me, so I told her. I had already told one lie.”
“You know what you have to do now, don’t you, Chester?”
“No. Not what you’re thinking, Em. No.”
“Yes. And anyone with her. You shouldn’t have done what you did. You’ve been a bad boy.”
He hung his head and put his hands between his legs and clenched them with his thighs. She looked at her watch. “Take care of it, Chester. Now. Then call me. We’ll get through this.”
“The little girl and the people in the house?”
“We have to make sacrifices sometimes.”
He nodded, then rose from the chair like a man in his sleep. He went into the living room and looked at the chauffeur curled in a ball on the carpet. He watched where he stepped and heard the first raindrops of the storm striking the windows and the metal roof and the glass doors, saw the rain denting the waves, swallowing the sky, probably thundering down on a sailboat and crew that were trying to reach the shore.
He wondered if flying fish could lift above the waves during a storm of such magnitude. He wished a whirlpool would form around him and this house and Emmeline and suck them under the sea. He hefted up the carbine he had propped by the front door and walked back into the kitchen and fired until the bolt locked open on an empty magazine, the brass dancing like little soldiers on the hardwood floor.
WHEN HELEN AND I arrived at the crime scene, the rain was driving hard on the bay, turning it into mist, sweeping in sheets across the roof of the house and deck. The 911 call came from a neighbor named Vidrine who said the daughter of his maid had told him about a man carrying a rifle. The neighbor had gone to the Nightingale camp and discovered the bodies. A fireman in a yellow raincoat with a hood met us at the door. He looked like a bewhiskered monk staring out of a cave. Behind us I could see the headlights and flashers of several emergency vehicles streaming through the rain.
“The dead guy is by the couch,” the fireman said. “One bullet wound through the back and out the chest. What looks like a double-edged puncture t’rew the throat.”
“Where’s the woman?” Helen said.
“In the kitchen,” the fireman said. “Nothing’s been touched or moved.”
“Good job,” she said. She went into the kitchen and came back out. “Emmeline Nightingale,” she said. “What a mess.”
“That’s the chauffeur on the floor,” I said. “His name is Swede Jensen. Clete got him a job as an extra in Levon’s movie.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?”
I nodded toward the bedroom. “Looks like they were getting it on.”
I went to the kitchen door. I had latex on; so did Helen. There was no brass on the floor or counters or table. It was impossible to count the number of wounds. Emmeline’s expression was one I had seen before: It was devoid of emotion. The eyes were fixed on nothing. The heart-bursting level of fear and pain, the violent theft of life and soul, the desperate plea that never left the throat would remain unrecorded, written on the wind, in the memory of no one except the killer.
Helen flipped open her phone and called the dispatcher. “Find Jimmy Nightingale and tell him to call me immediately. Tell his people nothing, and don’t take no from any of them. Out.” She looked at me. “I’ll take care of things here. Go up to the Vidrine place and talk to the little girl who saw the man with the rifle.”
“Got it,” I said.
“How do you figure this?”
“I don’t get it at all.”
“In what way?” she said.
“If the shooter is Smiley, I don’t see the motivation.”