“Is that what you told your husband? That you’d gone to a movie?”

  “I generally go to a movie when he’s in Tampa with his mother. He stays with her most of the day and doesn’t get home till quite late. There’s nothing unusual about my having gone to a movie.”

  “So let me understand this…”

  “I’m terribly pressed for—”

  “Even if Jamie’s in danger—”

  “Really, Mr. Hope—”

  “You won’t admit he was with you last night. Because such an admission—”

  “Mr. Hope, I read in this afternoon’s News that his son has already confessed to the murders. Is that true?”

  “It’s true.”

  “Then good day, Mr. Hope.”

  So there we were.

  There was Jamie Purchase’s “startlingly beautiful” mistress, who had worn a black raincoat and a green hat that first day they met secretly. There had been rain in Calusa, so unusual for February. He had put his hand on her thigh the moment she’d entered the car, “the touch was electric,” he’d told us. There had been the aroma of wet and steamy garments in that small contained space, the windshield wipers had snicked at the rain, snick, snick, snick—ah, l’amour. And ah, how that love had blossomed over the space of a year and a little bit more, till last night in a cottage by the sea, they had both sworn fealty, fealty forever, and had discussed the imminent demise of their respective mates—yes, that was the word Jamie had used. Mates. Not demise, oh no. The demise, presumably, was metaphoric, they had only talked of leaving their spouses. The waves had crashed in cinematically against the shore, Soon, my darling, soon, Burt and Deborah, Kim and Kirk, Elizabeth and Richard, and now, for the first time together in embrace on a beach, spume flying, JAMIE and CATHERINE, he kisses her face, he kisses her throat, he kisses her eyes—I wanted to vomit.

  A memorable moment, to be sure. So memorable that the dumpy little lady in the green smock seemed to have forgotten it completely less than seventeen hours later. Give her twenty-four and she’d forget her own name. But for now, at five-fifteen on a lovely Calusa afternoon, it was enough to have forgotten Jamie Purchase. Because remembering him would be endangering her marriage. Catherine was simply protecting her turf, that was all. She may have sworn to the stars and the sea that together she and Jamie would wend their way down life’s thorny path; she may even have meant it. But the chips were down now, as surely as they’d been down in that poker game Jamie had tried to lose and could only succeed in winning. Her hand was being called. She could declare the pair of deuces or bluff a royal flush.

  Jamie was safe, she thought. His son had confessed to the crime, there was no way Jamie could become involved, even if she denied having been with him last night. So Catherine was taking the odds on today, never mind the long shot on eternity; eternity was for graveyards. Catherine was opting for the good life she had with the surgeon; love and marriage, so to speak, house and garden, seashells arranged in an orderly row on a Lucite shelf, another charity ball next year, and the year after that, and the year after that after that. If she and Jamie ever got past this one—and she had to admit it looked a bit dicey just how—they might be able to pick up right where they’d left off before all the unpleasantness, same old stand next Wednesday or next Sunday, business as usual.

  I suddenly wondered what Aggie would do in a similar situation.

  Worse, I wondered what I myself would do.

  There was a metallic taste in my mouth when I left the flower shop. As I drove away from the curb, Catherine Brenet was putting in the last of her plants, a heavy weeping fig that she struggled to carry to the open door of the shop.

  10

  * * *

  I HEARD the burglar-alarm siren the moment I turned the corner into my street. I immediately looked at the dashboard clock. The time was twenty-five minutes past five. I could not imagine why the siren was going, or why Reginald Soames was standing on the sidewalk in front of my house, together with a handful of other neighbors. The sound of the siren was piercing. I pulled into my driveway, got out of the car, and immediately said, “What is it? Has someone broken in?”

  “Police have already been here,” Reggie shouted, “Couldn’t turn the damn thing off.”

  “Were the key holders here?”

  “The what?”

  “The key holders. There’s two of them. If the alarm goes off—”

  “Couldn’t turn it off!” Reggie shouted.

  “The key holders?”

  “The police.”

  “Did someone try to break in?”

  “Your daughter hit the panic button.”

  “What? My daughter—”

  “The cat got run over.”

  “Sebastian?”

  “Run over by a car. Your daughter hit the panic button, figured that’d bring the police.”

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “Don’t know where she is. Mrs. Tannenbaum drove your daughter and the cat to the vet’s. Police were mad as hell. Been trying to get you at the office, Junior, you shouldn’t be out sailing on a workday.”

  “What vet did they take him to, do you know?”

  “Haven’t the faintest. You’d better turn that siren off, Mr. Ziprodt up the block’s got a bad heart.”

  The front door was unlocked. I went directly through the house and to the back door, where one of the alarm stations was set into the wall just outside. I took my key ring from my pocket, and searched for the key to the system, wishing it were color-coded like the key at the jail. The siren was still screaming. I found the right key at last, put it in the keyway, and turned it to the right. The siren stopped abruptly. The silence was almost deafening. I went back into the house and to the utility closet, where the burglar alarm control box was mounted on the wall alongside a circuit breaker. I opened the front panel of the box and reset the system, but not the alarm; this had to be done whenever the panic button was hit. I slammed the panel shut, and went immediately to the phone in the study. In the yellow pages, I found under VETERINARIANS-D.V.M. at least a dozen listings. I scanned them quickly, found one that sounded familiar, dialed the number, and asked for Dr. Roessler.

  “Dr. Roessler is in surgery, sir.”

  “Who’s this I’m speaking to, please?”

  “Miss Hilmer.”

  “Miss Hilmer, this is Matthew Hope, I’m calling about a gray tabby named Sebastian. Would you—”

  “Yes, sir, the cat’s here.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s being operated on now, sir.”

  “Can you tell me what…how bad is it?”

  “His thorax is torn, Mr. Hope. The lungs and heart are exposed. Dr. Roessler is closing the wound now.”

  “Thank you, could I…is my daughter there?”

  “Just a moment, sir.”

  When Joanna got on the line, I said, “Honey, I’m on my way, you just wait there for me.”

  “Dad,” she said, “I think he’s going to die.”

  “Well, we don’t know that, honey.”

  “I tried calling, where were you?”

  “With a client.”

  “Cynthia said you were on a boat.”

  “Yes, I went there first to talk to someone, and then I went to the Police Department to talk to Michael Purchase.”

  “I heard on the radio that Michael did it, is that true?”

  “I don’t know. Honey, is Mrs. Tannenbaum still there with you?”

  “Yes. Did you want to talk to her?”

  “No, that’s all right. But please ask her to stay till I get there, would you? Where’s Mommy?”

  “I think she went to the beauty parlor, I’m not sure.”

  “All right, honey, I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  “Do you know how to get here?”

  “It’s near Cross River, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll remember it when I see it. G’bye, darling.”

  “Bye, Dad,” she said, and hung up.

  All the way to the vet’s, I kept thinking of Sebastian.

  On the day before we’d taken him into the family, Susan had gone down to the basement of our house in Chicago, and found herself face to face with a rat the size of an alligator. Brazen bastard got up on his hind legs and snarled and squealed, sent her screaming up out of the cellar to phone an exterminator who came that afternoon to seed the basement floor with poison pellets. Trouble was, we had a five-year-old daughter and I didn’t like the idea of all that poison lying around, however infrequently she might be visiting the basement. Susan began crying when I suggested the possible danger to Joanna, immediately thinking I was scolding her for having called the exterminator. I told her she’d done exactly the right thing, but that a cat might be a safer deterrent than scattered poison patties.

  What I had in mind was a big cat.

  I suppose the range of animals varies at any given shelter on any given day. On that particular day in March, seven years ago, there were two cats, eleven kittens, five mongrel dogs, and the most beautiful thoroughbred boxer I’d ever seen. Sebastian was one of the cats, an enormous gray tabby with darker gray stripes, white markings on his face, markings that looked like white socks on all four paws. The one on his right hind paw seemed to have slipped to his ankle. He was prowling the topmost shelf of a cage that contained two separate litters of kittens and a scrawny Siamese that was not only cross-eyed but looked mangy as well. Sebastian paced the shelf like a tiger. He looked fierce and proud and I was certain he was the best rat-catcher who’d ever stalked a basement. “Hey, there,” I said, and he looked at me with the greenest eyes I’d ever seen on man or beast, and gave a short “meow,” and I fell in love with that big old pussycat right then and there. Susan had wandered down to the other end of the room, where she was looking at the boxer. I called her over.

  “Well, he’s certainly big enough,” she said.

  “Look at those green eyes, Sue.”

  “Mm,” she said.

  “Let’s find out why he’s here. Maybe he ate his former owners.”

  We went outside to where a young man was filling out papers behind a desk. I asked him about the big gray tabby. Was there anything wrong with him?

  “No, the mother was allergic to him,” he said.

  “The cat’s mother?”

  “No, the mother in the family. He’s the gentlest cat. Not a thing wrong with him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Sabbatical.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, she’s a schoolteacher. The mother.”

  “That’s no name,” I said.

  “Well, that’s his name.”

  Susan and I went back inside again. The cat was still up there on the top shelf, licking himself clean now. We stood outside the cage, watching him.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Susan said. “I was hoping we’d find a white cat.”

  “Is he huge, or am I dreaming?”

  “He’s enormous.”

  “Hey, Sebastian,” I said, and the cat meowed again.

  Ten minutes later, we were taking him home in a cardboard carrier. We’d given a donation of twenty-five dollars to the shelter, and already had misgivings about this unknown cat without papers or pedigree. Sebastian broke out of the carrier before we’d driven five miles from the shelter. First his ears popped up out of the opening, then his green eyes wide and curious, and at last his face, white mask over the nose and mouth. He climbed out onto the back seat and looked around.

  “The cat’s out,” Susan said.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  But Sebastian only leaped up onto the little ledge inside the rear window, and sprawled there to watch the scenery going by. Never made a sound, didn’t scramble all over the place like most lunatic cats do in a moving automobile. Just sat there with those big green eyes taking in everything. Automobiles never frightened him. One morning—this was after we’d been living in Calusa for almost a year—I got into the Ghia and had driven halfway to the office when I heard a sound behind me. I turned to look, and there was Sebastian sitting on the back seat. I grinned and said, “Hey, Sebastian, what are you doing there, huh?” He blinked. Joanna played with him as if he were a puppy. Hide-and-seek, games with string or yarn, races across the lawn. One time she came into the bedroom, beaming, to describe a game she and Sebastian had been playing. “We had the most fun,” she said. “I was chasing him around the sofa, and he was laughing and laughing.” She really did believe he was laughing. I guess I believed it too. For some reason, perhaps because we’d got him close to St. Patrick’s Day, we all thought of Sebastian as Irish. I’d sometimes talk to him in a thick Irish brogue, and he’d roll over on his back to reveal the whitest, softest, furriest belly, and I’d tickle him—and yes, he was laughing, I’m sure he was laughing. I loved that cat with all my heart.

  The veterinary hospital was set on a street with three used-car lots and a store selling model airplanes. I parked the Ghia alongside a Chevy station wagon I recognized as Mrs. Tannenbaum’s, and then began walking across the parking lot toward the front door. From the kennel behind the red brick building, I heard a chorus of barks and yelps. My immediate reaction was to wonder what all that canine clamor might be doing to Sebastian’s nerves. And then I realized he was no doubt still unconscious, and my step slowed as I came closer to the door. I did not want to open that door. I was afraid that once I stepped inside, someone would tell me Sebastian was dead.

  There was a desk immediately facing the entrance door. A nurse in a starched white uniform sat behind it; she looked up as I came into the room. Joanna and Mrs. Tannenbaum were sitting on a bench against the wall on the left. A framed painting of a cocker spaniel was on the wall above their heads. I went immediately to my daughter, and sat beside her, and put my arm around her.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “They’re still working on him.”

  We were whispering.

  I leaned over and said, “Mrs. Tannenbaum, I can’t thank you enough.”

  “I’m glad I could help,” she said. Her first name was Gertrude. I’d never called her that. She was seventy-two years old, but she looked sixty, and knew more about boats than any man I’d ever met. Her husband had died ten years back, leaving her a twin-dieseled Matthews Mystic she did not know how to operate. She enrolled promptly in the Auxiliary Coast Guard’s boating safety course, and a year later took that boat from Calusa past Charlotte Harbor, into the Caloosahatchee River and then into Lake Okeechobee and the St. Lucie Canal, across the state to Stuart and Lake Worth, where she’d jumped off across the Gulf Stream for Bimini. She had lavender hair and blue eyes and she was tiny and wiry, but when she wrestled that forty-six-footer into a dock you’d think she was on the bridge of an aircraft carrier.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  “I got home from school about three-thirty,” Joanna said, “and I looked for Sebastian, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I was going to the mailbox to see if there was anything for me, and I just happened to look across the street—do you know where that big gold tree is on Dr. Latty’s lawn? Right there, near the curb. Sebastian was…he was just lying there in the gutter. I thought at first…I don’t know what I thought. That he was…playing a game with me, I guess. And then I saw the blood…oh God, Dad. I didn’t know what to do. I went over to him, I said, ‘Sebastian? What…what’s the matter, baby?’ And his eyes…he looked up the way he sometimes does when he’s napping, you know, and he still has that drowsy look on his face…only…oh Dad, he looked so…so twisted and broken, I didn’t…I just didn’t know what to do to help him. So I came back in the house and called your office but they told me you were out on a boat—what were you doing on a boat, Dad?”

  “Talking to Michael’s girlfriend,” I said, which was true enough. But by three-thirty, I had left the boat and was in bed with Aggie. I thought again of Jamie’s alibi for last night. Would his wife and children have been slain if he’d gone directly home at eleven, rather than to the beach cottage he shared with the surgeon’s wife? And similarly, would I have been able to help Sebastian if I’d been at my office when Joanna called?

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I didn’t know where Mom was, and I couldn’t get in touch with you, so I just went in the bedroom and hit the panic button. I figured that’d bring everybody running. Mr. Soames from next door came over, and then Mrs. Tannenbaum—”

  “I heard the siren, I thought at first it was some crazies come to rob your house in broad daylight. It could happen, believe me.”

  “She drove the wagon to where Sebastian was against the curb—”

  “We picked him up very careful. We made a stretcher from a board I had in the garage. We lifted him only a little, enough to get him on the board.”

  “Then we came right here. I knew where it was from when he had his shots last time.”

  “What did Dr. Roessler say?”

  “Daddy, he doesn’t think Sebastian’s going to live.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  There seemed nothing more to say. I told Mrs. Tannenbaum I was sure she wanted to get home, and I thanked her again, and she asked me to please call her as soon as we got back. We sat alone on the bench then, my daughter and I. I held her hand. Across the room, the nurse was busily inserting what I supposed to be bills into envelopes. To her right was a closed door. To the left of that was an aquarium with tropical fish in it. Air bubbles tirelessly climbed the inside of the tank.

  The last time I’d been inside a hospital was two years ago, when Susan’s mother died. She was fifty-six years old, and had never smoked a cigarette in her lifetime; but both her lungs were riddled with cancer. They’d performed the biopsy, and then closed her up, and told us there was nothing they could do for her. It was Susan’s uncle who made the decision not to tell her she was dying. I’d disliked him before then, but that was when I began hating him. She was, you see, a marvelous woman who could have accepted the news, who would in fact have welcomed the opportunity to die with at least some measure of dignity. Instead…ah, Jesus.