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'Did you see anyone?'
'You gentlemen have such an interesting attitude about accountability,' she said. 'Let me see, what exact moment did you have in mind? Do you mean while Expidee was asleep in his chair or wandering the halls?'
'I see. Thank you for your time,' I said.
She flipped the sheet over Chuck Sitwell's face as though she were closing a fly trap, released the blinds, and dropped the room into darkness.
I went to the office and began opening my mail behind my desk. Through the window I could see the fronds on the palm trees by the sidewalk lifting and clattering in the breeze; across the street a black man who sold barbecue lunches was building a fire in an open pit, and the smoke from the green wood spun in the cones of sunlight shining through the oak branches overhead. It wasn't quite yet fall, but the grass was already turning a paler green, the sky a harder, deeper blue, like porcelain, with only a few white clouds on the horizon.
But I couldn't concentrate on either my mail or the beautiful day outside. Regardless whether the autopsy showed that Charles Sitwell had died of complications from gunshot wounds or a hypodermic needle thrust into his throat, Will Buchalter was out there somewhere, with no conduit to him, outside the computer, running free, full-bore, supercharged by his own sexual cruelty.
What was there to go on, I asked myself.
Virtually nothing.
No, music.
He knew something about historical jazz. He even knew how to hold rare seventy-eights and to place them in the record rack with the opening in their dustcovers turned toward the wall.
Could a sadist love music that had its origins in Island hymns and the three-hundred-year spiritual struggle of a race to survive legal and economic servitude?
I doubted it. Cruelty and sentimentality are almost always companion characteristics in an individual but never cruelty and love.
Buchalter was one of those whose life was invested in the imposition of control and power over others. Like the self-serving academic who enjoys the possession of an esoteric knowledge for the feeling of superiority it gives him over others, or the pseudojournalist who is drawn to the profession because it allows him access to a world of power and wealth that he secretly envies and fears, the collector such as Buchalter reduces the beauty of butterflies to pinned insects on a mounting board, a daily reminder that creation is always subject to his murderous hand.
The phone on my desk rang.
'Detective Robicheaux?' a woman said.
'Yes?'
'This is Marie Guilbeaux. I hope I'm not bothering you.'
'I'm sorry, who?'
'The nun you met at the hospital. Outside Mr. Sitwell's room.'
'Oh yes, how are you, Sister?'
'I wanted to apologize.'
'What for?'
'I heard about Mr. Sitwell's death this morning, and I remembered how judgmental I must have sounded the other day. That wasn't my intention, but I wanted to apologize to you anyway.'
'There's no need to. It's good of you to call, though.'
I could hear a hum in the telephone, as though the call was long-distance.
'You've been very nice,' she said.
'Not at all… Is there something else on your mind, Sister?'
'No, not really. I think I take myself too seriously sometimes.'
'Well, thanks for calling.'
'I hope to see you again sometime.'
