I hadn’t noted DeeDee Danbury’s perfume when she was in the house; only after she’d left did it appear. There was delicacy to it, floral, with a base note of spice, something dry and exotic, like clove or cardamom. I walked slowly through the living room, sniffing, detecting where it seemed strongest, wondering how long it would take to dissipate.
I suddenly felt foolish and looked out at the beach. It had grown crowded during my conversation with Danbury. The Blovines were out as well, she sunning with her top strap undone and her pumpkin boobs squishing out the sides, him trying to fish. He’d backlashed the casting reel, and was tugging at the snarled line. Picking out backlashes takes patience, and he finally gave up and tossed the rig in the sand.
The clock rang noon and I headed off to meet Mr Ambrose Poll. Harry and Willow were at a diner in mid Mobile and we drove the last few blocks in Harry’s department car. Poll lived on a tree-lined street of bungalows built in the forties, tended flowerbeds, safe, boxy cars in the drives. No children playing, no sports cars in sight. A man on the porch eyeballed us over a paper he was pretending to read. Next door, an elderly woman with silver hair hosed water over dogwoods.
Willow nodded at the man with the paper. “That’s Poll.”
“Let’s face him and brace him,” Harry said.
“Hey there, Poll. Ambrose Poll,” Willow called when we’d walked halfway up the drive.
Poll squinted. “Willow?”
“It’s me, Ambrose. A ghost from the past. Boo.”
Poll frowned as he studied us. He had a ruddy, vein-spidered face and a prognathous jaw; he thrust the jaw at Willow like a defense. But his eyes flickered nervously.
“What’s going on here?”
Willow strode the steps to the porch as if it were his own. “These are detectives Ryder and Nautilus, Ambrose. They’re looking into the Hexcamp case. They’d like to talk to you about it.”
“Hex who? What the hell you talking about?”
“Stow the amnesia, Poll. You remember the case, no one could forget it. What I especially can’t forget is how everything I found in his house turned to vapor two days later.”
“I don’t know nothing about pages from Hexcamp.”
“I gave them to you. They disappeared.”
Ambrose Poll shrugged and spat off the front of the porch. “That was a long time ago.”
Harry spoke up. “Ancient history, Mr Poll. So it shouldn’t matter if you fill in any blanks we might have.”
Poll scooted the chair forty-five degrees away from us and stared into the street. The woman watering her lawn moved closer to the porch, her ear cocked toward us as she tried to eavesdrop.
Harry said, “You were the property-room clerk for a long time, Mr Poll.”
“I was good at what I did. You do good in a job, you keep it.”
“Back then property room was a job for guys too tired and fat for the street, or on the outs politically. You started in the job before you were thirty, and worked there until you retired. Must be a record.”
“What I did was my business, and you can take yours elsewhere.”
Harry peeled off his burgundy jacket, draped it over his arm, and sat on the porch railing, a relaxed man. He took his time looking up and down the street.
“Pretty little neighborhood here, Mr Poll, neat and sweet. Lots of retirees, I’ll bet. Like that lady watering her lawn. Or that fellow across the way looking through the curtain.”
“It’s a nice place to live. Be even better when you leave.”
“I’ll bet they love to hear your cop stories. Nailing the bank robbers, breaking the big cases. Ambrose Poll, the scourge of criminals everywhere. How many times did you almost buy it in the line of duty, Poll?”
“I got no idea what you’re blabbering about. I think you’re crazy’s what I think.”
“Do you tell people you were the original blue knight? Or a detective to rival Sherlock Holmes? Or do you tell them the truth: that you spent twenty-something years as a clerk?”
Poll stiffened. “I don’t lie to no one.”
I sauntered over and smiled at the woman, who had now turned off her hose and was fiddling with a myrtle five feet from the porch.
“Morning, ma’am, how’re you?”
She lit up at the notice. “Just fine, officer. You’re a policeman, aren’t you? I can always tell.” She pointed to our ride. “You folks drive the drabbest cars. The Navy drives gray ships and police drive drab cars.” She peered between the posts on the porch. “Morning, Ambrose. I watered your tomatoes.”
Poll looked stricken and forced a smile. “Thank you, Myrna.”
She arched a penciled eyebrow at me. “Is he helping you on a case? I know he still does that. Detective Poll probably has a lot to teach you younger fellows.”
“I guess, ma’am,” I said, nodding. “Trouble is, he’s just so doggoned humble, we can barely pry a story out of him.”
“Well you just ask him about the time he rounded up that cat burglar, chased him clear across a rooftop like in that movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.”
I produced a quizzical face. “Cat burglar? But all those years I thought Mr Poll worked in the -”
“Hey there,” Poll barked. “No need to go into all that.” He sighed and looked down. “Come on inside. I’ll tell you a story or two.”
Poll slumped into the house, Willow and I in his wake. Harry brought up the rear. He paused at the door, then leaned out to look at the woman. “Mr Poll’s an amazing resource, ma’am. I don’t know what we’d do without him.”
She beamed.
Poll’s house smelled like coffee and fried ham. We sat around his dining-room table, a pile of scissored-out coupons centering the table. Poll said, “I didn’t give a shit for all that street stuff. Car air conditionin’ wasn’t like now and half the time you’d spend all day in a rolling sweathouse. One day I allowed to the old dep’ty chief I’d do near anything to be done with it.”
Harry said, “You bought the job.”
Poll’s mason-block jaw jutted defiance at Harry. “I kicked back twenty per cent every payday. I didn’t care, it was a good job, and needing doing.”
“Twenty per cent is a big bite, Mr Poll.”
“I’m an economical man, I made do.”
“How much you make on the retail side?”
Poll started to protest but Harry held up his hand to cut him off. “Let’s turn off the fiction machine, Mr Poll. Nothing bad’s gonna happen if you tell the truth.”
Poll slumped in the chair, studied his hands. “Hell, there were guns and stuff in there went back fifty years. Closed cases. Nobody’d ever miss a little something gone now and then. I just moved enough to make back the twenty per cent.”
Willow leaned in, his eyes hot but his voice cool. “Hexcamp’s possessions, Poll. What about them?”
Poll squeezed his hands together, stared at them. “That was something different. I got a call that night. Said if the stuff you brought in got misplaced there’d be five hundred bucks in it. You know what five hundred bucks was then?”
“Over two grand now,” Willow said. “At least you weren’t a cheap crook.”
“Fuck you,” Poll said, but his venom had been replaced by resignation. I saw Harry eyeball Willow, Ease up.
“Where’d the stuff go?” Harry asked gently.
“I was told to take the package out back one night. Every piece, nothing held back. A car come along and we traded packages.”
“What’d the guy making the pickup look like?”
Poll pressed his hands into his eye sockets as if it helped light his memories. “Wasn’t a man,” he said, so softly we had to lean closer. “It was a woman, beautiful. She looked like an angel.”
We left Poll staring at his hands. “The beautiful woman?” I asked Willow as we walked to our cars. “One of Hexcamp’s followers?”
“Just because their heads were scrambled didn’t make the women ugly. Some of the prettiest women you ever saw would have gone a month without food just to wash Hexcamp’s feet.”
“What happened to them?” Harry asked.
“Most just drifted away; disappeared. A couple of the girls eventually went to prison on lesser raps. As you read, the Crying Woman shot herself after she put a bullet through Hexcamp’s belly. There were a couple of men as well, I heard, but not in for the long haul. There is one woman from the day who you can talk to.”
“Name?”
“Carla Hutchins. Lives in the country outside Chunchula. Be in her early fifties now.”
“You’ve not spoken with her?”
“I approached her twice. She wouldn’t talk and no way I could make her. I got the impression she didn’t want to relive those days.”
“She do time?” Harry asked.
“No evidence of direct involvement in the killings, a follower type. She was one of the sanest of Hexcamp’s groupies. Probably not saying a lot.”