“What does that mean?” asked Culpepper.

“I only meant that it must have felt like three minutes,” I lied and tried to change the subject. “But listen, Lieutenant, I do think it’s pretty likely it was suicide, not an accident.”

He looked at me with interest but said nothing, waiting patiently. As a professional, he knew that silence can be a very effective interrogating tool.

Unfortunately, as an arranger, I view silence as an eight-bar rest that must be filled at any cost. I added, “She had seemed pretty agitated, to the point of desperation, when she talked to me. That would have been less than half an hour ago.”

Culpepper emitted a profound sigh and looked at me as if I were the ghost of an old friend whose ashes he was about to toss into the ocean. He said sympathetically, “Gosh, I bet you’re already wishing you hadn’t said that.”

Chapter 8

8

The Blunt Instrumentalist

The best thing I had going for me was my alibi. I’d been standing with the island’s senior police official at the very moment Marie Prasquier had departed from Treasure Island’s highest summit to keep her irreversible appointment with death. Of everyone on the planet, surely I, Gail, and the fellow named Russ (about whose relationship with Gail I was still ignorant) were the three people most likely to be excluded from the suspicions of Lieutenant Robert Culpepper.

He took my arm more firmly now and started to walk me away from the area. I looked back and saw Gail moving, as instructed, toward the Enchanted Garden.

“Gail!” I called out.

The noise of the departing parade of material witnesses made it hard to hear what she shouted back to me; I heard something about “another carillon concert at three, today” at “the tower” something, before her voice got lost in a muddle of sound.

Culpepper said, “Come on, my friend.”

It was nice to have a friend.

“Meet me tonight at the Claremont!” I shouted to Gail, but she shrugged and indicated she couldn’t hear me. A police officer instructed her to move along, and she turned away.

“I said, come on now, pal,” urged Culpepper. I was clearly growing dearer to him every moment.

The offices of the Treasure Island division of the Oakland Police were located on the second floor of the Administration Building, which, unlike the rest of the island’s architecture, was a substantial and sensible half-circle structure that would have earned a doublechinned nod of approval from a banker.