A scream from the hallway. Victoria stepped out of the room, carefully again, and saw that it was Carmel, the maid, standing there in a pink robe and furry slippers with her hands theatrically at her mouth. Her wiry hair seemed actually to be standing up, but whether this was from fright, as in the movies, or a product of recent sleep, Victoria did not know. In any case, she went to the woman and shook her, as much to stop the mumbling prayers as to rally her to action.

“Oh, my God, is the señora dead?”

“No, the señor is dead. My mother has fainted from the shock. You have to help me move her.”

This was said in a tone that the maid had never heard before from the Little Señora, as she was known in the kitchen, a tone of command more familiar from her father’s mouth, and her training overcame her natural repugnance. Together the two women carried Mrs. Calderón to her bathroom, where they stripped off the blood-sodden nightgown, sponged her off as best they could, dressed her in a fresh nightgown, and placed her on her bed, all without a murmur from the woman, who almost seemed to have already joined her husband in death.

The downstairs bell sounded. Victoria went down and let in the Coral Gables policeman, a man several years her junior. She told him that her father had been murdered. He asked to see the body. She took him up to the study. On seeing what was in the room he uttered an unprofessional oath and turned nearly as green as the tiles. Murders of this kind, of any kind actually, are rare in the City Beautiful, as Coral Gables likes to call itself, and the chief duty of any CG cop who discovers one is to call the county police department, which this man now did.

Then sirens announced the arrival of the ambulance. The paramedics determined that Mr. Calderón was beyond help and removed the unconscious Mrs. Calderón to Mercy Hospital. After they left, Victoria went back to her bedroom to make some calls. The first was to her Aunt Eugenia.

“This better not be a wrong number,” said the voice that answered after twenty rings.

“Aunt Genia, it’s me. Look, there’s been a disaster here. You have to go to Mercy and take care of Mom.”

“Oh, Christ! Oh, Jesus, what happened?”

“We’re not really sure. Some kind of accident, an, an explosion. The police are here and I have to stay and answer questions. Mom’s not really hurt, but she got knocked out. Could you please get over there? I don’t want her to be alone when she comes out of it. And could you get in touch with Dr. Reynaldo, too?”

“Where’s your father, Victoria?”

The obvious question. “He’s, uh, he was killed. He died, in the, uh, in the thing…oh, no, please, Aunt Genia, if you start crying now I’m going to lose it and I can’t afford to. I’ll talk to you later and tell you all about it, but could you just…go?”

The distressing noises on the other end of the line faded. “Okay, good. Christ in heaven! Jesus, let me pull myself together here. All right, I’m on my way. Have you called Jonni yet?”

“Next on my list. Thanks for this, Aunt G., I’ll never forget it. I’ll call you later.”

She broke the connection and dialed a New York number. After four rings, she heard music and her brother’s light, pleasant voice singing a line from a hip-hop song she didn’t recognize, which faded and then the same voice said, “You’ve almost got Jonni Calderón. I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message and I’ll be right back at ya.” She disconnected and did the same again six times. On the last of these she heard her brother snarl, “What?”

“It’s Victoria, Jonni.”

“What’s wrong?” with a little quaver of fear. She told him, a truncated version, but with the central fact revealed. He said he’d be on the first plane down, and after very little further conversation, they hung up. They were not close.

The detectives from the county arrived a few minutes later. They showed her their ID and identified themselves as Detectives Finnegan and Ramirez of the Metro Dade Police. She said, “I don’t understand. We’re in Coral Gables,” and they, or rather Ramirez, had to explain to her, as he had so often before, that the metropolitan county government provided a variety of services to the smaller cities of the county, among which was the investigation of homicides. “You’d been in Miami, ma’am, they have their own homicide unit, but being in the Gables you have us.” He smiled sympathetically; he was a medium-size Cuban-American of about forty with clear aviator glasses and a brush mustache. Finnegan was much taller, and a little older, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair and the reserved and respectful mien of a quality mortician. They were both dressed in cheap, simple clothes, sports jackets and polyester slacks, and Ramirez had on a shirt of a particularly repellent green. They both wore ugly, thick-soled black shoes. Neither of them, Victoria reflected, looked like the cops of the media who, even if craggy-faced character actors, projected some kind of personality from the large or small screen. Like most people, she experienced this as disappointment: these guys were clerks, post office types.

Finnegan asked, “Could you show us where the body is, Miss Calderón.”

They all ascended. Victoria noted that the blood pool had dried on the edges now and clotted into small jellied islands. The detectives snapped on rubber gloves and slipped white booties over their shoes. They entered the study. Shortly thereafter, they were joined by crime scene technicians in white Tyvek coveralls. Victoria waited in her room, lying flat on her back in bed, and thought about the things she had to do the next day. In the midst of these thoughts, making lists, generating strategies, her mind decided to turn itself off.

She snapped awake to the sound of tapping, to find Detective Ramirez regarding her from the doorway. She was on her feet in a second, woozy, trying to shake herself into full functionality without appearing to need to. Her face truly ached now where the thug had slapped her, and she wished for a chance to fix herself up in a mirror. I should have put ice on it, she mused, and felt shame at this thought.

“We’d like to talk to you now,” said the detective.

They sat at the long mahogany table in the dining room downstairs. The tall clock in the corner said 4:45, which meant, hard as it was for her to believe it, that less than two hours had passed since that pistol shot had roused her into this horror.

The questioning, unlike the appearance of the two detectives, was apparently something that Hollywood got more or less right. The questions were the obvious ones, and she told the story without prevarication, but also without any of the background.

“So this guard hit you?” asked Finnegan after she’d described the events following the shot.

“Yes. I was so upset that I guess I went crazy. I hit him. I was hysterical and I guess he thought slapping me would calm things down.”

“From the look of your face that was a heck of a punch. Who were these guys?”

“I have no idea. The one who hit me, the one in charge, was called Martínez. I don’t know the names of the others. My father hired them. I don’t know where. Is it important?”

“Well, yeah!” said Finnegan. “According to you, they removed a victim of a crime from a crime scene, and as far as I know they’ve failed to report any of this to the police. We’d definitely like to talk to these fellows. I assume your father will have records, payments, contracts with the security firm, and so on.”

“As I say, I have no idea.”

“Fine. Then what happened?”

Victoria described the scene with her mother, the call to 911, the ambulance, and the calls to the relatives.

And now the classic question, from Ramirez: “Ms. Calderón, do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt your father?”

“Nearly everyone who knew him at one time or another, myself included. He wasn’t an easy man. He had some business rivalries that got pretty intense, but that kind of thing gets settled by lawyers, or by screaming over the phone, not by…not, you know, by someone breaking into a man’s home and chopping him up with an ax.”