“Better safe than sorry,” he said, unrepentant. “But if you’re not too annoyed, I have a favour to ask.” She grinned. “Would you look at these pictures and see if you recognize Jimmy in any of them? I know you say you didn’t get a good look at him, but we think we know who he is; it would help if you could confirm it for us.”

“Sure,” she said, eating another grape and putting down the bunch. “But I really didn’t see him, you know.” She wiped her good hand on the sheet and spread the pictures out on the bed in front of her. She looked intently. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “Is that ever funny. I don’t recognize Jimmy, but look at this one! It’s the man in the gray Honda!” And she picked up the picture of James Feldman, also known as Jimmy Fielding.

“Did everyone know about the man in the gray Honda but me?” asked Sanders over a plate of goulash in the closest Hungarian eatery. “That might have made things hang together a bit, you know.” He glared at her.

“Don’t harangue,” she said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. Heather probably knows more than I do.”

“Terrific,” he said, irritated. “And I wonder what the significance of ‘all the kids’ is in the statement ‘all the kids knew about it.’ The whole school?”

“I wouldn’t think so. Just her friends and anyone they told it to. Shouldn’t take more than a month to figure it out,” she said with a laugh. His glare checked her mirth. “Sorry, but you couldn’t imagine the speed at which news travels in a girls’ school. I doubt if you’d ever figure out who knew one piece of information at one particular time. But I’m sure that Roz will do anything she can to help you. Of course, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Unless you want to go around and try to see all Amanda’s best friends and see what they say.”

“No,” he said. “That’s probably a waste of time. I think I’ll concentrate on Mr. Fielding himself, and see what he can come up with in the way of an explanation.”

Chapter 13

Sanders walked into the familiar room and headed toward his desk with the profound conviction that he had never left it. The sight of Dubinsky, yawning and bleary-eyed, only served to heighten the illusion. It had been after three when they had finally decided that they were going to get nothing from Jimmy Fielding. For six hours he had sat and smiled and referred all questions to his lawyer. A sleepy nurse on night duty had thought that maybe Fielding’s mug shot represented the face she had seen in the hall outside room 526; but, then again, she hadn’t noticed him that clearly. Sanders’ jaw still felt stiff from suppressing his anger. He yearned to get the man alone for a few hours, to see if he could shake that complacent grin off his face, to evoke just a flash of fear in those bland eyes. Dammit. If they hadn’t been in such a hurry to hustle him downtown so they could get a positive I.D. on him from the Griffiths girl, he could have—but no. Whoever it was that Jimmy worked for would be a hell of a lot more terrifying to him than John Sanders, detective inspector, could ever be since Sanders was unlikely to carve him up and feed his guts to the gulls, no matter how tempting the idea might be. “Hi, Ed,” he yawned. “How’s it going? Any word on Parsons?”

“Not yet,” said Dubinsky. “McInnis is on. He’ll call if she comes to.”

“I think I’ll drop over to the hospital and keep an eye on things. We’d better take a copy of that sketch—if it’s ready—in case she can identify the bastard. And maybe we can get something new out of the Griffiths girl while we’re waiting.” He flipped half-heartedly through the mail on his desk, opened some, dropped the rest into a drawer, and then turned the leaf of his desk calendar. He peered at the cryptic scribblings on it. “What do you know,” he said. “This is the day Conway’s lawyer gets back from Mexico. Call him, eh, Dubinsky, and tell him we’ll be over this morning. Don’t give him a choice. I have something to pick up first. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Dubinsky fell into stride beside Sanders along Dundas Street. The weather, which had spoiled Easter with wind and cold, was tormenting office workers by being warm and sunny now that the long weekend was over. “I couldn’t get him,” he said finally, as they headed the few blocks over to the hospital. “He’s not getting back to the office until tomorrow, she says. And she hasn’t the slightest idea where he is.” Dubinsky grunted in disgust. “Which she seems to think is pretty funny. If I was that guy I’d get another secretary.”

Sanders noted the empty chair outside room 526 and scowled. He flung open the door, half expecting to find Amanda’s mangled corpse inside. But she was sitting tranquilly up in bed, watching a game show, with a young police constable in the chair beside her. “Working hard?” said Sanders, and jerked his head in the direction of the door. The young man fled. Sanders pulled a brown paper bag out of his pocket and dumped it on Amanda’s bed. She picked it up doubtfully and glanced inside, then pulled out three large Swiss chocolate bars—a hazelnut, a nougat, and a praline. “I hope you like those kinds,” he said. “I’m sorry about the food.”

“Mmmm,” she said. “I love them. But you really didn’t have to. Did you come all the way over here just to bring me chocolate? I’d feel awful if you did.” She was trying to open each one as she talked and to sample all three flavours, not an easy task for one hand.

“Well, no. I had other reasons.” He forced his fatigue-numbed facial muscles into a smile. “We’d like you to try to remember everything you can about Jimmy.” Amanda nodded. “First off, how often was he there?”

Her slightly freckled nose wrinkled in concentration as she considered the question. “I suppose once or twice a week, after school, usually. He’d just be sitting there in his car. We used to stand around on Leslie’s front porch talking, sometimes for a long time, and he’d be there all the time.”

“Can you remember when he first started showing up?”

“We first noticed him about five or six weeks ago, but he could have been around before that. You don’t really pay any attention to cars just parked there, you know. In fact, we probably never would have noticed him except that one day Mrs. Conway walked by the car and he called out something to her. She stopped and looked at him for a second, and then went right on. That was when we decided that he was following her, and we started making up these crazy stories about who he was and what he was doing. As a joke, you know.” She laughed. “Our best one was the oil sheik—he was a filthy rich oil sheik, dying of passion for her, and was waiting there to abduct her and carry her off to the Persian Gulf where she had to teach his other wives physics.” By this time she was giggling wildly, and Sanders and Dubinsky were staring blankly at her. She took a deep breath. “That was because one day a police car came by while he was there, and he took off right away—so, obviously he had something to hide, you see.”

Dubinsky looked up sharply from his notebook. “Looks like a drop, doesn’t it?”

Sanders nodded. “More convincing than the thought that little Jimmy was dying of love for her.” He shook his head. “Who’s he connected with, Dubinsky? You know him from way back, don’t you?”

He shook his head. “That’s hard. He always seemed to be a loner. But he’s been mixed up in a lot of mob-connected stuff.”

“Then we’ll have to work at it from the other end,” said Sanders, turning abruptly back to the girl. “Who knew that you knew who was in the gray Honda?”

Amanda stopped to consider for a moment. “Well,” she said, “Heather did. And she could have told her mother, I suppose.” He glared at her. “And Leslie. She saw it too, lots of times, although she didn’t walk by it, the way Heather and I did, so she couldn’t see in and recognize the guy. But aside from them, we talked about it at lunch one day.”