"Sounds like you boys fucked up."

"We prefer to think of it as a missed opportunity." Garcia smiled. "Very good coffee. Colombian?"

"Yeah," Dennis Gault said. He dumped a squirt of vodka into his grapefruit juice.

"The reason I'm here," Garcia said, "is I need you to tell me everything about what happened with Decker."

Gault sat down, tugged irritably at his cherry swimtrunks. Garcia figured they must be riding clear up the crack of his buttocks.

"Hell, I flew to New Orleans and gave a full statement," Gault said. "How many times do I have to go over it?"

Garcia said, "I've read your statement, Mr. Gault. It's fine as far as it goes. But, see, working the Miami angle, I need a few more details."

"Such as?"

"Such as how did Decker choose you?" Garcia was admiring the empty coffee cup. It looked like real china.

Gault said, "My feelings about Dickie Lockhart were no secret, Sergeant. I'm sure Decker talked to some fishermen, heard the stories. Once he took those photographs, I was the logical choice for a buyer—he knew I hated Dickie, knew I wanted to see him discredited. Plus he knew I was a man of means. He knew I could afford his price, no matter how ludicrous."

Man of means.Garcia was in hog heaven. "He told you all this, Decker did?"

"No, I don't recall that he did. You asked how he picked me and I'm telling you it wasn't too damn difficult."

Garcia said, "How did he first contact you?"

"He called."

"Your secretary just patched him right through?"

"Of course not," Gault said. "He left a message. Left about seventeen messages before finally I got fed up and picked up the phone."

"That's good," Garcia said. From the inside of his tan suit coat he produced a small notebook and wrote something down. "Seventeen messages—your secretary's bound to remember the name, don't you think? She probably wrote his number in a desk calendar somewhere. Even a scrap of paper would be a help."

"I don't know," Gault said. "That was weeks ago. She probably tossed it by now."

Al Garcia left his notebook open on his lap while Gault repeated his story that R. J. Decker had demanded one hundred thousand dollars for the photographs of Dickie Lockhart cheating.

"I told him he was nuts," Gault said. "I told him to take a flying fuck."

"But you saw the pictures."

"Yeah, and it was Dickie, all right, pulling fish cages in a lake somewhere. Illegal as hell."

Garcia said, "So why didn't you buy them?"

"For the obvious reasons, that's why." Gault pretended to be insulted.

"Too much money," Garcia said. "That's the most obvious one."

"Forget the money. It would have been wrong."

"Wrong?"

"Don't look at me like that," Gault said. "You're looking at me like I was a common criminal."

Maybe worse, Garcia thought. He had already decided that Dennis Gault was a liar. The question was, how far did it go?

"The note," the detective said. "Asking for a hundred grand—"

"I gave it to the cops in New Orleans."

"Yes, I know. But I was wondering what Decker meant—remember he used the word 'fee'. Like it was a real case. He said, 'The fee is now a hundred grand,' something like that."

Gault said, "Hell, I knew exactly what he meant."

"Sure, but I was thinking—why he didn't use the word 'price'? I mean, he was talking about the price of the photographs, wasn't he? It just seemed like a funny choice of words."

"Not to me," Gault said.

"When did he give you the note?"

"Same day he showed me the pictures. January 7, I guess it was." Gault got up and went to the bathroom. When he came back he was wearing a monogrammed terrycloth robe over the skimpy red thong. It had gotten chillier in the apartment.

"After I told Decker to get lost, he went right to Lockhart for all the marbles. It was pure blackmail: Pay me or I give the pictures to my pals at the newspaper. Naturally Dickie paid—the poor schmuck had no choice."

Garcia said, "How do you know all this?"

Gault laughed caustically and slapped his hands on his knees. "From R. J. Decker!" he said. "Decker told my sister Elaine. Turns out he was banging her—I'm sure New Orleans must've filled you in. Anyway, Decker told Elaine he squeezed thirty grand out of Dickie before Dickie cut him off. At the tournament Decker went to see him about it, and you know the rest."

"Decker doesn't sound too bright."

"Then why haven't you caught him?"

"What I meant," Garcia said evenly, "is that it wasn't too bright for him to blab all this shit to your sister."

Dennis Gault shrugged and stood up. "You know how it is—in the sack you'll say anything. Besides, you never met Elaine. Talking is her second-favorite thing." Gault flashed Garcia a sly, frat-house sort of look. Garcia thought this showed real class, a millionaire pimping his own sister. With each passing minute the homicide detective was growing to doubt Mr. Gault's character.

He said, "Maybe Decker was just bragging."

"Bragging, passing the time, waiting for his dick to get hard again, I don't know. Whatever the reason, he told Elaine." Gault took Garcia's coffee cup. "What about Decker's partner, this Skink maniac?"

"We don't even know his real name," Garcia said.

"He's a nut case, I've met him. Tell your boys to be damn careful."

"You bet," Garcia said, rising. "Thanks for the coffee. You've been most helpful."

Gault twirled the sash of his robe as he walked the detective to the door. "As you can tell, I had no love for Dickie Lockhart. If anything else had happened to him—a plane crash, prostate cancer, AIDS—you wouldn't have heard a peep out of me. Hell, I would've thrown a party. But murder—not even a cheating motherfucker like Dickie deserved to be murdered in cold blood. That's why I went to the police."

"Sort of a civic duty," Garcia said.

"Exactly." Before Gault said good-bye, something occurred to him: It would be best to end the interview on a light and friendly note. He said to Garcia, "You're from Cuba, right?"

"A long time ago."

"There's some hellacious fishing down there, south of Havana. Castro himself is a nut for largemouth bass, did you know that?"

"I read something about it."

Gault said, "For years I've been trying to pull some strings and wrangle an invitation, but it's damn tough in my position. I'm in the sugar business, as you know. The Bearded One doesn't send us many valentines."

"Well, you're the competition," Garcia said.

"Still, I'm dying to try for a Cuban bass. I've heard stories of sixteen-, eighteen-pound hawgs. What's the name of that famous lake?"

Garcia said, "I forget."

"Did you do much fishing," Gault asked, "when you lived there?"

"I was just a small boy," Garcia said. "My great-uncle did some fishing, though."

"Is that right?"

"He was a mullet man."

"Oh."

"He sold marlin baits to Hemingway."

"No shit!" Dennis Gault said. Now he was impressed. "I saw a movie about Hemingway once," he said. "Starred that Patton guy."

Back at police headquarters, Al Garcia sat down at his desk and slipped a cassette into a portable tape recorder. The date of January 7 had been written in pencil on the label of the cassette. It was one of three used in R. J. Decker's answering machine. Garcia had picked them up at the trailer after he got the search warrant.

He closed the door to his office, and turned the volume on the tape machine up to number ten on the dial. Then he lit a cigarette and pressed the Play button.

There were a few seconds of scratchy blank tape, followed by the sound of a phone ringing. The fourth ring was interrupted by a metallic click and the sound of R. J. Decker's voice: "I'm not home now. Please leave a message at the tone."