Death Notes

accepted the interruption graciously with a sad smile. ‘The man had no enemies.’
    ‘How about his sax?Any idea why somebody’d steal it?’ I’d asked to gauge his reaction and he seemed suitably surprised.
    ‘His sax! Christ! Georgette gave him that sax. I kept it all those years he stopped playing. He’d hocked it and the pawnbroker knew me, called me up. I ran down there and took it home. I held it for twelve years, until he decided he wanted to play again. Who took it?’
    ‘The police are still investigating.’
    ‘My God, first Match, now the sax. How?’
    I told him only that it had been taken from Sharon’s house last night but he didn’t press me for details.
    ‘Are you investigating Match’s murder?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m doing what I can,’ I hedged. ‘Someone started a rumor that Match whispered his killer’s name to me before he died. It’s kept me kind of jumpy.’
    ‘Understandably,’ he said. ‘Now that you bring it up, Clark mentioned something to that effect Saturday night but I didn’t really take it in. It was you he was talking about, then?’
    I nodded. ‘Is Clark Match’s son?’
    ‘Yes. He’s devastated about Match’s death. Just devastated.’
    ‘They had a good relationship?’
    ‘Excellent. Couldn’t have been better.’
    ‘How about his daughter? Yvette?’
    ‘Ah. She’s a disappointment, isn’t she? But Match wasn’t allowed into her life until the damage had been done. He loved her, though. Treated her far better than I would have in his shoes. Match was a good man. And patient.’
    ‘In what way?’
    ‘She never followed through on her promises. She’d promise to go to rehab and wouldn’t, she’d promise to stop prostituting herself and failed. He never gave up on her. Even now, with her business, he said he was glad she’d gone into selling other women instead of herself. He saw it as a step in the right direction. He always felt she should go to college and he offered to send her every time they spoke. He made concessions for her because he felt her shortcomings were his fault for not rearing her as his own child. Even though Yvette’s mother refused to let him see her until she was fifteen. Poor Match.’ He looked aggrieved, then his face hardened. His voice quivered with emotion when he spoke again.
    ‘There’s something I’d like you to remember, Miss Ventana. It’s important, and since you’re Cisco Ventana’s daughter, I feel I can say this to you. I’d like to get my hands on the scum who killed Match. I’d give anything to have a crack at him first. Anything.’ He held my eyes just long enough to make sure I got the message. ‘Please remember that. It’d mean a lot to me.’
     

23
     
    ‘ M iss Ventana?’
    DuPont’s secretary swiveled at her desk and called out after me on my way to the elevator.
    ‘Somebody dropped this off for you while you were in with Mr DuPont.’
    She waved a letter-sized envelope at me.
    ‘For me?’
    I hadn’t told anyone where I was going.
    ‘Messenger?’
    ‘No.’
    Executive secretaries are supposed to be discreet. This one was going to make me work for it.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘It was a woman, Ms Ventana.’
    ‘All right. What did she look like?’
    The secretary shifted some stacks of paper around on her desk and smiled coolly.
    ‘She had brown hair in a Dutch-boy cut. And glasses.’
    No mention of a Richard Nixon mask, thank God.
    ‘What makes you think she wasn’t a messenger?’
    ‘She was wearing a green suit and heels, Ms Ventana.’
    I tore open the envelope in the elevator. The message was neatly hand-printed in black ink on cheap unlined paper.
    Talk about Match?Parking Level 2, Section F.
    I glanced at the bank of buttons next to the elevator door, considered punching Parking Level 2, but got out at the lobby instead and headed for the Toyota. Whoever was waiting for me downstairs would be expecting me on foot.
    My third pass through Section F was my last one. The butterflies had faded from my stomach. The entire floor seemed deserted of people, and I was about to write the whole thing off as a prank when I beamed in on some movement behind a deep-blue Volkswagen with a dented fender. It was over by the center column. I pulled up in front of it, rolled my window down, took a deep breath and kept the engine running.
    ‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘I see you. Come on out.’
    ‘Shut your engine off!’
    The woman’s voice echoed off the empty parked cars above the soft rumble of