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exactly flashy, he was more delicate than that; more like mother-of-pearl or the scales of a fish.’ Mildred nodded. ‘That’s what I thought to myself, at first: that he was like some gorgeous silver-scaled dead fish on a slab in the supermarket.’
    Sam waited until a man, wheeling a trolley half-filled with coconuts, had passed them by. ‘His clothes were all silver?’
    â€˜Everything was silver,’ she said. ‘From his hair all the way down to his toes – he had those terrible shoes that make people look like they’re walking up on the mezzanine instead of the first floor, you know?’
    â€˜Sure, I know.’ Sam smiled, because listening to Mildred Bleeker was often a pleasure in itself; and he’d have been interested in knowing if she’d received her education from some fine school, or if perhaps she’d been self-taught, but since Mildred wasn’t one to speak much about herself, chances were he’d never find out.
    She shook her head again. ‘But then I realized he wasn’t a bit like a dead fish, because this boy was all life, all movement. He was more like some beautiful dragonfly, shimmering in the night, and I wanted to smile because he looked so good , almost like a skinny angel without wings, but instead my heart started thumping and I got these goosebumps.’
    â€˜Did you see his face?’ asked Sam.
    â€˜I did,’ Mildred answered, ‘and that was silver, too, but that aside, I couldn’t tell you anything much that would distinguish him from any other skinny young man, though he looked . . .’
    Sam waited a moment. ‘What? He looked at you? Did he see you, Mildred?’
    â€˜He did not look at me at all, Detective. He was too inside himself to do that, I thought.’ She smiled. ‘He seemed to me like a young man ought to look in the midst of lovemaking.’
    â€˜In the midst,’ Sam asked, ‘or at the height?’ Which was the most genteel way he could think of to try to ascertain if the stranger might have been climaxing, just possibly because of what he might recently have done, or have been about to do, to their John Doe.
    â€˜You mean was he having an orgasm?’ Mildred grinned. ‘No, sir, not yet. But he was most certainly having a heck of a time.’
    â€˜Was he high, so far as you could tell?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Mildred replied. ‘I’d say not, but of course I had no way of knowing that for sure.’
    â€˜So where was this? And when?’
    Down to business.
    â€˜Not last night,’ Mildred said. ‘It was early yesterday morning, around two a.m.’ She wore two wristwatches, one with a pale blue band on the right, one appearing to be gold, old and tarnished, a narrow bracelet with a small face, on her left wrist. She had told Sam in the past that she valued punctuality. She was, he had found, a reliable witness.
    Early Thursday morning. His happy demeanour not likely, therefore, to be immediately connected to the homicide. Unless he had already been planning the crime and relishing the anticipation.
    Probably just a stranger.
    â€˜And where did you see him?’ Sam asked.
    â€˜On the promenade,’ Mildred said. ‘Just along from here, near 7th.’
    Three blocks from where the rowboat had been pulled ashore.
    It could – almost certainly did – mean nothing, and they both knew it, except that Mildred Bleeker was not given to seeing psychos around every corner.
    This afternoon, with South Beach alive and pulsing, people out and about enjoying themselves in the hot, muggy sunshine, ignoring building clouds and forecasts of more thunder and rain, it was hard to picture silver oddballs high on possible dreams of murder.
    But Mildred was nobody’s fool.
    â€˜I asked myself afterwards,’ she said, ‘and then again this morning, when it kept coming back to me: why exactly did he make me feel so