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asked.
    “Yes, it’s butterscotch. I told Abby about the pie at the Goody-Goody on the ride back from Clermont and she just couldn’t wait.”
    Audrey sliced off another bite and stuck it into her mouth. She closed her eyes and chewed.
    Bender looked back at Dodge and gave him the crazy eye. Bender was a thick-necked cop who practiced curling weights before going on duty. He was also a hell of a joke teller and pussy hound, and picked up extra money for his wife and kids by playing jazz piano at downtown bars. He wore only the best suits from Wolf Brothers, while Dodge alternated two he’d bought from a Penney’s catalog.
    “And when did you arrive back here, ma’am?” Bender asked.
    “I don’t know. Twelve-forty? Yes, about then. We had burgers, too. Goody-Goody makes the best burgers. I told Abby about the burgers. She’s from Wetumpka, Alabama. They don’t have anything like that in Wetumpka, Alabama. Do they?”
    “Hush,” sister Abby said. “Let me have some of your pie.”
    “Ma’am,” Bender said. “When did you find your husband?”
    “Mr. Wall?” she said. “Oh, yes. Let me think.” She kept chewing and then swallowed. “That nice man from the cab company brought my bags into the bedroom.”
    Bender nodded and made notes. “So, he saw Mr. Wall?”
    “No,” she said. “My bedroom is before his. I went into Mr. Wall’s bedroom to use the phone. I was going to call Baby Joe and find out where Mr. Wall had gone. I’d seen the papers on the front porch, and all the shades were down in the house. I thought he must be out of town. It was so dark all over the house.”
    “And that’s when you saw the body.”
    “Mmm-hmm,” she said. She smiled at Bender as if she’d just passed a test or had complimented him about his wife or new car.
    Mark Winchester and Sloan Holcomb walked in from the bedroom where the Old Man lay. Dodge ignored the detectives, knowing they’d try to get the case even though he was the first on scene.
    Dodge held up the bat for Bender to see.
    “That’s not anything,” Mrs. Wall said, her face shriveled and her voice shrewish. “One of the kids threw that over the fence ages ago. The killer went through the front door.”
    She stood up and cleared away the coffee cups and pie. Dodge thought about the matter-of-fact way she’d said “killer,” and it sounded false and prepared, as if a line she’d read in a book.
    “Do you know what kid?”
    She brushed by, red-eyed and coffee-breathed, to the sink. She was a pinch-faced old woman, and Dodge wondered how an old hotshot like Charlie Wall had ever been turned on by something like that.
    Bender shrugged his shoulders, and the sister smiled at him and offered half a hamburger. The woman smiled blankly, as if in a constant dream.
    “No, thank you, ma’am.”
    “Well, okay, then,” Abby Plott said. “You holler if you need anything.”
    “Mrs. Wall, why were you in Clermont again?”
    “Abby and I were visiting my other sister. Mrs. Margaret Weidman. I was registered at the Clermont Hotel.”
    Bender looked back at his notes. “You were home at twelve-forty. How long before you found Mr. Wall?”
    “A few minutes.”
    “But you didn’t call the police for more than an hour?”
    “Oh, no,” she said. She grinned. “I had to call Baby Joe and Mr. Parkhill.”
    “John Parkhill?”
    “Yes, I had to call his attorney.”
    “Was the front door locked?”
    “Why, yes, it was. All the doors were locked. I already told the nice policeman this. I already told him all of this. I told him there’s fingerprints on the door, unless he used a handkerchief. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a bite of my pie?”
    Dodge wandered back to the bedroom, where he said hello to Sheriff Ed Blackburn and a couple of his deputies. The sheriff’s office always worked gangland killings jointly with the Tampa Police Department. Officially because they boasted more trained detectives, but in reality because the police department