“Mistress is a way of distancing herself, making sure we don’t think they were friends.”
“Or of convincing herself of the same.”
“Funny,” Morgan said. “The door being locked.” He paused. “There’s no Chagoi.”
“No what?”
“No Chagoi. I’ve read that every koi pond should have a Chagoi. It’s big and affable, wrinkled like gold foil.”
“Maybe it’s lying low.”
“A furtive Chagoi. No, it’s a personality fish. It mediates between species. It’s got the mind of a mammal. Extravagantly subtle. Billy Crystal wearing Armani.” He seemed pleased with the allusion.
Miranda glanced at his rumpled clothes and smiled. He would look good in Armani. She hadn’t noticed before, but he had a day’s growth of beard. Was it stylish, or had he forgotten to shave? Probably the latter.
“She didn’t know there were no ashtrays. She doesn’t look like a smoker,” he repeated.
“She doesn’t smell like a smoker. You ever kiss a smoker, Morgan? Like sucking garbage through a straw.”
“You used to smoke.”
“That’s how I know.”
“I never did.”
She wanted to kiss him right then and there. It wasn’t a sexual impulse, at least not directly, not rising out of the hollow inside. It was the need to connect, by touching someone intimately who actually gave a damn about her after the lights were out. Maybe a little sexual, she thought, and thinking so made it sexual.
“Hey, Morgan.” Maybe she should reveal her anxiety, the horror and panic and strange sense of relief.
“Yeah?”
“Did you notice the books?”
“The koi books? Or the others?”
“Not many people these days buy hardcover books except lawyers and scholars with grants,” said Miranda. “Did you see the degree?”
“Linguistics.”
“Semiotics.”
“Same thing.”
“Not.”
Miranda had been holding an envelope in her hand that she had picked up from the floor near the wingback chair. It was a piece of unopened junk mail with some writing scrawled on the back. She handed it to Morgan.
He walked over to read it in light streaming through the French doors that wavered as the forensic people inside moved about, finishing their work. “‘Language is immanent but has no material existence.’ Good opening. That’s how I feel most of the time. Here but not here.” He continued to read, mouthing the words with just enough volume that the hyphens were audible. “‘Language is imm-in-ent, preceding our being in the world; imm-anent, providing the dimensions of knowledge and experience. Language is consciousness, whatever the case.’ I doubt if he was much for small talk.”
“It’s interesting, though, isn’t it?”
“Doesn’t exactly solve the mystery.”
“Which one? About language and consciousness, or about death?” She smiled slyly as if she had been caught in a thought-crime. “Did you see the Rongorongo?”
“I saw you admiring it. You’ve got to wonder what’s locked up in a language that no one can read.”
“Precisely,” she said. “But it’s not the language that’s indecipherable. It’s the script. You can understand why a guy with a doctorate in semiotics might want to own it if he had the money.”
“And then he stores it beside a brolly stand with a clutch of old canes!”
“Strange guy, our lawyer-philosopher.”
“Yeah,” said Morgan. “So why would someone kill a philosopher. I mean, lawyers, even Shakespeare said ‘kill all the lawyers,’ but a semiotician?”
“Morgan, this note? It contradicts its own declaration.” She wanted to go on. Words shaped thoughts in Miranda’s mind; she wanted to let them out. But Morgan was back with the fish. She wanted to talk about language and writing, about Rongorongo, about speaking with the dead.
Morgan was bent over, peering through reflections of the night sky into the obsidian depths, but all he could see was an illimitable absence of light.
“You want something to eat?“ she asked. “Come on. The koi aren’t going anywhere. Tomorrow they’ll tell us their secrets. Tonight they’re in mourning, draped in black.”
“Fish and chips or sushi?”
Over dessert Morgan offered a discourse on carpets. The Kurdish runner in the den: antique, its pile worn, a tribal rug, coarse wool, natural dyes. The indigo blue a desert lake; abrash, the hue variations, like water under the desert sky. Persian. He didn’t say from Iran. Carpets had more longevity than nation-states.
He went on to describe the Qashqa’i hanging as a wall piece behind the wingback chair.
She interrupted. “The runner! Why would a valuable carpet on a slate floor not have an underpad?”
Morgan smiled. He had read about rugs, subscribed for a couple of years to Hali, the opulent trade journal from England, had learned about designs and dying, weaving on hand looms by nomads, on village looms for the rich, about symbols and patterns, trading and auctions. But it hadn’t occurred to him that there should be an underpad beneath the Kurdish runner.
“So we have a carpet problem,” he said. “Mystery upon mystery. Do you think she did it?”
“Eleanor Drummond? She had access, possibly motive — all mistresses have motives for murder. I doubt she did it.”
“No,” he agreed.
“She delivers herself, or a version of herself, as someone too self-possessed, too emotionally self-sufficient, to bother killing her lover. It was a business arrangement.”
“The murder?”
“No, her life.” Miranda tinkered with her cutlery.
“So who do we think did it?”
“We don’t know, do we?”
“I think the koi are the answer,” he said. “Maybe we should have drained the ponds.”
Miranda ordered coffee, black, for both of them. He usually took double-double.
“You should have seen the diver in the lower pond,” said Morgan. “She virtually disappeared. For goodness’ sake, it swallowed her whole. Twenty thousand gallons of pea soup.”
When he said “for goodness’ sake” and “my gosh” and “holy smoke,” she liked him best. “How do you know that?” she asked.
“I saw her. She had to feel her way, like being submerged in soylent green.”
“The gallonage, how do you know that? Nobody knows twenty thousand gallons.”
“Grade ten geometry,” he said. “It’s easy to calculate.”
“Geometry was in grade eleven.”
“I know about what interests me — or maybe I’m interested in what I know about. Koi interest me. Carpets interest me. A good carpet on slate, that interests me. Wine interests me. Really good wine, premier grand cru, brunello di montalcino, trockenbeerenauslese.” Each designation he enunciated with an appropriate accent — French, Italian, stage German. “I read about the stuff. I don’t drink it.”
“Who came from