How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Gillian Roberts

shattered, and I had so few of them left. “Please,” I said. “I am not interested in Dunstan, except for his last name. Maybe even where he works. My friend is—”
    She shook her head in irritation. “Take responsibility for your life! Stop playing games, hiding behind the cloak of a friend. If women would only own their own lives, if—”
    What the hell? It was going to be all over the papers in two hours or so. “My friend’s accused of murder.”
    Amazing what that word will do. “Murder?” she whispered.
    “She’s only accused,” I said. “She didn’t do it. She was with Dunstan at the time. I came to find him, to get him to go to the police. Only he heard the word ‘murder’ and ran away. I never found out his last name. My friend doesn’t know it, either.”
    She wiped the bar top, vigorously. “So who is this Dunstan-loving murderous friend of yours, then?”
    “Her name is Sasha Berg. She’s a photographer. She doesn’t love Dunstan at all and she isn’t a murderer. And what I need is his name.”
    She tilted her head back, let her jaw drop, and rolled her eyes up in a great show of concentration. Even the spikes of hair seemed to stand on tippytoe, the better to strain for memory. “Dunstan, Dunstan,” she murmured. “Dunstan—something-wrong-for-him-last-name. Something wholesome. With an S…no, an F… F-R… Frrr… Fllll… Nothing’s coming.”
    There were other ways, I reminded myself. Even if nothing pulled up from her data bank, I didn’t have to despair. There’d been another bartender on duty earlier who might remember Sasha. There was the restaurant, with waiters, hostesses, and fellow diners. Together, they might be able to put together a good accounting of Sasha’s time.
    If, of course, anyone had been paying attention. If, of course, the tourists who ate in the restaurant tonight were staying over until such time as we found them or they read a notice in the paper about the crime. If, of course, they hadn’t gone home, been too drunk to notice, been on some illicit assignation which they wouldn’t want to discuss with the police. If, of course, there were enough of those lucky, available rare types who know what they saw at what hour so that together, we could piece together a patchwork accounting of Sasha’s evening.
    Which meant we were never going to find nonstop Sasha monitors. Even if every improbable witness contingency worked out, there was always the lapse, the unaccounted-for period while the observers got on with their own lives or simply went to the bathroom. Only Dunstan could establish that Sasha had been far from the murder scene for that long block of time.
    The bartender was still making sounds, but more feebly. “Foooo… Hold on, it’s getting close. I can almost hear it now. Fill… Fit… Fis…” She shook her head. “Hell, I give up.”
    “Keep going—her life is at stake.”
    “Faaa… Famm… Farr… Farmer !” She was so loud that Mackenzie popped up from his chair.
    “I thought he was a photographer.” Cary Grant tending New Jersey chickens and pigs?
    “That’s his name. Dunstan Farmer.”
    “And where does he live?”
    “Someplace nearby, must be. He’s here almost every night, after all. In the casino, then in here for finding women. Doesn’t seem to have steady male pals. Or steady female pals, at that.”
    His skewed social life didn’t bother me. I had his name now, and a light-headed giddy conviction that I’d find him and settle this—a hope that was so unfounded, it couldn’t have happened except at four A.M. to a woman worn down by a year of teaching, a dubious relationship, serious sleep deprivation, and a best friend accused of murder.
    * * *
    The police wouldn’t let me have my clothing. Not even my toothbrush. “Crime scene. They’re still working on it,” the guard at the door said. And then he questioned me on my whereabouts at the time of the crime and brought in a buddy with the same questions all