Me, I was looking for a girl named Cate Holly. Poor kid saw her own cousin murdered, and has been haunted ever since. Not by ghosts or whispers or anything innocent like that, but from rabid heckling, the sound of her own heartbeat, and one too many plates of hospital food. In order to solve her cousin's murder, I first had to figure out what was going on in that young woman's head. I decided to talk to her directly at the Lion's View Asylum for the Mentally Ill. After pushing open the weathered oak doors, the only thing that was ill in that hallway was my stomach, once I saw the contents of another one spill over the cold, ceramic floor. It was turkey and string beans day, and the odour was like something you'd find in a trash heap at the back of a chinese food place, after Vinnie the Weasel heaved a final delivery into the egg foo young.

My feet steered clear of the mess on the floor, over to the reception area, where a girl in a trim white skirt asked me my business. I told her that business was murder. Not hers, but if someone didn't mop up quick, I thought I'd start planning my own.

I asked for Cate Holly's room, and the skirt told me she went out for her scheduled walk, and wouldn't be back for a few hours. Since I had a little time to kill, I figured I'd head over to St. Mary's Home For The Ailing. The name made me think of an alehouse I fell into, where you could get a pint for two nickels and a half-hearted smile from a bucktooth named Sally, on a lazy Thursday night.

Two hours and one matchbox later, I found myself at the doorstep of a halfway house with a teetering steel crucifix on its roof. Sister Mary Vivian met me in front of the chapel, and when I inquired after her opinion of young Catie, she shook her head. "My, my, my... We had such hopes for that child. You know, it's funny: her fate was like that of her namesake, St. Catherine. She told a truth that other people wouldn't accept, then she was cast out - excommunicated, I suppose you'd say - in that dreadful Lion's View place. But, the operation...that was just..."

I went on to inquire about any quirks the nun might've noticed, while Catie was under her care. For one thing, I found out she didn't like to be called "Catie". "Oh, people said that she babbled, tarnishing young Mr. Venable's reputation, God rest his soul." As was her habit, the tall, holy woman made the sign of the cross as she said those last few words. "But we always believed her. We made her swear on the Word of God that she was telling the truth; to the wind, with what her aunt says!"

So Cate knew how to yammer. But I've seen gin-runners put their hand on the Good Book, before a gaggle and a gavel, and lie through their polished pearly whites. That doesn't mean I have to believe some young dame who made sappy eyes at a nun, just so she could bum the next train to Topeka. Still, I felt real sorry for Cate, plain and simple. If anyone took a butter knife and started poking around in my steam engine, I'd shove that piece of metal so far up that doc's caboose, he'd be shouting, "Woo woo!" for the next forty years.

Before I left the home, the honest sister handed me a clipping of some poetry that Cate kept at her bedside, back when her sad life found her here:

Come with me, love,
Across the world,
Ere glory fades
And wings are furled,
And we will wander hand in hand,
Like a boy and girl in a playroom land.

After reading that, I lit up a cigarette and let the smoke try to clear my head. Near as I could tell, it had something to do with Cate and Sebastian, or Sebastian and that flighty aunt of Cate's. I'd read in the case file that Mrs. Venable and her son, the deceased Sebastian, would go on three-month trips each summer, and that the latter of the two wrote one poem each time. Well, Cate was the last person to see him alive, when she went with him on his fateful trip, and he didn't write any such poem that summer, from what I heard. Something between those lines didn't sit well with me. No matter how hard I tried to dismiss it, I couldn't help to think that the subject of that corpse's poem was his own mother, and that put a spin on things I didn't want to consider too long. Then again, it is the South.

If the poem wasn't about Cate, why did she keep it? Because she thought Sebastian was talking about her? Because somewhere dark in that ageless, peaceful mind, she felt serious affection for her cousin?

Whatever the reason, it was about time I returned to the asylum. I said goodbye to Sister Mary Vivian and took the long road back, under storm clouds that were begging to give my car a good wash.

Lion's View opened its jaws to me once more, and as before, the smooth beans and turkey stunk up the front square, except this time, they were mixed with the wonderfully nose-burning smell of floor polish. Anxious to see the skirt again, the only real reprieve from this runaway dog day, I turned my nose up and away toward the front desk. Lucky for her, she was away from the floor polish.

Unlucky for me, her shift was over an hour ago, and a plump nurse with cheeks as red as two-cent licorice informed me that Cate Holly had gone to bed, and was not to be disturbed until the morning, if it's all the same to me. Well, it was all the same to me, because I'd just gone through this song and dance earlier today. The only difference was, back before supper, there was a skinny skirt singing to me.

Now that this act of the opera closed its curtain, I spent the night at the edge of town in a mangy motel, sharing a room with some bum who had a bottle of hooch so wooden, that it tasted like the inside of a cheap sock.

I woke up to the sound of an out of tune, ten-piece band, realizing only after I fell out of the cigarette-burned covers that it was my aching head that blessed me with that foghorn rhythm. I somehow made it to the john, and heaved everything except string beans and a gobbler.

Instead of sending myself to the crackhouse again, I swallowed the rest of the black tar in some half-awake diner, and filled up the tank to drive over to the Venable estate. From the amount of exotic trees and flowers they kept about the property, it looked like the architects forgot they were supposed to build a mansion, instead of a million-dollar greenhouse.

I yanked the chain next to the front door, hoping that a showerhead wouldn't suddenly rain down on me, thinking I was a plant that had evolved to the point where it could walk and yank chains at will. Instead, a cornstalk of a woman gracefully turned back the door, and after my license and I introduced ourselves, she escorted us to the rear patio to await the lioness.

While I was trying hard not to suffocate from all the moisture that danced in the air, I found a thin volume called Poem of Summer on a wicker table nearby. It didn't take a rocket scientist's mutt to figure out that this was Sebastian Venable's poetry inside. I fanned through several pages until I came upon the bit of the poem I took from Sister Mary Vivian. Two more verses told their tale:

Stay with me, love,
In the city's murk,
Where the sun but dares
Shyly to lurk,
And we will watch life hand in hand,
Like a boy and girl in a grown-up land.

Before I continued with the third verse, something hit me. From what I'd read of the police report, Cate and Sebastian were bothered by a group of naked castaways in that savage, unforgiving town, just before he was killed. Maybe those kids were the "murk", the real street life that the cousins watched, before Venable shook the hand of Death. It just didn't make sense - the events surrounding his murder didn't happen until a year after he wrote this poem.

"Poets are always clairvoyant!" As if she read my mind, old Mrs. Violet Venable rolled out onto the patio, her wheels stopping just short of my creased gaberdine trousers. Her hair was the colour of candy floss, the kind you'd get at Yankee Stadium at the top of the 8th, after practically everyone had already gone home to eat something more substantial, not to mention healthy. There wasn't a note of health to Mrs. Venable's name, though she had a go at being venerable, at least insofar as it vexed her maid.

"I see you've got my dear son's volume in your hands." She took the book from me with delicate care, and held it up to the sky, as if she was some kind of pink-haired vicar, offering up the host for her departed son. There was something peculiar about this broad, because she read my mind again. "All poets look for God, all good poets do, and they have to look harder for Him than priests do, since they don't have the help of such famous guide-books and --" She went on and on, painting her son out to be some kind of textbook saint.

I interrupted her as politely as my conscience would allow, and asked about Cate Holly, her niece. She winced at the name, and claimed she'd disowned that wretch, and was glad to be rid of her. The truth was the next thing I was after. The truth about what happened to Sebastian, and how Cate was involved, and what dear Mrs. Venable thought about the whole affair. She cautioned my use of the word "affair", noting that her son was as chaste as the day he was born. From what I'd heard about how he treated Cate on the beach, forcing her to put on a revealing swimsuit, somehow, I had a little trouble believing this woman in the wheelchair, and anything else that came out of her mouth.

"I'll tell you the truth! She collapsed! I mean, her lies collapsed. Not my truth - not the truth..." Just as I thought. She was so adamant about her son being the angel she thought he was that she would do anything to protect him, even force poor Cate into a lobotomy. "My son was a creator! Now if my honesty's shocked you, pick up your little black bag without the subsidy in it, and run away from this garden! Nobody's heard our conversation but you and I, Doctor Sugar."

Doctor Who? Maybe her crazy eyes were going on her, because the Colt I kept holstered to my chest sure wasn't used for listening to people's rickety heartbeats. I reasoned she was talking about the doctor responsible for Cate's operation, and how he was struggling to get started until this crone came along.

It all made sense now. Fearing that Cate was actually telling the truth, Mrs. Venable called on that doctor to "take care" of Cate, so that he could physically remove any memory of the murder she witnessed. It was greed, and that was all there was to it. Greed of her family to keep Cate quiet (just so they'd be remembered in Mrs. Venable's will), greed of the doctor, who wanted to keep his own crazy practice alive, and her own maniacal greed of her son, whose memory she wanted to preserve for herself as an icon which was most definitely composed of nothing but sharply cut stained glass. "Nothing else is left for her..."

Her own niece. Why, if she wasn't in that wheelchair, I had a right mind to pop her one right there, because nothing on that rambling harpy from hell screamed "lady" to me.

I grabbed the book away from her, citing something about evidence or some other triviality, and slap me down if she didn't wheel herself after me with all the hellfire I knew she'd been born in. Getting into my car, I overheard her wishing me a good day, a good life, and a lot of other things that were about as good as a pickpocket with a collection plate on Easter Sunday.

The asylum was my ultimate stop, to see if there was a chance that Cate could give me anything more about the murder, because the mania I'd seen so far had made me glad I didn't follow my mother's advice to become a pipe-smoking shrink.

On my way there, I balanced Poem of Summer on the steering wheel, and scanned the lines of the third verse, while I blew loops of smoke out the window:

Go from me, love,
If thou'lt not stay;
Follow thy bent,
'Tis the better way.
And I will seem to hold thy hand,
Like a child in dreams of fairyland.

This part seemed to address the old bag whose rainforest I just left. It seems her son was telling her to go away, because she was upset that he could take his new interest, Cate, with him on his summer holiday, instead of his own loving, apostolic mother. Well, good for you, Sebastian. Your old lady's enough to drive anyone through Yonkers and back; it's just too bad Cate was the one who had to pay that stygian price.

It's funny that he'd say, "I will seem to hold thy hand," because after death, it sure looks like his reach still has Mrs. Venable dancing on her wheels.

Some people say the third time's the charm. Well, I walked through the entrance of the Lion's View Asylum for the Mentally Ill, and hoped that I had enough charm to weasel a smile out of the lips of that cute skirt I'd locked eyes with the day before. She rose up from her chair, smiled, and motioned for me to follow her. The way people were reading me today, I thought I had some kind of caption over my head, like they do in those funny books you can pick up at the five-and-dime, in front of the gumdrops and Tootsie Rolls.

She led me to Cate's room, and I walked in to see the hot, white sun beaming in through the window, where a twig of a woman sat, wishing for something. I tried to get her attention, but she wouldn't even face me. There wasn't a hint of recognition in her hips, for she kept her posture out toward a couple of youths playing in the yard. I noticed a scrap of paper clenched in her hand, and pried it out. It was what looked to be the final verse of the poem:

I must leave thee, love?
'Tis I must go?
Then as thou wilt,
For thou must know.
Let me but think I hold thy hand,
I'll roam content in any land.

I replaced the poem, and put my hand over hers, as if that touch could give her all the sympathy of an entire religion.

"For thou must know..." I walked away from her, on that blinding summer morning, believing that beyond everything they did to her, ahead of everything she witnessed and was subjected to, there was still some piece of Cate Holly trapped in the past, a sin that she could never wash away, and already had.

This story is based on Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer, from which the majority of the dialogue is taken. The lines of poetry are from Raymond Chandler's A Woman's Way.

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