“That’s where you’ll be stayin’ tonight,” Miss Bristol said, pointing at a mammoth, sprawling, half-colonial, half-Moorish pink wedding cake of a building that seemed to signal the end of Bay Street. “Sir Harry own that.”

“No kidding.”

Her smile turned mischievous. “A few years ago Sir Harry went into the hotel dinin’ room and the maftre d’ didn’t recognize him…Sir Harry’s apparel is…unpretentious, you know? Even unconventional.”

“Really,” I said, still savoring the odd, almost French-sounding accent she’d put on that unlikely last word.

“Really. So Sir Harry, he’s wearin’ the shorts and sandal, lookin’ kind of sloppy, you know, and he was refused a seat. And the next day, Sir Harry, he buy the hotel for a million dollar and he go back in and ask for a seat and the same thing happen. Only this time, he fire the maitre d’.”

“Well. I’ll be sure to keep my opinions about Sir Harry’s attire to myself.”

She laughed again. “Sometime it is best to be discreet.”

Pleasant as she was pretty, this Marjorie Bristol. But where did she get that vocabulary? I knew where she got the Caribbean accent-I’m a detective, after all.

But we had gone on past the hotel.

“We’re not stopping for me to check in?” I asked.

“No. Sir Harry wants you brought straight to him. He’s expectin’ you at Westbourne.”

“Westbourne?”

We were moving past a public beach, little-used at the moment, the surrey clop-clipping onto an open road, heading away from town.

“Westbourne,” she said. “Sir Harry’s beach house.”

I kidded her with a wry smile. “That name’s a little…grandiose for a cottage, isn’t it?”