Beauty and the Beast

4

Section 905.17 of the Florida Statutes, in describing who may be present during a grand jury session, unequivocally states: “No person shall be present at the sessions of the grand jury except the witness under examination, the state attorney and his assistant state attorneys, designated assistants as provided for in s. 27.18, the court reporter or stenographer, and the interpreter.”

This may seem to be loading the dice against the defendant, but such is not the case. He does not have to testify if he chooses not to, but when he is invited to testify, and assuming he accepts the invitation, he will once again be read his rights and he may at any time interrupt the questioning to consult with his attorney, who is waiting just outside the door to the sealed chamber.

On Monday morning, November 23, I was waiting in the courthouse corridor while George Harper was inside listening to the testimony of the doctor who had done the autopsy on Michelle Harper, and the garage attendant who had sold him the empty five-gallon gasoline can and subsequently filled it for him, and the laboratory technician who had lifted Harper’s prints from the can, and the police officer who swore that he had taken Michelle’s criminal complaint on the morning of November 16, and the fisherman who had positively identified Harper as the man he’d seen struggling with a white woman on Whisper Key beach that same night. Harper did not once come out to the hallway to summon me for assistance or advice; that was because I’d told him to decline any invitation to testify.

The grand jurors finished hearing the state’s attorney and his witnesses by a quarter past ten, and retired to deliberate their decision. When Harper joined me in the corridor outside, I asked, “How’d it go?”

“They gonna try’n fry me,” he said.

“Well, we’ll see. We don’t know how they’ll vote yet, do we?”

“Whut’s all this gonna coss me?” he asked.

“We’ll worry about that later.”

“I ain’t a rich man. I don’t wanna be in hock to you for the ress of my life.”

“I promise you won’t be.”

“How ’bout this other lawyer you said you’re gonna try’n find to hep you? Whut’ll he charge me?”

“First I have to find him.”

“You tell him I ain’t no rich man.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him.”

At a quarter past eleven, the jurors returned a true bill signed by the jury foreman and requesting the state’s attorney to prepare an indictment for first-degree murder. George Harper was taken back to the county jail, and I went to see James Willoughby, a criminal lawyer who had worked for the State’s Attorney’s Office before entering practice with the firm of Peterson, Pauling, and Merritt — familiarly known in Calusa as Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Willoughby was a man in his early forties, fox faced and blue-eyed, reportedly as shrewd and as clever as a murder of crows, the one attorney who — if speculation in Calusa’s legal shops proved valid — would one day replace Benny Weiss as the town’s dean of criminal lawyers. Unlike Benny, Willoughby brought to each of his defenses an intimate knowledge of the way the state’s attorney — his erstwhile employer — prepared his cases, and he coupled this inside information with an unremitting desire to humiliate his former boss (“that son of a bitch,” as Willoughby cheerfully called him) whenever the opportunity presented itself. It was the state’s attorney himself, Willoughby claimed, who had hindered his career in public service because of the fear that Willoughby would one day unseat him in a public election. Willoughby went after the State’s Attorney’s Office the way a terrier goes after a rat. Nothing pleased him more than to overthrow a case carefully prepared by whichever prosecutor “that son of a bitch” assigned to his latest murder, arson, armed robbery, burglary, or merely spitting-on-the-sidewalk case. Willoughby was just the man I needed.

“But I don’t want you fucking it up,” he said at once.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ll join you in the defense if you promise me your role will be a limited one. I don’t want to lose a case to that son of a bitch because some real-estate lawyer—”

“I’m not a real-estate lawyer.”

“Your firm handles a great many real-estate transactions.”

“Our firm also handles—”

“Does it handle homicide cases?”

“No, but—”

“The defense rests,” Willoughby said, and spread his hands, and grinned at me — somewhat ghoulishly, I thought. “My point, Matthew, is that whereas I have a great deal of respect for your expertise in sundry other areas of the law, I cannot have you bumbling about underfoot where a man’s life is at stake.”

“That’s why I came to you in the first place,” I said. “I don’t need to be lectured—”

“Forgive me, no lecture was intended.”

“I’m well aware of my limitations.”

“Fine, then. Just remember that we’re in my ball park.”

“I realize that,” I said. “In fact, if you’ll take the case, and if my client agrees to it, I’ll step out entirely.”

“No, no,” Willoughby said.

“Why not?”

“Well, from what you tell me, your man is a virtual pauper who—”

“No, I didn’t say that. He’s gainfully employed, he has his own junk business.”

“Can he afford the services of the best criminal attorney in Calusa?”

“Benny Weiss is the best criminal attorney in Calusa.”

“That’s an unkind cut, Matthew. If Benny’s such a hotshot, go to Benny.”

“He turned me down.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“He thinks Harper’s guilty.”

“So what? You’ll pardon me, Matthew, but that’s amateur night in Dixie. Who cares whether your man is guilty or not? Either you’re a gladiator or you aren’t. Either you’re willing to go into that arena and risk your reputation — even for a cause you don’t believe in — or else you get fat and lazy and that son of a bitch gets to send more and more people to jail or to the chair. I don’t care if a thousand witnesses saw your man carve up his wife with a butcher knife—”

“She was incinerated.”

“Who cares what she was? Stabbed, shot, strangled, hanged, who cares? The fun is in convincing a jury that your man couldn’t possibly have done it in a million years. That’s the fun of it, Matthew.”

I could hardly equate the attempt to save Harper’s life with unbridled joy, but I said nothing. I needed Willoughby, and he knew it.

“But to answer your question,” he said, “the reason—”

“I forget what the question was,” I said.

“The question was, in effect, ‘Why do I need you?’ I need you because my normal fee would be well beyond what your pauper client can afford.”

“If you get so much ‘fun’ out of it,” I said, “maybe he ought to charge you.”

“That, too, is unkind, Matthew. You may be willing to turn your shop into a charitable organization—”

“You should talk to my partner sometime.”

“Does he share my view? The point is, the grand jury’s brought in a true bill. Once Harper is served with the indictment, we’ll have two, three weeks to enter a plea. Our plea, of course, will be ‘not guilty,’ and we’ll request a trial by jury. Considering the jammed docket, that may not take place till the beginning of the year sometime. The point, Matthew, is that I could not normally expend the time and energy essential to an aggressive defense unless the fee were commensurate with my efforts. Since the case is nominally yours, I can only assume you’d be willing to do all the preparation necessary for—”

“Well, wait a minute—”

“Under my supervision, of course. I’ll tell you what we need, you’ll go after it Are we agreed on that?”

“Well...”

“We would have to agree on that, Matthew. Otherwise, count me out. I’m not suggesting that you have to do the legwork yourself. You can hire investigators to track down your witnesses, you can have some lackey in your office take depositions — unless, of course, you choose to do all that yourself, in which case you can consider it on-the-job training.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’ll base my modest fee on however many hours I put in before trial, and however much time I actually spend in court.”

“How much time do you think that’ll be?”

“In court? On a routine homicide? A week, ten days.”

“What’s your hourly charge, Jim?”

“The same as yours, I’m sure.”

“I don’t think Harper can afford that.”

“Then find another champion,” Willoughby said.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” I said. “If you get him off—”

“No deal,” Willoughby said. “This isn’t a collection case, this is murder.” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got someone coming in at one,” he said. “Are we agreed? Your firm handles the preparation — under my supervision — and I handle the trial itself. I get paid my usual hourly fee for whatever time I put in before the trial, and however long the trial may actually run. Does that sound fair?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“There are other lawyers in town,” Willoughby said drily. “Not as good as Benny Weiss perhaps...”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “Here’s where I’d like you to start.”

“Start? He hasn’t even been served yet.”

“He will be served, so why not get a jump on the state’s attorney? None of this’ll be wasted motion, Matthew, believe me. Any edge we can get will be worth the effort. The prosecution’s case will undoubtedly rest on (a) the fact that Michelle Harper made a formal complaint to the police charging that her husband had knocked her around on the night before the murder, (b) the fact that Harper bought a five-gallon can and had it filled with gasoline two days before the murder, (c) the fact that his fingerprints are on the can, and (d) the fact that someone has identified him as the man struggling with his wife on the night the murder was committed. I’m sure that guy at the garage really sold him the can and filled it for him, he has no reason to be lying about that. But how come his fingerprints aren’t on it, together with Harper’s? Talk to him, Matthew, find out in detail how he handled that can, how he filled it, and so on. Talk to Harper, too. Find out whether or not he took that can with him when he went to Miami. If he did, we’ve got trouble because that means it was in his possession and not laying around where anybody could have got hold of it. Fingerprints impress a jury, Matthew, they read too many detective novels and see too many movies. So get after that gasoline can and find out where it came from and where it went and how many people could have got hold of it before it ended up on the beach where the body was found.”

I looked at him and sighed.

“As for this fisherman, whatever the hell his name is...”

“Luther Jackson.”

“White or black?”

“White.”

“No matter. The point is, did he really see Harper on the beach or can we show that his identification can’t be trusted? He’s the first guy you’ve got to talk to, Matthew.”

“Okay,” I said, and sighed again.

“Now about Michelle,” Willoughby said, “who, unfortunately, is unavailable for further comment. She said her husband was the one who beat her black and blue. But how do we know he was?”

“Well, she came to my office...”

“Yes, and you took her to the police. But whose word do we have except Michelle’s — who now happens to be dead? How do we know it wasn’t some other guy who beat her up? And incidentally murdered her the following night?”

“She went to a neighbor for advice,” I said. “It was the neighbor who suggested she come to me.”

“After she heard Michelle’s story, right?”

“Right.”

“From Michelle’s mouth, and nobody else’s. Go see this neighbor — what’s her name again?”

“Sally Owen.”

“Sally Owen, right. Go talk to her, find out exactly what Michelle told her that Monday morning after her husband allegedly beat her up. Maybe Michelle said something we don’t yet know about.”

“All right,” I said.

“But first find this guy Luther Jackson and ask him what he saw and heard on that beach. He’s the prosecution’s star witness, Matthew. Without him, they can flush their case down the toilet.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So much for shooting down the prosecution’s case,” Willoughby said. “That’s only half the battle. Our case relies solely on alibi. Harper claims he was in Miami — with a short excursion to Pompano and Vero Beach — from sometime Sunday morning till sometime Tuesday morning. Okay, if he was really in Miami on Sunday night, then he couldn’t have been here beating up his wife, the way she claimed he did. And if he was really in Miami on Monday night as well, then he couldn’t have been here on the beach with her, where Mr. Luther Jackson says he saw him. If his alibi stands up, we’re home free. Talk to him, Matthew, pick his brain for whatever he can remember about the time he spent on the east coast, locate some guy who saw him pissing off a pier on Sunday night, locate some dame who went to bed with him on Monday night, dig around, get the facts and get the people — especially the people — we’ll need to establish that he couldn’t have been here getting in trouble when he was actually someplace else. Have you got that?”

“I’ve got it,” I said.

“Okay,” Willoughby said, and smiled, and extended his hand. “Good luck,” he said.

I had the feeling I was shaking hands with the devil.

By law, the State’s Attorney’s Office must supply to defense counsel the names and addresses of any witnesses it will call to testify at a trial. Even though I was getting an early start, I had no reason to believe that I’d have any trouble with them now. Whatever Willoughby’s opinion, there wasn’t a lawyer in town who did not believe that Skye Bannister — the unfortunate name with which the state’s attorney had been blessed — was anything but a fair and decent man sworn to uphold the laws of the state. A man in Bannister’s office immediately told me the name of Luther Jackson’s boat and the marina at which it was docked, and then threw into the pot as well the names and addresses of Lloyd Davis and Harper’s mother in Miami. Surprisingly, he wished me good luck before he hung up. Everybody was wishing me good luck today. I began thinking that maybe I would need it.

I did not get to the Sandy Pass Marina until a little after one o’clock that afternoon. I had called ahead to the marina office, but the man who answered the phone sounded dubious about getting a message to Jackson before my intended arrival. He told me he’d “try,” and in my experience anyone who tells me he’ll “try” is really intending to go out to lunch. But the boat (named Luther’s Hammer, presumably in reference to the protest nailed to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg in the year 1517) was there in one of the slips, and a man I presumed to be Jackson himself was squatting on the fantail, mending a fishing net. He looked up as I approached.

“Mr. Jackson?” I said.

“Yep,” he said.

“Matthew Hope. I’m representing George Harper, the man you—”

“Come aboard,” he said, and rose from where he was squatting. He was, I guessed, somewhere between sixty and seventy years old, a man whose face seemed eroded by sun, sea, and water, his nose bulbous and veined, his flinty blue eyes set deep in leathery weathered skin. He did not extend his hand. Instead, he reached for a pipe resting on the transom, shook the dottle out over the side, filled it with tobacco, and was lighting it as I stepped onto the deck.

“If you’re here to say I didn’t see him,” he said, “I seen him, and that’s that.”

“That’s what I’d like to talk about,” I said.

“You’ll be wasting your time.”

“It’s my time,” I said.

“And mine, too. I already spent close to two hours with the grand jury this morning, I don’t appreciate having to spend another two with you.”

“Mr. Jackson,” I said, “a man’s life is at stake here.”

“I ain’t about to change my mind about what I seen and heard. I already told this first to the police, and next to the grand jury. Ain’t no reason for me to go back on what I already said.”

“Except that when we subpoena you for deposition, you’ll have to tell us what you plan to say at the trial.”

“Who says?”

“That’s the law, Mr. Jackson. That’s what protects the innocent in this country.”

“Your man ain’t innocent,” Jackson said. “I seen him and I heard him. He’s the one killed her, all right.”

“In any case, can you tell me now what you think you saw or heard that night?”

“It ain’t what I think, Mr. Hope. It’s what I know.”

“And what’s that, exactly?”

“If you’re gonna get all this later in a deposition, why do you need it now?”

“Mr. Jackson, we’re spending more time arguing about talking than we’d be spending if we just plain talked.”

“Well, I suppose we are,” he said.

“So? Can I stop pulling teeth? I’m a lawyer by trade, not a dentist.”

Jackson smiled.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what you saw and heard on the night of the sixteenth. First, tell me what time this was.”

“Along around ten o’clock.”

“Where were you?”

“Anchored just off the beach.”

“On Whisper Key?”

“Yep. Heard the redfish were working in the shallows. Dropped the hook and put two lines over the side.”

“What kind of night was it?”

“Full moon, if you’re thinking I couldn’t see to the beach. Check the newspapers. They’ll tell you it was a full moon that night.”

“How far off were you anchored?”

“Just past the shallows. Maybe twenty feet from shore. No more’n that.”

“And you say you could see the beach clearly?”

“Clear as I’m seein you right this minute.”

“What exactly did you see, Mr. Jackson?”

“Black man and a white woman come runnin up the beach. The woman was naked.”

“What did she look like?”

“Long black hair, skin as pale as the moonlight.”

“And the man?”

“Big and husky. And black. Blackest nigger I ever seen in my life.”

I made a mental note to ask Luther Jackson, when we took his deposition, to discourse a bit on his attitudes about “niggers.” I also made a note to check with Morrie Bloom about the various shades of brown on the faces of the five policemen who’d been in the lineup with Harper; were any of them as black as he was? Or had Jackson made his identification based solely on how black Harper was?

“Did you see the man’s face?” I asked.

“I seen it, all right.”

“From twenty feet away?”

“My eyes are fine, Mr. Hope. If I can spot a school of fish three hundred yards off the bow, I can sure as hell see a man’s face from twenty feet offshore.”

“What kind of hair did he have?” I asked.

“Same as Harper’s.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“Couldn’t see his eyes. Most niggers have brown eyes, same as Harper’s.”

“When you say a big man...”

“Like Harper.”

“How tall would you say?”

“Like Harper.”

“How much did he weigh, would you guess?”

“Same as Harper.”

“Then there’s no question in your mind that the man you saw on the beach was George Harper.”

“None a’tall.”

“And you say you saw him at ten o’clock or thereabouts?”

“Around then. Him and the woman both. Was the woman first caught my eye, naked the way she was. Hard to see niggers in the dark, you know,” he said, and chuckled. I said nothing, but I made another mental note to ask him again, when we took his deposition, all about how difficult it was to see “niggers” in the dark.

“Did they just walk onto the beach, or what?” I said.

“Came runnin up the beach. Woman ahead of him, Harper following her.”

“Was she carrying anything?”

“Nothing that I saw.”

“No handbag, nothing like that?”

“Naked,” Jackson said, and nodded. “Big tits shining in the moonlight.”

I remembered that the police had found Michelle’s handbag in the sand, had in fact been able to make positive identification from the driver’s license in her wallet. It was the handbag that had led Morrie to believe she’d gone out onto the beach voluntarily. Had she dropped her bag on the sand near the pavilion before running from her murderer?

“How about him? Was he carrying anything?”

“Who? Harper?”

“The man you saw running after her.”

“Nope. Nothin I could see.”

“How long had you been out on the water before you saw these people, Mr. Jackson?”

“Couple of hours. Left here around six-thirty, figure it took me forty minutes to get to Whisper. Let’s say I was there, anchored there with my lines in the water, since from about seven-thirty on.”

“That would make it two and a half hours.”

“Like I said, a coupla hours.”

“Was the tide high or low?”

“High. Couldn’t a been sittin only twenty feet offshore with my draft if the tide had been low. Check with the papers, you don’t believe me. High tide, full moon.”

“What were you doing during those two and a half hours?”

“Fishing. What d’you think I was doin? That’s what I am, is a fisherman.”

“Catch anything?”

“Yep. Not as many as I hoped, but I pulled in a few.”

“What’d you do when you weren’t pulling in fish?”

“Had a few beers, whiled away the time. Fisherman gets used to being alone out on the water.”

“How many beers?”

“Just a few. If you’re thinkin I was drunk, Mr. Hope, forget it. Ain’t a fisherman in all Calusa can drink me under the table.”

“How many beers did you have, actually?”

“Drank me a coupla six-packs.”

“Twelve beers?”

“More or less.”

“Which was it, Mr. Jackson. More or less?”

“Maybe broke out another six-pack, started on that. Ain’t much to do out on the water when they ain’t bitin.”

“So you drank something between twelve and eighteen beers in the two and a half hours before you saw the man and the woman on the beach.”

“Which don’t mean I was drunk.”

“Nobody says you were. Did you see a fire on the beach?”

“Nope. Didn’t see no fire.”

“But you did see the man and the woman struggling.”

“Yep. Grabbed her by the arm, yanked her off her feet. Started slapping her, seemed like, I couldn’t see too clear when they were rolling around there in the sand. But I could hear the slaps, and I heard him yelling her name, too.”

“What name did you hear?”

“Michelle.”

“What else did you hear?”

“Called her a no-good whore. Said she always was a whore, said a whore wasn’t to be trusted.”

“You heard all that from the boat?”

“Yep. Wind was carrying from the east, you check the papers. Wind from the east, high tide, full moon.”

“What did the woman say?”

“Nothing. Just kept whimpering while he was hitting her.”

“Then what?”

“Dragged her off.”

“Dragged her through the sand?”

“Yep. By the hands, it looked like. Her hands were together, he was draggin her by the hands.”

“What’d you do?”

“Same thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dragged ass.”

“Why?”

“Fish weren’t bitin, no sense hangin around there. Pulled up the hook, went on my way.”

“Did you report what you’d seen to the police?”

“Not till after I heard about the murder.”

“When was that?”

“Tuesday sometime. Heard it on the radio. Figured maybe that was what I seen on the beach Monday night.”

“But you didn’t see any fire on the beach?”

“Nope.”

“Not after you saw the people there, and not while you were under way, either.”

“Nope. Went south, anyway. They were heading north, toward the pavilion — where they found her body, you know.”

“Mr. Jackson, I’d like to have you come to my office to repeat under oath what you just told me. Would you have any objection to signing a deposition?”

“None a’tall. Ain’t going to help your man none, though. I seen him on that beach, I heard him calling her them dirty names, I heard him slapping her, I seen him dragging her off through the sand. It was Harper I seen and nobody else, and I’ll swear to that on a stack of Bibles.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jackson,” I said.

“For what?” he said.

I phoned Sally Owen from the marina office, and caught her between customers at the beauty parlor where she worked. She told me she had somebody coming in at two, and asked if I could possibly get there at two-thirty, by which time she should be finished. As it turned out, she was still working on her customer when I got there at twenty to three.

Sally was a good-looking black woman in her early thirties, dressed for work in tight-fitting slacks, high-heeled sandals, and a white work smock that flared out over the slacks like a short miniskirt. She wore her hair in the sort of Afro cut Angela Davis had made famous, and she wore as well a pair of dangling ruby earrings that seemed more suited to a night out on the town than to the somewhat sterile decor of her surroundings. The shop was in New Town, the black section of Calusa, not too far from where Michelle had lived with her husband. Sally asked me to take a seat, and I watched as she continued twisting the woman’s hair into the countless number of slender braids Bo Derek had popularized in the film 10.

The woman upon whom she labored was a “6” at best — if one insists on rating women by their looks alone. Dale had despised the film. She asked me afterward, with some justification, how I would enjoy being rated by a numbers system. She insisted that Blake Edwards, the director, had to be some kind of a male chauvinist pig at heart. I told her I’d found the movie only slightly amusing, but that Bo Derek certainly was a beautiful woman. In an amazing turnabout, Dale asked me — somewhat shyly and a trifle coyly — how I would rate her if given the opportunity. Ever nimble on my feet (we were, in fact, supine in Dale’s bed at the time) I told her she surely rated a “20” on looks alone, plus another “20” for the purity of her mind. Dale said, “Liar,” but she snuggled closer to me.

The braiding was only half-finished when Sally came to where I was sitting. “Didn’t tell me this was what she wanted,” she said. “Gonna take another hour at least. I don’t want to keep you waiting. We’d better talk now.”

We moved to a corner of the shop away from the chairs and the hair dryers and the sinks. An end table between us was covered with back issues of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Ebony. Sally offered me a cigarette, and then lit one for herself.

“So,” she said. “Something, huh?”

She had, I realized all at once, extraordinarily beautiful eyes, a pale amber against the smooth tan of her complexion. Her left eye turned in ever so slightly, in what the British might have called “a bit of a squint,” not enough to make her look truly cross-eyed, but lending to her face a somewhat out-of-focus, smoky, and oddly sexy appearance. She was perhaps five feet six inches tall, a well-proportioned woman who sat with her legs crossed, the ruby earrings suddenly seeming appropriate with the high-heeled sandals she was wearing.

“You get to know a person, and then something like this happens,” she said, and shook her head, and dragged on the cigarette.

“How well did you know her?” I asked.

“Pretty well. For neighbors, we got along better than most. She lived only three houses down the street, you know. Only white woman in the neighborhood.”

“And that’s how you knew her? As a neighbor.”

“Well, a friend, too. I suppose we were friends. Considering.”

“Considering what?”

“She was white, I’m black. Aren’t too many whites and blacks who’re real friends in this town, are there?”

“Did you consider her that? A real friend?”

“I was a shoulder to cry on, let’s put it that way.”

“How so?”

“Whenever King Kong started up, she called me.”

“King Kong?”

“George. Her husband.”

“Started up how?”

“Well... hassling her, you know?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The green-eyed monster is what I mean.”

“He was jealous of her, is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s putting it mildly. Well, look, figure it out for yourself. You get a woman who looks like Michelle, and she’s married to an ape, he’s going to believe whatever he wants to believe, am I right?”

“I don’t think I’m following you. What, exactly, did he believe?”

“He was crazy, that’s all.”

“Crazy how?”

“Well,” Sally said, “let’s say the man was hypersensitive to any other man she even glanced at.”

“Did she glance at other men?”

“No, no, pure as a lily, Michelle was. It was all in his head, you understand?”

“You’re saying he accused her of—”

“Well, ‘accused’ might be too strong a word.”

“What word would you prefer?”

“Let’s say he suspected she was paying too much attention to other men.”

“Is that what she told you?”

“Used to come to the house in tears, complaining about the way he hassled her all the time.”

“Uh-huh. Confided all this to you, is that right?”

“Confided it to me, right.”

“How often did this happen?”

“Did what happen?”

“Her telling you he’d accused her—”

“Well, not accused.”

“Sally,” I said, “I’m having some difficulty getting this straight. Did Harper, or did he not, accuse his wife of paying too much attention to other men?”

“She said he suspected her of it, that’s right.”

“And hassled her about it?”

“Right.”

“That’s accusing her, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you want to put it that way,” Sally said, and shrugged.

“How often did this happen?”

“You want this exact?”

“Please.”

“It was at least three or four times.”

“She came to your house on at least three or four occasions...”

“Right.”

“In tears...”

“Right.”

“To confide that her husband had accused her of paying too much attention to other men.”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Had you ever witnessed any of this?”

“Witnessed what?”

“Michelle paying attention to other men?”

“No, no. Like I said, it was all in his head.”

“Had you ever been with them socially?”

“Oh, sure.”

“And you never saw Michelle behave like anything but a model wife?”

“That’s right.”

“How did Harper behave on those occasions?”

“He was his usual self.”

“And what was that?”

“Never said a word to anybody you didn’t have to drag it out of him. He’d come to the house sometimes with Michelle, just sit quiet the whole night long, like something was eating him up alive. I mean, this would be like a party, you know, six or seven people in, he’d sit there without saying a word to anybody. All bottled up inside, you know? I’m telling you, I’m not surprised he killed her. It’s the ones who’re all bottled up inside who finally let it out in ways you don’t expect.”

“Did he seem like a violent person to you?”

“Well, he beat her up, didn’t he?”

“You have only Michelle’s word for that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When she came to see you last Monday morning, she was the one who told you her husband had abused her.”

“And I wasn’t surprised, I’m telling you.”

“That she told you this?”

“No, that he finally got around to hitting her. It was what she was afraid of all along. That one of these days, when he got in these jealous fits of his, he’d hurt her somehow.”

“She told you that?”

“Right, that one of these days he’d hurt her. In fact—”

She shook her head.

“Yes?”

“She told me she was afraid he’d kill her one day.”

“When did she tell you that?”

“It was Halloween night. I remember because when she knocked on the door, I thought it was some trick-or-treaters coming around. Instead, it was Michelle again, in tears, telling me Kong was on another rampage, yelling at her, threatening her—”

“Threatening her?”

“Right, telling her if she ever looked at another man, he’d fix her good.”

“And she interpreted this to mean he’d kill her?”

“That’s what she said.”

“That he’d kill her?”

“Or mess her up some way. The morning she came here, last Monday morning, her breasts were all black and blue, her nose broken, teeth missing from her mouth. Hurting her that way, you know? So she wouldn’t be attractive to other men.”

“Uh-huh. But you heard all this only from Michelle, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Which would make it hearsay.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you never actually saw or heard any indication, in public, that Harper actually was a jealous person. Or that he might be capable of doing such extreme violence.”

“Man’s about to beat up his wife, he doesn’t go inviting a crowd in to witness it, Mr. Hope.”

“I realize that.”

I was silent for a moment. Sally took this as a cue that our conversation had ended. She stubbed out her cigarette and then glanced up at the wall clock. Across the room, the would-be “10” was beginning to show signs of impatience.

“How long had you known Michelle?” I asked.

“Since from when they got married.”

“Which would’ve been about a year and a half ago, is that right?”

“Right. I’ve known her about that long.”

“Were you at the wedding?”

“No, I didn’t really get to know her till afterward.”

“The wedding took place here in Calusa, didn’t it?”

“Yeah. Had a big reception afterward. At the house. Cars lined up all over the street.”

“But you weren’t invited.”

“Nope. Kong and I never did get along, and like I told you, I didn’t know Michelle at the time.”

She looked at the clock again.

“Just a few more questions,” I said.

“Sure, it’s just my customer’s getting itchy.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?”

“If, as you say, Harper had threatened Michelle on several previous occasions—”

“That’s what he did.”

“Why do you suppose that this time his threats erupted into actual physical violence?”

“Go ask him,” Sally said. “Not that I think you’ll have much luck. Like I told you, Kong isn’t the kind of man who goes opening his heart and soul to you.”

I was thinking of what George Harper, sitting in Bloom’s office during the Q and A, had told us openly and with seeming honesty: “I loved her t’death.” I was thinking of him bursting into tears immediately afterward, and then burying his face in his huge hands, and sobbing as though his heart would burst.

I thanked Sally for her time, and stepped out of the shop into brilliant sunshine that was painful to the eyes.