Three Blind Mice

3

Tall and blond, with an engaging smile and an even year-round tan, Christopher Howell was old enough at forty-one to appear beatable to the male players at Calusa Bath and Racquet. He was also young enough at that age to appear attractive to the female members of the club. The fact was that he could, and did, beat the best players the club had to offer. But he seemed aware of the fact that no one liked a tennis pro who came on with the married ladies, and so his manner with the thirtysomething young mothers who flocked to take lessons from him was entirely businesslike and circumspect. As a result, the men did not feel threatened — except by his devastating serve and his ferocious backhand — and the women respected his courteous professionalism. Born and bred in Boston, Kit — as he preferred calling himself — had moved to Calusa almost a year ago, and his speech still carried the regional inflections of his native city, giving him a courtly sound that was entirely becoming. Matthew liked him a lot, even if he normally felt inadequate in his presence.

This Saturday morning, he felt particularly inferior.

Perhaps because he’d overslept and hadn’t had enough time to shave. A man needing a shave looked, and felt, particularly unkempt in tennis whites. The club’s idiotic rule was whites only. Kit looked magnificent in his spanking-clean whites and his glorious tan. He was also clean-shaven. Perhaps because, being blond, Kit didn’t need to shave as often as Matthew did. Altogether he looked like some kind of Viking ready to smite an inept foe with his battle-ax. The fact that he was three years older than Matthew did nothing to change the uneven equation.

According to Matthew’s partner, Frank, a man’s life ran in twenty-year cycles. Twenty years old was young. Forty was middle-aged. Sixty was old. And eighty was dead. Finito. With women, it was slightly different. Their lives ran in fifteen-year cycles. Fifteen years old was young. Thirty was grown up. Forty-five was experienced. Sixty was middle-aged. Seventy-five was old. And ninety was still alive and kicking and hanging in there.

Maybe Frank was right.

Matthew knew that if he himself had his preference, men and women would remain respectively and eternally thirty-seven and twenty-nine. He was now thirty-eight. Over the hill, he guessed.

“… against a left-handed player,” Kit was saying.

Showing off, of course. He was a natural right-hander, but he could play with either hand at will. There were some players, in fact, who said his left-handed serve was even more powerful than his normal serve. Today, he was going to teach Matthew how to play against a left-hander. Matthew could hardly wait. The inside waist button on his tennis shorts had popped while he was putting them on, and they were now fastened only with the outside button. Matthew felt certain they would fall down the moment he tried to return one of Kit’s aces. Kit’s teaching technique was simple. No mercy. Take no prisoners. He played against you as if you were facing each other across some disputed battlefield. It worked. Matthew’s game had improved a hundredfold since he’d begun taking lessons last October.

“There are a lot of things you have to remember about playing a left-hander,” Kit said, “but we’ll cover only the two most important ones today, okay?”

“Sure,” Matthew said.

He was wondering how many others there were. Two seemed like more than enough.

“The first thing is that he is left-handed,” Kit said. “You’ve put on a little weight, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Matthew said, and sucked in his gut.

“I thought so,” Kit said.

Which made Matthew feel even more terrific.

“Most of the people you play against are right-handed,” Kit said, “so you know exactly where to put your serve, you know exactly where the backhand is because you’re in the habit of hitting the ball to it, of avoiding the forehand. So you’ve got to set your mind immediately to the fact that this guy is left-handed, and he’s going to remain left-handed for the rest of the game, that isn’t going to change one damn bit.”

Unless you’re Christopher Howell, Matthew thought. Who is ambidextrous and can change handedness midstream.

“A lefty is a lefty is a lefty,” Kit said, smiling, “and if you have to hesitate for even a single second to remember that, then he’s got an edge on you. So the thing you have to do from minute one is drum that into your head, he’s left-handed, he’s left-handed, and never for a minute forget it. That’s the first thing.”

Matthew could hardly wait to hear what the second thing might be.

“The second thing,” Kit said, “is that a lefty has a natural curve on his forehand shot. You can see that ball curving in over the net like a baseball curving in over the plate. If you don’t set yourself for it, you’re going to be a little off on all your returns. So for now just keep those two things in mind, okay? He’s left-handed, he’s left-handed — which means you’ve got to figure out where his backhand is from minute one — and he has a natural forehand curve. Want to start?”

He was merciless.

He drilled his fierce left-handed serves into Matthew’s backhand each and every time, the ball hitting the surface and sending up a little spurt of grey dust, and then bouncing up high and almost out of reach. It took almost a full set before Matthew could return any of Kit’s serves, and then only to have them pounded back at him in that “natural forehand curve” he’d been talking about, or in a backhand that was, if anything, more powerful than the forehand. Matthew kept telling himself that his opponent was left-handed, left-handed, left-handed, but the more he repeated this in his mind and signaled it to his arm, the more confused he became over where Kit’s damn backhand was. Whaaaap, and the ball would come back at him, looping over the net in a low, wide curve that didn’t seem at all natural to Matthew, that seemed in fact pretty damn unnatural if you asked him, and then it would bounce and spin away out of reach, leaving him standing there flatfooted.

And when Matthew did remember where Kit’s damn backhand was, served his hardest serve to that backhand, watched it zipping over the net at what had to be three thousand miles an hour, low and hard and to the right-hand corner for the deuce court or the midline for the ad court, a serve worthy of the men’s singles at Wimbledon, Kit just stood there cool and tall and tanned and blond in his still-immaculate whites, bouncing, and setting himself, and bringing back his racket in that fierce one-handed grip, and whaaaaap, those zinging strings collided with that yellow ball and it came roaring back over the net like an express train racing down the middle of the track, making Matthew want to get out of its way before it tore his head off, trying to walk around it so he could lay his forehand on it, getting caught in the middle instead, pulling his racket in close against his chest and watching the ball go past to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where it sent up another small triumphant puff of grey dust just inside the baseline.

By the end of the hour, Matthew was exhausted. His shirt was drenched with sweat, his hair was wet and plastered to his forehead, his face was red, his tennis shoes were grey, and he felt as if he’d lost five of the ten pounds he’d gained in Italy. He was shaking hands with Kit over the net when he spotted a woman who looked very much like Jessica Leeds approaching the fenced-in teaching court, and then blinked when he realized it was Jessica, and suddenly felt even sweatier and smellier and stubblier and shoddier and shabbier and more showerless than he’d felt a moment earlier. As his client’s beautiful redheaded wife approached the court in a pleated skirt that showed her long legs to splendid advantage, crisp white cotton shirt with a Head logo just over the left breast, smiling and waving to another woman as she came closer, Matthew wished a spaceship would swoop down and carry him off to Mars.

And then he wondered what the hell she was doing out here on the Saturday after her husband had been charged with murder, wondered about the propriety of her playing tennis while he languished in jail, wondered if anyone from the Calusa Herald-Tribune was out here today, wondered if mention of her appearance would be printed in tomorrow’s morning edition, wondered if her being here could possibly hurt his case, such as it was, wondered why she hadn’t first discussed with him the advisability of this, wondered too damn many things in the several moments it took her to reach the gate in the fence and unlatch it and open it. “Hello, Mr. Hope,” she said, and smiled. “Looks like Kit gave you a workout.”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

“He played a good game,” Kit said.

Praise from the Thunder God.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Jessica said.

“No problem,” Kit said.

“Nice seeing you, Mrs. Leeds,” Matthew said, and then to Kit, “Thanks, Kit, see you next week.”

“Look forward to it, Mr. Hope.”

Matthew put his racket into its cover, zipped it up, draped his towel around his neck, and started off toward the men’s locker room. Behind him, he could hear the steady cadences of Kit and Jessica warming up, the solid thwack of racket against ball, the softer thud of the ball bouncing on the court’s synthetic surface. He wondered again if it was wise of her to have come here. But here she was, for better or for worse, and there was nothing to be done about it now.

He headed for the showers.

“It sounds like you’ve picked yourself another winner, doesn’t it?” Frank said sourly.

They were in his office at Summerville and Hope, a comer office befitting his position as senior partner of the firm, although he was only two years older than Matthew. Frank did not like having to work on a Saturday. Neither did he like what Warren Chambers had just told them. Apparently, a man named Charlie Stubbs — who owned a marina called Riverview on Willowbee Creek — had seen Stephen Leeds driving up in a red Maserati at ten-thirty on the night of the murders.

“Unless he was mistaken,” Matthew said.

“It is not likely that anyone could mistakenly identify a red Maserati or a red anything,” Frank said, and rose from behind his desk, and came around it, and walked toward where Matthew was sitting, and pointed his forefinger at him like a prosecutor about to badger a hostile witness. “Certainly not on a clear moonlit night,” he said. “Which means that your man was out of the house at ten-thirty and not home asleep as he claims he was.”

“My partner’s playing devil’s advocate,” Matthew explained to Warren.

“I’m doing nothing of the sort,” Frank said. “I’m advising you to drop the case right this instant. Your man is as guilty as homemade sin.”

Frank Summerville often got his Southern expressions wrong; this one should have been as ugly as homemade sin. But he was a transplanted New Yorker who still had trouble with local dialect and custom and who spoke constantly about going back one day to the only real city in the entire world. London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, all were penny-ante burgs to Frank Summerville’s New York frame of mind. Calusa? Don’t even ask. A fly speck on a pile of elephant dung was Calusa, Florida. A city with cultural pretensions, a lousy climate for most of the year, and a population composed of eighty percent rednecks and nineteen point ninety-nine percent immigrants from the Midwest. He hated Calusa. Hated, too, what it did to people. Thinned the blood and addled the brain.

“How’s his eyesight?” Matthew asked.

“He wasn’t wearing glasses, if that’s what you mean,” Warren said. “And he was able to read what was on that license plate.”

“Which was?”

“JESSIE 1.”

“Worse and worse,” Frank said, shaking his head. “His wife’s name. Worse and worse.”

There were people who said that Matthew and his partner looked alike. It was true that they both had dark hair and brown eyes, but aside from that—

Matthew was thirty-eight, Frank had just turned forty. Matthew was an even six feet tall and weighed a hundred and eighty-seven, with his new Italian pounds; his partner was five-nine and a half and weighed a hundred and sixty. Matthew’s face was long and narrow, what Frank called a “fox face,” in contrast to his own full, round “pig face.” Moreover, Matthew was originally from Chicago — which Frank would not even admit was the Second City. To him, there were no second cities; there was only New York and then every other city in the world.

“Why would he have driven his wife’s car over there?” Matthew asked.

“Because he was out doing murder is why,” Frank said.

“If he was out on his boat,” Matthew said, “then he wasn’t out doing murder in Little Asia.”

“Unless he parked the boat, and got off the boat, and then went to do murder,” Frank said, jabbing his finger at the air again.

“Why?” Warren said.

“Why? Because they raped his wife, why do you think why?”

“Why,” Warren repeated, “would he go clear around his ass to scratch his elbow?”

“Meaning why didn’t he drive straight to Little Asia?” Matthew said. “Why all the hugger-mugger with the boat?”

“He was going out to kill three people,” Frank said. “Did you want him to leave a trail even a Boy Scout could follow?”

“He did that anyway,” Matthew said. “A red Maserati with his wife’s name on the plate? That’s leaving a trail, Frank. That’s leaving a highly visible trail.”

“No, that’s leaving an alibi,” Frank said. “You said it yourself, not a minute ago. If he was out on that boat, then he couldn’t have been over in Little Asia committing murder.”

The room went silent.

“You shouldn’t have taken this case,” Frank said. “I know I’ve said that about other cases you’ve…”

“Oh? Have you?” Matthew asked, and opened his eyes wide in mock surprise.

“Yes, smartass, I have,” Frank said. “But this time you seem to have gone out of your way to…”

“No, this is much better than the last one,” Matthew said. “Don’t you think so, Warren?”

“Oh, definitely,” Warren said. “The last one, the man’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. This one, there’s only his wallet at the scene.”

“Yes, wonderful, make light of it,” Frank said. “Ha, ha, wonderful. But for someone who’s made a credo…”

“Credo, get that, Warren.”

“Credo, yes, of defending only people you think are innocent…”

“I do think he’s innocent, Frank.”

“Why, of course he’s innocent,” Frank said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Any fool can see he’s innocent. His wallet is laying on the floor…”

“Lying on the floor, Frank.”

“… alongside three guys whose throats are grinning from ear to ear…”

“Please, Frank, don’t be gross.”

“… whose eyeballs, for Christ’s sake, are rolling around on the floor like marbles…”

“Really,” Matthew said, “that is gross, Frank.”

“You want gross? How about an enraged husband cutting off their dicks and stuffing them in their mouths?”

“I hope he at least got the right mouths,” Warren said, and he and Matthew burst out laughing.

“Laugh, go ahead. Ha, ha, very funny, laugh,” Frank said. “But wait and see what the State Attorney does with those three dicks.”

“That’s a sexist remark, Frank. The State Attorney happens to be a very beautiful young woman.”

“Even better. Can you imagine a beautiful young woman telling a jury about three blind guys sucking their own cocks, for Christ’s sake!”

“Disgusting,” Matthew said, and began laughing again.

“Ha, ha, go ahead, laugh. Laugh, clown, laugh,” he said, dramatically. “But don’t come crying to me later.”

“Frank?” Matthew said.

“Yes, what?”

“Why would he need the boat for an alibi?”

“What?”

“He already had an alibi. He was home with his wife all night long. So why the boat?”

“Because he’s a goddamn liar,” Frank said, and nodded his head emphatically. “And a murderer, too,” he said, and nodded again. “And you’re a fool for defending him.”

His tan hadn’t yet faded, but he’d been here in jail only since Tuesday. Give him another week or so, and the pallor would begin to set in. And the look would accompany it. The caged look that claimed a person’s eyes the first time he got locked up. A look just this side of panic. A trapped and helpless look. Leeds wasn’t wearing that look yet. It would come later. With the pallor.

The mark of an habitual offender was that he wore his pallor with something close to arrogant pride and never wore a caged look after the first time he was arrested. A murderer was something else again. Most murderers were one-shot offenders. They acquired the pallor and the look and either lost both when they were acquitted or kept both for a long, long time. In Florida, a convicted murderer kept them only until he was executed.

“I want you to tell me everyplace you went and everything you did last Monday,” Matthew said. “From the moment you left your broker’s office till the moment you went to sleep that night.”

“Why?” Leeds asked.

“I’d like to know, please,” Matthew said.

Leeds sighed heavily, as if being asked to tell his attorney where he’d been and what he’d done on the day of the murders was certainly burdensome and probably unnecessary.

“It was raining,” he said. “This was around three o’clock. When I left Bernie. Bernie Scott, my broker. Coming down in sheets…”

… drenching the sidewalks and the streets, running into sewers and drains, flooding the roads. Leeds has always felt uncomfortable driving his wife’s Maserati, it is too jazzy a vehicle for him, it promises a playboy when only a farmer is behind the wheel. The car is called a Spyder, with a y, and it lists for $48,000, though Jessie bargained the dealer down to $44,500. Zero to sixty in six seconds, black leather convertible top, wood facings on the doors, dashboard, and console, wood handles on the hand brake and gearshift. Tan leather and suede on the seats, rich black carpeting on the floor, all too rich for Leeds’s blood.

He feels even less comfortable driving it in the rain, but his own car has been in the shop for the past week, and they have only the two cars, his and Jessie’s, and they’ve temporarily been sharing the more expensive one. His own car is a ten-year-old Cadillac Seville, in the shop for a new transmission at a cost of twenty-one hundred dollars, but he loves that car, the look of it, the luxurious feel of it, he would trade ten Maseratis for his steady old Cadillac.

He stops at the video store on the South Tamiami Trail, just off Lloyd, between Lloyd and Lewis, he remembers the name now, it’s called Video Time. The man who owns the store has only one eye, he wears a black patch over the other one, his name is Roger Carson. Just running from the car to the front door soaks Leeds to the skin. The shop is almost empty at three-fifteen, which is when he gets there. A woman with a baby strapped to her back is shopping the racks of tapes. Carson himself is behind the counter, staring glumly out at the rain. Leeds remembers wondering whether rain is good or bad for the video business.

He tells Carson what he’s looking for — he has come here specifically for Casablanca, this is the movie Jessie wants to watch tonight — and Carson comes out from behind the counter and leads him over to a section called Classics, or Movie Classics, or something similar. He locates the tape at once and then asks Leeds if he’s ever seen the movie, and Leeds says he saw it a few times on television, and Carson asks him does he know what the best line in the movie is? Leeds immediately says, “Round up all the usual suspects!” and both men burst out laughing. The rain slithers down the windows. The lady with the baby browses.

The rain is beginning to taper at three-thirty as he drives south on the Trail to Timucuan and then turns the car eastward, toward the farm. The clouds are breaking off in tatters, blue is beginning to show in patches here and there. The road is wet and black ahead, the low red car hugging it, engine humming, tires hissing on the asphalt. He could get to like this car, he supposes, if he could ever bring himself to be unfaithful to the Caddy. He is beginning to think he might take the boat out. If it clears up. Drive over to the marina, dry off the seats, take her out for a little spin. Maybe run her up to Calusa Bay and back. Half-hour each way. If the weather clears.

By four o’clock, you’d never know it had rained at all. It is that way down here in Calusa during the month of August. It happens, and then it is gone, and the heat is still with you even though the fields lay emerald green and sparkling under a late-afternoon sun and the sky has been swept clean. He asks Jessie if she’d like to come out with him on the boat, but she tells him no…

“She’s not a boat person,” he tells Matthew now. “Never got the hang of running it, never enjoyed being on it…”

… so he drives all the way back into Calusa again. It takes about twenty minutes, this time of year, door to door from the farm to the marina. In the wintertime, when the snowbirds are down and the roads are packed, it’ll take a half hour, sometimes forty minutes. Those are the times he wishes he had a little house on a deep-water canal, keep the boat right there at the dock, take it out whenever he wanted to. Come and go as he pleased. Free. But the farm is his business, of course, his livelihood. He’s a farmer. The farm is what his father left him. His sister in Tampa got the trailer parks, and his brother in Jacksonville got the downtown real estate. The farm is a big moneymaker, Leeds has never regretted his inheritance.

The marina is off Henley Street, just past the big Toys “Я” Us warehouse. You go down the Trail heading south, and you make a right on Henley and follow it around past Twin Tree Estates, and then you take the little dirt cutoff leading down to the creek. Charlie Stubbs calls his marina Riverview, but it’s really on a little creek, is all it is, leading out to the Intercoastal. Willowbee Creek, it’s called. Sometimes the water’s so shallow you can’t get anything but a raft up it. Got to check the tides, give Charlie a call, ask him how it looks, can you move a boat up the creek? No such problem now when it’s just quit raining, and the tide’s coming in, and the draft on his boat is only three feet four inches.

The boat is a thirty-nine-foot Mainship Mediterranean. Powered with a pair of freshwater-cooled Crusader inboards, the Med is capable of doing almost thirty miles an hour, but Leeds has never pushed it that far. He loves this boat almost as much as he loves the Caddy. To him, the boat spells luxury. Well, it should spell luxury, it cost him close to $145,000. The Caddy is a comfortable old shoe, but the boat is a diamond-studded glass slipper.

It is one of those afternoons.

Matthew knows just what Leeds is talking about; he himself has been out on a boat on a day like the one Leeds is now describing, the sky a soft powder blue, the water still and smooth and golden green, a bird crying somewhere off to the right, shattering the silence, the cry echoing, drifting, and at last fading entirely. And all is still again. There is only the sound of the boat’s idling engines.

Mangroves line the shore on either side of the creek, reflecting in the water. Beyond these, receding into the landscape, there are palmettos, a scattering of sabal palms, a hummock of oaks trailing moss. The boat glides. A great blue heron stalks the edges of the shore, delicately lifting one spindly leg after the other. There are signs on slanted wooden posts in the water, no wake. Gliding. Gliding, idle SPEED ONLY. The Burma-Shave signs of boaters everywhere in America.

Leeds stands at the helm, a grin on his face. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, Top-Siders and a nylon mesh cap that was part of a giveaway two, maybe three years ago, when the Brechtmann Beer people down here were making a big push for their new Golden Girl Light. The cap is yellow, with a pair of interlocking red B’s — for Brechtmann Brewing — back to back in a circle above the peak. The cap is perfect for boating, Leeds wears it every time he goes out. If it’s a chilly day, he also wears a yellow windbreaker he bought at Sears. It is not a chilly day today. It is a normal day for August, insufferably hot and humid. But out here on the water, it is also heartachingly beautiful.

He hates to take the boat back in.

He cruises all the way up to Calusa Bay, moves slowly under the big bridge there, and makes a wide arcing turn on virtually deserted water. He feels utterly alone in the world. Alone with God. Who is being exceedingly good to him. And he forgets, for a little while at least, that there is anything in the world but peace and solitude.

He gets back to the marina at twenty past six and then drives the Maserati out to the farm again. He arrives there at a quarter to seven, somewhere around that time. Pete is just coming in from the fields, he waves hello from the tractor and Leeds waves hello back. Pete Reagan — no relation to the former president, whom Leeds hates, by the way — is his foreman, one of the thirty-six regulars employed by Leeds and his wife, an indispensable part of what has become a vast and very profitable operation since the death of Osmond Leeds six years ago.

For dinner that night, Jessie has asked their housekeeper/cook, Allie — who is Pete’s wife — to prepare steamed lobster, corn on the cob, and a mixed salad. The corn comes right from their own farm, as does the lettuce in the salad, but none of these is a cash crop like the tomatoes that are also in the salad. They sit down to dinner on the screened patio overlooking the pool. It is still stiflingly hot, but the water promises relief if the heat and humidity become unbearable, and the icy-cold beer in tall, frosted steins does much to dissuade thoughts of the weather. Besides, Leeds feels — and Jessie agrees with him on this point — that lobsters demand to be eaten outdoors at a long wooden table.

It is still a good day for Stephen Leeds.

God is still being good to him.

“When did you go out on the boat again?” Matthew asked.

“The boat? What do you mean?”

“What time that night did you go out on the boat again?”

“I didn’t.”

“You didn’t drive over to Riverview…”

“No.”

“… in your wife’s car…”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Didn’t you call Charlie Stubbs…?”

“Charlie? No. Why would I call him?”

“To tell him you’d be taking the boat out for a moonlight spin…?

“A moonlight spin?”

“A moonlight spin, yes. That’s what Charlie Stubbs says you…”

“He’s mistaken.”

“You didn’t call him?”

“I did not call him.”

“You didn’t ask him not to worry if he heard someone starting the boat…”

“I just told you I didn’t call him.”

“He says you called around nine.”

“No, I was already in bed by then.”

“He says you arrived at the marina around ten-thirty…”

“I told you, he’s mistaken. Or lying, either one. Jessie and I had an after-dinner drink, and then we got into bed and turned on the video. I must’ve fallen asleep watching it because the next thing I knew…”

There is a loud knocking at the door. And the bell is ringing. The knocking and the ringing overlap. Leeds struggles up out of sleep, opens his eyes to see Jessie putting on a robe. Sunlight is streaming through the bedroom window. The ringing and the knocking suddenly stop. As Jessie rushes out of the room, he hears voices from below. And then Allie calling up the steps, “Missus? It’s the police.”

Two of them, one bigger than the other.

A black cop and a white cop.

Is this your wallet? Is this your wallet? Is this your wallet? Is this your wallet?

It is his wallet.

It is indeed his wallet.

God has stopped being good to Stephen Leeds.

The detective’s name was Frank Bannion, and he’d been working out of the State Attorney’s office for the past three years now. Prior to that he’d worked for the Calusa P.D., and before that he’d been a uniformed cop and then a detective-sergeant in Detroit. He told all the other detectives on the S.A.’s squad that he had once done research for Elmore Leonard back in Detroit. What happened, actually, was that Leonard was hanging around the station house asking questions, soaking up atmosphere for one of his books, and he asked Bannion a few questions, and Bannion gave him a few answers. So now Bannion walked around as if he’d co-authored the damn thing with his good old buddy Dutch.

Bannion was also proud of the fact that he still had his own teeth and his own hair. He told anyone who would listen that all the men in his family — his father, his brothers, his cousins on his father’s side — had lost their hair and their teeth by the time they were forty. Bannion was forty-two years old and he still had his own teeth and his own hair. He attributed this to the fact that he had once bit a burglar on the ass. The burglar was going out the window when Bannion grabbed him and bit him. He had pictures of his teeth marks on the burglar’s ass as proof because the defense attorney had tried to get the case kicked out by showing Bannion had used unnecessary force.

Bannion was telling Patricia Demming what he had learned out at the Riverview Marina. Patricia had sent him there because Stephen Leeds had suggested to arresting detectives Bloom and Rawles that perhaps he’d left his wallet on the boat when he’d taken it out on the afternoon of the murders. Patricia wanted to find out if Leeds had truly been out on the boat. Because (A) if he hadn’t, then he couldn’t possibly have dropped his wallet there, and (B) if he hadn’t, then he was lying, and if he was lying about one thing then he could be lying about everything. Or so she would try to convince a jury.

She was now hearing that he had taken the boat out twice that day.

“This is what Stubbs told me,” Bannion said. “Charlie Stubbs, he owns the marina, sixty-two years old, a grizzled guy looks like Jonah and the whale.”

“Told you Leeds took the boat out twice?”

“Twice,” Bannion said. “First time in the afternoon, around four-thirty, tide was still good, second time at night around ten-thirty, tide coming back in, Leeds could’ve got the boat in and out easy.”

“Did Stubbs see him both times?”

“Saw him both times,” Bannion said. “Talked to him the first time, but not the time at night.”

“Does he seem like a reliable witness?”

“Is my mother reliable?”

“I’m sure she is,” Patricia said, “but how about Stubbs?”

“Very, you ask me. Sober, sharp, a very good witness, you want my opinion.”

“What’d they talk about?”

“They talked twice actually.”

“I thought you said…”

“Three times, in fact.”

Patricia looked at him.

“He drives over in the afternoon, he parks the car, stops by the marina office to tell Stubbs he’s taking the boat out, they chat about how hot it’s been, Leeds takes off. Stubbs watches him go up the creek into the Intercoastal, he hangs a right, which means he’s heading north toward Calusa Bay. He comes back in around six, talks to Stubbs again, tells him how beautiful it was out there on the water with God, and so on. That was the second time.”

“And when was the third time?”

“Nine o’clock that night. Stubbs is still in the marina office, catching up on his paperwork, the phone rings, it’s Leeds on the other end. He tells Stubbs it’s such a beautiful night, he’s thinking of taking the boat out for a moonlight spin, doesn’t want…”

“Were those his exact words?”

“Exact. There was a moon the night of the murders, by the way.”

“Okay.”

“Tells Stubbs he doesn’t want him to be alarmed if he hears the boat going out…”

“Was that the word Leeds used? Alarmed?”

“Yeah,” Bannion said, and looked at her, puzzled. “Why is that important?”

“I like to know exactly what people say,” Patricia said.

“That’s exactly what he said. Alarmed. Or at least that’s exactly what Stubbs said he said.”

“Okay.”

“True to his word, Leeds shows up around ten-thirty. Stubbs is home by then, he lives in this little house behind the sheds where they’ve got boats up on trailers for storage. He sees the car pulling in…”

“What kind of car?”

“A Maserati. Stubbs told me it’s the wife’s car. It’s got her name on the license plate. A red Maserati.”

“What does the plate say exactly?”

“Her name, Jessie, and then the number one.”

“Spelled out? The number?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“Ask him. And then check the plate with Motor Vehicles.”

“Okay. So Leeds gets out of the car and goes straight to where his boat is tied up…”

“What’s the name of the boat?”

“Felicity.”

“What a pissy name,” Patricia said.

“Yeah.”

“Was it backed into the slip?”

“No. Not when I was there.”

“Then Stubbs couldn’t have seen the name on the transom, right?”

“From his house, do you mean? I don’t think so. He was in the kitchen getting himself a bottle of beer when Leeds backed out. The kitchen windows face the dock area, but I don’t think he could’ve seen the name.”

“What I’m looking for…”

“I’m with you. You want to know did Stubbs see Leeds get on a boat named Felicity instead of some other guy getting on a boat named Lucky Lady or Serendipity.”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’ll go back later, check out the sight lines, talk to him again.”

“Also, if Stubbs didn’t speak to Leeds…”

“Yeah, how did he know it was Leeds and not some other dude?”

“Did he say?”

“He said it was Leeds.”

“But how did he know it was Leeds?”

“The hat. And the jacket.”

“What hat? What jacket?”

“A hat Leeds always wears on the boat. This yellow billed cap some beer company was giving out a few years back. He wears it all the time.”

“And the jacket?”

“A yellow windbreaker. One of these with snaps up the front and at the cuffs. Leeds was wearing it the night of the murder.”

“Get a search warrant this afternoon…”

“Can’t do that till Monday when the courts…”

“No, do it today. Find yourself a circuit court judge…”

“They don’t like being disturbed on Saturday, Miss Demming.”

“And I don’t like evidence being destroyed on Saturday.”

“I understand where you’re coming from, but…”

“Someone has to be covering at the courthouse…”

“Well, I’ll try, but…”

“Don’t try, Bannion. Do it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And then go out to the farm and get that jacket and hat for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Unless the wife’s already burned them,” she said.

“Patricia Lowell Demming,” Andrew said, “thirty-six years old…”

“She looks younger, though,” Matthew said.

“Born in New Haven, Connecticut, where her grandfather was a superior court judge. Lowell Turner Demming. Ring a bell?”

“No. Is that where she got the middle name?”

“Presumably,” Andrew said. “On the other hand, Lowell means ‘beloved’ in the Anglo-Saxon, so perhaps her parents named her adoringly.”

“Perhaps.”

“Knew she wanted to be a lawyer when she was seven years old and saw Gregory Peck in To Kill a…”

“Where’d you get that?”

“In an interview she gave to the Herald-Tribune when she joined the State Attorney’s office.”

“Which was when?”

Andrew lifted his glasses onto his forehead and consulted his notes. Wearing the glasses, he looked scholarly, almost judicial. With the glasses on his forehead, he looked like an eager cub reporter. Dark curly hair, brown eyes, an aquiline nose, a somewhat androgynous mouth with a thin upper lip and a pouting lower one. Cynthia Huellen once told Matthew that Andrew reminded her of Mick Jagger. Matthew said he could not see a resemblance. Sexwise, Cynthia said, and went back to her typing.

“Joined the staff just before Christmas,” Andrew said.

“Where was she before that?”

“I’ve got this in chronological order,” Andrew said. “It’d be easier if I…”

“Okay, fine.”

“She was graduated from high school at the age of sixteen…”

“Smart.”

“Very. Attended Yale University for two years and was kicked out one fine spring semester for smoking dope in class.”

“Dumb.”

“Very. She went from there to Brown, no less, where she graduated Phi Bete. There was only one incident there…”

“Dope again?”

“No, no. A fist fight. With a football player who called her Pat.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“Brown faxed me an article from the school paper. The incident made her a celebrity. Apparently this oaf… her word, oaf…”

“Nice word, oaf.”

“Very. This oaf came up to her and said, ‘Hi, Pat, my name’s…’ and she popped off and hit him. She later told the paper that pat was what you did to the head of a child or a dog, or Pat was a drunk sitting at the bar with his pal Mike, but Pat was not what you called someone you didn’t know when her name was Patricia, which, by the way, means of the nobility’ in Latin.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not the nobility stuff, that’s mine. But, yes, she said the rest, I’m quoting directly from the Brown Daily Herald. She also said that even the nickname Trish offended her.”

“Touchy.”

“Very. Went to law school at NYU in New York…”

“Law Review, of course,” Matthew said, and rolled his eyes.

“Surprisingly, no. But top ten percent of the class. Passed the California bar three years later and was hired immediately by a firm called Dolman, Ruggiero, Peters and Dern. Ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Stayed there for two years, earned the nickname Wicked Witch of the West, a sobriquet apparently premised on her courtroom manners. She moved from there to New York, the firm of Carter, Rifkin…”

“… Lieber and Loeb. Bombers.”

“Apparently. That’s where she made her rep.”

“As what?”

“Really ruthless defense attorney. Strictly criminal law. She’s successfully defended crooked oil company execs, Mafia bosses, Colombian drug dealers, tax fraud specialists…”

“How about murderers?”

“Three. Tough cases, too. One was a woman charged with strangling her six-month-old baby in his crib.”

“What’d she cop to?”

“She didn’t. She went for an acquittal… and got it.”

Matthew looked at him.

“Tough lady,” Andrew said, and nodded.

“What’s her courtroom style like?”

“Flamboyant, seductive, aggressive, unrelenting, and unforgiving. You make one slip and she goes straight for the jugular.”

“When did she cross over?”

“Left Carter, Rifkin for the New York D.A.’s office, worked there for three years before moving here to Florida. Apparently she wasn’t getting where she wanted to go fast enough.”

“Where does she want to go?”

“Washington is my guess. Eventually. With Florida politics as the stepping stone.”

“Like her boss.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who handed her this one because he’s got even bigger fish to fry. You haven’t seen anything in the paper about that, have you?”

“No, sir. What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“God knows. Have you found me a translator?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Check on the running time of Casablanca for me.”

“Casablanca, yes, sir.”

“And find out what time the tides came in and went out on the day of the murders.”

“Yes, sir, the tides.”

“What’s the translator’s name?”

Mai Chim Lee had been airlifted out of Saigon in April of 1975, when she was fifteen years old and all was chaos and confusion. She remembered her father rushing her to the embassy through thronged and deafening streets, her sweaty hand clutched in his firm grip, remembered him hoisting her up into the arms of a black American sergeant, the helicopter lifting off, people clinging to the landing skids, clawing for purchase.

She had not seen her father since that day. He had worked for the United States government as a translator; the Vietcong executed him the moment they occupied Saigon. She did not know where her mother was now. Perhaps they had killed her, too. She did not know. Three years later, when Mai Chim was eighteen, her mother stopped answering her letters. A letter from a neighbor, a woman she had called Auntie Tan, said only that her mother had gone away, she did not know where. Mai Chim could only imagine the worst.

She remembered her mother as a woman who smiled a great deal. Out of happiness, she supposed. She remembered her father as a stem disciplinarian who would smash teapots to the floor if his hot tea wasn’t ready and waiting whenever he wanted it. But he’d managed to get her on that helicopter. Mai Chim herself now worked as a sometime translator, although her main occupation was bookkeeping.

She told all this to Matthew as they drove in his rented car to Little Asia late that Saturday afternoon.

She also told him that her true name was Le Mai Chim, the family name Le — one of the three most common in her native land — having descended proudly from the dynasty that had begun in the fifteenth century, the middle name Mai meaning “tomorrow,” and the personal name Chim meaning “bird.” Her two older brothers, Hue and Nhac, had been soldiers in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. Both were killed in the Tet Offensive in 1968.

Mai Chim Lee — they called her “Mary” at the office where she worked, but she preferred her own name — had been in America for five years, in the hands of one governmental agency or another, before she struck out on her own. At the age of twenty she left Los Angeles, traveling cross-country by bus to settle at last in Florida — first in Jacksonville, next in Tampa, and finally here in Calusa.

She was now thirty-one years old, and although she spoke English fluently, there was still a trace of singsong in her speech, and occasionally she misused idiom or slang. A stranger in a strange city, virtually alone in the world, she dressed like an American — high heels today, and a linen suit the color of wheat, to complement her shining black hair and dark eyes — but she moved as if she were gracefully and delicately padding on sandals over the stones of an ancient village, and in her eyes there was a look of lingering sorrow.

She herself did not live in Little Asia.

She rented a condominium out on Sabal Key.

The people who lived here in the development, she explained, were mostly newcomers, most of them working in restaurants as either dishwashers, busboys, or waitresses. Many, too, worked in light-industry factories, where they performed unskilled labor for minimum wages — or less, if the owners could get away with it. Ten or twelve people often shared these one-family wooden shacks that had been thrown up in the early twenties, when there was still an important fish cannery in Calusa and housing was needed for the cheap black labor imported from Georgia and Mississippi.

The shacks sprawled across the scruffy land in fading, flaking Christmas colors, some green, some red, all up on stilts because flooding was common in Calusa even this far from the Gulf. An automobile was essential here; public transportation existed, but buses were infrequent and unpredictable. One of the first things these immigrants bought was a car, usually chipping in for one they could share on their way to and from work, a wreck as faded as the shacks in which they lived. Mai Chim wondered why so many poor people drove faded blue automobiles. Always faded. Always blue. A phenomenon. On her lips, the word sounded Oriental. Phenomenon. She smiled when she said it. A phenomenon. The smile illuminated her entire face and set her brown eyes to dancing. Matthew could imagine her mother beaming this same smile in a safer, more innocent time.

Tran Sum Linh, one of the men who’d claimed he’d seen Stephen Leeds on the night of the murders, lived in one of these shacks with his wife, his six-year-old son, and three cousins — two of them male, one of them female and a cousin only by marriage — who had recently moved cross-country from Houston, Texas. He was thirty-seven years old, a former lieutenant in the ARVN, who had escaped Vietnam by boat to Manila shortly after the fall of Saigon. He was certain that if ever he went back to his country, he would be arrested and executed. He was trying to make a life here. He worked in a supermarket at the South Dixie Mall, stacking and sprinkling fruit and vegetables in the produce department, for which he earned four dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. He did not like getting involved in this business that had happened, this murder of his three countrymen, but he knew it was his obligation to tell the truth. He said all this to Mai Chim in his native tongue; he spoke only several words of English.

They were sitting outside Tran’s shack, he on the low steps that led up to the front door, Mai Chim and Matthew on folding chairs he had carried out of the house. Tran was wearing thong sandals, grey shorts, and a white Disneyworld T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of the minarets of Fantasyland. Matthew was wearing a suit and a tie; he felt like a jackass in this heat.

“This was at eleven o’clock, or perhaps a little past eleven,” Mai Chim said. “It was quite hot, do you know, that night…”

…translating simultaneously and apparently literally, judging from her stilted and somewhat formal phrasing…

“… almost identical to that of my own country during the summer monsoon, the rainy season, do you know? The rain…”

… is heaviest between June and November when typhoons blow in off the South China Sea, But there are monsoons winter and summer, and there is no true “dry” season, except relatively. All of Vietnam lies entirely below the Tropic of Cancer, and the climate is therefore hot and humid all of the time, some eighty degrees Fahrenheit every month of the year, heavy rainfall all year round except during April and May.

“Vietnam is tropical, do you know? So we have mosquitoes and ticks and leeches, same as the Malay Peninsula. And we have, too, crocodiles and pythons and cobras and tigers and leopards and wild dogs…”

In the Mekong Delta, where Tran grew up as a boy and fought as a teenager and a man, the land was — and still is — extremely fertile and well cultivated. Tran’s father was a farmer, as was his father before him and Tran after him. Rice was their crop. Their little village — situated on a levee close by the Song Vam Co River — consisted of bamboo houses with thatched roofs, narrow streets laid out in a grid pattern, a bamboo fence around the entire site. During the summer monsoon, when the land was flooded, the only dry ground was on the levees and the dikes. Whenever there was a break in the rain, the family would sit outside the farmhouse with its small vegetable garden. Often on a hot, steamy night, Tran would look out over the flooded rice paddies to the mountains beyond Saigon and dream of wisdom beyond years, wealth beyond imagination. On just such a night, in the city of Calusa, Florida…

He has been sitting outside with the others in his family for, oh, it must have been almost two hours, do you know? His wife — two years older than he, but this is considered auspicious according to the horoscope — has already put their son to bed and then gone to bed herself because she must be at the factory at eight tomorrow morning. Tran sits outside with his three cousins. The men are smoking. The woman, who is quite homely, is dozing. In a little while, she and her husband, Tran’s older cousin, also go inside to bed.

Tran and the other man talk softly.

Smoke from their cigarettes swirls up on the air.

On U.S. 41, not two blocks away from the development, there is the hum of traffic, trailer trucks heading south to pick up Alligator Alley for the east coast, passenger cars driving down to nearby Venice or farther south to Naples or Fort Meyers.

The night is gentle.

Soft.

Tomorrow there will be deadly dull toil for subsistence wages, but for now there is the soft, gentle night.

At last, Tran’s younger cousin rises and yawns and goes into the house. The screen door slams shut behind him. Tran sits alone on the steps with his thoughts and the hot, still moistness of the night. The moon is full. He remembers nights like this on the delta, the rice fields stretching away to the horizon under an orange moon floating above.

He smokes.

He drifts.

He sees the man first from the comer of his eye.

A flicker of bright color, almost as if a sliver of moon has broken off and fallen to earth, glowing for an instant and then gone.

The house Tran and his family are renting is situated one row east and one house south of the one shared by the three men who were first accused and later cleared of raping that farmer’s wife. In his native Vietnam, before the Communists took over, murder and aggravated assault were among the most serious crimes, punishable by from five years in prison to death by guillotine, a means of execution inherited from the French occupiers. Tran further knows that rape in his country was considered aggravated assault, and he assumes that the crime is equally serious here in his adopted land.

He does not know how the Communists deal with such matters now, and he cannot possibly know that sexual battery — as rape is politely known in the Bible Belt state of Florida — is punishable by anywhere from fifteen years to death in the electric chair, depending upon the age of the victim and the amount of force threatened or applied. But it is his strong belief that crimes committed by any member of an ethnic or racial group reflect upon all members of that group, and therefore he is pleased that his countrymen have been exonerated of the crime. He knows them only slightly, but he thinks of them as decent, hardworking men, which — he freely admits to Matthew through Mai Chim — may be a biased opinion.

There is another burst of color on the night.

Sudden.

Catching the eye.

And then disappearing again.

It is very definitely a man, tall and broad-shouldered, very definitely an American man. Tran himself is slender and slight, his physique not uncommon in a nation where the average height for a grown man is a bit more than five feet and his weight some fifty-five kilos. The man running toward the house where the three men live is easily six feet tall…

Matthew’s heart begins sinking…

And he weighs at least ninety kilos…

Which Matthew calculates at two point two pounds per kilo for a total of two hundred pounds…

And he is wearing a yellow hat and a yellow jacket…

And Matthew’s heart sinks entirely.

“… going into the house,” Mai Chim translates, “where the three men were found murdered the next morning, do you know?”

Matthew knew.