“Let’s go,” he said.
“What?”
“Time to go back down.”
She wanted to hit him.
Instead, she smiled dazzlingly and said, “Sure, whatever you say,” and held out her right hand for the cuff.
5
Charles Nicholas Werner lived in a Spanish-style house that had been built in Calusa during the early thirties, shortly after the area was rediscovered, in effect, by a railroad man named Abner Worthington Hopper. Before then, the city’s growth was lethargic at best, the 1910 population of 840 people growing to but a mere 2,149 a full decade later. But then came Hopper, and suddenly the town became a proper city of more than 8,000 people, and all at once Calusa was on the map as a resort destination. Building his own Spanish-style mansion on choice Gulf-front property, Hopper then built a hotel to accommodate the multitude of guests he and his wife Sarah invited down each winter. The mansion was now the Ca D’Oro Museum and the hotel was a fenced derelict perilously close to U.S. 41.
The museum housed an only fair collection of Baroque art, of which Calusa was inordinately proud; when you were the self-proclaimed Athens of Southwest Florida, you had to boast about your cultural treasures, however second-rate they might be. Restoration groups were constantly promising to remodel and refurbish the hotel, which had deteriorated over the past six decades from lavish and lush to comfortable and cozy to faded and worn to shabby and decrepit. Recent talk was of tearing it down and replacing it with a shopping mall. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Werner house was the only hacienda-type structure on either side of the narrow canal running behind it. Pink stucco walls and a roof of glazed orange tiles, arched windows that smacked of Saracen influence, exotic-looking peaks and minarets greeted Andrew and me as we walked from where I’d parked my Acura to the arched mahogany front door. There was a fair amount of boat traffic on the canal. This was the beginning of the weekend — well, four o’clock on what remained of Saturday afternoon — and a popular boaters’ activity was cruising the backwaters of the city’s myriad canals, ogling the sometimes lavish homes on their banks. A wrought-iron doorbell fashioned to look like an opening black rose was situated on the jamb to the right of the door. Andrew pressed the push button positioned like a single white eye at the center of it. We heard footsteps approaching the door.
Despite the wealth down here in sunny Calusa, there are very few live-in housekeepers anymore, and seeing one of them in a proper maid’s uniform is as rare as spotting a wild panther. The maid who answered Andrew’s ring was in her early twenties, I supposed, a beautiful black woman wearing a black uniform with a little white cap and apron and collar. We told her who we were and whom we were here to see, and she said, “Pase, por favor. Le diré que está aquí.” I wondered if she had a green card.
We were standing in a hallway floored with blue tile and lined with Moorish columns. Beyond, at the center of the house, was a secluded cloister riotously blooming with flowers. Late afternoon sunlight pierced the colonnaded stillness. We could hear the maid’s footfalls padding through the house. Out on the canal, the sound of a boat’s engine spoiled the sullen stillness.
Werner, wearing shorts and sandals and nothing else, came from somewhere at the back of the house, walking briskly toward where Andrew and I were waiting. He was a short, gnomic man who looked a lot like Yoda, somewhat bandy-legged, very brown from the sun, with twinkling blue eyes and a fringe of white hair circling his head. His handshake was firm. He told us he was happy to be of assistance and then led us to the back of the house where a pool sparkled and shimmered under the sun.
I detected for the first time a faint Southern accent when he asked if we’d care for anything to drink, “Some whiskey, gen’lemen? Beer? Iced tea?” But we told him we didn’t want to take up too much of his time, and got to work at once, setting up the recorder on a low white plastic cube and sitting around it on expensive Brown Jordan lawn furniture. The boat that had earlier entered the canal was now making its way back to the Intercoastal. A sign on a stanchion across the canal warned NO WAKE ZONE. We waited until the boat was clear, and turned on the recorder.
Werner told us essentially what he had told the grand jury. At ten forty-five this past Tuesday night, he had been guiding his sloop — a twenty-five-foot centerboard, under power, and with a spotlight showing the way — toward his slip at the club’s dock. There are sixty slips in the marina. He had passed on the approach to his slip the yawl Toy Boat, with its cockpit lights on and a blond man and woman sitting at the table drinking. He had recognized the man as Brett Toland, with whom he had a passing acquaintance at the club.
“Did you recognize the woman?” I asked.
“I had never seen her before in my life,” Werner said.
I kept trying to pinpoint his accent. I guessed maybe North Carolina.
“Have you seen that same woman since?”
“Yes, suh,” Werner said. “I was shown her photograph at the grand jury hearing.”
“Just one photo?” I asked. “Or were there...?”
“They showed me at least a dozen photographs. I picked hers out of the lot.”
“You identified her from a photograph.”
“I did.”
“Can you now tell me who she was?”
“She was the woman charged with killing Brett Toland. She was Lainie Commins.”
“You say you were under power as you came into the club.”
“I was.”
“How fast were you going?”
“Idle speed.”
“And you say your spotlight was on?”
“It was.”
“Pointing in the direction of the Toland boat?”
“No, suh, pointing at the water.”
“Ahead of the boat?”
“Dead ahead as I came past the club marker, and then toward the dock as I came closer in.”
“How much light was there in the cockpit of the Toland boat?”
“Enough to see who was sitting there.”
“Two blond people, you say. A man and a woman.”
“Brett Toland and Miss Commins, yes, suh.”
“You saw them clearly?”
“Clear as day. Sitting there drinking.”
“Did you say anything to them?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t greet them in any way?”
“No, suh.”
“Didn’t call to them?”
“No, suh. I was busy bringing my boat in. Watching the water, watching the dock.”
“Did they call anything to you?”
“No, suh.”
“Was your slip alongside the Toland slip?”
“Oh, no. Much further down the line.”
“How many boats down the line, would you say?”
“Six or seven boats.”
“Could you still see the Toland boat after you passed it?”
“Could’ve if I’d looked back, but I didn’t look back. I was bringing a boat in at night, with just a spotlight showing me the way. I kept my eyes on the water all the time.”
“You say this was around ten forty-five, is that right?”
“Just about on the dot.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s a clock on my dash.”
“Lighted?”
“Yes.”
“And it said ten forty-five?”
“Almost.”
“Is it a digital clock?”
“No, it’s what they call an analog. With hands. Black hands on a white dial.”
“Then how can you know so exactly...?”
“The hour hand was almost on the eleven, and the minute hand was almost on the nine. So it was almost ten forty-five.”