“Didn’t call her from the house, is that right?”
“No. Said he wanted to call from the boat.”
“Why?”
“Lend urgency to it. Tell her he was already on the boat, ask her to meet him there, discuss a solution calmly and sensibly.”
“Didn’t ask you to come along?”
“No. He didn’t want it to seem we were ganging up on her.”
“So he left the house at eight...”
“Yes.”
“And this was now sixteen minutes past twelve as you were approaching the club...”
“Yes, the big stone pillars at the club’s entrance.”
“What did you do then?”
“I made a right turn in front of the restaurant, where the driveway swings around the oval there, and I headed for the marina parking lot.”
“Toward the booth there at the entrance to the lot?”
“Yes.”
“Was there anyone in the booth at that hour?”
“No.”
“Were there any lights on in the booth?”
“No. Listen, let’s just get to it, okay?”
Frank raised his eyebrows.
I looked surprised.
“Get to what?” I asked.
“Your client,” she said.
“I’m sorry, what...”
“Elaine Commins,” she said. “In her little white Geo. Racing past that booth and out of the parking lot.”
My heart sank.
I was silent for a moment. Helen Hampton kept watching the tape recorder. Sidney Brackett sat with his arms folded across his chest.
“You just said there weren’t any lights on in...”
“There were lights outside.”
“Where?”
“Hanging on either side of the booth.”
“Overhead lights?”
“I saw her.”
“Even though...”
“I saw her! It was Lainie. I looked her dead in the eye as she went flying out of that lot. Lainie Commins. Fresh from killing my husband!”
“Did you know he was dead at the time?”
This from my partner Frank, who’d been silent until this moment.
“No, I did not know he was dead.”
“No one had yet informed you...”
“Of course not!”
“...that your husband was dead?”
“No.”
“Then you had no reason to assume, even if you did actually see Ms. Commins driving out of that lot...”
“Oh, I saw her, all...”
“...that she’d killed your husband, isn’t that right?”
“Until I found him, do you mean?”
She said this quite sweetly, nailing Frank right between the eyes. No, she was saying, I had no reason to connect a woman racing from the scene of a crime until I’d actually found the scene of the crime. But we are coming to that, counselors. Just keep asking your dumb questions, and we will slowly but inexorably get to my husband Brett Toland with two bullets in his head.
Wish to or not, we had to hear it.
“Can you tell us what happened next?” I asked.
What happened next...
And next...
And next...
And next...
...was that she’d driven her car to a parking spot facing slip number five, where Toy Boat was tied up, and she got out of the car and walked up the gangway to the boat, calling her husband’s name because there were lights on in the saloon and she figured he might be down there, though she had no idea at the time that he might be down there dead.
Far out on the water, she can hear a buoy’s foghorn moaning to the night. The wooden ladder creaks under her weight as she takes the four steps down into the saloon with its Oriental rugs and its paisley-covered couches and glass-fronted lockers and Currier & Ives prints, walks through the saloon and past the closed door to the head on her right, and down the passageway into the master stateroom.
She does not see her husband at first.
What she sees at once is a gun on the bed.
Blue-black against the white bedspread.
She knows this gun, it is her husband’s. But it is odd that he would leave it here in plain sight on the bed, and besides...
Where is he?
“Brett?” she calls.
And sees him in that instant.
Lying on his back, on the carpet, on the deck, on the far side of the bed.
He is naked.
A white towel is draped open around his waist.
His face is covered with blood.
He is red with blood.
Quite calmly...
She is amazed that she does not scream.
Quite calmly, she lifts the cellular phone from where it is resting on one of the cabinets, and quite calmly dials 911 to report that she has just discovered her husband murdered aboard their yacht.
Her watch reads twenty minutes past midnight.
The police arrive five minutes later.
If anyone in Calusa needs confirmation that the crime business here is in very good health, thanks, all he has to do is take a quick glimpse at what was once called the Public Safety Building. The old tan brick facade of the building is still there, but in place of the discreet lettering that had announced the police facility in the dear dead demure days, there are now bigger, bolder, bronze letters informing the public in no uncertain terms that this is the home of:
The day was hot and still. There seemed to be even less wind than was normal for September. It has always struck me as odd that the school year down here starts in August, when a person can wilt just stepping out of bed. September is no picnic, either. Sultry is perhaps the best word to describe September in Calusa, although at night cool breezes often blew in off the Gulf. It rained a lot in September. You expected the rain to cool things off, but no, all it did was cause steam to rise momentarily from the sidewalks. Tourists knew what Florida was like in the wintertime, but year-round residents knew the real Florida. Sometimes in September, when the days got steamy and sullen, an alligator waddling up Main Street wouldn’t have surprised anyone. September in Florida was what Florida was all about.
There were no alligators coming up Main Street on that hot and sunny morning of September eighteenth. I walked past the pittosporum bushes lining the sidewalk in front of the police facility, and glanced up, as I usually did, at the very narrow windows resembling rifle slits in a fortress wall. But there were no snipers behind them because they were designed for protection against heat rather than siege. Where once a person walked through a pair of dark bronze doors into an open space containing only a reception desk with a young woman behind it, there was now a metal detector unit with an armed Calusa P.D. blue standing to the right of it and another one sitting at a desk behind it. The one behind the desk conducted a hands-on search of my briefcase. He also asked who I wanted to see, and called upstairs to make sure I was expected.
Upstairs is where the real changes have taken place. On the third floor, the old orange-colored letter elevator is gone, a victim of high-tech delivery systems. The old somewhat cozy reception area has been enlarged to some four times its original size, and transformed into a bustling space that resembles a warship’s battle room, with computer terminals beeping and blinking, phones ringing, civil service employees mingling with P.D. blues and plain-clothes cops in a frantic boil resembling a famous borrowed television show. A bank of four elevators is on the entrance wall. The other three walls have more doors in them than a bedroom farce, constantly opening and closing, people coming and going in handcuffs or without.