“The next step is you get out of here.”
“The next step, if Ishtar decides to save his own ass by naming you in his deposition, the next step is we go to the S.A….”
“So go to him.”
“I see you want to play hardball, huh?”
“What do you call this? Softball?”
“So far, it’s just you and me. Your wife is home cooking dinner for you and your darling little daughters…”
“We have a housekeeper who prepares dinner.”
“Terrific, but hear me out. We go to the S.A. and say here’s a deposition in which Ishtar swears he was with you on the morning of the thirtieth. So now the S.A. calls in Ishtar who tells him, Yes, that’s who I was with, and the S.A. comes to you to hear your side of it, just in case Ishtar is lying. Would you like to explain to your wife why the S.A. suddenly wants to talk to her straight-arrow husband? Would you like to explain why Ishtar Kabul thinks he was in bed with you that morning? It can get very messy, Mr. Henderson.”
“How would it be any less messy if I tell you here and now that we were, in fact, together that morning?”
“It’d be less messy because the buck stops here.”
“How do I know that?”
“Here’s the way I figure this, Mr. Henderson. Kabul got Christie Hewes to alibi him…”
“That cunt,” Henderson said, and rolled his eyes.
“Be that as it may, she’s sworn to his whereabouts on the morning of the murder. So I have to figure Ishtar got her to lie for one of two reasons. One, he committed the murder. Two, he was protecting you. If he was, in fact, protecting you, then we’ve got no reason to pursue this any further. We’re looking for whoever ran away from that house on the morning of the thirtieth. We’re not looking to persecute two consenting adults doing their thing in private.”
“How do you know I won’t lie to protect him? The way Christie did.”
“Because you’d have done it already, instead of my having to pull teeth here.”
Henderson was silent for what seemed like a long time.
Then he said, “We were together.”
“Good. From when to when?”
“Two in the morning to twelve noon. I was waiting for him when he left the party. My wife thought I was in Tampa on business.”
“Where were you waiting?”
“A friend’s house. ”
“His name, please.”
“Her.”
“Who?”
“Annie Lowell.”
“Her address, please.”
“1220 Beach Road.”
“On Fatback Key?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll check this, you realize.”
“I thought you told me the buck stopped here.”
“I was lying,” Warren said.
3. This is the priest all shaven and shorn that married the man all tattered and torn…
Warren’s input:
Scratch Ishtar Kabul.
Annie Lowell was an eighty-two-year-old woman who lived in a luxurious house on Fatback Key. Annie was not a fag hag as the term was commonly understood in the trade. But Henderson was her stockbroker, and she had made a great deal of money through his kind and expert offices, and she saw no reason why she shouldn’t allow him to use the guest house behind the main house every now and then, no questions asked.
Yes, she knew he sometimes used the guest house to entertain male acquaintances. Listen, Annie was eighty-two years old and she didn’t care who did what to whom so long as it didn’t frighten the horses. Annie could remember when there wasn’t even television. Annie did not think that whatever Henderson and his male acquaintances did in the guest house could be any worse than what was on television these days.
Then the big question.
Yes, she knew the man Henderson had been with on the morning of the murder.
His name was Martin Fein.
Who, of course, was Ishtar Kabul.
Howard the Duck in Arabic.
Scratch Ishtar Kabul.
Warren’s further input:
Leona Summerville had left her house on Peony Drive at eight o’clock last night, had driven in her green Jaguar to the home of a woman later identified as Mrs. Shirlee Horowitz (from letters in the mailbox Warren had perused this morning) where she remained for two and a half hours, going directly home from there to arrive on Peony Drive again at a quarter to eleven. Unless the lady was having a lesbian affair with Mrs. Horowitz — an unlikely possibility in that Warren had subsequently learned the woman was seventy-one years old, the wife of a retired gynecologist named Marc Horowitz, the mother of two children and grandmother to three, and the secretary of the League to Protect Florida Wildlife — Leona Summerville was so far clean.
All this from Warren at ten minutes past ten on a cold, bleak, wet Saturday morning.
In December of last year — when Matthew was still regularly dating his former wife, Susan — she’d asked if he thought Leona Summerville was having an affair.
“What?”
“Leona. I think she’s having an affair.”
“No.”
“Or looking for one. ”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“She dresses like a woman sending out signals.”
Pillow talk. Former husband, former wife renewing vows of undying love while wondering aloud about Leona’s faithfulness. It had been raining that night. It was raining this morning, too. Maybe it always rained in Calusa. All water under the bridge anyway, rain down the gutters; he had not seen Susan since just before Christmas.
Another video.
Sudden.
Shocking in its clarity.
Leaping unbidden onto the screen of his mind.
Two or three years ago perhaps, one of Calusa’s many charity balls. They are going in the Summervilles’ car, they are on the way to pick up — had he been dating Dana O’Brien at the time? Had it been Dana? No matter. Leona is wearing a slinky green gown that matches exactly the color of her Jaguar. Frank, in dinner jacket and black tie, is driving. The windshield wipers snick at the rain, rain, go away. The tires hiss on wet black asphalt.
Leona has joined Matthew in the backseat, trying to help him with his tie as Frank negotiates the car around the twists and turns of the slippery road.
She looks stunning.
Green gown molding her body like a patina of tarnished brass.
Sculpted hair settled like a sleek black helmet on her head.
A green feather in her hair, over one ear.
Green eye shadow.
Dark lashes.
Brown eyes luminous under the Jag’s courtesy light.
Brown eyes intent on his black silk tie and the hands working it.
Long red fingernails on those hands.
The light casting a pearly glow on the sloping tops of breasts scarcely contained in the gown’s flimsy top.
Hands working.
Knees touching his.
The electric feel of silk over nylon.
Knees moving away at once.
“There,” she says.
A Carly Simon mouth, widening over even white teeth.
He wonders who is fucking her.
The mouth widens, widens…
Click.
The time on the Ghia’s dashboard clock was a quarter to eleven.
As he drove the car into the driveway of St. Benedict’s church on Whisper Key, he suddenly wondered whether all marriages eventually ended in adultery.
He got out of the car, grumbling at the rain, and then ran through the pelting downpour toward the rectory, up a crushed-gravel pathway past a large wooden cross on a berm planted with rain-stooped hibiscus bushes. The church — built in the Spanish-style architecture favored at the turn of the century — was situated directly on the Gulf of Mexico, dominating a point of land beyond which was an ominous gray sky and a roiling gray sea. The Parrish house was located not a hundred yards north of the church, occupying a much smaller plot of land, but facing the same turbulent sea; Matthew could see the house from where he stood in the pouring rain and lifted the knocker on the thick wooden door to the rectory behind the church. He was fifteen minutes early. He hoped Father Ambrose would answer the door before he dissolved.