So our wariness — Dale’s and my own — with the words I love you is perhaps understandable. Or perhaps we have no need for saying them out loud. If what we share together isn’t “love” (whatever the hell that may be), it is at least a reasonable facsimile. We are enormously glad to see each other. We chatter like magpies when we’re together, not only about the profession we happen to share, but about everything under the sun — and there is a lot of sun in Calusa, Florida. Moreover, I find it more and more difficult to keep my hands off her. I want to touch her all the time. I find it almost impossible to be anywhere with her — a public place and most certainly a private one — without longing for some sort of physical contact. I will sometimes reach across a restaurant table to brush a strand of auburn hair away from her cheek. I will touch her fingernails, I will touch her arm, I will cop a covert feel as I am helping her into her coat, I seem to absorb from her flesh the very essence of her, and the simple knowledge that she is still and simply there. My partner Frank says that the world is divided into Touchers and Tap dancers; Frank tends to make sweeping generalizations about everything. I know only that never in my life (discounting those delirious adolescent forays when I would have touched even an iguana if the contact served to still the longings of that raging tumescent creature in my pants) had I been a particularly demonstrative person. My need to touch Dale remains bewildering to me.
Dale insists it’s because of the sunrise-sunset coloration of her hair; the hair on her head is a lovely burnished shade of red, the hair between her legs is blonde. Since I am privy to her secret, she says, since I know that her “golden snatch,” as she sometimes calls it, had in her own tumultuous adolescence inflamed more than one energetic swain to heights of unprecedented passion by its very contradictory and surprising existence — why naturally, then, I burn with desire to touch not the passive flesh of cheek or elbow but rather the responsive slit buried behind those gilded portals, the touching here and there above serving as a sort of out-of-town tryout for a Broadway opening below, so to speak. Dale is thirty-two years old, a true child of the sixties, and is often more candid about matters sexual than the Tap dancers of the world are. (Frank defines a Tap dancer as anyone who glides and clicks away from true contact with another person.)
Lying in bed with Dale that night, I told her all about the encounter the day before with Michelle Harper and her subsequent murder (which she’d read about in the Calusa Journal, without connecting the story to the beautiful woman we’d seen on the beach Saturday) and the Q and A with her husband, and the fact that he had no real alibi for where he might have been when Michelle was first being beaten and next being killed. Dale listened — I love the way she listens, those magnificent green eyes intent on my face — and then rolled over naked to light a cigarette, nodding, absorbing what I was telling her, weighing it with the keen mind of a lawyer searching for a case that could possibly be made in Harper’s favor. She blew out a stream of smoke (I realized all at once that she was smoking pot) and then said, “If he really did it, you’d think he’d have a ready—” and the telephone rang.
I have always regretted the moment of insanity that prompted me to give Morrie Bloom the telephone number at Dale’s house on Whisper Key. She answered the phone now, listened for a moment, said, “For you, Matthew,” handed me the receiver, and then sat cross-legged on the bed, closing her eyes and puffing on the joint.
“Hello?” I said.
“Matthew, it’s Morrie. Sorry to disturb you so late at night.”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, and Dale pulled a face.
“Few things I think you ought to know,” he said. “You remember I was telling you about that empty five-gallon can we found on the beach?”
“Yes?”
“Well, we checked with the gas station where Harper brings in his truck, and also where the woman used to get her Volks serviced, it’s right around the corner from where they live. We figured it would be the most likely place, and we got lucky. Place called A&M Exxon on Wingdale and Pine. Anyway the attendant there — black guy named Harry Loomis — filled Harper’s gas tank on Saturday morning, around seven, seven-thirty, sometime in there. He also sold Harper an empty five-gallon gasoline can. Filled it for him. A red can like the one we found at the scene.” Bloom hesitated. “Matthew,” he said, “we had him up here looking at the can, he’s identified it as the one he sold to Harper on Saturday morning.”
“How can anybody tell one red can from anoth—”
“That’s not all of it. I got a call from the lab ten minutes ago — well, let me go back a few steps, okay? You remember that before Harper left the station house this afternoon, he agreed to let us print him, said he had nothing to hide, you remember that, don’t you? You were there when the guy downstairs was printing him.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, we sent those prints over to the lab, where they were working on the latents they lifted from the can, and I got a call from them ten minutes ago. The prints on the can match Harper’s. And, Matthew, they were the only prints on the can. Harper’s and nobody else’s.”
“Are you calling for my advice, Morrie? Then here it is. Harper first bought that gasoline can—”
“And had it filled, Matthew.”
“Yes, at seven, seven-thirty Saturday morning. He then went back to the house and was home all day Saturday. There’s nothing to say he didn’t leave that can in the garage or wherever before he left for Miami at 2:00 A.M. Sunday. If he left the can home, anybody could have found it and used it to—”
“His fingerprints are on it, Matthew.”
“They’d naturally be on it. If he handled the can...”
“What happened to Loomis’s prints? The guy who sold him the can, the guy who filled it for him?”
“Are you suggesting that Harper wiped off the attendant’s prints, and then committed murder and neglected to wipe off his own? Come on, Morrie.”
“People panic, Matthew. I had cases before where the killer left incriminating evidence behind. I had one guy, he strangled this hooker to death while he was fucking her, he was naked when he did it, you know? And he left behind a monogrammed shirt, ran out of there barefoot with only his pants on, left behind a shirt with his initials on it, R.D., I can still remember the initials. So it’s not too unusual, Matthew. Even the pros panic. And murder isn’t a professional crime unless the mob has it done for them.”
“This is all circumstantial, Morrie. A man buys a gasoline can, he has it filled—”
“I got a witness who saw them on the beach Monday night, Matthew.”
“What witness?”
“A fisherman anchored just offshore. Saw a white woman and a black man struggling on the beach.”