He set the glass on his tray and hightailed it away to the bar. My admirer turned to him and asked a question, and then looked out at me with a dark scowl when the waiter answered. The bartender looked out at me, too, and his lips firmed into a tight-mouthed smile as he dumped the margarita and whipped up another one.
I cut a thick slab of bread with the giant knife, and was using the knife to smear butter on the bread when the waiter brought a new drink. He carried it out on a tray held shoulder-high and set it down with a flourish.
“He says you’ve got an attitude.”
“Tell him I’ve also got a sharp knife.”
“Whoa, hon, just take it as a compliment. Men are gonna hit on you. That’s just life.”
He left and I looked toward the two men on my right. They had forgotten their first-date anxiety and were grinning at me. When they caught my eye, they raised their wineglasses in a toast. I smiled back and sipped my margarita. Inside, the bullet-headed man put money on the bar and stomped out, his pants creasing around a thick wad in his crotch.
By the time I got the stone crab, I had eaten enough bread and salad to be in a better mood. Stone crab is probably what God eats every night of the year, but in Florida we mortals only have it from mid-October to mid-May. Florida law prohibits fishermen from killing the crabs, but stone crabs can regenerate lost claws, so fishermen break one off and throw the crab back into the sea. That only leaves them one claw to defend themselves with, but they’re not boiling to death like they would be if they were lobsters.
The claws are steamed right there on the boat, and then they’re chilled and delivered to restaurants like the Crab House, where people like me eat them without giving a thought to the crab’s trauma. Mine came with mustard sauce and a wooden mallet for cracking the claw, and I happily cracked and slurped away.
Sixteen
While I ate, I watched boats bobbing at the dock and idly listened to bits and pieces of conversation from neighboring tables. I learned that somebody named Tony was a real bitch and a half, and that somebody named Grace had finally gotten the money she had married for when her husband’s rich and ancient mother died. Grace, they said, was hell-bent to move back east where people would be impressed with their new wealth, but the husband was refusing to give up his golf and tennis life just to hobnob with some snooty New Englanders. Poor Grace. All that money and no place to flaunt it.
It was almost eleven o’clock when I ate the last morsel. I put some bills on the table before the waiter came back, adding a hefty tip to make up for being churlish earlier, and stood up and started inside. The waiter saw me leaving and scurried over with a questioning look.
I said, “I’m going to sit at the bar and listen to the piano player.”
He looked over my shoulder at the money on the table and smiled. “No prob,” he said. “The pianist should be here any minute.”
“You know him?”
“Just to speak to. Seems like a real nice guy.”
“He is.”
“Oh, he’s a friend of yours?”
I smiled, suddenly feeling proud to know Phillip. “Yeah, he’s a friend.”
Inside, only a few people were at the bar. All men, and all with the appraising look of people who realized the evening was growing old and if they hoped to hook up with somebody, they’d better do it soon. None of them gave me a glance. I took the stool at the end near the bandstand and ordered another margarita.
The bartender grinned when he set it in front of me. “This will be your third, right?”
“Counting the one I didn’t drink.”
“That guy, what an asshole! What’d he think, anyway?”
“Maybe that works for him sometimes.”
“Not with a woman like you. He shoulda known that.”
Behind me, Phillip’s voice said, “Miz Hemingway?”
I spun around, to see him standing there looking at me in disbelief, as if I were a genie he had conjured up from a bottle. Up this close, I could see the black flocked jacket he wore had been made for a much larger man. He looked like a little boy dressed up in his father’s suit coat.
“Gosh, you snuck up on me, Phillip!”
“Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t, I just didn’t see you come in.”
“I came in the back.”
“Can you talk a few minutes before you start playing?”
He grinned nervously, and I wanted to hug him. He was all wrists and ears and cheekbones, too ill at ease to know how to handle this unexpected moment.
“Come on,” I said, “let’s go sit at a table for a minute. You want something to drink?”
He shook his head, then licked dry lips and nodded. The bartender, who had been silently watching us, filled a glass with club soda and handed it to him.
“Okay,” I said briskly, and walked the length of the bar to a tiny two-top in the back corner. Phillip trailed along behind me carrying his club soda, and we both dropped into chairs like falling rocks.
He still seemed nonplussed that I was there, so I leaned toward him and said, “You left a message on my machine that you wanted to talk to me.”
“Oh. Yeah. That. Well, see, I got to thinking and all…you know, about what happened next door. You know, how the policeman asked if I’d seen anything?”
“Uh-huh. And did you see something?”
“Well, that’s just it. I mean, I should have told him, but my mother was there and I didn’t want her to know I’d been outside at that time, you know. But the cops probably should know…I thought maybe you could tell that detective guy.”
I could tell this would take all night if I didn’t prompt him. “Okay, what did you see that you didn’t want to talk about in front of your mother?”
A deep port-wine blush rose from his throat and suffused his face. “It was when I was coming home Friday morning. I was crossing behind Miz Doerring’s house and I saw a woman come out of her house and get in a car in the driveway. A black Miata. The car swung in the driveway, the woman came out of the house and got in, and it drove off. I thought it was Miz Doerring, but now I’m thinking maybe it was somebody else. You know, like the killer.”
I waited, but he seemed unable to continue. I said, “Could you see the driver?”
Phillip’s flush deepened. “The top was up, so I couldn’t see. I just saw the woman.”
I took a sip of my drink and pretended not to notice his discomfort. “And you could see her well enough to think it was Marilee Doerring?”
He looked down at his plate, and for a moment I thought he might cry. “Not really. I guess I didn’t really look good. It could have been her or it could have been some other woman.”
He averted his eyes and his throat bobbled in a nervous swallow. I tried to put myself in his place, a kid coming home after an evening that had to be kept secret from his parents and seeing a woman he thought was a neighbor get into a car and drive away.
“Did the woman see you?”
He bobbled his head in a staccato motion I took to be an affirmative nod. “I think maybe she did. She looked over her shoulder toward where I was and it seemed like she jerked a little bit—you know, like she was surprised or scared or something.”
“And then what?”
He looked directly at me for the first time. “Then she got in the car and left.”
Carefully, I said, “What time do you think this was?”
“I don’t want to get anybody else mixed up in this.”
“I’m not asking you where you’d been or who you’d been with, just what time you saw a woman leaving Marilee Doerring’s house.”
“It was a little after four.”
I remembered the flash of movement in the woods that morning when I was walking Rufus. That had been around 4:30.