There’s a lot of old Florida still extant on Whisper Key, but it’s inexorably losing the battle against the developers. You’ll drive past a long stretch of impenetrable vegetation behind which you know is a low, rambling house on shallow brackish water leading nowhere, a ramshackle dock jutting out to where a flaking rowboat sits in mottled sunshine, and suddenly the wall of green is gone and there is a white tower jutting up into the sky, a fountain splashing water in the center of a landscaped oasis, parking sheds over shaded spaces, the sound of children shouting and giggling in a cool blue swimming pool hidden somewhere behind the building’s steep facade, voices rising and falling on the sullen hot September air. And several hundred yards beyond that, the road will amble past half a mile of lopsided overgrown wooden fence, and you know that behind this fence there is yet another residential relic of what this area used to be. And your heart breaks.
Sheila Lockhart lived in a new sixteen-story condo called Sandalwind, at the southern end of Whisper Key, adjacent to the public beach. The day was humid and hot, the Gulf surging in restlessly against the shore, whitecaps cresting on the dark waters beyond. I would not have liked to be on a boat in a chop like today’s.
I parked the Acura in a row of spaces reserved for VISITORS and then found my way to a building called the Sundowner, and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor. Sheila lived in apartment 14C. I had called ahead, and she was expecting me. I rang the doorbell and waited. I rang again. Waited. The door opened at last.
She was not twenty-one, as Diaz had claimed, nor was she even any longer close to that age, but perhaps he’d merely meant she was over twenty-one. But he’d also said she was free and white, and whereas I had no quarrel with her apparent liberty, she could not have been considered white under any circumstances. Then again, Diaz merely may have been using a figure of speech. Nonetheless, Sheila Lockhart appeared to be in her late thirties or early forties, a very good-looking barefooted black woman wearing white cutoff shorts and a white halter top, her long black dreadlocks strung with tiny bright-colored beads. A rush of cold air swept out of the apartment.
“Come in,” she said, “before the heat does.”
White she wasn’t, but neither was black a proper classification. Her skin was the color of dark amber, her eyes the sort of grayish-green one finds a lot in the Caribbean, the end result of centuries-old admixtures of black, white and Indian Indian. I followed her into a longish living room that ran from the entrance door to a screened terrace overlooking the Gulf. Sliding glass doors closed now because the air-conditioning was on. Kitchen off to one side of the room. Closed door adjacent to it. The bedroom, I supposed. A choice apartment in that it was on an upper floor and facing the water.
“So what kind of trouble is Bobby in now?” she asked.
“None that I know of,” I said.
“Then why’s he looking for an alibi?”
She had gone briefly into the kitchen as she spoke, and now she returned with a tray bearing a pitcher of iced tea and two tall glasses brimming with ice cubes. Our eyes met. I hadn’t mentioned anything on the phone about wanting to verify Bobby’s story of where he’d been on the night of the twelfth. I could only assume that she’d called him to say I’d be visiting her, and that he’d asked her to confirm his whereabouts that night.
“Tea?” she asked.
“Please,” I said.
She broke eye contact.
Poured over the ice in each glass. Cubes crackled and popped. She put down the pitcher. Sat opposite me in a white leather sling chair. I was sitting on a platform sofa with a foam rubber cushion covered in pale blue linen. We lifted our glasses. Drank.
“What makes you think he needs an alibi?” I asked.
“I got the feeling,” she said, and smiled.
“Would you alibi him?”
“Depends on what for?”
“How about murder?”
“I wouldn’t alibi anybody for murder. No matter how well I knew him.”
“How well do you know Bobby?”
She shrugged.
“Meaning?”
“We’ve been seeing each other on and off for four, five months now.”
“On and off?”
“He comes here, I go to his place. Like that. We’re not living together, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“He told me he was here with you on the night Brett Toland was killed. Was he?”
“Yes, he was.”
“Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“When he arrived, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Something black. Or very dark blue. Slacks and a shirt. Long-sleeved shirt. Silk, from the feel of it.”
“Was he wearing a hat?”
“No.”
“Or a cape?”
“A cape? No.”
“What time did he get here?”
“Seven. We went out to dinner, then came back.”
“How long did he stay?”
“All night.”
“Left the next morning?”
“Yes.”
“Wearing the same clothes?”
“Well, yes. He doesn’t keep anything here.”
“What time was this? When he left?”
“About eight-thirty. We both had to get to work.”
“What sort of work do you do, Ms. Lockhart?”
“I’m an R.N.”
“Oh? Where?”
“Good Sam.”
“My alma mater.”
“I know. “You were a celebrity there. We all wanted to carry in your bedpan. Big hero lawyer got himself shot.”
“Not a hero, I’m afraid.”
“We all thought so. All that fan mail! Like a movie star.”
“Sure,” I said.
The room was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner. Out on the water, lightning flashed.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t suppose there’s anything else I have to know. If Mr. Diaz really was here that night...”
“He was.”
“Then that’s that.”
I put down my glass. More lightning flashed over the Gulf. There was the sense of a tight, enclosed space, cool and dry and protected, while outside a storm was gathering.
“Did you really think he killed that man?” she asked.
“I was wondering why he volunteered an alibi, that’s all. Then again, he’d been talking to Brett earlier, so perhaps he felt...”
“Yes,” she said, and nodded.
I looked at her.
Lightning flashed again.
“He called from here,” she said.
I kept looking at her. Now there was the sound of thunder, close by, on the left.
“Isn’t that what you meant?” she asked. “About talking to Mr. Toland earlier?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.”
From where Warren lay bound hand and foot on the lounge, he first saw the door to the head fly open and then Toots coming out with a fiercely determined look on her face. He almost said something to her but the warning look in her eyes shut him up at once. She moved swiftly and silently across the cabin to the starboard side opposite the head, into the small recessed cooking area, partially hidden from above by a bulkhead adjacent to the ladder. She was reaching down to take the high-heeled pump from her left foot when Warren saw a man’s shoes and trouser legs moving down the ladder. He almost yelled a warning this time, but he realized at once that Toots knew the man would be coming down those steps, which was why she was backing away against the sink, squeezing herself into the tiny galley, trying to flatten herself out of his sight line as he came below, the shoe gripped in her right hand like a hammer now — she had done this before, she knew how to do this, he was confident she knew how to do this.