The bartender was standing in front of him; Jamie held up his glass for a refill. When he realized the man was waiting to be paid, he blinked, and turned on the stool, and looked around the room as if he were waking from a bad dream. He was crying again when I paid the check.
I led him outside to the car. The night was still sticky and hot. I opened the door for him, and he got in and sat staring through the windshield, his hands folded in his lap. I backed the car out of the parking lot and began driving north. There was hardly any traffic at this hour of the night.
“Jamie,” I said, “the police are going to check on where you went after you left that poker game. Are you sure it was The Innside Out?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Because if you didn’t go there...”
“That’s where I went, Matt. Don’t worry about it.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I should’ve gone straight home,” he said.
“Don’t start thinking that way, Jamie.”
“I’m as much to blame as whoever...”
“No, you’re not. Now quit it! You went to your usual poker game...”
“I left the game early...”
“You had no reason to believe anything would...”
“I should’ve gone home.”
“You went for a drink instead, there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said, and turned sharply on the seat.
“I do believe you, Jamie.”
“Then why do you keep asking me where I went?”
“Only because the police...”
“The police never said a word about it. I told them where I went, and that was that. But my own lawyer...
“Come on, Jamie. You can’t believe they’re not going to check. You left the poker game at a little before eleven, and you didn’t get home till almost one. That’s a gap of two hours. And the police didn’t just let it pass. Ehrenberg asked how many drinks you’d had...”
“He was trying to find out if I was drunk. Down here, if you’ve had a drink...”
“No, it wasn’t that. Because the next thing he did was ask how long you’d been at The Innside Out. Almost an hour and a half, you told him. From eleven to twelve-twenty. Only two drinks in all that time. That’s what he was after, Jamie.”
“Well, if I had only two drinks, was I supposed to lie and say I had four?”
“Of course not. I’m simply trying to tell you that Ehrenberg considers you a suspect. And he’ll keep on thinking that way till he knows for sure just where you spent the time between eleven and one.”
“I told him where I spent the time.”
“Yes, and he’s going to check it.”
“I doubt if anyone’ll remember me. The bar was crowded, I was...”
“At eleven on a Sunday night?”
“It’s always crowded there, Matt.”
“How do you know? Do you go there regularly?”
“I go there often enough. It’s a good restaurant, they always get a crowd.”
“Do you know the people that run it?”
“No.”
“Do they know you?”
“I doubt it. They may, but I doubt it.”
“Ehrenberg’ll probably ask you for a picture, I’m second-guessing him now. He’ll want something he can show the owners, and the bartender, the cashier, whoever was there. You give him a good one when he...”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“I keep telling you the man considers you a suspect, Jamie. You make sure you give him a good picture. I want somebody to remember your being there. Otherwise, he’ll be back with a lot more questions.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You keep saying okay, okay, but you keep circling back to it. Where the hell do you think I was, Matt?”
“Just where you said you were.”
“Then why do you keep asking me where I was?”
“Because... look, Jamie, I’m not a cop, I’m a lawyer. And I know when somebody’s evading a question. When Ehrenberg asked you if you or Maureen were fooling around outside the marriage, you didn’t answer him. He may have missed that, but I didn’t.”
“I answered his question, Matt.”
“No, you didn’t. You sidestepped it. You said you were happily married, but you didn’t answer the question.”
“If I didn’t answer it...”
“You didn’t.”
“It wasn’t deliberate.”
“Okay, it wasn’t deliberate. Then would you like to answer it now? For me? Privately? For your lawyer who’s trying to help?”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Okay. Straight out then. Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“You said you were playing around in your former marriage...”
“Yes, but...”
“That can get to be a habit, Jamie.”
“Not if you’ve changed your whole life for someone. Do you think I’d jeopardize a chance at happiness to... to fool around with—”
“That’s what I’m asking you, Jamie.”
“The answer is no.”
“How about Maureen? Was there another man in her life?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. Look, you either trust someone completely, or you don’t trust them at all.”
“And you trusted her completely, is that right?”
“Yes, Matt. Completely.”
“All right,” I said.
I kept driving till I saw the first VACANCY sign. The place was called the Magnolia Garden Motel, small and hardly distinctive, but I doubted if we could do better without reservations at the height of the season.
“Will you be all right?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for everything, Matt.”
“I’ll call in the morning. If there’s anything you need, even if it’s just to talk, pick up the phone.”
“Thank you,” he said, and shook my hand.
I left him then and began driving home. A breeze was coming up as I crossed the bridge to Stone Crab Key. I kept wondering why I still didn’t fully believe his story.
3
It was a little after three A.M. when I got to the house. I went directly into the den, turned on the desk lamp, and phoned my partner Frank. When I told him what had happened, the first thing he said was, “Oh, God” and then he asked if Jamie had committed the murders. I told him Jamie had said no, and then filled him in on everything else he’d said. Frank advised me to go to bed, he’d see me in the morning. We said good night, and I hung up, and sat at the desk for a moment, unmoving, my hand on the telephone receiver. I snapped off the lamp then, and rose, and went down the hall to the bedroom.
Susan was asleep.
I tiptoed into the room and then went into the bathroom to turn on the light, leaving the door cracked so that light slanted into the room but did not touch the bed. I had no desire to awaken her. We’d been fighting when the call from Jamie came. I had, in fact, been on the verge of asking her for a divorce.
The fight had started twelve hours earlier, on our way to the Virginia Slims finals that afternoon. The matches were supposed to begin at one o’clock, and we’d left the house at twenty to, which was cutting it a bit close on a Sunday at the height of the tourist season. There are only two seasons in Calusa: the tourist season and summer. In the good old summertime, there is no one here but mad dogs and Englishmen. And me. During the season, most of the tourists come from the Midwest. That’s because if you draw a line due south from Columbus, Ohio, it will go straight through the middle of Calusa. Frank says that Calusa is really only Michigan on the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe he’s right.