“Yes.”
“Can you say for certain that your husband didn’t get out of bed at any time that night?”
“Well, I…”
“Because that’s what the State Attorney’s going to ask you, Mrs. Leeds.”
“I can’t say that for certain, no.”
“Then he might have got out of bed…”
“I suppose that’s possible…”
“… and gone downstairs to put on that yellow jacket and hat…”
“Yes, but…”
“… and driven your Maserati…”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t hear the car starting. I would have…”
“But you were sound asleep.”
“Well… yes.”
“So you wouldn’t have heard the car starting.”
“I guess not.”
“So you really can’t say for sure that your husband was home with you all night long.”
“Whose side are you on?” Jessie snapped.
“Yours, Mrs. Leeds. Your husband’s.”
“I was beginning to wonder.”
“No, don’t ever wonder about that. I’m only asking you what the S.A.’s going to ask. You’re his only alibi. If she can cast doubt on your…”
“My husband did not kill those men!” Jessie said sharply. “I may have been asleep, yes, I may not have heard everything happening in this goddamn house, but I know he did not go out to kill those men!”
“How can you know that?” Matthew asked.
“I just know it!”
“How?”
“Because he…”
She cut herself off.
There was a silence on the line.
Matthew waited.
“Yes?” he said at last.
“He…”
And another silence.
“Yes, he what?”
“He rejected the idea,” Jessie said.
“What idea?”
“Of having them killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“I wanted them killed.”
Oh, no, please, Matthew thought.
“I wanted to find someone who’d kill them.”
No, you didn’t, he thought. Please.
“Have you mentioned this to anyone else?” he said.
“Of course not.”
“But you did mention it to your husband?”
Say no, he thought. Tell me you didn’t suggest it to your…
“Yes. I told him I wanted to… to start asking around… discreetly. Find out if there was someone. anyone. who would kill those animals for me. Rid the earth of them. There are such people, aren’t there? Who do these things for money?”
“Yes, there are such people,” Matthew said.
“But Stephen said no. He said the men who raped me would have to live with their consciences for the rest of their lives. That was God’s punishment, he said. And God’s punishment was enough.”
Try selling that to a jury, Matthew thought.
“Mrs. Leeds,” he said, “at the trial, your husband didn’t sound quite that magnanimous. He…”
“Yes, his outburst, I know. But that was in anger, and this was much later.”
“How much later?”
“We heard the verdict on Friday. This was on Sunday.”
“The day before the murders.”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Matthew said.
There was another silence on the line.
He was thinking, Please don’t let Demming get her hands on this.
“My husband didn’t kill those men,” Jessie said. “Believe me, I know he didn’t. He couldn’t have.”
But Matthew was thinking he could have.
The name of the place was Kickers.
Until just two months ago, it had been a seafood restaurant called The Shoreline Inn, and six months before that it had been a steak house called Jason’s Place, and three months before that it had been known as The Purple Seahorse, which served Continental food as precious as its name in an interior all done up in violet and lavender.
Kickers had opened at the beginning of June, not an auspicious month in that the tourists usually left shortly before Easter and the native trade down here could not in itself support a restaurant. If you hoped to get through the dog days of summer, you raked in your chips from November through April, and then either closed for part of the off-season or contented yourself with eking out a bare existence till the snowbirds flew down again. Opening at such a lousy time. Kickers should have followed the sad tradition of all the hard-luck joints that had come and gone on this spot, the exterior of the building remaining while the name and the interior decor changed every few months or so.
But against all odds, it seemed to be surviving, possibly because Salty Pete’s — a rowdy saloon favored by year-round residents of Whisper Key — had considerately burned to the ground shortly after Kickers threw open its doors. There were those who voiced suspicions that Michael Grundy, the owner of Kickers, had himself engineered the unfortunate blaze at Salty Pete’s, but neither the police nor the fire department had found the slightest proof of arson.
Smack on the Intercoastal, Kickers inhabited a big old white clapboard building with a huge outdoor deck overlooking the water and a dock that could accommodate some ten to twelve boats, depending on their size. It was the site, of course, that had encouraged all those previous entrepreneurs to rush right in where angels might have feared to tread. And with a splendid view like this one — the waterway at one of its widest bends, the bridge to Whisper in the near distance, lazy boat traffic constantly drifting by in a no-wake zone — the mystery was why all those other places had failed.
Grundy had opted for the casual air of a honky-tonk saloon, wisely recognizing Salty Pete’s (before it burned down) as his only competition for the key’s steady drinking crowd. He hired a flock of fresh-faced young barmaids — six of them altogether, four behind the long bar in the main dining room, two behind the circular bar on the deck — and dressed them in white blouses low enough and black skirts short enough to delight men while not offending women. And for balance he hired a horde of handsome young waiters and a piano player with a Gene Kelly grin, and he dressed them in black trousers and open-throated white shirts with puffy sleeves and red garters. And then he made damn sure he was serving generous drinks, choice cuts of meat, and the freshest fish he could buy, all at reasonable prices. And before you could shout eureka, he had himself a place that looked like a saloon but behaved like a restaurant, attracting customers day and night by land and by sea. A Calusa success story. Of which there were not too many these days.
When Frank Bannion arrived at noon that Monday, the place was already beginning to fill up for lunch, and many of the customers looked like banking people who had driven over from the mainland, a sure harbinger of longevity. He parked his car — prominently marked with the State Attorney’s seal on both front doors — alongside a silver Lincoln Continental that looked like a beached shark, and then he followed the sound of a whorehouse piano into an interior bright with sunshine but nonetheless managing to convey the look and feel of a friendly, bustling, happy, cozy joint that had been here for the past hundred years and would be here as long as good food and drink were being served anywhere in the state of Florida. No small accomplishment for this jinxed location.
Bannion nodded his head in appreciation and walked through the main dining room and out onto the deck, where round white tables shaded by huge brown umbrellas overlooked the water. A boat under sail was gliding past on the wind. Boats made you want to be on them, Bannion thought, until you actually got on them. He sat at the bar and began chatting up the redhead who took his order for a gin and tonic. He was here to talk about the night of the murders. He had a choice of coming right out and saying he was a detective working for the State Attorney, or else he could just pretend to be somebody curious about what had happened. Sometimes if you came on like the Law, they froze. On the other hand, if you came on like a snoop, they sometimes told you to fuck off. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. He decided to show his shield.