The girl was impressed.
“Wow,” she said.
Twenty-three years old, twenty-four maybe, with an amazing sun-tan for somebody with red hair. Bannion figured the hair color had been poured out of a bottle. Brown eyes. Little button nose. Her name was Rosie Aldrich, she told him.
“I hate the name Rosie, don’t you?” she said.
She’d come down from Brooklyn for a few weeks last winter, decided to stay awhile. She loved working here at Kickers, she told him. What she did, she alternated days and nights, which gave her a chance to spend time on the beach. She loved the beach. Loved the sun. Also, with a job like this, she got to meet a lot of interesting people. Like detectives from the State Attorney’s office, wow.
Bannion told her he had once bit a burglar on the backside.
Out of deference to her youth, he didn’t say ass.
He showed her the photograph of the burglar’s behind to prove it. His teethmarks on the burglar’s behind.
The girl shook her head in awe and admiration.
Bannion asked her if she’d been working here on Monday night, August thirteenth.
“Why, what happened then?” she asked.
Brown eyes saucer-wide.
“Routine investigation,” Bannion said. “Would that have been one of the nights you were working?”
“What night would that have been, the thirteenth?” she asked.
“A Monday,” Bannion said.
He was beginning to get the feeling she was kind of stupid. A sort of airheaded look in those brown eyes. Or maybe she was on something. A lot of kids these days, you figured them for dimwits, they were in fact stoned.
“Yeah, but which Monday?” she said.
Today was Monday, the twentieth of August. One of those flip-up calendars behind the bar displayed the date in big white numbers on a black background. So what Monday could the thirteenth have been if not last Monday?
“Last Monday,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
He waited.
“When was that?” she said.
“Last Monday,” he explained. “The thirteenth. Last Monday night.”
He was thinking that even if she had seen anything, Demming would never put a dope like her on the stand.
“Were you working that night?” he asked.
“Gee, no,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, relieved.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you know who would’ve been working that night? Out here on the deck?”
“Why out here on the deck?” she asked.
“Would you know?” he asked, and smiled pleasantly and patiently.
“I’ll ask Sherry,” she said.
Sherry turned out to be the dark-haired girl serving drinks at the other end of the bar. She was very tall, five ten or eleven, Bannion guessed, giving the long-legged, high-heeled impression that her skirt was even shorter than it actually was. She listened intently to what Rosie was telling her, glanced down to where Bannion was sitting and nursing his gin and tonic, nodded, and then came over to him.
“How are you?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. “I’m from the State Att—”
“Yeah, Rosie told me. What’s this about?”
Intelligence flashing in her dark eyes, thank God; he hated stupid people. Sharp nose that gave her the look of a fox on the scent of a hare. Wide mouth, full lips. Actually, quite attractive, he thought. Twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, in there. He wondered if she knew his teeth and his hair were still his own.
“I’m investigating a murder,” he said.
Impress her flat out.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Were you working out here on the deck last Monday night, the thirteenth?”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
Watching him. Gauging him. Was he for real or was this some kind of pitch? Bannion was sure she got guys in here pretending to be all sorts of things they weren’t. He figured he’d better show her his shield.
“Okay,” she said, and nodded.
“Okay?” he said, and smiled.
He felt he had a very nice smile because all of his teeth were his own.
“I said okay, didn’t I?” she said, and returned the smile.
She had a nice smile, too.
“So what’s this murder?” she asked.
This morning, Bannion and the S.A. had studied a nautical chart together and had decided that the closest landing to Willowbee Creek was right here at Kickers, just off marker 63. Good dock space, even on a crowded night, and a Monday night wouldn’t have been that crowded. Pull the boat in, tie her up, get into a car, and then drive over to Little Asia, not fifteen minutes away. Leeds had to have pulled in here. Stubbs had seen him turning left out of the creek, heading south. The next place for docking a boat would’ve been The Captain’s Wheel, off marker 38, too far south to have made it back by car to the scene of the murders within the time estimated in the coroner’s postmortem interval. No, Leeds had to’ve got off his boat right here at Kickers.
“Were you here around ten-thirty, eleven o’clock that night?” he asked.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Working the bar here?”
“Yeah?”
“You can see the dock from the bar here, can’t you?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m looking for a boat that would’ve come in around ten-thirty, eleven o’clock. Would’ve been coming down the Intercoastal from Willowbee Creek.”
“Marker 72,” she said, and nodded.
“Are you a boater?”
“I’ve been on a few boats,” she said, raising her eyebrows slightly and somehow conveying the impression that she had done some very interesting things on boats in waters hither and yon. Their eyes met. Bannion suddenly felt he had a shot at bedding this woman.
“I know the Willowbee Creek marker,” she said.
“This boat would’ve been a thirty-nine-foot Mainstream Mediterranean, coming down the waterway south from Willowbee. White boat with black trim, the name Felicity painted on the transom. Guy at the helm would’ve been wearing a yellow jacket and hat.”
“Sure,” Sherry said. “What about him?”
Emma Hailey had worked in what the Calusa County Courthouse called its Records Division since 1947, when the town was relatively unknown as a resort. Now in her late sixties, Emma wondered how it had ever become popular. The weather here was iffish at best in the wintertime and swelteringly hot in the summer, which melted directly into the hurricane season. There was none of the lushness one associated with tropical climates, nor for that matter any of the riotous show of color you got in Atlanta when the magnolias were blooming, or Birmingham or Tulsa when the azaleas popped, or anywhere in summertime Connecticut when the daylilies bloomed orange and red and yellow along every country lane. Even the springtime blooming of Calusa’s jacaranda trees was pale by comparison to the exuberant purple explosion on virtually every Los Angeles street at that time of the year.
Here, there were listless bougainvillea and limp hibiscus, tame by Caribbean standards. The cluster of gold trees that bloomed in the spring on U.S. 41, down near Marina Lou’s and the bridge to Sabal Key, were admittedly impressive, but their glorious show of color was short-lived. Most of the year — and especially during the summer — Calusa’s foliage looked faded or scorched, and no one seemed to give a damn. Easier to go fishing than to water a garden. Why prune a bush when you could hop on a boat and sail out into the Gulf? The lack of concern showed. Calusa looked like an elegantly dressed woman whose soiled and tattered slip was showing.