“Mm-huh,” he said.
Touching her.
“They’re afraid black men’ll run out into the streets with their big cocks…”
Grabbing him hard as she said this, illustrating her point.
“… and rape all the white women in the nation.”
“I’ll bet that’s it,” he said again, breathlessly.
“Don’t you want to kiss me again?” she asked.
He kissed her again.
He got dizzy kissing her again and again.
“I think you’d better be careful,” he said.
“Mmm,” she said.
“What you’re doing,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Because…”
“They’ll do all these steamy sex scenes between two white people,” she said, her hand moving recklessly, “but never between two blacks, yes, there it is, now you’ve got it, mmm. Oh maybe a little kissy-facy, mmm, yes, but never the real thing, oh no, oh yes, right there, oh God, yes, never a real sex scene, oh Jesus!” she said, and suddenly lifted her hips to him. He yanked the bikini pants down over her thighs and her knees. She kicked them away onto the sand and spread herself wide for him on the blanket. He was naked in an instant, rolling onto her.
“Never anything like this,” she said, “oh Jesus, never!”
8
You came down into the marina on a dirt road behind the Toys “Я” Us warehouse off Henley Street on the South Tamiami Trail, skirting the Twin Tree Estates development along the wetlands bordering Willowbee Creek, the pampas grass moving gently in the welcome early-morning breeze. You saw first the fenced-in boats up on trailers under the storage sheds, their tin roofs rusting in the sunshine. Beyond the sheds was the asphalt-shingled house in which Charlie Stubbs lived with his wife and a pet golden retriever named Shadrach. The house was on the water, and it commanded a good view of the twenty-one slips he rented to boaters. On the night of August thirteenth, Stephen Leeds was supposed to have climbed onto a boat named Felicity at a slip numbered twelve and cruised off into the night to do multiple murder.
“We had three of them, one time,” Stubbs told Matthew. “A female named Meshach and another male named Abednego.”
He was bending over to stroke, tug, scratch, and twist the ear of the big golden, who sat loving it all, his tongue hanging out and his eyes closed, his giant lion paws solidly planted on the wooden planks of the dock. They were standing just outside the marina office. Through the open marina door, Matthew could see boat keys hanging on hooks, each key identified by a slip number crudely painted onto the wooden rack. He wondered if the office door had been locked on the night of the murders.
“This was when we were still living up north, you familiar with a little town in Vermont called West Dover? Pretty country up there, but you can freeze your butt in the wintertime. Me and my wife come down here in ’forty-seven, looking to buy ourselves a motel, ended up with a marina, didn’t know a damn thing about boats. Anyway, one winter up there in Vermont the two other ones disappeared, Meshach and Abednego. We figured some skier up from New York had kidnapped them, there’s a big market in pedigreed dogs, you know. They were beauties, too, the pair of them. Figured they’d been stolen. My wife was brokenhearted. She loved them dogs, especially the bitch. Anyway, come springtime, I get a call from the caretaker at one of the lodges up there, he tells me he was cleaning some fallen branches and such out of the lake, and he looked down and saw what he thought was a couple of deer on the bottom, but it turned out to be two big dogs. He knew to call me ’cause of the tags on their collars. It was them, all right. The way we figured it, they must’ve been playing on the ice, you know, just frisking, and crashed on through. Couldn’t find a way to get up again, couldn’t find their way out, you know. It must’ve been a bad way to die, don’t you think?”
Matthew wondered if there were any good ways to die.
“My wife loved them two dogs,” Stubbs said.
The way he said it, the forlorn sound of his voice, the way he kept working the dog’s ear, caused Matthew to believe that Stubbs himself had loved those dogs more than his wife had.
“Mr. Stubbs,” he said, “I’m sorry to bother you this way…”
“No bother at all.”
“But there are just a few more things I’d like to go over.”
“Sure.”
“First, can you tell me… those are boat keys, aren’t they? Hanging on the rack there inside the office door?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Identified by slip number, isn’t that right?”
“Twenty-one of them, that’s right.”
“Mr. Stubbs, was the office locked…”
“It was.”
“… on the night you saw Stephen Leeds take his boat out?”
“It’s locked every night. Owners have their own keys, all we keep in there’s the spares, for when we have to move the boats, one reason or another.”
“Then Stephen Leeds would’ve had his own key when he took the boat out that night?”
“Had to’ve had his own key. The spare was right there in the office, and the office was locked.”
“Mr. Stubbs, would you mind if I sent someone around to check the office doors and windows?”
“For what?”
“For signs of forced entry.”
“Be my guest,” Stubbs said, and shrugged. “Wasn’t anyone broke in there, though, I’d’ve noticed. What is it, boy?” he said to the dog. “You gettin’ hungry again? Your mama just fed you this morning, didn’t she? Old Shad here’d eat us out of house and home, we’d let him,” he said to Matthew, and then turned to the dog again and said, “Come on then, ’fore you die of starvation.”
He walked into the marina office, Matthew and the dog following. From a shelf in one of the wall cupboards, he took down a big bag of dog food and poured generously into a plastic cup bigger than the dog’s head.
“There you go, boy,” he said, and patted him on the head and watched appreciatively as the dog began eating. Outside, a fifty-foot Sea Ray with a sedan bridge was pulling into one of the slips. Stubbs turned his attention from the dog.
“Man there’s learning how to drive a boat, bangs my dock up every time he comes in. Watch him now.”
Matthew watched. There was on the captain’s face a look of panic Matthew had seen a hundred times before, a look that had been on his own face all too often. The look said that an irresistible force was about to strike an immovable object and there was nothing that could be done about it. Absolutely nothing. Twist the wheel, tug at the gearshift levers, pull back on the throttle, nothing could stop this damn boat from—
“There she goes,” Stubbs said, and winced.
The starboard side of the boat slammed into the slip piling, bounced off it with a thudding lurch. The captain threw his gears into reverse, panicked again, twisted the wheel in the wrong direction, and whapped into the piling yet another time. A young blond girl in a black bikini — either the captain’s daughter or his girlfriend, you never could tell down here in southwest Florida — stood on the bow trying to keep her balance as the boat whacked the piling once again. There was an astonished look on her face, as if she were trying to understand whether this was the way you were supposed to dock a boat. The captain finally got the boat alongside and yelled for the girl to jump ashore. She hesitated a moment, and then leaped the two feet to the dock, popping one of her breasts out of the scant bikini top, recovering it quickly and without embarrassment, and then bracing herself to catch the line the captain tossed to her.