“Better go help him,” Stubbs said, “before that nitwit falls in the water.”
He stamped out of the office and walked swiftly to the dock. Gently, he said, “I’ll take that, miss,” and accepted the line from her and then swiftly and automatically looped it around the piling in a series of half-hitches. “Let me have the other one,” he called to the captain, and then went through the same routine on the port side of the boat.
“Think I’ll need lines aft?” the captain asked.
“ ’Less you want her banging around all day,” Stubbs said.
It took him some ten minutes to make the boat secure. The girl watched him all the while, trying to learn something. Matthew figured she was in her early twenties. Seven or eight years younger than Mai Chim. He wondered why Mai Chim had suddenly popped into his mind. Perhaps because the girl on the dock looked so indigenous to Florida, and Mai Chim looked like a total stranger.
Stubbs came stamping back up the dock. He looked at the captain and the girl as they walked off toward where their car was parked, and then he came back into the office again.
“He’d spend less time screwing that little girl and more time learning how to park, he’d be a better seaman all around,” Stubbs said. “First thing you learn when you come down from the north is there’s only two things to do here in Florida. Screw and drink. He’s from Michigan and he’s learned how to do both real well.”
Stubbs shook his head.
“When’s this door-and-window man gonna show up?” he asked.
“I’ll talk to him when I get back to the office,” Matthew said. “His name’s Warren Chambers, he was here…”
“Right, last week,” Stubbs said. “Nice young feller. Smart as a whip, too. Anybody gonna find anything here, it’ll be him. Look at that dog go, will you? Think he hadn’t been fed in a month.” He shook his head again and watched the dog in silent amazement. Then he looked up at Matthew and said, “Well, if that’s it, I got work to do.”
“Just one other thing,” Matthew said. “I wonder if you could listen to something for me.”
“Listen?”
“Yes, sir,” Matthew said, and took from his pocket the small Sony tape recorder he’d carried to the office yesterday.
“What is it?” Stubbs asked.
“A tape I made.”
He pressed the rewind button to make sure the tape was fully rewound, said, “Listen,” and then hit the play button. The tape began unreeling.
“Hello, this is Stephen Leeds,” a man’s voice said. “I just wanted to tell you I’ll be taking the boat out again for a little moonlight spin, around ten, ten-thirty, and I don’t want you to be alarmed if you hear me out there on the dock.”
Stubbs looked at the recorder.
There was silence now.
The reel kept unreeling.
“Was that the man who called you last Monday night?” Matthew asked.
“Can you play it back for me?” Stubbs said.
“Happy to.”
Matthew rewound the tape. He hit the play button again.
“Hello, this is Stephen Leeds. I just wanted…”
“Sure as hell sounds like Mr. Leeds.”
“… to tell you I’ll be taking the boat out again for a little moonlight spin, around ten, ten-thirty, and I don’t want you to be alarmed if you hear me out there on the dock.”
Stubbs was nodding now. “Yep,” he said, “that’s Mr. Leeds, all right.”
“That’s not what I asked you,” Matthew said. “I asked if that was the man who called you last Monday night.”
“Oh,” Stubbs said. “Play it again, willya?”
Matthew played it again.
“Hello, this is Stephen Leeds. I just wanted to tell you…”
“No,” Stubbs said.
Matthew stabbed at the stop button.
“That’s Mr. Leeds, all right,” Stubbs said, “but that ain’t the man who called me last Monday.”
At last, Matthew thought. One for our side.
More damn doors here than you could find in a Broadway farce. Windows, too. Everyplace you looked. A burglar’s paradise. You told your average junkie burglar there was a farm out here on Timucuan with no burglar alarm system and all these windows, he’d wet his pants in glee. Even your sophisticated burglar would appreciate a vacation from having to work so hard getting into a place.
Your junkie burglar went for the windows. All he knew was crack, man. Got to get the crack, man. Smash, grab, got to get the crack. Even if he knew how to pick a lock or loid a door, which he didn’t, he couldn’t waste time fooling around with such things. Easier to smash the window with a brick or a hammer, climb on in, take all the shiny stuff, and split to the crack house.
Your sophisticated burglar knew locks and alarms. There wasn’t a door he couldn’t open or an alarm he couldn’t circumvent. Break a window? No way. Everybody knew the sound of breaking glass. Guy asleep in his bed five miles away, snoring to beat the band, he hears breaking glass he jumps up in bed, knows right away something’s happening, reaches for the phone. You broke a window, it was like banging a pair of cymbals together, announcing to the world at large that a burglary was in progress. Your sophisticated burglar went in and out through doors. Warren had once read a book with that title. Doors. About a burglar. He forgot who wrote it.
Here at the Leeds farm, you didn’t have to be any kind of burglar to get in. A two-year-old kid still learning to walk could get into this house. Not a single one of the windows was locked. The front door and the two other doors on the entrance side of the house had Mickey Mouse locks on them, the kind with the little buttons you pushed in to lock them, what you usually saw on the inside of a bathroom door, worthless against forced entry. The sliding doors on the back of the house were equipped only with thumb locks fitted to their handles. You could open them from the outside with a screwdriver. Warren was looking for tool marks that would conclusively show forced entry, but he knew he wouldn’t find any. You didn’t need tools to get into this place. All you needed was determination. And not much of that, either.
He was trying a door he’d missed at the side of the house…
More damn doors.
… twisting the knob, unsurprised when the door opened without the slightest re—
“Help you?” the voice behind him said.
Warren turned.
He was looking at a very big, very good-looking white man in bib overalls and high-topped work shoes. Six feet two inches tall, he guessed. Two hundred and twenty pounds at least. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, in there. Bulging biceps showing where his short-sleeved blue denim shirt ended. Tattoo of a mermaid on his right forearm, all bare-breasted and scaly-bottomed. Shock of red hair hanging on his forehead. Glittering green eyes. A wide grin on his face. The grin was not friendly, but it was reasonable. It was saying a thief had been caught in the act. Maybe it was even saying a nigger had been caught in the act. Sometimes you couldn’t tell from grins alone, however reasonable they appeared. Not down here, anyway, where everyone was oh so friendly and polite.
“Mrs. Leeds knows I’m here,” Warren said at once.
“I’ll bet she does,” the man said.
“My name is Warren Chambers, I work for Matthew Hope, the lawyer who’s defending Mr. Leeds.”
The man kept looking at him, still grinning reasonably.
“Ask your boss,” Warren said.
“I will. Want to come along with me?”
The look added. Or I’ll break your arm.
Like two old buddies out for a short morning stroll, they ambled around to the back of the house together. Not half an hour earlier, Warren had talked to Jessica Leeds on the terrace here. She’d been having her morning coffee at a round glass-topped table overlooking the pool. Wearing a jungle-green nylon wrap, short nightgown under it. Barefooted. Legs crossed. She’d offered him a cup of coffee. He’d politely declined, saying he wanted to get to work right away. That was when he thought he’d be busy with tool marks. That was before he learned the house was a cracker box. Mrs. Leeds was no longer at the table. Even the breakfast things were gone.