The mall has been closed for an hour and a half by the time they reach the parking lot. There is an hour and a half she must account for. The movie has already let out, even the restaurant is closed, its neon sign dark, its front plate-glass windows black. The parking lot is empty, everything is dark, everything is still, save for a single light hanging over the rear door of the restaurant and a light shining through a narrow window beside the door. Kit drives her directly to where she’s parked the car. She does not even kiss him as she gets out. She is thinking ahead. She is still wondering what she can possibly tell her husband. She is thinking there is no possible way to explain a time lapse of an hour and a half, it’s all over, finished and done, he’ll kill her. Swiftly, she unlocks the door to the Maserati.
She has parked it behind the restaurant, which is shaped like a pagoda, and which in fact is named The Pagoda. The car is an expensive one, and this is four days before Christmas. With all the traffic in the mall’s lot a dented fender is a distinct possibility, but this was not her prime concern when she chose this deserted spot; she is a married woman having an affair, and moving from car to car is the most dangerous time. So she has parked it far from where — if she’d been back here on time — there would have been other cars, parked it instead here behind The Pagoda, alongside a low fence beyond which is undeveloped scrub land. She climbs in behind the wheel, locks the door, and starts the engine.
The dashboard clock reads twenty minutes to twelve.
The sound of the engine tells Kit that everything’s okay, but she flashes her headlights anyway, signaling, and he flashes his own headlights in farewell and begins backing his car away from the fence. She puts the gearshift lever in reverse. Kit makes a wide turn and then begins driving toward the exit. It is best not to follow him too closely, the night has eyes. She waits until in her rearview mirror she sees him turning out of the lot. Then she steps on the accelerator, and begins backing her own car away from the fence, and realizes almost at once that she has a flat tire.
The nightmare is about to escalate.
She knows how to change a flat tire, she has changed many of them in her lifetime, she is not one of these helpless little women who eat bonbons on a chaise longue while reading romance novels. She takes the jack out of the trunk, lifts out the spare, lays it flat on the ground behind the rear bumper, and then kneels beside the right rear tire to loosen the lug nuts on the wheel. She has removed one of them and placed it in the inverted hubcab, when…
The first thing she hears is the rear door of the restaurant opening.
And then voices.
Foreign voices.
Well, a Chinese restaurant, she figures they’re Chinese voices.
And then three men come out of the restaurant, through the back door, talking and laughing, and she recognizes them as the men who’d been out back here smoking earlier tonight when she’d parked the car, eight o’clock tonight when she’d parked the car, three hours and forty minutes ago when she’d parked the car. Three young men out back smoking. “Good evening, boys,” she’d said cheerfully — well, perhaps a bit flirtatiously, too; she was a woman on her way to meet her lover, and a woman with a lover thinks the whole world is dying to fuck her. “Good evening, boys.” Three hours and forty minutes ago. A nightmare ago.
One of them reaches in to snap off the inside lights. There is only the light over the door now. Another one pulls the door shut. The sound of the spring bolt clicking into place is like a rifle shot on the night. The three are still talking among themselves, their backs are to her, they haven’t yet seen her. One of them laughs softly. And then they turn from the door, and… and… they… they…
“They were starting to move away from the restaurant,” she said, “when they saw me. And they… stopped and… and… one of them… the leader. Ho… smiled at me and… and said in his singsong English, ‘Oh, good evening, boys,’ imitating me, mocking me! And then they…”
She fell silent.
She took a tissue from a box on the coffee table, dabbed at her eyes and her cheeks.
Matthew waited.
“You know the rest,” she said, “I told you the rest. I had to lie about the time, but the rest was all true.”
“So you risked a conviction…”
“Yes.”
“… to protect your he.”
“To protect my life!”
“You let three rapists go free…”
“They were my alibi.”
“Your what?”
“Stephen believed it, that’s all that mattered. He believed I left the mall at ten and was raped fifteen minutes later. He believed it.”
“The jury didn’t.”
“That was a chance I had to take. Otherwise, I’d have lost everything.”
“You’ve still lost everything.”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “Stephen will still believe me.”
“The State Attorney won’t. Kit told the police you planned it together.”
“Oh? Planned what together?”
There was a faint smile on her face now. He had seen this smile before. On the faces of people who had decided to bluff it through because there was nothing worse that could possibly happen. Kit Howell had told them everything; Jessica Leeds would tell them nothing.
“They have his sworn statement,” Matthew said.
“He’s lying. Besides, he’s a tennis bum.”
“Whatever he is, he signed…”
“Tell me,” Jessica said. “If an infatuated tennis bum goes out on his own to redeem the honor of a farmer’s wife… how is the lady to blame?”
“Where’s the lady?” Matthew asked, and walked out.
The Q and A took place in Captain Rushville Decker’s office in the Public Safety Building at 6:25 A.M. that Sunday morning, August 26. Present were the captain himself, in cleanly pressed blues and looking wide awake at this early hour; Christopher Howell in jeans and a blue T-shirt; Skye Bannister, who’d finally been located at his sister’s house in Sanibel, and who looked tall and blond and suntanned and elegant in a dark-blue tropical suit and silk rep tie; Patricia Demming, who was dressed now in a grey pin-striped business suit and low heels, looking extremely beautiful but also very grave; Matthew Hope, who had not slept at all the night before and who needed a shave and who was still wearing the clothes he’d lived in all day yesterday; and a uniformed police stenographer, who was operating the recording machine and taking backup shorthand notes and looking essentially bored. Bannister read Howell his rights, confirmed that he understood them, further confirmed that he did not, repeat not, wish a lawyer present, and then began the questioning:
Q: Can you tell me your full name, please?
A: Christopher Leslie Howell.
Q: Where do you live, Mr. Howell?
A: At 2115 Ocean Drive, Whisper Key.
Q: Any apartment number?
A: 2A.
Q: Mr. Howell, earlier today you made a voluntary statement to a Detective Howard Saphier of the Calusa Police Department, is that true?
A: That’s true.
Q: I show you this, and ask if it is a true representation of the statement you made?
A: It is.
Q: Is this your signature at the bottom of the statement?
A: It is.
Q: And is the date alongside your signature the correct date?
A: It is.