Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

The room went silent.

“You shouldn’t have taken this case,” Frank said. “I know I’ve said that about other cases you’ve…”

“Oh? Have you?” Matthew asked, and opened his eyes wide in mock surprise.

“Yes, smartass, I have,” Frank said. “But this time you seem to have gone out of your way to…”

“No, this is much better than the last one,” Matthew said. “Don’t you think so, Warren?”

“Oh, definitely,” Warren said. “The last one, the man’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. This one, there’s only his wallet at the scene.”

“Yes, wonderful, make light of it,” Frank said. “Ha, ha, wonderful. But for someone who’s made a credo …”

“Credo, get that, Warren.”

“Credo, yes, of defending only people you think are innocent…”

“I do think he’s innocent, Frank.”

“Why, of course he’s innocent,” Frank said, his voice dripping sarcasm. “Any fool can see he’s innocent. His wallet is laying on the floor…”

“Lying on the floor, Frank.”

“… alongside three guys whose throats are grinning from ear to ear…”

“Please, Frank, don’t be gross.”

“… whose eyeballs , for Christ’s sake, are rolling around on the floor like marbles …”

“Really,” Matthew said, “that is gross, Frank.”

“You want gross? How about an enraged husband cutting off their dicks and stuffing them in their mouths?”

“I hope he at least got the right mouths,” Warren said, and he and Matthew burst out laughing.

“Laugh, go ahead. Ha, ha, very funny, laugh,” Frank said. “But wait and see what the State Attorney does with those three dicks.”

“That’s a sexist remark, Frank. The State Attorney happens to be a very beautiful young woman.”

“Even better. Can you imagine a beautiful young woman telling a jury about three blind guys sucking their own cocks , for Christ’s sake!”

“Disgusting,” Matthew said, and began laughing again.

“Ha, ha, go ahead, laugh. Laugh, clown, laugh,” he said, dramatically. “But don’t come crying to me later.”

“Frank?” Matthew said.

“Yes, what ?”

“Why would he need the boat for an alibi?”

“What?”

“He already had an alibi. He was home with his wife all night long. So why the boat?”

“Because he’s a goddamn liar,” Frank said, and nodded his head emphatically. “And a murderer, too,” he said, and nodded again. “And you’re a fool for defending him.”

His tan hadn’t yet faded, but he’d been here in jail only since Tuesday. Give him another week or so, and the pallor would begin to set in. And the look would accompany it. The caged look that claimed a person’s eyes the first time he got locked up. A look just this side of panic. A trapped and helpless look. Leeds wasn’t wearing that look yet. It would come later. With the pallor.

The mark of an habitual offender was that he wore his pallor with something close to arrogant pride and never wore a caged look after the first time he was arrested. A murderer was something else again. Most murderers were one-shot offenders. They acquired the pallor and the look and either lost both when they were acquitted or kept both for a long, long time. In Florida, a convicted murderer kept them only until he was executed.

“I want you to tell me everyplace you went and everything you did last Monday,” Matthew said. “From the moment you left your broker’s office till the moment you went to sleep that night.”

“Why?” Leeds asked.

“I’d like to know, please,” Matthew said.

Leeds sighed heavily, as if being asked to tell his attorney where he’d been and what he’d done on the day of the murders was certainly burdensome and probably unnecessary.

“It was raining,” he said. “This was around three o’clock. When I left Bernie. Bernie Scott, my broker. Coming down in sheets…”

… drenching the sidewalks and the streets, running into sewers and drains, flooding the roads. Leeds has always felt uncomfortable driving his wife’s Maserati, it is too jazzy a vehicle for him, it promises a playboy when only a farmer is behind the wheel. The car is called a Spyder, with a y, and it lists for $48,000, though Jessie bargained the dealer down to $44,500. Zero to sixty in six seconds, black leather convertible top, wood facings on the doors, dashboard, and console, wood handles on the hand brake and gearshift. Tan leather and suede on the seats, rich black carpeting on the floor, all too rich for Leeds’s blood.

He feels even less comfortable driving it in the rain, but his own car has been in the shop for the past week, and they have only the two cars, his and Jessie’s, and they’ve temporarily been sharing the more expensive one. His own car is a ten-year-old Cadillac Seville, in the shop for a new transmission at a cost of twenty-one hundred dollars, but he loves that car, the look of it, the luxurious feel of it, he would trade ten Maseratis for his steady old Cadillac.

He stops at the video store on the South Tamiami Trail, just off Lloyd, between Lloyd and Lewis, he remembers the name now, it’s called Video Time. The man who owns the store has only one eye, he wears a black patch over the other one, his name is Roger Carson. Just running from the car to the front door soaks Leeds to the skin. The shop is almost empty at three-fifteen, which is when he gets there. A woman with a baby strapped to her back is shopping the racks of tapes. Carson himself is behind the counter, staring glumly out at the rain. Leeds remembers wondering whether rain is good or bad for the video business.

He tells Carson what he’s looking for — he has come here specifically for Casablanca , this is the movie Jessie wants to watch tonight — and Carson comes out from behind the counter and leads him over to a section called Classics, or Movie Classics, or something similar. He locates the tape at once and then asks Leeds if he’s ever seen the movie, and Leeds says he saw it a few times on television, and Carson asks him does he know what the best line in the movie is? Leeds immediately says, “Round up all the usual suspects!” and both men burst out laughing. The rain slithers down the windows. The lady with the baby browses.

The rain is beginning to taper at three-thirty as he drives south on the Trail to Timucuan and then turns the car eastward, toward the farm. The clouds are breaking off in tatters, blue is beginning to show in patches here and there. The road is wet and black ahead, the low red car hugging it, engine humming, tires hissing on the asphalt. He could get to like this car, he supposes, if he could ever bring himself to be unfaithful to the Caddy. He is beginning to think he might take the boat out. If it clears up. Drive over to the marina, dry off the seats, take her out for a little spin. Maybe run her up to Calusa Bay and back. Half-hour each way. If the weather clears.

By four o’clock, you’d never know it had rained at all. It is that way down here in Calusa during the month of August. It happens, and then it is gone, and the heat is still with you even though the fields lay emerald green and sparkling under a late-afternoon sun and the sky has been swept clean. He asks Jessie if she’d like to come out with him on the boat, but she tells him no…

“She’s not a boat person,” he tells Matthew now. “Never got the hang of running it, never enjoyed being on it…”

… so he drives all the way back into Calusa again. It takes about twenty minutes, this time of year, door to door from the farm to the marina. In the wintertime, when the snowbirds are down and the roads are packed, it’ll take a half hour, sometimes forty minutes. Those are the times he wishes he had a little house on a deep-water canal, keep the boat right there at the dock, take it out whenever he wanted to. Come and go as he pleased. Free. But the farm is his business, of course, his livelihood. He’s a farmer. The farm is what his father left him. His sister in Tampa got the trailer parks, and his brother in Jacksonville got the downtown real estate. The farm is a big moneymaker, Leeds has never regretted his inheritance.