Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“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.

Emma thought of it as drab.

Matthew’s partner thought of it as tacky.

Matthew wondered if they’d ever exchanged views.

“The trial went on for three weeks,” Emma was telling him. “We’ve got 1,260 pages of transcript here, are you sure you want to read them all?”

“If it’s no trouble,” Matthew said.

“Long as you carry ’em over to the desk, it makes no difference to me,” she said.

Emma was a stout woman with grey hair and a faint limp. She’d had the limp ever since Matthew had known her. He supposed it was from a childhood injury. Or perhaps undetected polio; he remembered with something like surprise that polio had once been the scourge of the earth. He followed her between rows and rows of filing cabinets marked in a system only Emma herself could fathom. The cabinets were of the old oaken style, heavy, sturdy-looking; he remembered with additional mild surprise that once upon a time many things had been fashioned of wood rather than metal or plastic. It goes by too fast, he thought. Where was the kid with hair in his eyes who played sandlot baseball in Chicago, Illinois? Where were the sandlots anymore?

“Transcript’d be in the People Versus section,” Emma said. “Have you got the names of them three? They were tried together, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Matthew said.

The defense team, of course, had tried to obtain separate trials, sever each defendant out, present each individually as a confused young man in ill-fitting clothes, a poor put-upon immigrant, sitting at the defense table with his eyes wide in bewilderment. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask you, could this shy, unassuming creature possibly have committed rape? Skye Bannister had prevailed. The three had been tried together. But the state had lost the case anyway.

“Ngo Long Khai,” Matthew said, reading from the slip of paper in his hand. “Dang Van…”

“Hold it, hold it,” Emma said. “Let me see that, willya, please?”

He handed her the slip of paper. She studied it in consternation, shaking her head all the while, and then limped down the aisle between the rows of cabinets. “Let’s try the Ho one,” she said. “I have a feeling I filed it under the Ho.”

Matthew could only imagine why.

But sure enough, she found the transcript filed under Ho Dao Bat, People vs . and flagged for reference to Ngo Long Khai and Dang Van Con, co-defendants.

“Can’t even lift it,” she said.

An exaggeration, even if it was a thick file — or rather files , in that the 1,200 some-odd pages of transcript had been separated into four more easily handlable bundles, each packaged between pale blue, stiff board binders secured with brass paper fasteners. Matthew took the binders out of the drawer one at a time, stacking them on top of the cabinet, and then closed the drawer and hoisted the stack off into his hands and his arms.

“Thank you, Emma,” he said.

“Call me when you’re done, okay?” Emma said. “I’ve got to sign ‘em back in.”

He followed her down the aisle. She snapped out the fluorescent lights behind them. The old oaken cabinets vanished in a wink, as if dismissed again to a remote and silent past. Ahead was a room with long windows and a high, beamed ceiling, another throwback to the turn of the century, when the courthouse was built. A long oaken table stood on stout, round legs. A furled American flag was in one corner of the room. A framed picture of George Washington was on the wall beside it. Early-afternoon sunlight streamed through the windows, burnishing the tabletop’s golden finish. Dust motes lazily climbed the slanting shafts of sunlight. The room was utterly still. Matthew suddenly remembered why he’d become a lawyer.