Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Oh?” she said, surprised.

“They have to supply them,” Matthew said. “Anyone they plan to call. We have to do the same.”

“Who are they?”

“Two Vietnamese men. One of them saw your husband going in, the other saw him coming out.”

“They say .”

“Yes, of course. And, of course, we’ll contest anything they say. Meanwhile, they have him going in at eleven…”

“That’s absurd. He was lying asleep beside me at that time.”

“And coming out at a little after midnight.”

“Stephen didn’t leave the house all night long. We had dinner, watched the movie he’d brought home…”

“Which movie was that?” Matthew asked.

“ Casablanca ,” she said.

Exactly what her husband had told him.

“He fell asleep watching it, in fact. He was asleep by nine-thirty, ten o’clock.”

“What time did he go out on the boat?” Matthew asked.

“Around five,” she said.

“And came back when?”

“Well, we had dinner at six-thirty, seven. So he was home before then.”

“Just took the boat out for a spin, he told me.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“He also said he may have left his wallet aboard.”

“That’s a possibility, I suppose.”

“He thinks someone may have found it on the boat.”

“Well… that seems farfetched, doesn’t it?”

“How do you think it got at the scene?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been going over that same question again and again in my mind. I have no answer. Stephen was here with me. But they found his wallet in that house with those three…”

She bit off the word before it left her mouth. But her flashing green eyes said the word. The curl of her lip said the word.

“Mrs. Leeds,” Matthew said, “the prosecution is going to make a big deal about you being your husband’s only alibi. Now that they’ve got these witnesses…”

“Who are they? What are their names?”

“I’m sorry, they’re difficult names to remember. I’ll phone you when I get back to the office, if you…”

“No, I was merely wondering if they’re relatives or anything. Half the Vietnamese in Calusa are related. If these two…”

“That’s a good point.”

“Because they couldn’t possibly have seen Stephen going in or out of that house. That’s flatly impossible. They have to be lying.”

“Or merely mistaken.”

“Then they should have kept their mouths shut! If they weren’t sure! Because I hope you know… I hope you realize that those… those three bastards…”

She shook her head.

Kept shaking it.

“Forgive me,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He said nothing. He kept watching her. Her head was bent now. She was staring at her hands. Behind her, the clouds were rolling in swiftly. The tractor was heading back in this direction. The rain would soon be here.

“They’re saying I was with him, aren’t they?” she said at last.

Her head was still bent. She kept twisting her fingers, one hand in the other, long fingers with bloodred nails.

“There’s a rumor to that effect,” Matthew said.

“What do the witnesses say? Did they see two of us?”

“No. Only your husband.”

“Does that make me innocent?”

“A man writing a letter to a newspaper…”

“Well, I’m guilty,” she said. “In my heart, I’m guilty.”

She lifted her head. Her eyes met his.

“In my heart, I would have done the same thing,” she said. “Slit their throats, put out their eyes, cut off their…”

She turned away sharply.

A flash of lightning sundered the summer sky. A man in a straw hat and bib overalls was running toward the house, the abandoned tractor behind him. There was thunder on the left.

“Shall we have lunch now?” she asked.

The rain came in over the water in blinding sheets. Warren stood in the small marina office and waited for Charlie Stubbs to come back in from where he was pumping gas into a twenty-five-foot Boston Whaler. Warren liked this about Florida. The drama of it. There’d been drama in St. Louis, too, by way of tornadoes, but down here the action was more varied. And sudden. One minute you had sunshine that could scorch your eyeballs, and the next it was pouring down raindrops the size of quarters. Pelting the wooden dock outside the office, banging on the tin roof, sliding down the louvered glass windows, lashing into the canvas on sailboats caught unawares. This was one hell of a frog strangler.

Stubbs was wearing an orange poncho, one of those plastic things that weren’t worth a damn in a true storm. The poncho kept whipping around his knees, the wind trying its best to rip it clear off him. Stubbs knelt there unperturbed, a dead cigar between his lips, the hose in his hands, the nozzle stuck into the open mouth of the Walkaround’s tank. Warren was happy to be inside.

The owner of the boat was wearing grey walking shorts, a white T-shirt, and brown Top-Siders. He was soaked through to the skin. He kept talking to Stubbs as he filled the tank, the words lost to Warren, Stubbs nodding every now and then to let the man know he was listening. Finally, Stubbs got up, hung the hose back on the pump, put the cap back on the boat’s tank, gave it a tightening twist with his key, and then came walking back swiftly toward the marina office, his poncho flying all orange and angry around him, the boater following him drenched.

Stubbs was talking as they came in.

“… wait it out the ten minutes or so, I was you,” he was saying.

“Looks to me like it’s gonna be longer’n that,” the other man said. “You take American Express?”

“Just Visa or MasterCard,” Stubbs said.

“I’ll have to give you cash then,” the man said, and glanced at Warren, and then took out his billfold and said, “What’s it come to?”

“Eleven-sixty,” Stubbs said.

“Can you break a twenty?” the man asked, and turned to look at Warren again. “Somethin’ interestin’ you here?” he said.

“You talking to me?” Warren said.

“Ain’t but three of us here in this room and I’m lookin’ straight at you, now ain’t I?”

“I suppose you are,” Warren said.

“This money transaction interestin’ you?”

“Oh, yes,” Warren said. “What I plan to do is hit you upside the head and steal your big twenty-dollar bill.”

Stubbs burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” the man asked.

“Nothin’,” Stubbs said, still laughing.

“Man’s standin’ there watchin’ me take out my money…”

“Come on now, come on,” Stubbs said soothingly.

“How’s a person to know whut’s goin’ on inside his head?”

He handed the bill to Stubbs and stood there glowering while Stubbs rang up the sale and made change from the register. He seemed to be debating whether he wanted to start up with Warren or not. He was still debating it when Stubbs brought back his change. He counted it, gave Warren a dirty look, and went out into the rain. His transom hit one of the pilings while he was backing the boat out. Good, Warren thought.

“You get a lot of that?” Stubbs asked.

“Enough,” Warren said.

“I thought that was history.”

“Sure. Where?”

“I just thought it was. That kind of bullshit.”

“Well,” Warren said, and let it go. “You were telling me about Leeds taking the boat out…”

“Right.”

“This was Monday afternoon, correct? Sometime Monday afternoon.”

“Around a quarter to five. Was when he drove in. Time he untied the boat and went off, it was maybe ten minutes later.”

“What time did he come back in?”

“Around six? Thereabouts?”