chapter four.

I drove into Apalachicola and found the sheriff's officea"a squatty yellow-brick building wedged between two Victorian homes that had been converted into offices for a few lawyers and accountants and a couple of real estate agents.

Inside at the front desk, a pleasant young woman wearing a telephone operator's headset and an overbite asked if she could help. I said I was hoping to see a deputy. She pushed a b.u.t.ton, waited, and spoke into her headset. A few seconds later, a friendly red-headed guy came through the door. He looked like he smiled a lot, and that's what he did as he introduced himself as Deputy Mickey Burns. He looked strong, and he had a scattering of faded-blue, Marine Corp tattoos competing for s.p.a.ce among a few hundred freckles and a carpet of reddish-blonde hair on his forearms. I told my rehea.r.s.ed story. He smiled some more and said, "Let's go have a look."

Twenty minutes later, we pulled onto the driveway of "See Sh.o.r.e Cottage" in the deputy's patrol car and parked behind a white truck with a chrome toolbox installed behind the cab. Two five-gallon, plastic paint buckets lay on their sides in the sand and clover that made up the front yard. The deputy said, "Looks like they're having some work done." I agreed that it looked just like that. He thought for a few seconds, and asked, "You think maybe your client saw some construction workers horsing around and got the wrong idea?"

"I guess you never know, but I don't think so. That really doesn't fit what my client told me."

Deputy Mickey Burns exhaled through his nose, looked out at the water, and said, "Well, let's go look around." We both stepped out of the car into a bright spring day.

The cottage was a cla.s.sic Florida beach bunkera"concrete block, aqua-blue exterior, white asphalt roof, and, running along one side, a privacy wall constructed of decorative cement blocks turned on edge so that you could see through the inside pattern. A pair of mirror-image, oversized plaster casts of seahorses flanked the front door. The cottage sat at ground level and would violate every high wind and water damage construction spec on the books if it were built today.

Local law enforcement took the lead, and I followed. After banging on the aluminum doorjamb, the deputy pulled open the screen door and walked inside. "Yo! Who's here?"

No one answered, but I could hear what sounded like an old Lynyrd Skynyrd song bouncing around some other part of the house. We walked down a short hall and into what seemed to be a bedroom. Drop cloths were draped over the furniture, the carpet had been pulled up, and two guys in shorts and sandals and not much else were working hard at brushing white paint onto white walls. The deputy said, "Can't y'all hear back here?"

At least that's what I think he said. All I heard was, "Can't y'all he...," before one of the painters yelled, "s.h.i.t," and spun around, slinging a thick streak of white across his buddy's shoulder. The deputy held up both palms and said, "Whoa. Nothing to get excited about here. We're just looking around."

The jumpy painter smiled now and said, "You scared the h.e.l.l out of us."

The deputy said, "Sorry about that. We knocked, and then I yelled for you in the front room there. I guess you couldn't hear over the music."

The painter with a new white stripe on his shoulder didn't smile. He did walk over and flip off a paint-speckled boom box. The talkative one said, "What can we do for you?"

The deputy introduced me to the two painters by name, which, even then, seemed like a bad idea. The one who was doing all the talking said "Hey," and gave their names: Tim and Sonny. My escort then explained that someone on the island had called me the night before and reported that they had seen some guys up to no good at See Sh.o.r.e Cottage. Tim, who was apparently the only one of the two with the gift of speech, laughed and said, "Me and old Sonny here are generally up to no good alright."

We all laughed a little, everybody except Sonny. Tim laughed because he thought he was funny, and the deputy and I laughed to be polite. The bare-chested, paint-spattered Sonny glanced furtively around the room while paint dribbled from the brush in his hand onto the bare concrete floor. Deputy Mickey said, "I don't know if anything happened around here last night or not. And I don't think Mr. McInnes really knows either. He just had somebody..." The deputy turned to look at me. "Was it a man or a woman? I don't even know whether to call 'em him or her, here."

I stared at him for a couple of seconds while trying to decide why he would ask that in front of Tim and Sonny, whether it really made any difference that he had, and, finally, how much of a schmuck I would look like if I refused to answer. I said, "A man. The client is a man." And I said it after just enough pause and with just the right emphasis to look like I was completely full of s.h.i.t The deputy looked a little confused, said, "okay," and went on talking to Tim and Sonny. "Mr. McInnes' client says he saw three guys hauling a fourth guy around who looked like he was hurt. Said it was late last night sometime."

Tim fixed his face into a look of concern, Sonny glanced around the room some more, and I was beginning to regret giving too many details to Deputy Mickey. Tim said, "Me and Sonny worked here pretty late last night. We had to get the carpet up and out before we could start painting this morning. So we just kept at it until it was done."

I asked why.

Tim said, "Whatcha mean?"

"Why pull up the carpet? I mean, if the owner's going to keep it, you could just cover it with drop cloths like you did the furniture. And if you're planning to throw it out and put in new carpeting, why not just use the old carpet for a drop cloth and tear it up later?"

Tim looked theatrically puzzled. The deputy scrunched up his face in thought and said, "Yeah. I don't know why we're that worried about the carpet. But what he says makes sense, if you wanted..."

Sonny, the mute painter, blurted out, "It stunk." We all looked at him. He had stopped glancing around the room and focused his eyes on mine. I liked it better when he couldn't focus. He looked a little nuts. "We got it outta here 'cause it stunk. The roof musta leaked or something and got it wet. All I know is it smelled like ... it stunk when we come in to do the job. I told 'em I wasn't going to paint nothing until that rug was gone."

Tim joined in, "That's a fact, buddy. First thing we did was rip it up and get it out of here."

Sonny continued to stare into my eyes. I asked, "What happened to it?"

Tim said, "Took it to the dump. Probably buried under a few tons of garbage by now. Don't know why you'd care, though."

The deputy said, "We're getting off the point here. All I want to know is if either of y'all saw anything last night or this morning that didn't look right, and if anybody else came with you or stopped by yesterday."

Sonny resumed his wandering eyes act, and Tim said, "Nope and nope. Just another job, Sheriff."

"Deputy Sheriff."

"Sorry. n.o.body got hurt around here that we know about, Deputy."

Deputy Mickey thanked them and then, as if it were an afterthought, asked, "Have you two got a contract or a work order or something like that from the owner for this work?"

Tim said, "Yessir, we sure do. Out in the truck."

The deputy asked if he could see it, and the rest of our little group left Sonny alone to continue his eye exercises. Outside, Tim lifted a metal clipboard off the truck seat, flipped open the cover, and handed it to Deputy Mickey. I read it over his shoulder. The only page in the clip was a work order from Dolphin Rentals, authorizing carpet replacement and new paint in the bedroom of one See Sh.o.r.e Cottage. The work order was dated two weeks earlier and signed by Billie Timmons, Agent.

Back at the sheriff's office, Deputy Mickey walked me to my car. I got in and rolled down the front two windows. He bent down, leaned two furry, tattooed forearms in the driver's window, and peered inside the Jeep. He smelled faintly of sweat and citrus aftershave. He said, "Well, that looked like a wild-goose chase, but chasing wild geese is mostly what the job is about. You happy?"

I wasn't a d.a.m.ned bit happy, but I just shrugged and said, "Sure. At least I can report back to my client. I'm sure he'll be relieved no one was hurt."

Deputy Mickey said, "Yeah, we can all be happy about that. Anyway, I was glad to help." He fixed a rea.s.suring smile on his face and turned to walk away.

I asked, "Does your department keep ownership records on the houses on St. George?"

Burns stopped and turned back. "We probably got that information around somewhere. But, if you're a lawyer, you can find it as easy as I can by going by the courthouse."

"I just thought you might be able to save me some time."

Deputy Burns smiled again. Very nice. Very friendly. But we both knew he was done with me. Then he turned and walked inside the sheriff's building. I backed out and, once again, turned southeast toward St. George Island.

Back at the beach house, I discovered that Carli was gone. Susan had given her a ride to the restaurant so she would be there to help set up for the lunch crowd. In light of my unsettling encounter with Tim and Sonny, I wasn't happy about my new client running around the island unescorted. But Susan a.s.sured me that she had impressed on Carli the need to keep her mouth shut. Susan added, "It's hard anyway to get Carli to say much of anything except just making small talk or, if she's really comfortable, maybe talking about being an artist one day. I think you learn early to keep secrets when you grow up in a family like hers."

I asked, "What kind of a family does she have? You've mentioned a couple of times that she's terrified about going home, but you've never said why."

"I really don't know exactly. And I don't know why I tried to sound dramatic and sage about 'keeping secrets.' The whole thing sounds a little Barbara Walters, doesn't it?"

"It sounds like you're making it up as you go. If that's what you mean."

Susan gave me a look. "I just know that Carli's scared to death of having to go back. And I know it's not just some high school angst thing. And I know that she won't talk about it." Susan paused and said, "What did you find out at the sheriff's office?"

I told her. I recited my morning adventure and jotted down notes while the whole mess was fresh in my mind. Later, I would transfer the notes to my laptop, just as I did with every case, so they would be available for word searches and for preparing a chronology of the facts. While I was writing out a summary of my meetings with Deputy Mickey Burns and the painting duo of Tim and Sonny, Susan pulled out her yellow pages and looked up Dolphin Rentals, which turned out to be a small real estate company in Apalachicola. She punched in the number and asked for Billie Timmons. Ms. Timmons was not in the office and would not be back for another four days, but she did handle See Sh.o.r.e Cottage and had full authority to authorize normal repairs to the property.

Susan and I sat in her living room and looked at each other for a while. She was thinking. Finally, she said, "Okay, what about the paint? They can't just slap some paint on the walls and cover up all traces of blood. I mean, I know real life isn't like cop shows on TV. But the police are more sophisticated than that, aren't they?"

"Sure they are. The cops could probably peel the walls and find some bloodstains between the paint layers. But they'd need sufficient probable cause to get a search warrant that would allow them not only to search the cottage but to also strip the walls looking for bloodstains. Which sounds like a good idea, except that a warrant that allows destruction of property is pretty hard to get. At a minimum, any judge would want an eyewitness before he allowed something like that to happen." I stood and stretched out my back. "I'm afraid something like that would take Carli coming forward and making a sworn statement." Susan started to speak, and I said, "And, even if Carli did that, we couldn't be certain the cops would find enough evidence to do anything. A little blood on the wall doesn't mean much without a body."

Susan looked disappointed. "We should be able to do something."

I said, "We will. We just don't know what it is yet."

A few quiet seconds pa.s.sed before Susan's head snapped up from the impact of a sudden thought. "Tom! Shouldn't we be over there to follow those painter-guys when they leave?"

"Nope."

"Why not? They've got to be connected some way with the murder. If we followed them..."

I sat up and put my elbows on my knees and looked at Susan. "If we followed them, they'd probably spot us a mile down the road. Neither of us is qualified to do that kind of thing well. And, if Tim and Sonny did spot us tagging along behind their pickup, we could count on one of two things happening. One, they would know we were on to them, which would cause them to take off down some swamp road to the middle of nowhere and hide. Or, two, they would know we were on to them, which would cause them to turn around and attempt to do us bodily harm. In either case, we've announced that I didn't buy their good-old-boy routine at the cottage. And, in one case, we could end up hurt or worse."

"You're sure about this?"

"I've got the tag number and make of the truck, their descriptions, and the names they gave us. This is a small place. If we need to find them again, I imagine Joey can do it in an hour or two."

Susan and I wandered out onto the deck. Frustration and feelings of impotency seemed to be working on her, and I felt pretty much the same way. Maybe I was handling it better because, for a lot of reasons, the feelings were less foreign to me. Finally, we decided to load into my Jeep to go have another look at See Sh.o.r.e Cottage.

We made a reconnaissance trip past the cottage and saw that Tim's truck had departed taking Tim and Sonny and the plastic paint buckets with it. I turned around in a driveway three doors down, backtracked, and pulled onto the now-familiar parking pad of Carli's nightmare house. We got out. For the second time that day, I approached the giant-seahorse-guarded door of See Sh.o.r.e Cottage with the intention of conducting some sort of investigation. Through the front bedroom window, we could see that the paint job was lousy but finished, the drop cloths had vanished, and the bed and other furniture had been shoved back into place. Susan said, "Poof."

"Yeah. Like magic." I walked around to the side window to peer inside the way Carli had the night before.

Susan said, "Look at the floor." I cupped my hand against the gla.s.s to block the sun's glare and looked down at bare, paint-splattered concrete. "You think they're coming back later to put down new carpet?"

She was being sarcastic. I said, "I wouldn't count on it."

I drove Susan to her beach house. Along the way, a running debate streamed through my minda"should I stay on St. George with Susan and the girl or head back to Mobile? On the one hand, I didn't much like the idea of leaving Susan and Carli alone on the island. Emotionally, it felt like I was deserting them. On the other hand, my surprise meeting with Tim and Sonny had turned my presence into a liability. As we turned into Susan's driveway, I decided that putting some distance between my clients and myself seemed the smartest way to go.

I explained my reasoning to Susan. She agreed and promised to keep an eye on Carli. I promised to try to think of something useful to do.

It had not been a successful day, and the drive home seemed endless. Back at my place, I checked in with Kelly, my secretary, and made a few business calls before wandering down the beach to the Grand Hotel for dinner. I thought a good meal might make me feel better. It usually does. It didn't. Back snug in my living room, I checked my answering machine, turned the recording volume and the ringer all the way down, and spent a couple of unfocused hours with Umbrto Eco. The h.e.l.l with it. I started getting ready for bed. Maybe I'd wake up smarter in the morning.

Twenty minutes later, I heard a fist banging on my front door. I trotted downstairs, flipped on the porch light, and peeked outside through a narrow column of windows. Joey stood there glaring at the door, looking angry and excited all at once. I opened the door.

"Where the h.e.l.l have you been? We called Susan. She said you left there hours ago."

"I've been here. I just turned the sound off on my machine. What's wrong?" In the half second before he could answer, I had a sickening thought. "Is Carli okay?"

"Carli's fine. Everybody's fine. But Kelly's been trying to get you for over an hour. Somebody broke in your office. Kelly says the security company called her. She's down there now with the cops, and they need you to come down."

I said, "Hang on," and went inside to get my shoes. Two minutes later, I was seated in Joey's huge four-wheel-drive, and he was speeding toward Mobile. I looked out the window and watched pine trees and underbrush spin by in the dark. Joey asked about my trip to St. George, and I filled him in.

As we entered the city's neon outskirts, talk turned to the break-in, and Joey said, "One more crummy thing in a crummy day, huh?"

"Maybe not."

"You like having somebody break in your office?"

"Not much. But at least something's happening. I sat around all day down at Susan's drinking coffee and wondering what to do next. I did learn a few things from the painters. But now, at least, the coincidences are starting to pile up, and we can begin trying to make some sense out of it."

"That all sounds real good. But somebody still busted in your office tonight and probably took some of your favorite lawyer stuff."

"Lawyer stuff?"

Joey didn't elaborate.

We were on city streets now, close to the Oswyn Israel Building where my violated office and, I hoped, some answers awaited. I said, "I'm going to call Susan and tell her to get hold of Carli, maybe bring her to the beach house and lock everything up tight until we can think this out."

"Probably a good idea. Susan got a gun?"

"I have no idea."

I used Joey's cell phone to get Susan. She promised to pick up Carli from work and keep her at the beach house. Susan reminded me of the guard at the gate to The Plantation and said she also had a .38 revolver. I hung up as Joey turned into my parking lot.

Upstairs, Kelly was waiting in the reception area. She said, "Looks like they got scared off."

A pair of blue uniforms lounged on the sofa drinking coffee that I guessed Kelly had brewed for them in my new Krups machine. One of the officers started to stand. I said, "Let me look around first, okay?" He nodded and sat back down. His was not a controlling personality. As I walked back to my office, I asked Kelly, "Nothing's missing?"

Kelly followed. "Almost nothing."

I made a quick inventory of the desk drawers, the small wall safe, and the few expensive odds and ends on my walls and shelves. I sat down behind my desk to think. Joey strolled in holding a mug of steaming coffee in each giant paw and put one down in front of me. Then he plopped into a leather guest chair and sipped his coffee. Kelly sat in a chair that matched the one Joey was overflowing, looked across the desk, and said, "The policemen want you to sign some kind of report. They couldn't find any fingerprints or anything like that, by the way."

I said, "What do you mean 'almost nothing' is missing?"

"What? Oh. It's creepy. Right now, it looks like whoever broke in just grabbed the appointment calendar off my desk and took off."

"Your appointment calendar? Are you sure that's all?"

"I've got to look around some more, but, like I said, right now that looks like it."

A shapeless, but vaguely disturbing, thought was worming around the back of my mind. I let it work through, and my stomach began to squeeze into a knot.

"Kelly, did you put Susan Fitzsimmons' name in the appointment book today?"

"Sure. I put all your appointments in there."

Joey cussed as he and I jumped up and ran out of the office. As we rushed through the waiting room, the two cops looked surprised. They didn't move, but they did appear to consider the option.

chapter five.

Joey was a former sh.o.r.e patrolman, former Navy Intelligence officer, former Alabama state trooper, and former Alabama Bureau of Investigation agent. In fact, former would serve as a pretty accurate one-word description of his career in law enforcement, all of which sounds worse in some ways than it is. Joey was never unreliable, unless you were counting on him to follow orders or to treat an employee handbook like the Word of G.o.d. And, when things get serious, att.i.tude and obstinance and confidence are what I want. Boy Scouts scare the s.h.i.t out of me.

Now, on the highway east of Mobile, Joey was driving like the cop he used to be, going ninety-plus on two-lane roads. And, like a cop, he seemed to be in complete control behind the wheel as trees, houses, shops, and other traffic whirled by as varying shapes and colors in the night.

"She's not there." It was the fourth time I had punched in Susan's St. George number.