Suspicion of Madness (20 page)

He noticed his watch and stood up. "Golly, look at the time. I hate to do this, but I've got a client coming in soon."

Not moving from his chair, Anthony glanced over at Gail. "Is there anything you want to ask about?" His eyebrows lifted, inviting her to go ahead, what the hell, nothing to lose.

"Well, I was wondering about Sandra McCoy. You knew her, didn't you?"

"Yes, she worked for The Buttonwood Inn."

"You asked her to run errands and keep an eye on your aunt. Sandra told one of her coworkers that you paid her a thousand dollars, and I'm assuming you paid her in cash, over a space of about two months. Is that right?"

Lindeman focused on Gail. "I don't know. Possibly. That amount of money isn't so much when you're talking about peace of mind. I can't get out there as often as I'd like, and frankly, I was worried about Aunt Joan. I'm still worried."

"How did you happen to hire Sandra?"

"Well, I needed someone already at the resort. I'd met Sandra, and she seemed like a responsible young lady. Lois Greenwald gave her a good reference, so I asked her to help me out. She already knew Aunt Joan and was very sympathetic."

"How did that work? I know that Sandra often came here to your office on business for The Buttonwood Inn, delivering papers and so forth. Is that when you paid her?"

"I... I guess so." He spread his hands. "Is there some point to this?"

"I'm just trying to figure things out. Excuse me for asking such a personal question, but… did you and Sandra have more than a business relationship?"

He stared at Gail, then made a single laugh. "No."

"Sorry. I suppose the police interviewed you after her murder?"

He let out a breath, showing how patient he was. "Yes, they did. They talked to everyone who knew her. Everyone except for Billy Fadden." He looked at his watch again.

"One other thing," Gail said. "Could you tell us where you were when Sandra was killed?"

Frowning, he ran his tongue across his lower lip, then laughed and looked over at the only other male in the room for support. "What's going on here?"

"I think she's asking for your alibi," Anthony said.

"Oh? I think it's time for both of you to get out of my office." Doug Lindeman stood directly over Anthony, whose eyes were turned upward, though he remained casually slouched in his chair.

Anthony took his cell phone out of his pocket and unfolded it. "Martin Greenwald's number is on speed-dial. Martin is a big client of yours, no? He'll take the call. Ask him if it's all right if you talk to us."

Lindeman backed off. "Great. I have nothing to hide. I was in trial in Key West all day. I drove back, had something to eat, then came here to finish some work. Lois Greenwald came around seven o'clock to go over some contracts, and she left at eight-fifteen. I turned off the lights, locked up and went directly home. I got there at eight-thirty. All right?"

Gail looked at him. "You were with Lois Greenwald."

"That's what I just said."

"What is your relationship, exactly, with Lois?"

"Relationship? She's my client."

"There's no romantic involvement?"

"What is it with you? I said she was my client. I do not
involved
with my clients."

"Really. She said you were. She said you were practically engaged."

Doug Lindeman's full, rosy mouth hung open. He laughed. "Yeah, well, she's... we're friends."

"I must have misunderstood her," Gail said.

"I guess you did."

They stood at the edge of the quarry looking down into a weedy, brush-choked pit about twenty feet deep and fifty yards across. White coral rock thousands of years old had been blasted, hacked, and broken away in great cubes, then hauled out to be sliced into decorative slabs called keystone. The quarry had shut down in 1962. The state had turned it into a geological site.

Behind the visitors center a hundred yards or so east, out of view from where they stood, were some rusted tracks and an even more rusted steam engine. Men had pounded steel pikes into the rock, gouging a long trough so the block could be cracked away from the side.

Sandra McCoy's body had been found here on the desolate western side of the pit. A ranger had supplied a map and marked the place. Anthony walked to the edge. Gail kept her distance, fighting the irrational urge to look behind her.

The sun had dropped below the tops of the trees but still shone on the pit floor and on the opposite wall. She could see across to the bright water of Florida Bay and a scattering of low mangrove islands. She wondered if, in the days since the murder, the rain had washed the blood away, or if streaks of it still darkened the rock.

Sandra's body had been positioned with her legs pointing away from the pit, shoulders just at the edge, her head back, throat exposed. Already dead. When the knife had sliced through her neck, the blood had not spurted but flowed. She had been found crumpled at the bottom in a patch of weeds, discarded like a soda can or a cigarette pack.

Still looking down, Anthony peered through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter.

Gail had shown him how, no real trick to it. When they got back to the cottage, which she hoped would be soon, she could download the card to her computer and bring up the image on the screen.

Taking shots of the video store had been easy. Movie Max was the last of four small, glass-fronted stores in a building set back at an angle off the highway. She had captured the parking spaces in front, a few shade trees, and at the far end of the lot, a hedge. Sandra McCoy had left her car in the last space. She had gone in for a video, come out, stuck the keys in the door, and he... someone... had grabbed her. No one had noticed the video bag and her purse on the ground until late the next morning.

The rope had gone over her head too fast for her to scream.

He had dragged her around the end of the building and finished the job. His car would have been close by. He had probably driven to the access road just west of the rock quarry and carried or dragged her through the woods, a distance of only twenty yards or so. Why here? He could have taken her body anywhere, could have left her in the mangroves. She'd have been reduced to bones in a week. But he had brought her here. He had laid her out on these rocks like a sacrifice, her sightless eyes staring up at the starlit sky, and her throat slit open, the blood pouring out, a long quiet flow.

"Anthony, are you about finished?"

He raised the camera and took a couple of shots across the rock pit, then turned and picked his way over the weedy ground to where she stood.

"Did you see anything?"

"Some crime scene tape. The brush is trampled. That's all."

Gail turned off the camera and put it back into her purse. "Let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps."

Arriving at the Blue Water Marina, they spotted a man in old hiking shorts and a khaki fishing hat seated among the patrons at the bar outside the restaurant. Anthony parked the car under the awning near the Buttonwood dock, and they walked back across the lot.

Martin saw them and lifted a hand in greeting. He was halfway through a mug of beer. Anthony asked if there was time for him to talk to the marina manager. Unspoken but understood was the reason for this: Anthony wanted to find out who had been on duty the night of October third. Had anyone seen Billy Fadden around 7:30
P.M. getting into his boat and heading for home?

"Go ahead, take your time," Martin said. "We'll be right here." Someone moved down one stool, and Gail slid in next to Martin. A waitress bustled through the screen door of the restaurant with a basket of peel-and-eat shrimp, which she gave to a man at the end of the bar. Martin asked Gail if she was hungry. Gail said she would have a beer, and the bartender tilted a frozen mug under the tap.

Martin told her he'd just heard one of the fisherman bitching about losing a charter. "They say the storm is right on track for the Upper Keys, unless it veers off at the last minute."

"It is going to become a hurricane?"

"No, no, don't worry. They're not going to start ordering evacuations, but we'll get some heavy rains and wind on Friday. I've talked to Lois. She's already putting every hand to work battening down the hatches. We'll have to delay the opening."

"Oh, that's bad."

"It's not bad. Bad is the roof blowing off the hotel. This is inconvenient."

"What about your nursery?" Gail grabbed a napkin to blot the foam off her lips.

He answered with a shrug. "Palm trees are made for this weather."

"Martin, I want to apologize to you."

"Why?"

"I shouldn't have asked about Lois the way I did, making it sound like we suspected her."

"No need to apologize," Martin said. "I've had some things on my mind, and I took it badly. You go ahead and do your job. I won't interfere."

"Well, we talked to Doug," she said. "He confirmed that he and Lois were in his office discussing business at the time in question."

"What did he say about Joan?"

"He thinks Joan is loony."

"I thought he would."

Gail took another sip of her beer, crisp and cold. "Martin, forget what I said about Lois and Doug being involved in any way. I must not have heard her correctly. Please don't mention it to her. I'd die of embarrassment."

But Gail had heard correctly. And either Lois had wildly misunderstood her relationship with Doug Lindeman, or she was delusional. Anthony said it didn't matter; it was Lois's problem, and they should leave it alone. Gail thought he was right, but it bothered her. She already felt sorry for Teri. Now this.

"I won't say a word." Martin had finished his beer and was signaling the bartender for another.

Gail said, "Should you be drinking? Oh, God, listen to me. I'm sorry."

"You're right, I shouldn't. This is my last one. I've just been to see my doctor."

"Not bad news."

"The old ticker is wearing out. They want me to go to Miami next week for some tests. The cardiologists are talking about raising the hood and replacing a couple of parts. I'm not in any imminent danger of falling off this bar stool, don't look so alarmed." He smiled at her, then said, "I hope you don't mention this to Anthony. Above all, not Teri. You and I will have a mutual pact of silence."

"Martin, are you talking about a
transplant?"

"Heavens, no, just a valve or two. A couple of new pipes. The first ones they bolted in there aren't holding too well." He looked through the open bar to the water beyond. "It's a pretty day, isn't it? We'll need umbrellas tomorrow."

His sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and she could see his deep-set hazel eyes, sad and beautiful, under thick, dark brows. Once he had been a powerful man; it showed in his bones and the way he carried himself. The king was dying—or believed he was.

"Teri has to know," Gail said. "She's your wife. She loves you."

He finished a swallow of beer and set down his mug. "That's precisely why I don't want to tell her. She has too much on her mind already with Billy. We've been through some tough times with him. This is about as bad as it ever was. I hope that psychiatrist can offer some guidance, because I'm at my wit's end. This is something I've tried to fix, and I have failed completely.

"He doesn't like me. I can't fish as well as his father can. I don't push him around, so how can he respect me? He wants to stand on his feet like a man and he can't do it, and he's frustrated to hell and back. Oh, I remember what it's like, being that age.

"What I fear most is that Teri will be hurt. Billy's going to break her heart, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it. I've succeeded at everything else most people put value on. I made my first million at twenty-six. That's true. And I didn't lose it and make it back, I kept it and made even more. Oh, it was great fun stomping the opposition, scooping up deals. We had a fantastic apartment on Central Park West, and I rarely saw it. My daughter wouldn't speak to me. My wife was about to divorce me when she got sick. She died a year later. I went to her funeral and was back at work the next day.

"I was thirty-eight when I caught that first whiff of mortality. It wasn't a bad attack, as these things go. The biggie came at forty-one. Lois flew up to take care of me. She browbeat my doctors for six months of recovery. I couldn't go back to work. It would have killed me. She told me Lindeman Key was for sale. So I bought it.

"The only way I got the deal I got—and it still cost me a bundle—was by agreeing to take the property subject to Joan's life estate. Her nephew, Teddy, talked Harry Lindeman into it. I think it was so Teddy could continue to enjoy the property, too, that's what I think, because he and Joan were pretty tight, but Teddy got himself busted by U.S. Customs and went away for ten years. He never got out. He died in prison."

Gail said she had heard about that.

Martin looked into his beer mug, turning it around and around on the varnished teak bar. "Lois and I had big plans at first. A megaresort with a timeshare condo on the eastern side. Very bad idea. Joan's being there saved me from that. Now I've gone green. I'm working to get everything low impact, totally solar powered, making all our own water. The world will have to go that way eventually. If not, we're all in trouble. You know, Gail, the good thing about nature is that it reminds us we are not in control. The storm is coming, and my trees will be blown away or not, and my heart will go when it decides to, and that's all right. I've learned something: We don't choose our fate, it chooses us.