Longboat Blues Read online

  The affair would be known to Banion by now. He would have heard the gossip, and he was probably already honing in on Logan as the chief suspect. But then, I had gotten the impression that morning that Banion had already decided that Logan was the guilty party.

  “You don’t like the entertainment?”

  I looked up into the face and bosom of Pearl. She was tall, blonde, buxom and sheathed in a white sequined dress designed to accentuate her positive attributes. Bets had been taken on whether those magnificent mammaries were the result of good genes or a surgeon’s skill.

  “Hey kid. Sorry, I was about a thousand miles away. Sit down.”

  She sat. “Isn’t it terrible about Connie? God, she must have gotten killed right after she left here. I may have been the last one to see her alive. Well, other than the killer.”

  “Connie was in here last night?” I asked, stupidly.

  “Yeah, until about 11:00. She only stayed maybe an hour.”

  “Have you talked to the cops yet?”

  “Sure. I called Bill Lester as soon as I heard about it. Told him she had been here last night. Some goofball from the county came by and took a recorded statement before I came to work this evening.”

  “Banion?”

  “Yeah. That’s his name. A real sourpuss.”

  “Was Connie with anybody last night?”

  “No. She came in alone and sat up at the bar. Asked me to play a couple of old songs, had a couple of drinks and left. I don’t think she even talked to anybody.”

  “Are you sure about the time she left?”

  “Pretty sure. I take a break at 11:00, and she left just before that. I was surprised because we usually sit and talk during my breaks when she’s in.”

  “Are you sure about the time she came in?”

  “I play for fifty minutes and then take a ten minute break on the hour. I stick to the schedule, because you know what a hardass the owner is. I had already started back from my 10:00 break, so it had to be after 10:10. But not much. I think I was on my first song.”

  “You’re sure she didn’t talk to anyone at the bar?”

  “Pretty sure. It was quiet last night, and there were only two or three other people here while she was at the bar. Some of the trailer park crowd, but I don’t think Connie knew them. They were sitting on the bass end and Connie was all the way around at the treble end. She was real quiet, sorta depressed, if you know what I mean. She usually sings along and talks to everybody. But not last night.”

  “Did she say anything about where she was going when she left here?”

  “No. She just waved and walked out. Unusual for Connie, you know? She’s usually real friendly.”

  “Look, Pearl, if you hear anything about where Connie went after she left here or if anyone saw her, let me know, will you?”

  “Sure, Matt, but what the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know, but a friend of mine could be in trouble over this.”

  “Logan?”

  “Yeah. Logan.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Matt. Logan wouldn’t hurt a flea. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have hurt Connie. I think they had something going, you know?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know. You could just tell. They would come in here together sometimes, and they, I don’t know, just looked like they had something going. My ten minutes are up Matt. Time to get back. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

  “Play ‘Misty’ for me,” I said.

  “Right, cowboy. See you later.”

  She played “Y’all Come Back Saloon.” My favorite song.

  I was up early the next morning, sitting on my balcony drinking coffee. High clouds ambled slowly across the bay. Bright orange streaks splashed their puffy faces, a promise of the arrival of the sun. The air was cool, cooler than the water, and a mist hovered around the mangrove islands, giving them a surreal look, as if they were rising from the bay to meet the day. As the first bright arc of the morning sun crested the horizon, Logan belched. He was standing just inside the open doors to the living room, a cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “It was until you ruined the mood,” I said.

  “Sorry about that. Pizza always gives me gas.”

  “You want to go down to Izzy’s for breakfast?”

  “Nah. Half the people I know will be there, and I really don’t want to face anybody yet.”

  “What’s on the agenda today?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’d like to get back into my condo.”

  “My guess is that they’re going to keep you out for another few days. They’ll go over it with a fine tooth comb.”

  “We could go fishing.”

  “That we could, my friend, that we could.”

  We loaded the gear into my boat, stopped by Annie’s for bait, and headed to Palma Sola Bay. We spent the whole day there, with a short trip to a waterfront restaurant for lunch, and more beer for the cooler. We didn’t catch any fish, but Logan began to relax a little.

  Two days later I heard from Chief Lester. He called to say that the medical examiner had finished with Connie, but there didn’t seem to be any relatives to claim the body. They had found a small life insurance policy among her effects, and that would about pay for a funeral. The body was at Sand’s Funeral Home on Manatee Avenue.

  We buried her the next day in a small cemetery near the Manatee River, all the way out near I-75. There were no headstones, just those ground level plaques that the lawn mowers can clear when they cut the perpetual care grass. The cemetery promised to place one on her grave as soon as it came in. It had been ordered from their headquarters in Kansas City. A full service burial corporation, I guess.

  There were about twenty people there to see Connie off. The sound of trucks traveling the interstate wafted toward us on the easterly breeze. I could hear the gentle shuffling of feet on the grass as the friends gathered near the open grave. Otherwise, there was quietness there on the flat land of the cemetery; the sun getting hotter now, as Florida’s short Spring eased into Summer.

  Death had come creeping into our little group on the sun swept island, and plucked one of us, seemingly without reason. None of us understood why it was Connie, but each of us was glad it was not he. I thought about a time, in winter, when I was on the Metroliner between Washington and New York, back in that other life when I was the quintessential lawyer. I was gazing out the window as the partially snow covered landscape rushed by under a low and cloudy sky. We came upon a cemetery, sitting on rolling ground, with large white tombstones marking the graves. Some were overturned, lying flat on the ground as if years of guarding the dead had finally tired them. We were probably somewhere in Maryland or maybe Delaware. The graveyard was empty, except for a solitary couple in overcoats, arm in arm, standing at a grave. I wondered then if the grave was perhaps that of their child, or a parent, and what tragedy brought them there on that day. I knew I would always remember them, and they did not even know I existed. They were gone in an instant, as the train hurried north carrying me on some long forgotten errand. But that image came to me now, and I wondered if there were people on the interstate, rushing by, wondering at our grief, and we didn’t even know they existed.

  The minister from the chapel on the island had agreed to say a few words, even though he did not know Connie. He was a quiet and gentle man who cared for his flock and their friends. I knew that old Chief Bishop was a longtime member of the church, and I guessed that he had asked the preacher to come. It was a dignified end for a lady who had regained her dignity on Longboat Key.

  We drove back in on highway 64, turning south on highway 41, to Cortez Road and drove straight out past the Coast Guard station and onto Anna Maria Island. Logan and Dick Bellenger were in the Explorer with me. We stopped at a bar overlooking Anna Maria Sound and spent the afternoon holding our own little wake, getting drunk and remembering Connie.

  The dea
d haunt me. I’m not so freaked by death itself, but by my thoughts of the last day of those who die. The accident cases never know when they get out of bed in the morning and eat their oatmeal that it will be their last sunrise, their last bowl of mush. Is there any vision of what lies in store that day? Do they have any inkling, even a twinge?

  Once, a long time ago, I was walking down a jungle path, through an area that had seen a firefight at daybreak. The dead lay where they had fallen: American boys and Vietnamese boys, so different in life, so alike in death. As I rounded a bend in the path I saw a man in the uniform of a North Vietnamese regular, bending over the body of his comrade. He must have heard me a moment before I came into view, because he was already turning and raising his AK-47. I was holding my M-16 at an easy combat ready position, barrel pointing down at a 45 degree angle, finger on the trigger. Before the soldier could get his rifle pointed at me I had a bead on him and was pulling the trigger. It only took a second, from the time I saw him until I killed him. But, in that small space of time I saw it register in his eyes, or perhaps his face. He new that death had come calling, and that he was looking at his killer. I saw resignation, and despair, and regret, and, I think, acceptance.

  My shot caught him in the middle of the chest. He was dead before he hit the ground. I kept moving, ever watchful for his buddies, scared as an eighteen year old gets, wondering if this was my day to die. They say that youth is bullet proof, that the young think they will live forever. But I knew better. I had seen too many of my teenage contemporaries die a violent death in that fetid country. I tasted my mortality every day, and on that day, I had killed a man, not for the first time, but close up, like never before. I only had that fleeting glance of my prey, but I have never forgotten him. I wondered often about his life, and about the strings of chance that brought us together on a fine morning in a jungle far from our homes.

  Death is random. We never know when or whom it will strike. The healthy young mother who discovers a lump in her breast, the teenager on his way to school who happens to share the road with a drunk driver, a soldier on a jungle path who was a millisecond slower than another soldier on the same path.

  But while death is finality for the deceased, it is perhaps only a small memory for the soldier who lived, or the doctor who told the mother she was past hope. And death is grief for those left behind.

  So, on a bright spring day, we sat in a bar overlooking the water, and remembered Connie. We told funny stories about her, some larger than the reality, and mourned her in our way. We said goodbye to a woman we all liked, knowing that soon she would begin to fade into the evermore dimming recesses of our memories.

  Chapter 5

  Summer comes quickly in Southwest Florida. One day the humidity drops in like an unwelcome guest, bringing wet air that causes people to sweat as soon as they leave the air conditioning. The sea breezes cross the coasts on both sides of the peninsula driving the thunderstorms that bring the daily rain that, for a time, cools the afternoons.

  That year, Summer arrived in mid-May. There had been no rain, and over in the middle of the state forest fires raged. There was turmoil in the middle east, the Democrats and Republicans were fighting over tax cuts in Washington, and a young Midwestern governor named George Wentworth, the son of a former United States Senator, was making his run for the Republican presidential nomination, even though the nominating convention was more than a year away.

  It had been a month since Connie’s death, and the island had hardly burped over it. Life moved on. The world does not intrude loudly on Longboat Key, and in a place with as many old people as these islands, death was familiar. I missed Connie, but every day she receded further into my memory. Once in a while, I would walk into a bar, knowing the local crowd would be there on that particular day, and be momentarily surprised at Connie’s absence. We didn’t talk about her much, except to occasionally wonder who could have murdered her.

  There had been a flurry of articles in the daily newspapers over on the mainland in the first week after her murder. I read that the police had found Connie’s apartment undisturbed. Her car was parked in her reserved space in the apartment parking lot. There was no sign of a struggle in the car. There were no leads on the perpetrators. It was a real life mystery that caused a lot of gossip on the key. The island weekly ran an article about her death, and the next week a follow up personality profile in which I was quoted. A columnist in Sarasota, who seemed to hate policemen in general and Longboat Key policemen especially, ran a couple of columns castigating law enforcement for not finding the murderer. Logan was never mentioned.

  Logan had stayed at my condo for a couple more days until he got a call from Chief Lester telling him he could move back to his own place. On Monday Logan left Sarasota-Bradenton airport on his next business trip and returned to the island on Friday. He and everyone else settled back into their routines.

  On a bright morning, the third Saturday in May, Chief Lester called me at home. He didn’t waste any words. “Matt, late yesterday the Manatee County grand jury indicted Logan for the murder of Connie Sanborne. Banion and I are heading to his place to arrest him. I thought you would want to be there.”

  “What? You can’t be serious.” I said, stunned.

  “Dead serious, Matt. We’re leaving the station now.”

  I was wearing shorts, boat shoes and a tee shirt from the key’s most recent annual St. Jude’s festival. I headed for Logan’s, thinking that this was a chickenshit thing for the State Attorney to do. Logan could not possibly get before a judge for a bail hearing before Monday. He would have to spend at least two nights in the lockup. Then it occurred to me that if the State Attorney took the case to a grand jury rather than filing an information, it would be a first degree murder indictment. It was almost impossible to get a judge in Florida to set bail on a murder one case. Logan would probably have to stay in jail until the trial.

  I arrived at Logan’s place just as the chief and Banion drove up in an unmarked car. I shook hands with both and asked, “What the hell is this all about, Bill? I thought everyone was convinced that Logan had nothing to do with Connie’s murder.”

  “I was, Matt,” said the chief. “But new evidence came up, and the State Attorney went for the indictment.”

  “What new evidence?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to get that from the State Attorney, Matt. I just thought you’d like to be here.”

  “Damn, Bill, I wish I weren’t here. Can I go talk to him before you arrest him?”

  “Fuck no, counselor,” said Banion. He still smelled of old whiskey and stale cigarette smoke. His eyes were the red of a first rate hangover. “We’re taking that fucker to jail. Now.”

  “Bill?” I implored.

  “Go on up, Matt. We’ll give you five minutes.”

  “What the fuck, chief? You shouldn’t even have called this fuckhead. Let’s get the bastard in the car and take him to the stockade.”

  “Go on, Matt. We’ll wait,” the chief said.

  I took the elevator to the fourth floor, dreading this message more than any I had ever delivered. I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again, and then peered over the walkway railing to the parking lot. Logan’s car was gone. I felt a great sense of relief, and immediate guilt at my relief. It would be better for me to break this to Logan than to have Banion arrest him and haul him off to jail.

  I went back downstairs and told the cops that Logan was not at home. “Bullshit,” said Banion.

  “Go see for yourself asshole,” I said. “You’re such a genius you didn’t check the parking lot for his car.”

  “Fuck you, Counselor,” said Banion.

  “He always says that,” I said to the chief.

  “Calm down, both of you,” said Lester. “You sound like a couple of schoolyard bullies trying to outdo each other. Do you know where he is, Matt?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said honestly and, I hoped, earnestly. “It’s Saturday morning. Maybe he’s playing go
lf. He doesn’t check in with me everyday. He might be out of town for the weekend. Sometimes his trips keep him out for more than a week. What made the state decide to indict him?”

  “DNA,” said the chief. He had apparently changed his mind about telling me about the evidence.

  “What?”

  “Connie had been raped. We never mentioned it to the public, but the medical examiner found it when he did the autopsy. He was able to get a sample of semen from her vagina and sent if off for DNA testing. We also tested some hair the techs found in Logan’ comb in his bathroom. There was a match. It’s like a billion to one chance that the semen isn’t Logan’s. The results were faxed to us Thursday and the State Attorney took it to the grand jury late yesterday.”

  “Something’s wrong here, Bill. You know Logan wouldn’t do something like this.”

  “I wouldn’t think so, Matt. But you never really know what people are capable of. The DNA evidence is hard to refute.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We find the mother,” growled Banion, “and we put his ass in jail, and then we try him and put it in the electric chair.” A real hardass.

  “Fuck you, Banion. You’ll have to go over me to convict him,” I said. Hardass is a two way street.

  “Bring it on, fuckhead,” he said.

  “Jesus,” said Bill Lester. “Both of you are nuts. Let’s go Banion. If you hear anything Matt, let me know.”

  “Sure, Bill. Listen, if you find Logan, go easy. There’s probably an explanation for all this.”

  “I hope so, Matt, but I don’t really think so.”

  The two cops loaded into the unmarked and headed back south on Gulf of Mexico Drive, leaving me standing in the hot sun, roasting like a pig on a spit. I was stunned. Logan couldn’t have done this. On the other hand, after O.J., everybody in the country knew that DNA evidence was as solid as you ever get. Including me.