Palm trees. For some reason the sight of palm trees always surprises me. And there were plenty of them.
I drove through the town of Sarasota, which in different parts looked either like a transplanted part of the Midwest, all malls and gas stations, or like something out of a 1938 Humphrey Bogart movie, with ancient Florida houses built for coolness in the sun, the kind of places that whisper of dark Southern secrets. The stuff of Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.
Sarasota has a history. Once it was the winter home of Mr. Ringling’s circus. Signs for various circus exhibits remind the visitor of those days. It’s an exotic place. Even the boats in the town’s harbor, each worth a fortune, seem somehow sinister, like props in a spy movie.
I followed Robin’s directions and turned right at the light she had described. The Cadillac was now chilly, but it felt good. I drove on a two-lane road past flat fields that alternated with clumps of jungle. I passed a number of subdivisions, places with houses built into the greenery, places where Tarzan would have felt quite at home.
Robin’s directions had been very accurate. I approached the bridge she had described, a short concrete span that led into Sheridan Key. A fisherman lounged on the bridge, watching several lines he had put into the water. A huge gray pelican, with an eye like an ancient god, perched on the rail and watched the fisherman. Man and bird were motionless, intent on what they were doing. Both ignored my Cadillac as it rumbled past.
The bridge seemed to end in an enormous clump of jungle, and then the road turned. What lay around that bend looked like a border crossing, complete with gate and guard. Above the gate, a small sign proclaimed: SHERIDAN KEY, A PRIVATE COMMUNITY. The word PRIVATE seemed to stick out, although it was the same size as the other lettering.
The small, gaily painted gatehouse could have been borrowed from the road company of an old musical comedy. But there was nothing comical about the uniformed guard who emerged.
Middle-age spread caused his belly to lap over his gun belt but there was muscle beneath the straining uniform fabric around his shoulders. He wore a military-type cap pulled down to the rim of his reflecting sunglasses.
His skin was the color of rare roast beef and marbled with little purple veins that had ruptured in the surface of his sun-soaked nose and meaty cheeks. A world-class drinker, by the looks of him.
I hit the switch and my electric window glided down. The warm air came through like a soft slap.
“Yes, sir. Can I help you?” The words were polite but his challenging tone bordered on hostile.
“My name is Sloan,” I said, smiling. “I’m here to see Mrs. Harwell.”
He studied me for a moment, even glancing into the back of the Cadillac, then he spoke. “Charles Sloan?”
“That’s me.”
There was no sudden change, but now that he had identified me he became immediately respectful. He was the kind who was either at your feet or at your throat. “You’re expected, Mr. Sloan. You can go on through. The Harwell place is about a half-mile up the road, on the Gulf side. The name is out front, sir. You can’t miss it.”
He returned to the little gatehouse, did something with a control, and the striped gate rose smoothly.
Sheridan Key was surprisingly narrow, just a spit of land traversed by a winding road. On one side was the Gulf of Mexico, on the other a large bay. The shoreline houses on each side of the road were almost hidden by palms, flowers, and other greenery, but I could see glimpses of them. It was not a place for poor people.
The houses were small palaces, each set on an acre or two of land. The twisted road was very narrow at places and I worried about meeting another car, but the place seemed almost deserted.
At points along the way huge boulders retrieved from the Gulf lined the roadway. I thought the road was probably a nightmare to drive at night.
There was an exotic, foreign feel about Sheridan Key. The island was so narrow and low it seemed that one good-sized wave from the Gulf might wash the whole thing away. The island had a make-believe quality, like a movie set.
Each jungle estate had a small metal sign at the mouth of each driveway. Nothing much, just a name. I saw HARWELL, and turned into the drive.
The house and grounds were hidden from the road by enormous tropical hedges so thick even a small bird wouldn’t have been able to penetrate them.
The Harwell estate was a compound of three very large, low-slung buildings with matching red tile roofs. If they had had thatched roofs they would have looked like something out of the South Seas.
The main house, which seemed as long as a football field, was set near the water. Beyond the house, the Gulf of Mexico, picture-postcard perfect, was shimmering and green, with tiny white cloud banks forming on the distant horizon. The two other structures in the compound were a huge garage and what looked like an apartment motel. I assumed the servants lived there.
I parked the Cadillac.
“Mr. Sloan?”
The athletic young man hurried toward me. He was dressed in white shorts and a blue shirt. His grin showed perfect white teeth, their whiteness exaggerated by contrast with his milk-chocolate skin.
“The ladies are out by the pool. I’ll take you to them.”
He opened the back door and I followed. The place was something out of the pages of an architecture magazine, all tile and sunshine. There seemed to be a view of the Gulf from every window.
The house had been built in horseshoe shape with an enormous outdoor pool in the center, to give the illusion that the pool was an extension of the Gulf. The young man opened the door and I stepped out of the air conditioning. The slight breeze off the water carried the tangy odor of the Gulf and the heady fragrance of exotic flowers.
Robin and Angel were laying on beach chairs watching me.
I noted again the striking similarities despite the difference in age. Both bodies glistened with oil.
“Hello, Charley,” Robin said, smiling. “We have spare suits in the house if you’d like to join us.”
She looked over at Angel. “Honey, put your top on. You don’t want to embarrass Charley.”
Except for a small bit of cloth, more of a patch, below her navel, Angel was naked. She didn’t smile, nor did she seem flustered. She sighed, sat up, and slowly donned the top, a couple of other patches.
“Better?” She looked up at me.
“Sit down, Charley.” Robin nodded at a beach chair. “Good trip down?”
“Fine.”
There were some boats far out in the Gulf. I watched two pelicans gracefully glide past on huge outstretched wings searching the water for whatever it is pelicans eat.
Soft recorded music was being piped out to the pool area. It sounded Hawaiian.
“Tough way to live,” I said.
Robin laughed. “If you force yourself, you can get used to it. Can we offer you something to drink? One nice cold beer wouldn’t hurt, would it?”
“I’ll pass.”
“You said something about a policeman down here,” Robin said. “What’s that all about?”
“I intend to find out. Have you ever been arrested down here, Angel?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Have you ever been picked up by the police here? For anything?”
“Once,” she said.
“What happened?”
Robin cut her off. “That wasn’t an arrest, Charley. Harrison had the police take Angel to a hospital here.”
“I stayed three days,” Angel volunteered. “That was as long as they could hold me legally. At least that’s what I was told. They were nice about it. Some aren’t, you know.”
“Why did the police take you?”
“Daddy,” she answered.
“He called them?”
She nodded. “Yes. He was drunk.”
“The police have been here several times,” Robin said. “Harrison could get very loud and abusive. He frightened the servants. They were the ones who usually called the police.”
“How come they took you, Angel, and not your father?”
“They should have taken him,” she said. “He was the one who was out of control.”
“Why did they take you then?”
“Because of what he told them,” she replied.
“And what was that?”
“He said I had tried to kill him.”
Robin interjected quickly. “Things got rather tense. Harrison got cut on the arm.”
“Did you try to kill him, Angel?”
“That time?”
“Yes.”
She looked out at the Gulf, then spoke. “Oh, I suppose I did.”
19
MILO ZECK DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A COP.
We met at a small bar just outside of Sarasota. I had followed his directions and found it easily enough. I had hoped it would be an exotic tropical place but it wasn’t. The saloon could have been moved to New Jersey and no one would have noticed a difference. It was air-conditioned to the point of frost.
I tended to avoid bars for obvious reasons but sometimes I couldn’t gracefully. This was one of the times.
Zeck was tall and skinny. About forty, he wore wire-rim glasses and a rumpled seersucker suit, but no tie. Sandy-haired and fair-skinned, he could easily have been an accountant or a bank clerk. We sat at a table in the back of the place.
I had a Coke and he drank bourbon, straight up. He had just finished his shift and the bourbon, he told me, was his way of rewarding himself for getting through another day. I was familiar with that kind of reward.
We talked about Michigan. He had never been there and looked forward to coming up as a witness.
I had anticipated hostility but his attitude seemed quite the opposite. You would have thought he was my witness.
“I got you something,” he said, handing me an envelope from inside his coat. “We believe in cooperation down here.”
The papers were copies of official police reports. The subject of the first report was Angel Harwell and the incident that had led to her being taken to a local mental hospital. It was written in standard terse police language that seemed to be universal. The officer had answered a disturbance call at the Harwells. Harrison Harwell had been cut on his left forearm. He told them his daughter had done it, that she had tried to kill him with a knife. The daughter, the policeman was told, had a history of mental illness. Harrison Harwell declined to press criminal charges but asked the officer to take Angel to a small private mental hospital in the area. Harwell told the officer he would seek medical help himself for the substantial cut. There was no reference to what had caused the trouble between parent and child. Angel had struggled and the officer had used handcuffs to restrain her while conveying her to the hospital. The medical people had been alerted and were waiting when the police car got there. The report laconically described Angel Harwell as hysterical. It was signed in several places by the officer, Milo Zeck, and countersigned by his watch commander.
The other three incident reports concerned additional police contacts at the Harwell place. All had occurred before the cutting and each had been described as a family disturbance, but with no details. Each time Milo Zeck had been one of the policemen responding.
“Thanks,” I said. “What were those other incidents about?”
Zeck grinned, sipped his bourbon, then spoke. “Family-trouble runs, just like it says. Every time old man Harwell got a snootful he thought he was John Wayne and started raising major hell. We’d run out there and calm him down. That sort of thing happens a lot out on Sheridan Key. From my point of view rich people aren’t that different from poor. They drink, screw around, go nuts, everything, just like us poor folks. We handle them a bit different, the rich.”
“How so?”
He gulped down the drink. I tried not to stare. He signaled the bartender to bring another.
“I’ll bet it’s the same the world over,” Zeck said. “Those people out on Sheridan Key contribute to the local politicians, local charities, and so forth. They pay a lot of taxes. We’re instructed to handle them with kid gloves. Don’t misunderstand, we do our job, but we’re very polite, maybe even sensitive about how we do it. Anyway, I think I spend half my duty time talking to some drunken millionaire who has just blackened his wife’s eye.”
“How about Harwell’s daughter? Outside of the cutting incident, was she involved in the other troubles?”
He smiled his gratitude at the bartender as the fresh drink was delivered. I bolted down my Coke and asked for another.
“Once. That was the first time I ever saw her. When we went out there as usual to cool her father down. She was yelling and stuff, but her mother dragged her into the house while we talked to Harwell. She seemed out of control then, but not as much as that time I carted her off to the hospital. Both times I thought she might have been on chemicals, having a bad trip or something. It happens. There’s probably more cocaine on the Key than in Bolivia. Anyway, the time I took her to the hospital I had to wrestle her into the car. I remember thinking she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked.” His laugh ended in a snort. “Man, she kicked the hell out of me until I slapped some cuffs on her ankles. I was working alone that day, so it was tough. She was biting, spitting, kicking, every damn thing.”
“What did she say?”
“Do you know a cop from up your way named Morgan? An older guy, a detective.”
“I know him.”
“He was down here. He asked me the same thing. He had one of those little hand-held tape recorders with him.”
“What did Angel say, if you remember?”
“Oh, I remember. It’s a long drive to the hospital when you got a screwball thrashing around in the backseat. I remember it real good. She was as pissed as a hornet and stayed like that until I dumped her off with the orderlies.”
“What did she say?” I repeated.
He sighed and sipped the whiskey. “Mostly, she was screaming, but not out of fear or anything like that. She must have really hated her father. Everything was directed at him. Well, almost everything. I came in for a fair share of abuse on that ride. Like I say, from my point of view, she was either nuts or sky high on something.”
“Go on.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Try me.”
“She kept repeating, over and over, usually at the top of her lungs, that she was going to kill her father.”
He sipped again. Then he chuckled. “Man, she knew dirty words that even I hadn’t heard before. Her language was kind of colorful, but it all came out to the same thing. She said she was going to cut his heart out.” He paused, looking away. “As a matter of fact, those were her exact words.”
‘That’s when Morgan turned on his tape recorder?”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“You’ve been very helpful and I appreciate it.” It was time to get out of there. “Of course, there are some very good legal reasons to prevent your testimony at trial.”
He nodded. “Yeah. It would be the same down here. Unless you got a very friendly judge, of course. All things are possible then.”
He looked at me. “Can I ask a favor?”
“Depends.”
“I know you have to object to what they want me to say. I understand that. But maybe you could hold off until I’m up there? See, it’s a free trip for me, kind of a vacation. I’d like to see Michigan. How about it?”
“I can’t object until they call you, not effectively. Unless something changes, you’ll get your trip.”
“Sure you won’t have a real drink? I’ll buy the round.”
I stood up. “Thanks, no. I may give you a call before the trial.” I left money for the bourbon and the Cokes.
He nodded. “She’s good looking, that Angel. You, ah, getting anything besides your fee?” It was said as a joke, the locker-room kind.
“I learned a long time ago not to mess with clients.”
He nodded again. “Yeah, especially that one. She’s
nuts. You might end up like daddy.” He smiled. “I’ll see you up there. Maybe we can have a few drinks, okay?”
He grinned and raised his glass in a parting salute.
*
I CALLED Angel’s psychologist and to my surprise he said he would see me. No hassle, no fuss about fitting me into a busy schedule. He just told me to come right over. Things in Florida seemed to go so much more smoothly. I wondered if it was the climate.
It was getting toward the end of day when I arrived, and I was the only one in the waiting room. Besides a potted plant that looked like it might eat anything that got too close, there was nothing exotic about the Florida office; it was spartan and businesslike. There were a few placid prints hung on the walls and three diplomas. I took a closer look at the diplomas.
Alphonse Germain had popped out of Rutgers some twenty years before with bachelor and master’s degrees. Then a Connecticut college a few years later had awarded him a doctorate in philosophy. There was also a framed certificate proclaiming that he had completed a psychology residency at a New York hospital.
Dr. Germain came out of his office, escorting a lady patient to the door, his hand on her elbow as if it were a tiller. She was a stout, middle-aged woman who looked at him with adoration and longing. As soon as she was out the door he offered me his hand.
Milo Zeck hadn’t looked like a cop and Dr. Germain didn’t look like a psychologist. If anything, he resembled Steve McQueen, although he was a little shorter. Fifty maybe, his smooth face suggested that a plastic surgeon might have taken a few tucks here and there.
“Al Germain,” he said grinning. His brown hair had been permed and cut to increase the McQueen illusion. Tan and lean, he wore a thick gold chain at his neck. His silk shirt was worn open, displaying the gold against his graying chest hair and sun-darkened skin.
His grip was strong, probably from hours of tennis.
“Cm’on in,” he said, escorting me into his office, holding my elbow just as he had his stout lady patient’s.
His office was as spartan as the reception room. Germain sat down behind the uncluttered desk and indicated I should take a chair opposite. There was a black leather couch, but it was against one wall and didn’t look like it was used for business, at least not his doctor business.
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