Love and Death in the Sunshine State Read online

  Only when the glass doors parted and I stepped from the air-conditioning into the tumid and oppressive atmosphere of Florida in summer did I come to myself. A number of palms rose around me and, alongside them, a few concrete pillars. Well above was the elevated road that brought cars to and from the airport. I was standing beside a cement container perhaps six or eight feet across, sparsely planted with the very same purple-and-yellow flowers that had lined the patio behind my childhood home. The combination of bright sunlight and concrete gave the terrain an overexposed look, and indeed I had the sense that the place had been left too long in some sort of reductive chemical bath. The vertigo that I’d felt on the flight, when the land leapt out from underneath me, had been building steadily in the hours since, and as I thought of the drive out to Anna Maria, of the appointments I must keep, and of the creeping entanglement of Bill and Sabine’s story with my own, a sharp nausea crept over me.

  Avoiding the motel, I took a room instead that overlooked the very plot of beach where the body was believed to be buried. I changed my shirt and went to meet a reporter from the Sarasota paper on Longboat Key, an island to the south. Separated less by the narrow channel of water that lay between it and Anna Maria than by the spiritual feel of the two places, Longboat featured ten-story condos set amid tennis courts, and the grass ran off for quite a distance from the sides of the road.

  When I arrived at the restaurant, I found a small woman on a high stool, dressed in chinos and a lime-green blouse, with a half-finished cosmopolitan on the table in front of her. I had requested this meeting in the hope that some of the journalistic accomplishments of this woman might rub off on me, and after exchanging a few niceties, she set her drink down precisely in the center of a maroon paper napkin and looked at me.

  “So what’s your angle?” she said.

  “My angle?”

  “I mean, no offense, but there’s nothing remarkable about this story. There was a triple homicide just last night.”

  “I saw a few weeks ago a woman was convicted of having sex with her dog.”

  “A beagle, I think.”

  We lapsed into silence.

  “I don’t think I have an angle,” I said finally.

  By some strange turn in the conversation, we fell to talking of our families. I narrated for her the peculiar relationship of my grandparents, and she, as if confessing, began to tell me the story of her Uncle Hank, who, in the cockpit of a single-prop ten thousand feet above Missouri, had with some violence rebuffed the pilot’s homosexual advance or been rebuffed in the act of his own advance. As she described in detail the contradictory testimonies of the parties involved and the web of outrage and indignation once the men returned to earth, I began to feel with more and more certainty that I had read this exact story before, in an unfinished novella by the author Barry Hannah. The reporter’s story of Uncle Hank, I believe, marked the moment when the world of simple, straightforward facts began to seem like a place I no longer occupied, and I broached that idea with her.

  “God,” she said, and signaled to the waiter for the check. “I wish I could make it up. Then I could start to tell the truth.”

  By the time I returned to my room, I was nearly incapacitated by some combination of gin and despair. The idea of rising and going out to find some bit of dinner was inconceivable to me, as was the thought that in the morning I must put on fresh clothes and say hello to other human beings. Unable to sleep or to turn my thoughts to useful endeavors, I locked the door of my room, slipped the key into my pocket, and took to the beach. I quickly found myself on that plot of sand where it seemed most likely Sabine had been buried, and with my hands in my pockets, I strolled through the brush and dunes, stopping every so often, without ever really meaning to, and digging my toe down an inch or two. From time to time, I encountered an object and reached down with my hand to clear the sand from around it, inevitably unearthing a stick or a palm frond or the plastic brim of a sun visor, and at some moment, hardly thinking, I began to dig with both hands. Soon, I was clawing at the dirt. I passed through a layer of shells into a muddish stratum. The sides of the cavity began to slough off, and the hole began to fill with water. I felt certain that she was buried here, perhaps only another inch or two deeper. I was breathing heavily and flinging handfuls of muck between my legs when I realized that she actually might be, that my hand might touch bone at any moment. I froze then, and as if seeing myself suddenly from the outside, I became aware of what I was doing. I wiped my hands on my pants and hurried back to my room.

  Late that night, as I drifted to sleep, I remembered something the detective had mentioned on the phone. He was describing how they’d been digging on the beach, how many tractors were running, how they’d scraped away the sand an inch at a time looking for any sign that it had been disturbed, and how they could have missed her by six inches and they’d never know. “We’ve got William away for thirteen years,” he’d said. “But I’d like to find her before I retire.”

  Some time later, I was woken by the sensation that fine particles of sand were falling softly on my lips. I did not, at first, open my eyes. Instead, I kept lying there, feeling the almost impalpable cascade of sand upon my mouth. When at last I did open my eyes, Sabine’s face was positioned not an inch from my own. I tried to scream, but my lips would not part. I tried to move, but she had pinned my body to the bed. Strings of wet and filthy hair hung down along my cheeks, and though my eyes were locked upon hers, I could see somehow that the door of my room was open to the night, that a sandy path led from my bed across the floor to the beach and the hole she’d crawled out of. I cannot say how long I lay there with her atop me. When at last I managed to close my eyes, the weight evaporated from me, but even then, having understood it to be a dream, I did not look to the door to see whether it was still open.

  When I arrived at the sheriff’s office the next morning, Detective Gisborne was waiting for me on the other side of the metal detector. He nodded to the deputies in the lobby, and as we took the stairs to his office, he breathed heavily through his gray mustache. Our tour of the office—a labyrinth of cubicles, from which arose only the sound of computer keys clicking—concluded at his own desk, with its disarray of papers and its stained coffee cup no different from any other, except that pinned to one wall was a mug shot of a man who looked strikingly like Santa Claus. “Here’s a sick one,” Gisborne said. “His wife drowns in their pool. He’s pretty broken-up about it. We hear back from the coroner she’s got bruises all around her left ankle. He dragged her to the bottom of the deep end and didn’t let go. Guess what we call him?”

  “Santa Claus?”

  “Dead ringer, right?” He surveyed the room, his head and shoulders protruding only slightly above the level of the cubicles. “And the scary part is, he’s one of us.”

  “Law enforcement?” I said.

  “Corrections.” He shrugged. “Yep, one of the good guys.”

  He ushered me into an empty conference room. There, sitting at a long table, he recited again everything he’d said on the phone, almost word for word. It was still an active investigation, so they hadn’t released much information, but they had the material they needed to make a case—blood in the apartment, blood in the car, the blistered hands, the phone records, the public record of him going to pieces—everything but a body.

  “Recording technology has come a long way in the past few years,” Gisborne said, leaning over the table. “We have a device that looks just like a credit card. You can stick it right in your shirt pocket.” He took in a breath. “What if you went to see Cumber again? Tell him you’re going to write a nonfiction book about this—excuse me, which one’s made-up?”

  “Fiction,” I said.

  “Tell him you’re going to write a fiction book about this. You make it clear that this is a story where everything is made-up, and then you ask him if he had done it, where would he have put the body.” He sat back again. “Do you think he’d go for that?”

  Th
at night in a rented house on Anna Maria, I met with Sabine’s brother. A tall, angular man, he spoke little English, and for hours we sat together at the kitchen table looking at pictures of Sabine while his wife, doing dishes at the sink, translated. He would hand me a photograph, describe what it depicted, then move to the next, describe that, then the next. This was Sabine at a birthday party. This was when Sabine stole their grandmother’s fur coat. This was Sabine with her first boyfriend. Between these brief phrases, the silence stretched out, and soon we were looking at one picture after another, but saying nothing. When I asked him to tell me what she had been like, he seemed unable, even in his own language, to find words. As his wife offered up possible adjectives, he sat mute beside me, clenching and unclenching the muscles of his jaw.

  “Pünktlich,” he finally said, and before his wife could translate, he spoke again, with precision. “She was punctual.”

  It wasn’t until we were saying goodbye that he offered up a final adjective, a quick series of guttural sounds that I couldn’t understand.

  “He says Sabine was joyful,” his wife said. He immediately put his hand on her shoulder, and they talked for a moment in German, both shaking their heads.

  “He says I mistranslated,” said the wife. “She was materialistic.”

  After that long and silent evening, I couldn’t bear the idea of returning to the beach to sit alone in my room, so I drove the back streets west of Bradenton. I looked at the houses as they drifted by, and when I found myself inevitably in a cul-de-sac, I spun the rental car in a wide arc and kept driving. Erin called, but I couldn’t bring myself to focus on the conversation, which seemed to me to be nothing more than a rehashing of our respective days. At some point, I pulled up in front of a mint-green house on a treeless corner lot and parked the car. I’d found the address in an old file at the county clerk’s office. It was the house where Bill Cumber had lived when, as a younger man, he’d first moved to Florida.

  “Is there something you’d rather talk about?” Erin said, but I couldn’t think of anything.

  The long, panting drive to Punta Gorda followed one of those roads that seem, impossibly, to go on perfectly flat and perfectly straight forever, with here and there a turnoff for a used-car lot or a used-truck lot or for another flat, straight road. At last, a small sign appeared, reading oil well road, and I swung onto a gravel lane, bordered on the left by a line of scraggly trees and a soybean field, and on the right by a broad pasture of freshly mown thatch grass. Three horses grazed almost in the shadow of the razor-wire fence and the squat concrete building behind it.

  Bill had been transferred to a new facility, and this prison provided a waiting area for visitors outside the main entrance: a few metal picnic tables bolted to a cement pad, and a hut containing a restroom. When I arrived, a number of others were already waiting: an old man in a dusty white cowboy hat, a mother and her round-faced little boy with a tuna sandwich. As the sun climbed the sky, my skin began to sizzle lightly beneath my clothes, and my shirt clung to my sides. Still more arrived: an ancient grandparent, wrinkled and sexless; a young Latina woman in a skintight dress the color of a daffodil, who, when told by the guards that her clothing did not meet the length requirement, unearthed a cell phone from some hidden crevice and made a call: “Mami, no me dejan entrar . . . Sí, por mi ropa. Sí.” Large black flies with metallic green eyes tacked out of the shadow of the guard station, landed on a glistening neck or arm, exacted their due salt, and dissolved again into the boiling heat. And out of the restroom, a great blue heron emerged to steal between the tables, chasing in slow motion the pudge-faced boy with his sandwich. At last, a guard stepped out and gestured to us to come.

  Compared to the chaotic and brusque intake in Chipley, the process in Punta Gorda was a competent and sensitive affair. After passing through a metal detector, I was buzzed into a frigid room, where I handed an officer my keys and belt to be placed in a locker. Even had I accepted the detective’s offer of a wire, I would have been unable to bring it with me here. I was patted down carefully, and a minute later I was ushered through a series of doors that opened onto what appeared to be a large and sunny cafeteria. At the far end, on a sort of dais, stood a frowning man in a forest-green uniform, and at each of the blue tables, spaced evenly around the room, a single prisoner waited. A number of those who had waited with me on the outside already sat across from their loved ones. The old man, having left his hat behind, had a head of strong white hair. The little boy was assembling a plastic game of Battleship while his parents spoke in low tones. The rest of the men remained motionless at their tables watching the door expectantly, and as I entered, one of these stood and was Bill Cumber.

  The color had come back to his face. He wore a loose gray uniform and cocked his head at me as he put out his hand.

  “Hey, bro,” he said. “You get all my letters?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I guess I wouldn’t know if I didn’t.”

  “I guess not.”

  “So why’d you leave me hanging? Why didn’t you take my calls?”

  “You grew a beard,” I said.

  He stroked a hand down his face. “Yeah, man, I’m all-natural. I’m off the meds, too. I’m seeing much more clearer now.” He leaned forward and looked at me closely. “Let me ask you a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why are you here?”

  Again, I squirmed. “I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

  “I already told you that.”

  “The detectives think they can charge you with Sabine’s murder. I thought—”

  “That’s bullcrap.” He gestured toward the windows. “I’m gonna be a free man.”

  “I want to know about Denise.”

  His head turned sharply to me.

  “Who told you about Denise?”

  “It’s in the records at the courthouse.” It was true. In the run-up to this visit, I had requested copies of every document relating to William J. Cumber. There were pages and pages on Bill’s one-time girlfriend, about fights, a restraining order, a final falling-out. According to the report, he had grabbed Denise’s daughter by the throat one night and shouted, “Why do you defy me?” There was even a letter Denise had written some weeks later to the judge, asking that Bill not be charged with child abuse. “He just seems to be a slow learner,” she wrote at the time.

  Now he sat back, squinted at me, and grinned. “Man, you an investigative soul.” He looked from side to side. “All right. Me and this buddy of mine had just got out—this was in North Carolina—and he says he wants to go see his lady, so we go and see her. But right off the bat, I could tell she wanted to be with me, not him. So when he went back in the other room, I asked her to roll up my sleeve.”

  “To roll up your sleeve?”

  “Yeah, I put out my arm like this, and say, ‘Could you roll up my sleeve?’ ” He held out his arm on the table between us. “And that was it. We was together. That was Denise.”

  He talked for a time about their troubles in North Carolina. He’d punched the foreman of his tree-trimming crew, and she’d maybe cashed some checks that weren’t hers. So they came to Florida with her daughter.

  I brought up the police report, and he looked at me again for a long time.

  “I’m not proud of it,” he said, “but I didn’t hit her any harder than she needed to be hit.” He thought again for a time. “I never judged anybody who didn’t deserve to be judged.”

  Suddenly coming to himself again, he pulled a thick, frayed folder from his lap and set it between us. “I almost forgot something. Check this out.”

  He pulled from the folder a drawing of two dolphins leaping in front of a pink sunset.

  “What do you think?” Bill’s nose and an eye appeared to one side of the drawing. “It’s two dolphins in front of a sunset.”

  “Nice.”

  “That’s my art.”

  “You made that?”

  He drew back in mock offense.
“I’m an artist, man. I was starting to sell my drawings out on the island. Sabine was helping me, you know, before everything that happened happened. I had a LLC and everything. It was called Cumbervision, except with an e on the end, you know, so you said it like French. Cumbervisioné.”

  He began now to pull out one page after another.

  “Look at these. That’s a heart. And here’s one that’s a honey bear. A dog with a heart-shaped nose—I call that one The Dogtor of Love.” A falsetto laugh shook his shoulders. He looked again at the drawing, then put it away. “Here’s more dolphins.”

  “Bill,” I said. “I want to know more about you and Sabine.”

  “More dolphins. I could sell a thousand of these in a minute for three dollars a piece.” He nodded to himself. “I just need somebody to set up the website.”

  “Did you love her?”

  He paused, still holding up a dolphin drawing. “Yeah, I loved her.”

  “What did you love?”

  “She had a charm about her. You would be happy around her. Your movement changed. She cared about you. Like when I was in prison, she would send me things. Sundry items. Vitamins and shampoo, pants, shoes—she sent me a pair of Nikes once. She used to send me nail hardener.”

  “Nail hardener?”

  “It’s a hardener, you know. It doesn’t sit on top of the nail. It soaks in and hardens it.” He held up his hand and pointed at a nail. “And then when I went out to the motel on Saturdays, she would give me a manicure. She didn’t like my raggedy nails. You had to look GQ for her.” He pantomimed the snapping of his lapels. “Yeah, she was always working at my cuticles.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We became destranged. We went out for dinner with her friends, and she ate in these little niblets, you know. I was afraid just to order a beer. And the language that was talked was different. These people, they looked like a skipper or a maiden, and I didn’t know how to speak. She could walk around almost with her nose up in the air. I didn’t want her to be around me, but in a way I did. I’m used to this,” he said, and he intertwined his two index fingers. “Unity.”