Love and Death in the Sunshine State Read online

  The native people most associated with Florida, the Seminole, aren’t from there at all. They came to the state only as a last resort during the nineteenth century, when they were forced off the more fertile and temperate lands of Georgia and Alabama. There is something fitting, though, in the Seminole as a state symbol, since any history of Florida is less a history of people arriving there than one of people fleeing somewhere else, Ohio or Germany, or anywhere it happens to be snowing. Like California, it exists for most people as an idea, something to be talked about while you’re counting your tips at the end of the night or punching your time card after a graveyard shift. As in de Soto’s time, when Florida stretched north unmapped and borderless, the shape of the Sunshine State is defined less by the 31st parallel than by the imagination. Only long after you’ve arrived, as de Soto discovered, does it become anything like a reality.

  To get to Florida from Pennsylvania—where I’d stopped for the New Year to sit briefly in that hotel bar—you follow Interstate 95 down along the Atlantic. At Jacksonville, you cut southwest across the scrub-choked interior of the peninsula, and around Ocala, you turn abruptly south and run parallel to the Gulf Coast for a little over a hundred miles. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge, after its heroic leap across Tampa Bay, eventually deposits you in Bradenton, and by taking the first right turn, you’re able to almost entirely avoid that shining, squandered city. You pass the mammoth steel-and-glass Judicial Center, and the old neoclassical courthouse huddled up in its shadow, and then the road opens to four lanes and the buildings shrink away from it, drawing back to allow room for parking lots and billboards. Here are the offices of the orthodontists and cosmetic surgeons, the shake shacks and nail parlors and law firms of one, and the occasional gas station that looks from the mold like it was abandoned decades ago but has been vacant only a few months.

  Then the strip stops. Grass replaces the cement sidewalks, and the businesses give way to the long, perfectly smooth walls of the closed communities. Their beige and taupe shells seem to go on forever, interrupted only momentarily by a gate, a guardhouse, a sudden glimpse of ponds, fountains, swans. When at last the walls end, there’s the briefest idea of what Florida may have been a long time ago, or of what it will be when it sloughs off its human inhabitants: a solid bank of vegetation borders the road, waxy green and impenetrable. The Florida DOT cuts it back regularly into what looks like a hedge, but behind it there are no homes, no golf courses, no active, unrepentant retirees—only salt marsh and mangrove, ugly lizards and motionless birds, and half-blind crabs the size and color of bruised thumbnails forever sidling in and out of the shadows. Even this, though, is only a flash, and it passes as quickly as a premonition. The sides of the road drop away, and you follow a series of low, simple bridges across the bays and bayous until finally you land on Anna Maria Island, the road Ts, and the only thing left ahead is the Gulf of Mexico.

  In January, the island is cold for Florida. The sky clouds over, sometimes for an entire day, and islanders won’t put a foot in the surf for another month or two. There are still tourists—there are always tourists—but they are their own breed: the misinformed, the perverse, the congenitally cheapskate. There are some Canadians, a few Swiss. I arrived on a Tuesday.

  The motel looked exactly as it had during my last visit—the same German woman in the hut by the pool, the same teen in the office—except off to one side, set a little back from the street, the burned-out building sat, as though hiding, behind two large potted plants. The floor had been swept clean of ash, but long, wavering scorch marks remained on the walls, and police tape flapped between the palms. under construction said a hand-lettered sign hung on a sawhorse, but there was no evidence to support this notion. In the front office, the girl sat working busily on a sudoku and did not look up when I entered. I asked for the same room I’d rented the previous January, and as I put my clothes in the dresser, removed my shoes, and unwrapped the tiny soap, I felt like in some way I was returning home.

  For dinner, I found a restaurant on the beach with a large covered deck, the edge of which disappeared into the sand. All the tables were full, and I took my place on a long bench with the rest of those waiting to eat. To my left was a little boy with a shoe in each hand, pouring sand from one to the other, and to my right sat a man with hair so white and stiff and dramatically windswept it appeared, out of the corner of my eye, as though a seagull sat perched on his head.

  It was a popular place to watch the sunset, but by the time I arrived the sky had clouded over. It refused to darken even well after the sun had gone down. Instead, all the objects—the tufts of grass along the beach, the rows of ketchup bottles at the hostess stand, and the plates of half-eaten halibut and shrimp—all these things spread their gloom out around them, and when the whole scene was connected by a single dimness, then it was night. The waitstaff was composed mainly of high school students wearing cutoff shorts and smelling of pimple cream and mall perfume, and older men and women with tobacco-stained fingers. As the first cold breezes blew in off the water, they unrolled large plastic flaps from the ceiling and positioned propane heaters at intervals around the deck, and this combination of the diffuse orange glow of the lamps and the clear plastic walls lent the dining area the distinct feeling of a large and fantastic incubator.

  The man to my right finally turned to me. “You from around here?”

  Before I could answer, a woman leaned out from behind his shoulder. “We’re from Pensacola.”

  “Pennsylvania,” I said. “Originally.”

  “Never been,” said the man. “No reason.”

  “But I’ve heard it’s lovely,” the wife said. “They have the . . . What do you call it? In fall?”

  “Foliage.”

  “Foliage.” She sighed over the word. “That’s it.”

  “Here for business?” the husband said.

  “I came down to find out about the fire at the motel.”

  “And the woman that got killed,” he said.

  “Sabine, yes some people think she was murdered.”

  “Sabine,” said the wife. “Yes, I heard it was her boyfriend.”

  “True crime,” the husband said, inhaling deeply. “You ought to come up to Pensacola. Some unbelievable cases up there. Riots, murders, lynchings . . . Good stuff.”

  “We should know,” the wife said. “Harry’s a state prosecutor.”

  He bowed his head and put out his hand. “Harold and Noreen.”

  “We’re here to get away from his work.”

  “Lost a case at the state supreme court.” He bunched up his shoulders and released them.

  “Florida won’t execute unless you’re the triggerman,” Noreen said. “Can you believe it?”

  They wanted to say more—a public defender had gotten drunk at a Christmas party and told them things that would make your head spin—but just then, the hostess called their name. Harold shook his head and looked into his drink, and as he pumped my hand a final time, I had my first real glimpse of his face: smooth, almost boyish cheeks and two bright and undiminished eyes.

  I made a short dinner of it. The trays of frozen margaritas, the weathered plastic tables, the keenness with which Harold and Noreen had yearned for an execution, and the aging rocker in a corner trying the first chords of a Jimmy Buffett song: all these things had begun to have an oppressive effect on me, and by the time my server arrived, hefting before her a mountainous Caesar salad festooned along its edge with shrimp, I had all but lost my appetite.

  After dinner, I walked to a bar down the street. It was a simple stucco building, painted bright blue, with neon beer signs in its small porthole windows. Its dark interior smelled of some solvent, and feeling much more at home, I ordered a whiskey and fell into conversation with the bartender.

  Georgia, with the gaunt, cynical forthrightness of a person who ushers her fellow human beings nightly into drink, was happy to lay out any information pertaining to her own life or her perspective on the lives of others. She
had come to Florida from Michigan twelve years earlier. For two years, she’d checked the weather on Anna Maria, researching and making sure she was sure, and one day it was just time. She didn’t live on the island, of course. Who could afford to live on the island? She lived in one of the developments near Bradenton, a decent enough situation since her ex moved out. And anyway, she got to work here—she gestured down the bar to where two old men drank alone in the dark—on the island. Her hair was teased into a halo around her head, throwing her face into shadow, and when I asked about the missing woman, her eyes narrowed in thought. She leaned against a rack of potato chips and sucked on a cigarette.

  “They want to make it out like the boyfriend did it,” she said. Gold hoops bounced from her ears as she shook her head. “No way. The husband did it. Follow the money—that’s what I say. Barbecue or salt-and-vinegar?” She slid a bag of chips down the bar to one of the old men. “That’s two-fifty, honey. Yep, my money’s on the husband. It’s always the husband. What do you think, Cindy? Who killed that woman that owned the motel?”

  Two servers, a man and a woman, had slipped in the back door of the bar. I recognized them from the restaurant.

  “Hey,” said the woman, glancing at me. “Caesar salad with shrimp.”

  People who work at restaurants and bars carry on a sort of continual conversation, interrupted sometimes for a minute, sometimes for an hour, by the necessities of their work, and they have developed the skill, through long practice, of sliding into a conversation with fluid ease. Cindy, taking the seat beside me and placing a handful of pens on the bar, didn’t balk at Georgia’s question or inquire who I was or why we were talking. She only shrugged. “Don’t know much about it,” she said, and lit a cigarette with one hand while she untied her apron with the other. Forrest, a tall man, folded his apron neatly before him on the counter and took the seat on the other side of her.

  “I knew Sabine quite well,” he said, his head moving on his neck as if on casters. “We used to make sandcastles together. I’m a little world-famous”—the head swiveled, and he fixed his eyes on me—“in the sandcastle world.”

  Cindy cut in. “I don’t know much about it, but I think the husband killed her and that boyfriend’s a patsy. I’ve always thought so. I mean, how much insurance did they have on that motel?”

  “Follow the money,” Georgia said, and at this injunction, the three of them drew thoughtfully on their cigarettes. I looked into my glass. On the wall, a white fan nodded back and forth, and at each of its passes, it dispelled the cloud of smoke from around their faces and made Georgia’s hair shiver with an anemone-like electricity. “Didn’t they used to do nudie camps at the motel, Forrest?” she said.

  “Did they?” said Forrest. “It’s amazing how you know a person so well, then you just lose track.” He leaned behind Cindy and said, “If you’d like, I could show you some sandcastle pictures that would knock your socks off.”

  “You ever see the husband, Forrest?” said Cindy. “I know you can’t tell just from his face if he did it, but did he look like he could’ve?”

  “The husband,” Forrest said. “I don’t recall.”

  “The boyfriend story is just too perfect,” said Georgia. “And why would he off her with things going good? Over an argument about a cigarette. Ha!”

  They all ashed their cigarettes, and Georgia moved the ashtray away and replaced it with a clean one. “I have a fetish about ashtrays,” she said, patting a stack of empty ashtrays beside her, and for the first time, she smiled. “Ever since I was a little girl. We never had full ashtrays in my house growing up.”

  “What about that other guy? Was Corona his name?” said Forrest.

  “Yeah, what about him?” said Georgia.

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Cindy said.

  “Was it something about money with him?” said Georgia. “Follow the money—that’s what I say.”

  I did not follow the money. I paid for my drinks, thanked them for the conversation, and accepted a business card from Forrest. Then I got in my station wagon and drove over to the mainland. I drove around Bradenton for some time, curious to get a sense of the place, and it was quite late by the time I arrived on Fourteenth Street. At that time of night, the wide empty boulevard felt like a runway. As I parked and stepped out of the car, someone hurried on foot from one side to the other. A sedan streaked by, leaving a greenish line across my retina. There were a few bars, a few motels, some abandoned, some not yet. There was an RV parts-and-repair shop, and a business that rented out inflatable castles, but they’d long since drawn down their metal gates. The pawnshops, too, were closed at that hour. Behind their steel grates were pearlescent guitars, a mounted sailfish, two samurai swords on a stand—the flotsam of misplaced hopes and poor decisions. Even the liquor stores were closed. The bulletproof glass had been wiped clean; its surface smelled of ammonia. Only the gas stations, lit bright like surgeries, were still open at that hour.

  It had been on Fourteenth two months earlier, shortly after three o’clock on the morning of November 6, 2008, that a white convertible swung out onto the asphalt. The night was warm but its roof was up, and the radio played loudly. The car traveled a few blocks south—a trip lasting less than a minute—at which point a cruiser from the sheriff’s office pulled it over for driving with a broken taillight. The vehicle then turned onto a smaller side street and coasted to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

  This part of the city, though only a few miles distant from the coast, was a world away. The houses were small: four walls, a roof, an air conditioner, and a satellite dish. The cruiser came to a stop behind the convertible. The siren and flashers flicked off, and one of the deputies typed in the vehicle’s license-plate number. The results came back quickly. The car was registered to an address on Anna Maria Island, to a woman named Sabine Musil-Buehler. But she wasn’t the one driving, a fact that became apparent when the door of the convertible opened and a heavyset man wriggled out from behind the steering wheel and ran away.

  The deputies radioed for backup, and soon the sheriff’s office had set up a perimeter around the area. Handlers walked German shepherds up and down the streets. Lights went on in the houses. A few people came out and stood on their front steps to see what the commotion was about and, as long as they were up, to have a smoke. Flashlights shone through the bushes and the windows of parked cars. Garbled voices came over the deputies’ radios and went silent as quickly as they’d come. The dogs finally stopped at a pickup truck and began to bark. Underneath it lay the driver, his stomach on the asphalt.

  Since he was a stocky man and since he had to keep his hands in front of him where the deputies could see them, it took some time for him to extricate himself. When finally he lay facedown on the street next to the truck, he was handcuffed and informed of his rights, and only then, as he was pulled to his feet, did anyone get a good look at him. His chin did not quite rise above the level of his shoulders, and his face was wide, the skin thick, like the skin on knees, and his eyes were small and set closely together. There was a scar above one of them. His name was Robert Corona, and he had a lengthy criminal record in Florida, ranging from robbery to possession to assault, which meant that he was familiar with the procedure, and once in handcuffs, he relaxed. He was asked how he had come into possession of Musil-Buehler’s vehicle, but all he would say was that an older woman had loaned him the car. Soon he wouldn’t say even that.

  Deputies drove out to Anna Maria Island then, to the address where the car was registered. The house was set back in the trees, and when they knocked at the door, a tired-looking older man answered. His name was Thomas Buehler, and he was the woman’s husband. He said he hadn’t seen his wife in two days, and feeling like this fact required some justification, he explained that while he and his wife still officially lived together, they were no longer married in the traditional sense. They still shared their home, but she spent most of her time at her new apartment on Magnolia Avenue, with her bo
yfriend. What had happened, Tom asked. The deputies told him that someone had been pulled over in her car. “Well,” he said. “She’s dead then. She’d be dead before she let someone drive her car.”

  At her husband’s suggestion, the deputies also stopped by her apartment and spoke with her boyfriend, but like Tom, he was unable to offer them any useful information. They’d had a falling-out two nights before, he said, and she’d left the apartment in a huff. He’d been trying to call her, but she wouldn’t pick up.

  Later that morning, Tom Buehler signed an affidavit stating that to his knowledge Corona at no time had permission to use the vehicle. A report was made, and shortly after, on an otherwise mild, breezy day, Sabine Musil-Buehler was officially entered into state and national databases as a missing person. It was during this time that the vehicle was processed for physical evidence. According to the probable cause affidavit:

  During processing, blood was found in several locations inside the driver and passenger compartments of the vehicle. There are several areas inside the vehicle where pieces of the seats and carpeting have been removed. The surfaces around these locations including the driver’s seat belt were found to be stained with blood also. A cell phone charger was found plugged in, inside the car, but no cell phone, purse or other items belonging to Musil-Buehler were found. The trunk of the car was packed with clothing and other personal items belonging to Musil-Buehler. Due to the presence of blood and no known whereabouts for Musil-Buehler this investigation is being treated as a possible Homicide Investigation.