“Evidence?” I asked as I stood and made a mental note of our proximity to the main island.
Leber shrugged. “She drowned. She had some signs of small fish nibbling at her extremities.” He looked at Harold and continued speaking. “She was in fairly recognizable shape. Drowning, if that’s all it is, leaves the body in fairly good condition.” He squinted at his phone. “The report says something about bruising on the backs of her thighs, like a board hit her there, but not too hard. She’d bruise easily at her advanced age.”
“Do the police have any idea where she’d have drifted into here from?” I asked. “She died somewhere out there, right?”
Leber nodded. “They think she must have been in the water at least two days before washing up here.”
“Hey man, if you offed someone, wouldn’t you weigh the body down or something?” Harold asked.
“Let’s get back on the boat,” I said.
“What for?” Junior asked.
“There’s no evidence here, is there, Detective?”
This time Leber shook his head, a gleam in his eye. “You’re a little brighter than most of the P.I.’s around here, I’ll give you that.” He turned to Eddie. “What’s his name again?”
Eddie spoke in a tone so low, even I wanted to date him. “Mr. Montague.”
We returned to High Hopes. Leber stood off to the side, his arms crossed over his bulging chest. Junior fell into his soft stillness. He’d witnessed a murder in my office and now we had confirmation that his grandmother was also a murder victim. My thoughts returned to one of my father’s tried-and-true remarks that things, usually bad things, happened in threes. If you included Roger’s death almost three years ago, this was my third, but I had a feeling that didn’t qualify.
“What are you doing?” Harold asked once we were back on the boat still moored to the small concrete pier.
Leber’s skepticism oozed over me as I hunched over, examining the inside edges of the area around the steering wheel, fisherman’s chair, and the entrance to the below-deck cabin. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary except for a little nick in the otherwise immaculate white fiberglass over wood finish. After snapping a photo of the small gouge, I straightened up.
“Where’s your partner?” I asked. “What’s his name? Bales?”
“Barnes, but you already knew that,” Leber said. He still hadn’t taken off those oval sunglasses. Mr. Cool.
“Are your eyes sensitive to light?”
“You want to look deep into my baby blues?” he asked.
“Nope, but I do like to see the eyes, otherwise how do I know who I’m dealing with?” I shot back.
Leber waved his hand in a let’s-get-on-with-it circle, so I did.
“How tall was your mother?” I asked Harold.
He looked at Junior and shrugged. “I dunno, what you say, Junior, five-two.”
Junior assented to the estimate.
“And how tall are you, Harold?”
“Five-eight and one-quarter.”
“Would you stand over here?”
He moved against the railing of the boat. Taking hold of both his shoulders I positioned him directly in front of the mark I’d found.
“Please lean back so the backs of your legs are touching the edge of the railing.”
“Hey man, you’re not gonna push me in, are you?” When he said this, everyone’s eyes lit except Harold’s. “What? Wha’d I say, man?”
“Where’s it touching the back of your legs?”
“Hmmm. I dunno. Maybe just below the knee here.”
“What kind of shoes was she wearing when you examined her?” I asked Leber.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have reception?”
He checked his phone, then climbed out onto the dock and strolled to the shore. I pointed at the nick in the rim of the boat, then laid back and put my sneakered foot on the edge and banged my heel against it.
“This could have been made by a shoe kicking down with the heel as she was shoved over the side.” I stood and leaned over to look at the starboard hull. There were no marks there. It was very, very speculative on my part. A mark. Not much.
My stomach had begun to churn again, so I got out of the boat and sat on the dock, giving myself a good view of the spot where Francine was found. Junior settled next to me, squinting up at the sun, his forehead redder than ever.
Junior said, “She wasn’t wearing shoes, but she had on stockings when they found her. Sounds like she would have worn some kind dressy shoes with heels.”
Picking up a pebble, I chucked it into the green water. “Women in their eighties, they like shoes like that. Let’s go look at her closet and find out who had access to this boat.”
Leber returned, clicking off his phone. “You sound like you think you’re in charge of this investigation. This is a police matter.”
“You find out anything about her shoes?” I asked.
“No.”
“No, you didn’t find out anything or no, you’re not sharing?”
He turned his face toward the sun. “Beautiful sunset tonight. It’s best y’all go grieve your loss and be ready to answer some questions tomorrow.”
I put my arm on Junior’s shoulder like a friendly neighbor. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think these po-lice were more interested in snagging a collar than in figuring out who killed your grandma. Would you like to take a piss on the deck?”
He peered around at Eddie, who had positioned himself back in front of the steering wheel in a possessory manner. Eddie tilted his head. He had brown skin and a football-thick neck. His blue shirt flapped in the breeze.
Leber said, “It isn’t like that. We want to figure this out and all help is appreciated. Much appreciated. But, we need to be kept in the loop. You share everything with us.”
At that Eddie turned and fired up the engines. Leber disembarked.
“How do I get in touch with you, partner?” I asked. “I only have your office number. What about your cell?”
He wrote his cell on the back of a business card and handed it over. I noted its thickness. Even the government had better business cards than
