Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  The sheriff made his announcement on Friday morning, the first of many announcements he would make to the public regarding Sabine Musil-Buehler. Though he refused to name any suspects, he named three persons of interest. The first was Robert Corona. The second was the woman’s husband, Thomas Buehler. The final person of interest was the boyfriend, a man named William Cumber. As the sheriff ended the press conference, he asked that anyone with information relating to Sabine Musil-Buehler please contact his office, and that was how the search began.

  The newspapers and the local TV stations displayed their usual knack for turning the life of a person inside out, like a pocket. The Bradenton paper found an old photo of Sabine squinting into the sun, and this was printed alongside long descriptions of Corona’s criminal record. The boyfriend was quoted as saying that he loved her, and this quote was followed directly by a note that he’d recently been incarcerated for setting fire to a previous girlfriend’s home. And no newspaper could help mentioning that the missing woman had shared ownership of a house and motel on Anna Maria with her husband (by then, they had begun calling him the estranged husband), the implication being that Tom Buehler stood to reap great financial gain from her disappearance.

  The phone at the sheriff’s office rang regularly with people offering tips, leads, and suspicions. A woman had seen Sabine at the ticket counter of the Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport, checking in for a flight to Costa Rica. She had also been seen walking west on Nebraska Avenue, holding a small purse; waiting patiently at the dentist’s office; or wearing a blue fleece jumpsuit in a bar in Bradenton, looking “disheveled and upset.” Or she’d been seen at a bar called Mr. Bones, with a short man with long gray hair, dressed like a “pimp”—though the witness, an amiable young woman, mentioned that she had been drunk at the time, so she couldn’t be entirely sure, and in his report the interviewing detective felt “it should be noted that she was intoxicated when I was speaking with her.” Sabine was in hiding. Sabine had debts. She was at the Circle K and the Salvation Army. Sabine had left a cryptic voicemail on a friend’s phone. Sabine was being held captive in a house with black-and-white linoleum floors. Someone was expecting a message from the beyond, which would be received telepathically via Sabine’s pet parrot, and she would be in touch when it arrived. One woman said she’d found bones in the sand and carefully relocated them to the top of a dune where Chilson Avenue met the beach. A deputy rushed to the location, but Chilson Avenue was not a through street; it did not meet the beach. Standing on a dune, he called the woman back. “Chilson Avenue doesn’t meet the beach,” he said. “The bones are on the dunes,” she said. “The bones are on the dunes. Anyone can find them.”

  That first morning back in Florida, feeling drowsy after my late-night stroll along Fourteenth, I pulled a collared shirt over my head, debated at some length between dress shoes and flip-flops, and finally crossed the patio of the motel and went to speak with Tom Buehler. Before the disappearance of his wife, he had been generally regarded on the island as a friendly and self-effacing member of the community, an earnest small-business owner, and a hard worker, though his businesses had occasionally struggled. But of the three men, he was the only one who had anything like a motive for committing the crime. His marriage to Sabine, like the three before it, had long been defunct, and some said that he had been duped into the arrangement in the first place. He stood to take full ownership of their house on Anna Maria, as well as the motel, and it was eventually revealed that he was the beneficiary of not one but two life insurance policies. Many recalled his anger when he’d discovered Bill and Sabine’s affair, and the mutual enmity between husband and boyfriend was well known (in his interviews with the sheriff’s office, he rarely used the man’s name, preferring the epithet scumbag). More than anyone, he was positioned to benefit from her disappearance, and he was the only person, it seemed, who had any reason to want her gone.

  But when I arrived at the office, the small man I found there with glasses on his nose did not look the part of the murderer. His neck was short and his ears were wide, and a fine gray stubble covered the back half of his head. Though his body, bent over a computer keyboard, was tense, the roundness of his face seemed to predispose it to smile, and when I walked in, he did just that and asked what he could do for me.

  I introduced myself and explained, haltingly, that I was hoping to talk to him about his wife, that I wanted to write a story about the disappearance, nothing sensationalized, and even as I spoke, a look of bodily horror overtook him. He had stood when I told him my name, and now, as I continued to speak, rambling at this point, about how this story might be important, how I hoped to tell it in a considerate manner, he was backing away from the counter, his arms tucked around his chest and the skin tight around his eyes. Those eyes were of a distinctly pale blue, and they watched my mouth with mounting tension as it formed yet another syllable and another. “I just want to hear what—”

  He threw up his hands, and those eyes began to dart, looking first at the floor, then the ceiling, then back to me, then at his hands, which he now held clenched before him. “I’m not talking to reporters anymore,” he said.

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I’m a graduate student in a writing program.”

  Here his posture eased slightly. “A student.” He looked at me again—I had chosen flip-flops—and seemed to consider this plausible. “Where?”

  “Iowa.”

  “That’s a long way.”

  “It is.”

  Now he shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking past me as if hoping someone else might walk in the door and rescue him from this situation. “A student. I don’t know. Can I think about it? Can I think about it and get back to you?”

  I wrote my cell phone number on the back of a brochure, and with this in his hand, he seemed at last to have regained his equilibrium.

  “There’s one other thing,” I said. His face paled, and again he raised his eyes to me. “I stayed here last night, and I was hoping to stay another five nights. But I only have two hundred fifty dollars.”

  “Five more nights?” Relieved to return to the customary relationship of motel owner and motel guest, or maybe only thankful to have something specific to do, he sat again at the computer, his fingers pecking rapidly at the keyboard. “Five nights.” He hemmed and clicked, hemmed and clicked. “You’d have to pay up front, and I couldn’t give you a kitchenette. I just couldn’t.”

  “I don’t plan to cook.”

  “All right, I think we can work something out.” His face turned to the computer, and he began rapidly typing. “So you’re in college,” he said. “They should make kids in college learn about sales. Why don’t they?” Here he paused and looked at me as if truly perplexed. “Life is sales. It’s about convincing other people that they want what you want. It’s about convincing other people to give you . . .” He paused, seeming to lose his way in the thicket of his own speech. “To give you what they want.” He laid a receipt out on the counter between us. “With tax it’s an even two hundred eighty.”

  I bit my lip. “I only have two hundred fifty.”

  He grimaced, turned back to the keyboard again and printed another receipt, this one for $250.82. I had the feeling, as I counted the bills out of my wallet and pulled the coins out of my pocket, that those cents represented to him a matter of principle and pride, that it wasn’t really a sale unless I parted with something I had intended to keep.

  With my bill settled, I hurried up the street to the island coffee shop. Racks of sunglasses stood on the counter, alongside bowls of sand dollars and bric-a-brac and curios and postcards of otters (You Otter Be Here). All the panels on the drop ceiling had been removed, and a variety of sea paraphernalia had been wedged in the four-square metal structure: buoys, starfish, flip-flops, surfboards, pieces of driftwood, red and blue and green glass balls. A sense of nostalgia predominated, not for the Gulf specifically but for some broad idea of the sea. And beneath a shelf of f
aux driftwood, on a long green velvet divan, a reporter from the island newspaper was waiting for me. It had been her article, the keenness of her details—the old woman threatening to leave the island, the heavy gear of the firefighters, the anguish of a motel guest who had left his Labrador in his room—that had caused me to undertake this trip, and I was surprised to find a diminutive woman with a pageboy haircut and a ball cap. She seemed prepared at any moment to dissolve into a crowd, and she spoke so quietly as she introduced herself that I could hardly make out her name. She tilted her head as I asked her about the case, and after thinking a moment, she spoke with exactingly enunciated syllables.

  “Nobody knows what to think. Some people think her husband killed her. Some think it was her boyfriend. Some think it was the man driving her car.”

  “Corona?”

  “He seems like pretty bad news—lots of arrests—but the sheriff’s office seems pretty sure it wasn’t him. Just a case of the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Have you spoken to the husband or the boyfriend?”

  “Tom Buehler—he’s the husband, you know that—he certainly has the motive, as I’m sure you’ve heard. They co-owned their properties, and there was a life insurance policy, two hundred fifty thousand dollars, I think. But everyone who knows him doesn’t seem to think he could have done it.”

  “He seems like a good guy?”

  “A good guy, yes, but also a little”—she scouted around for the right word—“scattered, I guess. Has trouble finishing projects, can’t stay focused. Not the type to dispose of a body without a trace. And then he has an alibi, too. He was at a party the night she disappeared.” She looked momentarily uncomfortable. “I actually was at that party, too. It’s not a large island.”

  “I tried to talk to Tom this morning. He didn’t seem too excited.”

  “He won’t talk to anyone anymore. I think he didn’t like the way the whole thing was played up in the news. Bill, though, that’s the boyfriend, he actually asked me to interview him. He’s . . .” She paused again to look for the appropriate description. “He’s funny. Just before Christmas, he called me on my cell phone and asked me to meet him on the beach. He said he had very important information to discuss. I’d heard he was losing it. He was sleeping in the toolshed of an abandoned motel on Fourteenth Street, right across from the bar where her car was abandoned, if you can believe it. Anyway, when I got there, he seemed pretty drunk. He hadn’t shaved. He had this backpack that he carried around with him everywhere, and he just held this backpack on his lap and smoked one cigarette after another.”

  “What was the important information?”

  “That she was still alive. He was sure of it, and he was going to find her. He kept saying that he loved her, he missed her.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He said he was going to stay on the island, he had to find her, he had to see it resolved.” One of her thin eyebrows arched. “Two days later, he took off. They found him up in Ocala and put him right back in prison for violating his parole.”

  “I guess you don’t think she’s still alive.”

  “It’s weird,” she said. “It’s just I’ve never seen anything quite like this case.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ve got grand theft auto, driving without a license, resisting arrest, arson, violation of parole, maybe insurance fraud.” She listed each item off on her fingers. “But there’s just no body. It’s six crimes in search of a murder.”

  Having watched the journalist disappear down the street on an old bicycle, I walked around the corner and stood in front of the apartment building where Sabine Musil-Buehler had lived with William Cumber. It was a modest structure, pink beneath a high turquoise sky, and it had a modest patio and a half dozen parking spots along the road. A car with Ontario plates sat out front, and on a concrete bench a woman leaned over her knees painting her toenails. This was the last place anyone had seen Sabine Musil-Buehler alive, and I wished that my vision could penetrate not only into the building’s rooms but also into its past.

  When I turned back, I was confronted by a bank of newspaper machines, each of which depicted, in various photographs, the face of Sabine Musil-Buehler, and the reality of this undertaking, the fact that somewhere a woman’s body lay hidden, a fact that until that moment had seemed quite far from me, suddenly became quite real. As I climbed back into the stifling cabin of my station wagon, I felt much as that deputy must have felt, atop a dune in the middle of the night looking for bones, having arrived somewhere he never expected to be with directions he now knew, in their very premise, to be false.

  I have been trying for some time to understand the atmosphere that pervaded that first return to Florida. The dread that was eventually to accompany these southern sojourns had not yet fully unwound in me, and instead, on the surface, I felt the vacationer’s sense of being merely adrift. I’d prepared for myself a busy schedule—phone calls and lunch meetings and appointments at the office of the clerk of court—but despite the activity ahead, a feeling of idleness predominated.

  Perhaps this is only a feature of that part of Florida, where so many of the residents measure their days in rounds of golf and glasses of chardonnay, but it seems to me now that the morbid nature of the project threw its shadow across everything. In the men and women crowded along a darkly varnished bar, in the rows of identical pastel homes, in a misspelling in the newspaper or a soda bottle in the gutter, I thought I perceived the symptoms of a universal decay, among which the disappearance of a woman was only the most striking example.

  No vacationers had fled the island fearing for their lives. In fact, the reverse was the case. A great many people followed the events with keen interest (though not always with great attention to detail). If I went out one morning for eggs Benedict, someone was sure to be talking about “that man Corvona” or “the million in life insurance,” and it was not uncommon for a car to drive slowly past the burned portion of the motel. When the deputies set out a perimeter on the beach and began looking for clues, a crowd materialized in minutes. A wife called her husband at the hotel where he was sunbathing, then reported that he was on his way over. Two women canceled their lunch plans and set up their folding chairs nearby. One nodded at the detectives and said, “Let’s go to lunch when they go to lunch.”

  When I began asking questions about the missing woman in a bar one afternoon, an emaciated man with a busted flip-flop cornered me beside the jukebox to tell me he knew for a fact that Sabine Musil-Buehler was a lesbian and her boyfriend, Bill Cumber, was gay. “What do you think goes on in prison, man? They turn you,” he said. He knew all of this because he had been undercover on the island for the last thirty years—“C-I-A,” he said, pronouncing the letters with a pause between each—investigating the gay conspiracy, and did I know that 99 percent of the people on the island were homosexuals? He laughed. “You didn’t expect that, did you? Now you’ll be a little more careful about who you talk to.” Then a tremor passed through his frame. He looked at me again—I was wearing a lavender shirt—and his eyes hooded, and he disappeared.

  I mention this all by way of illustrating the degree to which, in the span of a few months, Sabine had already become part of people’s thinking. In disappearing, she became the property of the public imagination, and the only thing uniting the disparate pieces of information was that each revealed an insecurity of the person offering it. Some of the more romantic souls believed all of it was fake, she’d returned to her native country of Germany or fled farther south, perhaps to Cuba. A few thought she’d been wrapped in garbage bags and sunk in one of the island’s canals. The wealthy assumed a violent boyfriend had killed her in a crime of passion, while those who lived in the apartment blocks off Fourteenth had no doubt it was a calculated murder-for-money scheme, masterminded by a greedy husband. I, too, engaged in that madness of speculation, perhaps more so than anyone, as I’d begun to track down and interview those who had known her. I
t seemed no matter where I went, I ran into some minor acquaintance with a scrap of information that they found crucial to understanding Sabine. “If she saw a child and an animal lying in the street,” one friend told me, “and they were both about to be hit by a car, Sabine would save the animal.” Someone said she’d cried at her birthday party when a balloon floated away.

  In my motel room, I kept a stack of note cards, and each piece of data I collected, I wrote on one of these cards. At night, I laid them out on my bed, arranging and rearranging them. I was convinced that somewhere in this pile of anecdotes and photographs and recollections was the vital clue, the detail that would make everything slide into place, and as I began to assemble all the information I’d gathered into an idea of a woman, I imagined myself at the head of a troupe of deputies and detectives, leading us all inexorably in the direction of Sabine Musil-Buehler.

  She was a thin woman, slightly above middle height, with a blunt nose and dark-blue eyes set wide on her face. Sun and age had begun to deteriorate her appearance. She still had the smooth gait of youth, the same narrowing of the gaze and quick, sharp voice, but the line of her jaw had softened and her smile seemed weighed down. She was concerned about her appearance, some thought overly so. She had seen an orthodontist about having her teeth straightened, and she’d begun to work with a personal trainer. She changed her hair more often than was usual for a woman of her age; she’d worn it long, wavy, and blond, but shortly before she disappeared, she cut it shoulder-length and dyed it silver.

  She was born Sabine Musil in 1960 in Montabaur, West Germany, and throughout her life she retained the singsongy cadence and the soft r that so defines the natives of that region. Her father had been a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe during World War II. After the war, failing to find work as a wood-carver, he’d become a tax consultant. Her parents’ marriage was not a happy one, and they separated when she was still young. We like to think that life’s challenges serve to draw us closer to each other, but as often as not they reveal only that we were never as close as we’d imagined. The divorce blew Sabine’s family to pieces as simply as a bomb. Her brothers were much older and had borne witness to the dissolution of the parents’ relationship. When the mother and father separated at last, it was a welcome end to what had been a painful and embarrassing drama. They felt relieved of some unnameable obligation to one another. From that point on, she lived with her mother and her brothers in a working-class suburb of the city.