Love and Death in the Sunshine State

by Cutter Wood

  “Don’t know,” says the detective.

  Britta is in Germany when the email arrives from Karin. She closes the computer and bites the inside of her cheek. Missing is a strange word. Hadn’t she thought something like this might happen? Hadn’t she worried? She realizes she never said goodbye to Sabine before she left. But it is probably nothing. Britta worries too much. That’s what Sabine always tells her. She needs to learn to relax, Britta thinks, and she begins cleaning the insides of the cupboards.

  The trolley driver is an enormous man, whalelike in his damp polo shirt, with small considerate eyes, and he is stopped in front of the playhouse when he looks in his mirror and sees a man running down the sidewalk, waving something in his hand. Bill mounts the steps at a run, and nearly falls over as the vehicle lurches forward, only latching on to a railing at the last second.

  “I’m looking for someone,” he says as they pick up speed. He thrusts the crumpled photo in front of the driver, whose eyes dart back and forth between the photo and the road. “Have you seen her? She’s missing.”

  At the next stop, as a group of sunburned British enter the trolley, the driver takes the picture and looks at it more closely.

  “Who is it?”

  “My girlfriend,” says Bill. “She’s missing.”

  “You know I think I did see someone like this down at Coquina Beach.”

  Bill stares at the man.

  “Yeah, definitely down at Coquina.”

  “Get me there,” he says. “Fast.”

  The speed limit is twenty-five, and the driver still has to stop every few hundred yards to pick up and drop off passengers, but he goes as fast as he can. Bill takes one of the front seats, and talks to the man about how much he loves his girlfriend, the bike rides they used to take, her cooking, how much he worries about her.

  At Coquina, Bill runs up and down the beach with the photograph. He interrupts barbecues and games of paddleball, he talks to a large poodle, and eventually he gives up and walks back north staring mournfully out at the water. Why isn’t Tom out here with his golden retriever looking for Sabine? Where are all her fancy friends with their noses in the air? Where are they now that she needs them most? It breaks his heart thinking that the only person who truly cares about her is the one who killed her.

  There’s a wedding reception on the beach, and as the sunset draws on, the sounds of polka drift out along the water. High heels lie in pairs here and there on the sand, and a couple strolls off arm and arm into the gloom for a few minutes of privacy before the dancing begins. They speak passionately about nothing in particular, they joke about the bride’s cousin, and they are already beside one of the benches before they realize there’s a man sitting there asleep with his knees together and his head resting on a small blue backpack. He wakes as they pass by.

  “Hang on,” he says. His gaze swings between their faces, and his forehead is dripping with sweat. “I’m trying to find a woman. I . . .” He reaches into the backpack and removes a small piece of paper. “Have you seen her?”

  He presses the photo into the girl’s hands. She wants to help somehow, but she doesn’t know what she can say or do.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I wish I could—”

  Her boyfriend pulls her away.

  Bill wakes in the apartment with a stuffy nose, and lies on his back in the bed, looking at the ceiling and breathing. His sternum aches. He has pawned the TV, the radio, his ten-speed, his drill, the blender. What wasn’t pawned, the police have seized for evidence: the wine bottle and glass, some cutlery, a blouse.

  He’s lost her face. He can see her eyes blinking blue and bright in the bathroom mirror when she plucked her eyebrows, and he knows the set of her mouth when she was displeased. He has no trouble recalling her nose or the way she pointed it when angry. But he can’t bring these things together. As soon as he draws one into focus, he loses another. Her ears, he has lost entirely, and this, more than anything, depresses him. Her soft little ears, which he would take delicately in his teeth, he had to go find a photo to see what they looked like.

  The memory of that night remains with him, but it has changed. In the hours after her death, he could think of nothing but the sequence of events leading up to it. He reviewed each second, every movement of her hand, every note in her voice. No sooner had he finished than he began again. Now he sees that with each of these recollections, the memory of her recedes. The event remains, but it is a clumsy caricature, in which he and Sabine walk around like marionettes. The steadily mounting anger and the terror that came with it, he no longer feels these when he remembers her tying her shoelaces.

  At Britta’s apartment on Anna Maria Island, no one answers the bell, but a neighbor rolls down her car window just far enough to tell Bill that Britta’s in Germany for the week. He walks past the motel and sees Tess talking on the phone, but he’s not allowed on the property. When Karin finds him, he’s back in the courtyard at the apartment with a case of beer between his feet. She leaves her car door open and the engine running.

  “I’ve already been yelled at,” he says. “But if you want, I can tell you the same thing as everybody else.”

  “You’re still staying here?”

  “Long as I can.”

  “Until the end of the month?”

  He nods and, for the first time, looks her in the face. “You think it was me?”

  “Could be,” she says, and digs a cigarette out of her purse.

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. I try not to think about it.”

  “You don’t think about her?” he says.

  “You do?”

  “Every minute.”

  “Well,” she says. “That’s good to do.”

  Who hasn’t resented a woman? Who hasn’t wanted to cut off his pinkie and make her see it, saying, “You did this.” Who hasn’t looked up at the full moon and wished it would fall on her?

  Bill eyes the bartender as though she can read his thoughts, and he worries over a mound of boiled peanuts. Around three, the room begins to fill. A few kids at first, then the regulars, shriveled up like old palmetto leaves, take their positions. The tourists come last, smelling of steak and SPF. They leave the door open too long, and a breeze sends paper napkins swirling around the bartender.

  Bill hides in the back room by the pool table, where it’s quiet, near the chalk and quarters and graffiti. There’s a chunk of hard-boiled egg on the table, and a single ant has been left to itself to figure out what to do with it.

  Two boys come in, blond-haired and smooth-cheeked. In their long surf shorts, they seem to be leaning backward.

  “Is this your table?”

  Bill looks up.

  “Hey,” says the other. “Are you still on here?” His hand shoved deep in his shorts, he’s jingling a whole pocketful of quarters.

  “Yes, I am,” says Bill.

  The chalk shoots up in a plume as he strikes the cue ball. The solids and stripes sort themselves out. He finishes off the kid in a few quick strokes. Pulling long slugs of beer between shots, he dismisses the friend, as well. Feeling flush, he goes to get another drink, and when he comes back, he finds some tourists fingering the cues.

  “I’m on here right now,” he says.

  Again the crack of balls, the feeding of dollars into the machine by the bathroom, and the clink-clink of dispensed coins. He leans on the cue like a crutch.

  “I used to be all right,” he says to someone leaning against the wall. “Hung around with my old man at the pool hall. Now look at this. They call this English.” He tilts the cue down steeply toward the table. “Are you looking?”

  He loses a few games then but comes back with another beer and a cup of quarters. Soon he’s playing with a young woman. “Now the trick,” he says, “is to get down low like this. You’ve got to sight her along the cue. Otherwise, you’re just guessing.”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “That’s it,” he says
. “That’s the big secret.” He looks around, but there’s no one left in the room except the woman’s boyfriend.

  “It’s your shot,” the man says.

  “Yes,” Bill says, settling down behind the cue ball and drawing the table into focus. “Now, who’s solids and who’s stripes?”

  The rough nap of green baize, and how it feels to regain life there, the smells of the bar—the yeast, the urine, the smoke and congealed fat, the perfume—all concentrated by the billiard cloth. His cheek is chalky and numb. His eye rolls back as if to see his ear. He finds the bathroom, pisses, vomits, hums a tune, leans his head against the mirror. It’s still light outside. A few hours have passed, but not much else. The sun has just begun its march on the horizon, and at last the sky is darkening. The pavilion is ahead. He talks to her and thinks, if only she’d known how he feels now, so bored and so lonely.

  16: Laurel and Bay

  In the days after Sabine Musil-Buehler disappeared, the detectives took a number of photographs out on Anna Maria, and during the time that I was following the case, I kept a folder of these images in a drawer in my desk and returned to them every so often when I felt I’d lost a sense of what I was doing. There was nothing gruesome about the pictures, and if someone had stumbled upon the folder, they would hardly have thought these bland images depicted the denouement of a fatal love affair. There was a shot of the island from above, a shot of the motel, a shot of the door to Sabine and Bill’s apartment. There was a photograph of Tom and one of Bill. Tom stands in his living room. He wears a black shirt, his hands are at his waist, and as he stares into the lens of the camera, he bites his lip. Bill stands in the apartment in front of the couch, his eyes downcast and his face expressionless. He has a pen in the pocket of his shirt, a pair of sunglasses hanging from his top button, and two large circles of sweat spreading out under his arms. The photos were taken with a flash, and because of this, both men’s shadows are outlined on the walls behind them. In one image, the convertible sits in a patch of sand and crabgrass at the impound lot, looking clean and white. In the background, there are other cars, each presumably with a crime and a story of its own.

  I was drawn to these images, I think, precisely because of how commonplace they seemed. There was a photo of the floor of Sabine’s car, where an Ultimate Santana album had come to rest, and one of a closet, with a few outfits hanging—a yellow cotton skirt, a black-and-white dress—and below them, a jumble of high heels and open shoe boxes and a fallen coat hanger. In the open trunk of the convertible, there are Styrofoam plates, a snorkel, a few plastic bags, and a single shoe. On a side table, there is scorecard for a board game, an empty wine bottle, and a remote control. They reminded me of the aimless photographs that children take, confusing precisely because it is impossible to say just why they were taken. They seemed almost like they could have come from any life. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about the photographs of the couch in the apartment, a long red sofa with its cushions disheveled, except that in one of the photos a few small plastic placards with the numbers 2 and 3 indicated where blood had fallen.

  In the months following that summer visit to Florida, while Erin and I went about our lives in Iowa, I began assembling the notes I’d made on my flight. I kept up with the goings-on in Anna Maria. I spoke sometimes with the detectives and emailed with Sabine’s friends and family. I continued writing small postcards to Bill Cumber and received long letters in return. Gradually, these letters trailed off of their own accord. Robert Corona was sentenced for grand theft auto, served his time, and shortly after his release, was arrested while driving a stolen van down Fourteenth Street. The lead detective retired and took a part-time job at a local school. On the anniversary of her disappearance, Tom and a few friends organized a quiet memorial service for Sabine, which for lack of a grave, they held in a shadeless garden beside city hall.

  The state attorney’s office quietly brought charges against Bill Cumber for the murder, but the evidence was so insubstantial—no body, no weapon, no motive—that neither the prosecution nor the defense seemed to be in any rush to actually carry out a trial. At one docket sounding after another, the court date was postponed. By that time, I had given up hoping that a trial would bring any sort of closure to the case. What would it have meant anyway if Bill Cumber were found guilty or not guilty? Sabine would still be missing. I had ceased to expect there would be news, and in many ways, I felt a great deal of relief when I thought that I could finally put the story behind me, that I would never again be obliged to visit Florida.

  Hardly had this thought crossed my mind when I received a call from the assistant state attorney. Some of the details in Bill’s letters to me conflicted with the account he’d given detectives. Nothing substantial really, the attorney assured me, but a small part of the puzzle. I would soon be receiving a subpoena to testify.

  So I made one final journey to Florida. I wanted to review the case the state had prepared in advance of the trial, and I waited for some time outside the state attorney’s office before a side door finally opened and one of the administrative assistants waved me into the rooms beyond. She pushed before her a cart stacked high with boxes as she led me through the offices.

  “You wanted to look at the materials from the Cumber case, right? We’ll just put you in the conference room.”

  “What do you have there?” I said. “Looks heavy.”

  She smiled at me. “This is the Cumber case.”

  For three days, I went through the boxes one by one. Even now, it’s difficult for me to say exactly what I was looking for. There were affidavits from Sabine’s friends, deputies’ reports, the transcription of Tom Buehler’s polygraph examination, a copy of the first letter I’d sent to Bill, reams and reams of paper, but there was hardly anything I didn’t already know, and the more I read, the more I felt I was doing nothing more than making myself ill. It seems to me now that there wasn’t any real reason to look through those files. There were obvious signs that their love affair would end terribly, signs that many had understood from the start.

  Tom Buehler had predicted as much, and in his deposition, he’d recalled a conversation he had with Sabine when she first started dating Bill.

  We’re in my backyard. I said, Sabine, he’s a con man. I said here’s what’s going to happen. When he gets out of prison, I said, I’ll give you two months, and he’s going back into doing this old stuff again. He’s going to cause trouble at the motel. He’s going to cause trouble for you and trouble for me. I said my whole concern is when you two break up, and it’s going to happen, he is going to be big trouble. And she’s trying to explain to me why she’s doing all this. And she says I can’t help it, I fell in love.

  I think it was this: she’d loved him, and she thought that was enough. I wanted there to be some evidence that she hadn’t been wrong all along. Sabine believed in what Carol Wood had called “the recuperative nature of love,” and I wanted to believe, too.

  That night, after a dinner alone at a bar in Bradenton, I called Erin from my hotel room.

  “If people lived a thousand years,” I said, “how many do you think would stay together?”

  “Not many,” she said. “But probably a few.”

  There is another possible reason that I sifted through those files with such thoroughness: I knew that when I finished, I would have to drive to the county jail a few miles north of the city and speak with Bill Cumber, who was there awaiting the trial. I didn’t want to see him, not because I was disgusted by what it seemed he’d done, but because I didn’t think I could bring myself to ask him about it again. I put off the trip one day, then another. That Wednesday, as I was finally preparing to make the drive, I received a message on my phone, letting me know there would be no trial, the case was now closed. William Cumber had just confessed.

  The confession took place in downtown Bradenton, on one of the upper floors of the Manatee County Judicial Center. He was brought in a little before ten in the morning, and he s
at down with his appointed attorney, the representatives of the state, a number of detectives, and a stenographer. In response to the state attorney’s questions, Bill began to tell a story that was, by and large, exactly as the detectives had imagined it. He and Sabine had quarreled the night she disappeared. He had been drinking beer. She had been drinking wine. He went out for a cigarette, and when he returned to the apartment, she confronted him about his smoking. In the argument that ensued, she said she was leaving him, and she began to dress. She put on her jeans and her shirt. She was sitting on the couch, tying her sneakers, when he struck her twice, once with his left hand, on the head, then a second time with his right hand. He was unable to say where the second blow fell. He knew only that it landed somewhere on her face. Before she had time to react, he placed his hands around her throat.

  How long would you say you were choking her? the attorney interrupted. A minute? More?

  Bill searched for words. Until she wasn’t moving.

  He looked down at her afterward. He couldn’t believe what he’d done, but he knew that he couldn’t go back to prison, so he came up with a plan. He took a sheet off the bed and wrapped her in it. After he’d looked outside to make sure that no one was around, he took her out to where her car was parked.

  Did you drag her or throw her over your shoulder?

  I drug her.

  And put her in the back seat?

  Yes.

  It’s been said she was very particular about whom she let drive her car. Is that true?

  That’s true.

  He drove a half mile south and turned onto Eighty-First Street, and in a shadowed part of the road just past her motel, he parked. After stealing a shovel from the motel, he went out to the beach and began to work. In that sand, the softest in the world according to the visitors’ bureau, it took only twenty minutes to dig a hole up to his waist, and when he’d finished burying her, he drove back up the island, parked down the street from the apartment, and went home. The next afternoon, he drove the car across the Cortez Bridge into Bradenton and left it at the Gator Lounge, where Robert Corona would later find it. Just before dark, he caught the last bus back to the island. He was lying in bed when the convertible was pulled over.