“I’m sure I don’t know a thing about that.” And Dave better not know anything about any connection between dead swamp man and dead Earl.
“Lilly, just come to the jail, okay? The sooner you get here, the sooner Dave gets out.”
For a man who couldn’t stand up to a skinny old lady over some okra plants, Tired certainly managed to project the stern tone of a direct order from a law-enforcement official. One who might hold up Dave’s release from jail if I didn’t comply.
After I conveyed both my acquiescence and my general displeasure, we said good-bye, and I punched in Philip’s private number, got the recording, left a terse message, picked up the Drunk vs. Bright Light file, and walked down the hallway to Angela’s office. Since it had been her case to begin with, she probably knew more about it than me, so I dumped it on her desk and said, “See if you can use whole sentences.” And I stomped out to my car.
At the front desk of the jail, a woman who could have set the lowest common denominator for bad hair was scratching a pen over paper, trying to make it write, and muttering, “Damn thing.”
“Hi. I’m here to see Officer Tired Johnson.”
The woman looked up, and suddenly beamed. “T.R. is here?” She smoothed back her drastically overprocessed hair and looked around, as if Tired was hiding in a corner.
“Yes, I’m supposed to meet him here.”
“Business? Or pleasure?” Bleached-hair lady looked suddenly hostile.
“I assure you it’s purely business. About an inmate, Dave Baggwell, two gs.”
She smiled again, and I noticed that she actually had a rather sweet face. “I’ll page him,” she offered.
While she paged, I fished around in my purse till I found one of Brock’s cards. Aside from being my hairdresser and primary therapist, Brock works wonders with makeovers.
“T.R. will be right here, in a minute.” She radiated anticipation.
Twenty-something, sweet face, bad hair, mastery of the paging system if not the ballpoint pen. I wondered how she felt about Redfish.
“Do you like babies?”
The woman didn’t even blink to signal that this might be an odd question from a perfect stranger. “Oh, I just love babies. I baby-sit for my cousins’ kids all the time.”
Perfect, more or less, I thought. “Look,” I said, offering her Brock’s card, “this man is a genius with hair. Especially color. With your, eh, peaches-and-cream complexion, you should be a strawberry blonde. That white-blond look is too”—what, too tacky to show yourself in public?—“old for you. Tell him Lilly sent you, and he’ll work you in.”
She took the card, and her expression indicated some confusion as to whether she had been insulted and how she might respond. “Does this Brock do your hair?”
“Yes, he does,” I said.
“Wow, your hair is like totally beautiful.”
Yes it is, and I smiled, and thanked her, and then she smiled and thanked me, and I added good manners to the list of her assets. Definitely, I should mention her to Tired as a prospect.
Tired came bounding out of one of the hallways, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and sticking out the other for me. He didn’t even acknowledge Miss Bleached Head, but I bet he would when Brock finished making her over.
After the preliminaries, Tired led me back to a small room that smelled very bad, and I sat down in the offered chair with great reluctance, and made a mental note to be sure to shower and change clothes as soon as I left here. “Where is Dave?”
“Oh, I’ll bring him out soon.”
“Is he all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine, don’t worry. Now, I’ve got some questions for you.”
“I already told you I don’t know anything.”
“A young fellow named Benicio called in a dead man in the Myakka swamp last week. You know anything about that?”
“No. I mean, I know Benicio, Benny. He’s my secretary’s son.”
“Yeah, I found that out. Thought that was kinda interesting.”
“Why?”
“You don’t know anything about him calling 911 on last Saturday night?”
“No.”
Tired stared at me a long time. I didn’t blink or let my eyes wander and I didn’t wipe my hands or do anything to give myself away. But still, the lie bubbled there in the air between us.
“You know, the more you tell me about what you know, the better off we’ll all be.”
Let me be the judge of that, I thought, but said nothing.
“Okay, did you know that Benny was with Dave when he made the call?” Tired asked.
“I think I might have known that Benny and Dave had gone to Myakka together.”
Tired sighed. “Look . . . oh, hell, all right, here’s the deal.”
Finally.
“That man in the swamp was a man named Mike Daniels. Ring any bells?”
“None. Honest.”
“Michael Andrews Daniels, nickname of Mad.”
“I never heard of him.”
“He did some work for Earl Stallings, you know, the wine guy.”
“Yeah, I know the wine guy.”
“So how exactly do you know the wine guy?”
“We’ve been over this.”
“So, go over it again.”
“Here is the whole story, everything I know, and once I tell you—again—I want to see Dave, you hear.”
“All right.”
“The night Dave was arrested, some woman came to my door and said Dave and Waylon were in jail and Dave wanted me to get them out. I called Philip Cohen, and you remember, we all met here. Philip explained to me that Earl Stallings was pressing charges for the theft of a warehouse full of organic wine. The next day, Sunday, I went to the winery to try and talk Earl into dropping the charges for the allegedly stolen wine. We met, we talked, and he said he’d think it over.”
“So who was the woman who came to your door?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’d she look like?”
“Like 1969, a real hippie, dark hair.”
From the expression on Tired’s face, I gleaned that he probably knew who the woman was.
“So who was she?” I asked.
“Continue, please, ma’am, with your story about Earl.”
“So Monday, Earl talked with Philip, but he didn’t drop the charges. Tuesday I had to go to court in Lakeland, and I had my client with me, and—”
“That guy in the yellow thing over his pants?”
“Yes, Gandhi Singh.”
“That’s not his real name, is it?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Okay, go on.”
“So, I swung by the winery to see Earl, to see if I could persuade him to drop the charges. That’s all. And Gandhi and I discovered his body, and called 911, and you came out, and that’s the end of the story.”
“Not hardly.” Tired glared at me.
I remained silent.
“Ma’am, look at it from my point of view. There’s a guy out in the swamp, snakebit to all hell and back, and he worked for Earl. This guy’s car had been run off the road, and it looked like he had hopped out and run off into the swamp.”
Uh-oh, that was news to me.
“Then Dave and Benny, both guys you know pretty well, find the body, and Benny calls it in a few hours later, and then Dave and Waylon get arrested. Okay, so then you get mugged in your own front lawn.”
So how’d Tired know about that? That was a matter for the city police.
“Then, you see Earl, and two days later, you find Earl dead, and then somebody puts a dead fish on your front stoop and you call 911 again. Did I leave anything out?”
Well, a few things, but I continued to exercise my right to remain silent.
“So, something is going on and I want to know what.” Tired glowered, and leaned over at me. “You seem to be slap dab in the middle of this. Now what is going on?”
Damned if I knew. I shook my head. “
Honest, Tired, I don’t know.”
Despite my assurances that I didn’t have a personal clue as to what sinister plans were at work, Tired persisted and we went another twenty rounds, and I got plain rude and demanded to see Dave.
Tired went somewhere and brought Dave back into the room. Dave looked healthy enough and nobody had cut his pigtails. After a full-toothed smile, Dave gave me a big bear hug.
“Hey, Lilly Belle, my old sweetheart.” And he gave me another bear hug.
“How are you? You handling this all right?” I asked.
“Well, beats picking cotton, but not by much,” he answered. “Tell you what though, I’m about give out.”
Dave did look exceptionally worn out and while I considered chastising someone for failing to take better care of him, Tired insisted we all sit down. “Let me handle this,” he said to me, and then Tired turned to Dave and asked, “Do you know a man named Mike Daniels?”
“Nope.”
“Did you find a body in Myakka Park last Saturday night?”
Dave paused, looked over at me, which caused Tired to look over at me, and I thought we needed Philip Cohen here because I didn’t know the general rules of criminal defense and had the feeling I hadn’t done so well with Tired myself, and I dug my cell out of my purse and punched in Philip’s number. When he answered, I snapped, “Why aren’t you at the jail?”
Tired sighed.
Upon Philip’s advice, I told Dave not to say anything at all until Philip was able to get to the jail.
“Look,” Tired said, “if you’re not going to be any more help than this, you might as well go.”
Okay, I suspected Tired wanted me out of there on the off chance he could trick Dave into telling him something before Philip got there to tell Dave to shut up, but I trusted Dave to keep his mouth shut, he wasn’t like Gandhi, all right? and I was desperate to change clothes and shower off the jail.
“Well, all right, be that way,” I said, got up, clumped out of the jail, and shook my hands in the warm air and headed toward my car.
My parting words to Dave were, “Keep your mouth closed, and I will see you later.”
Chapter 18
When I was in first grade, my grandmother, who lived in a brick house on a dirt road in the middle of Bug-Fest, Georgia, taught me to gut and skin a squirrel, how to pee in the woods without getting it on my feet, and everything my six-year-old head could hold on the subject of snakes.
The snake thing definitely proved useful when I crawled into my cobalt-blue Honda after sniping with Tired at the jail. Both windows were down, and the door wasn’t locked, and I didn’t remember leaving it that way, and swore that if my priceless collection of germ-killing Handi Wipes was gone, I was going to raise holy hell. But I wasn’t going back to complain now. I was thinking about showering and my hand was poised in midair to stick the key in the ignition.
But then I saw it. Sprawled out on the floorboard of the passenger side was a snake.
A big snake.
And not just a big snake.
A big rattlesnake.
Even in my limited-caffeine stupor, I couldn’t mistake the rows of diamond-shaped brown markings outlined against the cream-colored scales. I was close enough to see the white oblique stripes on the side of the snake’s face.
Sit still. Don’t move. That much of the childhood lessons came back to me. My grandmother’s voice floated down from the cosmic rays in perfect clarity. “Don’t piss that snake off,” she said, “and don’t move.”
The thing is, a snake doesn’t see the way we do. It sees by sensing motion and vibration. Apparently I was lighter and more graceful than I might have believed, since I had slipped into the car without disturbing the snake into a coil or rattling mode.
If I didn’t move or vibrate, that diamondback wouldn’t know I was there.
So, how long could I sit perfectly still with my hand in midair?
The rest of my life was my immediate goal.
I had begun to sweat profusely when I saw, from the corner of my tearing eye (I was afraid to blink), Tired Johnson sauntering toward me with that cowboy gait that seemed so out of place in Sarasota, even for a county sheriff’s investigator. I was too scared to wonder then what afterthought might have led him to the parking lot to catch me before I drove off.
As Tired began to lean into my opened window, I said, “Snake.” I willed the word to come out of my very pores, and didn’t move my lips. Later I wondered if I had a hidden talent for ventriloquy, but at the moment I was concentrating on not moving and not pissing off that snake.
“Don’t move,” Tired said.
Quicker than I could blink, Tired whipped out a long-blade knife and threw it with his right hand, and at precisely the same time he yanked open my car door with his left hand, and I fell out in a thunk against his legs and landed bottom down in a pool of greasy car oil.
Tired snatched me up and dragged me bodily away from my Honda as if it were in flames and due to explode at any second.
“Stay put, ma’am,” he said, and began to stalk back toward the Honda.
As I picked myself up from another puddle of grease, a crew of trusties from the county jail who were washing the patrol cars all came a running.
To my relief, but no doubt the great sorrow of the rattler, the snake had been neatly decapitated by Tired’s knife throw. The trusties, arriving en masse at the scene of the execution, took great glee in tossing the poor headless thing around at each other as if it were still capable of biting one of them.
One of the trusties giggled as he wrapped the snake around his neck like a feather boa.
“You boys stop that,” Tired said. The trusty just pranced off, on his tiptoes, adorned by a headless rattler, sashaying like a chorus girl, and I hoped I never went to jail.
One of the trusties knocked down the snake-dancing chorus girl and grabbed the snake. As I watched him examine the snake, I saw disgust on his lean, weathered face. When he threw the snake down, and the trusties began to drift off as if the show was over, I walked toward him, my curiosity up.
“Ma’am, ma’am, you better stay away from them. They’re prisoners. Ma’am?”
No, duh? I thought the gray-white overalls were just some new kind of fashion statement, like a retro-disco leisure suit for the workingman crowd. I kept walking. The jail parking lot was more or less full of men with guns, and I couldn’t imagine one of the inmates making any kind of move on me. Tired pattered after me, ma’aming me the whole way.
“What’s wrong with the snake?” I asked the lean-faced man. He looked like one of the men out of the famous Depression photographs, with squinty, drained eyes in a sharp face.
“It’s dead.” He wiped his hands on his overalls, took a pointed look at my breasts, and then turned away as an armed guard approached.
“Of course, it’s dead. Tired cut its head off,” I said to the departing trusty.
“That deputy man done cut the head off a dead snake then,” the inmate said, and kept walking.
By then Tired was beside me. I bent down and touched the snake, then picked it up. Like hard rubber. Definitely dead. Definitely dead for longer than five minutes.
Somebody had put a dead snake in my Honda. Which, on balance, beat putting a live one in the car, but in my mind, Tired was no less the hero.
“Now why would anybody do a thing like that?” Tired asked the humid air around us.
A dead snakebit man in a swamp. Poor smashed Earl under his grape harvester. A dead rattler in my car.
I guess Gandhi Singh’s appellate argument hadn’t been so bad after all.
Chapter 19
I couldn’t get out of those clothes and into my shower quick enough, and while I was letting the hot steam work out my aggravation and flush off the jail germs, the phone rang. The machine kicked in, but over the flow of the hot water I couldn’t hear the message.
When I played the machine, it turned out the message was from Philip. Checking on me, worried, dea
d-snake assault and all, and asking that I call him to let him know how I was doing. I penciled myself a note to challenge any bill for that call, as it was strictly personal.
Once dressed, I called Philip back, and asked where Dave was.
“I dropped him off at Waylon’s duplex. It seemed that Waylon decided he did not like the wine business so much after all and he has returned to Lakeland. As his rent was paid until the end of the month, he bequeathed his duplex to Dave for the next two weeks.”
Well, Waylon sure bailed out at the first sign of trouble, I thought.
“Dave did ask me to remind you that he would need, what he referred to as his . . . I believe the phrase was, just how did he put it?”
“Spit it out, okay? What’d he want to remind me about?”
“His ‘sack of personal assets,’ that’s the phrase, I believe.”
Okay, I thought, Dave wants that grocery bag of money back. But not until I deducted from the cash what I had already paid Philip from my personal checking account.
Then Philip went back to the snake thing, and what did I think it meant, and was I really all right. Dadeda, dadeda about the snake thing, and I reassured him a hundred times that I was just fine, and finally he said, “Lilly, it is the beginning of the weekend. Might I have the pleasure of your company for dinner tonight?”
The pleasure of my company? Did this man live in the nineteenth century?
“Business or pleasure?” Translation: Was he going to bill for this?
“Absolutely pleasure.”
Ahhh, that Dean Martin voice just radiated out of that phone and melted over me like warm lavender lotion.
Of course, it took me a few minutes after the phone call to remember that I needed to talk with Benny and find Dave, and that if I had a date with Philip, I would have to put off Benny and Dave until Saturday. So how much harm could there be in that? I blithely thought, and peered into my refrigerator for a light lunch before returning to work.
My mood lifted, especially for someone so recently assaulted with a dead rattler. By the time I finally returned to the salt mines at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, well past the noon hour, I was flushed with anticipation over a date with Philip Cohen, the crooner-voiced, sensuous-lipped man who had once rendered me practically mute simply by touching the skin of the inside of my arm and smiling at me.
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