A Death in Live Oak

by James Grippando

  Percy took another step forward and then stopped short, realizing that he was standing amid a plot of grave markers. Eight dead O’Connells, the oldest born in 1909. Someone had lived in this shack a long time.

  Someone was still living there.

  “Ben!” a woman shouted from inside the house. “There’s a nigger in our yard!”

  “What?” Ben grumbled.

  “And he’s wearin’ shackles! Must’ve escaped from a chain gang!”

  Percy wanted to shout out in his own defense, No, no, you’ve got it all wrong! I need help!

  The front door flew open, and out came big Ben, armed with a shotgun.

  “No!” Percy screamed, but the blast of the shotgun followed.

  Percy was hit in the leg—how many times, he didn’t know, but it was bad enough to knock him to the ground. His thigh burned, and the pain made him dizzy, but he pushed himself from the ground and made one last plea.

  “Don’t shoot!”

  “You got ten seconds to git off my land!”

  “Okay, be cool, I—”

  He was silenced by the unmistakable sound of a shotgun racking. Percy turned and raced across the clearing toward the river. Arms pumping and chains rattling, he ran through the pain. Another blast of the shotgun cut through the night. Percy was at full speed when he launched himself from the bank, diving headfirst and disappearing into the river as the buckshot flew overhead. He forced himself to stay under as long as he could, swimming in total darkness. It seemed like forever, but he was without air for only a minute. When he surfaced, the light from the shack was a fuzzy little ball way upriver. The current had done most of the work for him, taking him to safety.

  Percy rolled over and floated on his back, staring up at the stars. The cold water felt good on his leg wound. Hypothermia was possible, he knew, not to mention shock. He needed to swim ashore. But he let himself have this moment. He didn’t know where the river was taking him, but he knew what was behind him. The current was his friend.

  His only friend.

  CHAPTER 76

  You can come in, Jack,” said Virginia.

  Jack was standing in the hallway outside Kelvin Cousin’s hotel room, and Virginia was inside, holding the door open. The media had reported that Jamal’s parents were staying at a private residence with friends of Leroy Highsmith, but the extended family—uncles, aunts, grandparents, and Great-grandfather Kelvin—were at the Hampton Inn. Virginia had contacted him as Cynthia Porter’s caretaker and taken him the letter. Jack had been waiting almost thirty minutes.

  “He’ll talk to me?” asked Jack.

  “Yes.”

  Jack entered and Virginia closed the door. The room was a suite for business travelers, and Kelvin was in the living area beyond the kitchenette, seated in an overstuffed armchair. He reached for his walking cane as Jack approached.

  “Don’t get up, please,” said Jack.

  Kelvin Cousin nodded in appreciation of the reprieve from etiquette. The men shook hands, and Jack expressed how grateful he was for the chance to talk to someone who knew something about Willie James Howard.

  “What I know is secondhand, you understand,” said Kelvin, speaking in a voice that cracked with age.

  “Who told you about Willie James?”

  “Cynthia Porter. She called the Florida State Conference for the NAACP. I worked there and was the only one in the office that day. I answered the phone.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, I’d say nineteen fifty. Fifty-one, maybe. She said there was something she wanted to get off her chest.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  Kelvin reached for the letter Virginia had shared with him. “Everything she wrote right here. It was not a quick phone call. Talked almost an hour, as I recall. She told the whole story.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I listened. Took notes. Then when the call was over, I typed it all up.”

  “Do you still have those notes?”

  “No, sir. I sent them to the governor’s office.”

  “Why there?”

  “I knew there’d be no justice in Live Oak. So I wrote to the governor. Bad mistake.”

  “I presume it went nowhere,” said Jack.

  Kelvin shook his head. “Worse than that. They must have come down on Cynthia like a ton of bricks.”

  “Did she withdraw her statement?”

  He nodded slowly, an empty expression in his eyes. “I spoke to Cynthia one more time after that. I can’t remember if I called her or she called me. But I won’t forget her words. She said, ‘You and I never talked. Leave it be.’ And that was the end of it.”

  “There was no investigation?”

  “No. One of our local NAACP officers in Mims tried to get something going. There was talk of going to the Justice Department, but this was years before the civil rights movement. No federal jurisdiction. Nothing ever came of it.”

  “Did you ever tell anyone about it?”

  “Sure did. Just about everybody I told is dead now. Even Jamal.”

  “You told Jamal about Willie James?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jack wished he would stop calling him “sir.” “How did that come about?”

  “I was in Gainesville to see him sworn in as Alpha president. Afterward, I sat down with him and Brandon.”

  “Brandon Wall?”

  “That’s right. Brandon was the outgoing president, Jamal was the new one. I wanted to tell them how proud I was of both of them, and how important it is for black fraternities to have leaders like them. You know, there’s folks who say the Divine Nine are a thing of the past. Used to be that black fraternities produced all our important leaders. Martin Luther King. Thurgood Marshall. That’s changing. Barack and Michelle Obama, Obama’s attorney general, the last three black men elected to the U.S. Senate—not one of ’em was in a black Greek-letter organization.”

  “How did that conversation lead to Willie James?”

  “At some point Brandon asked me, ‘How do you feel about the president of a black fraternity having a white girlfriend?’”

  “He meant Jamal?”

  “When he asked the question, I didn’t know if he meant Jamal or himself. But it wouldn’t have changed my answer.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told them I felt no different than I would about any black man with a white girlfriend. I said be careful. See, when you get to my age, and you realize how fast the years pass, it really isn’t that long ago that a black man could be lynched over a white woman. So I told them about Willie James.”

  “You told both Jamal and Brandon?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When was that?”

  “September. Not but two months ago.”

  Kelvin’s gaze drifted away. Jack couldn’t tell if the old man was taking a moment to remember that time “not but two months ago” when his great-grandson was alive with so much to live for, or if he was just getting tired.

  “Do you have any more questions, Mr. Swyteck?” asked Virginia.

  Her clear implication was that it was time to leave Kelvin alone. Jack rose and thanked him. Virginia asked if there was anything Kelvin needed before they left, but he assured her that he didn’t. He was sharing the suite with his nephew, who would put him to bed upon returning from dinner.

  “I don’t know what you intend to do about all this,” said Kelvin. “But I’m hoping I did the right thing.”

  Jack shook his hand and said, “You did.”

  CHAPTER 77

  Andie rode past midnight, nonstop, until they reached the river. There were eight in her group, including herself and Agent Ferguson. Andie took comfort in knowing that the GPS chip in her transmitter kept their FBI contact apprised of their exact location.

  “We need a boat,” said Colt.

  Andie hoped that the tech agent monitoring her body wire transmissions caught that remark. Confirmation arrived in less than thirty seconds.
>
  “Let’s head this way,” Ferguson told the group. “There’s private property upriver. We can probably borrow a boat.”

  Everyone knew what he meant by “borrow.” Only Andie knew that his intelligence had come directly from their FBI contact. Agents were in the area, and it made Andie feel safer to know that a team would swoop in if something went wrong. But she also understood that time was running out for her to get one of these Alliance members to say something solid to implicate Steger in the abduction of Percy Donovan.

  “What do we do with the bikes?” asked William.

  “Paulette can stay here and watch them,” said Colt. He meant Andie.

  “No,” said Ferguson. “She goes with me.”

  “I’ll stay,” said one of the old guys. “My back’s killing me anyway.”

  The group of seven set off, heading up the pathway along the river. Ferguson’s intelligence had been spot-on. In less than five minutes they came upon a house on private property. A flats boat was moored to a pier that jutted out into the river.

  “Bingo,” said Colt.

  Andie went with the flow. Technically speaking, an undercover agent’s participation in a felony—grand larceny—required prior approval. This one had to fall under the “exigent circumstances” exception. They climbed aboard. Colt made short work of the combination lock and pushed away from the pier. The current carried them downriver, and when they were far enough away from the owner’s house, Colt started the engine. Soon they were at full throttle, throwing a V-shaped wake against the riverbanks. The tall cypress trees were mere silhouettes, their moss-clad limbs barely visible against the starlit sky. A thin blanket of fog stretched across the river. The speedboat cut through it like a laser through cotton candy.

  Suddenly, Colt killed the engine. The boat drifted silently downriver.

  “Listen,” he said.

  There was a hum in the air.

  “Is that another boat?” asked William.

  “Or a helicopter,” said Colt. “Cops must be searching. They must know he escaped.”

  “Who?” asked Andie.

  She was trying to get him to say “Percy,” but her question was answered only with a suspicious glare.

  “The boogey man,” said Colt.

  “Should we turn back?” asked William.

  “No,” said Colt, still looking at Andie. “We keep going. And we find the boogey man. Before they do.”

  CHAPTER 78

  Jack was in the courtroom early, well before the Arthur hearing was scheduled to reconvene.

  Brandon Wall was shaping up to be the hearing’s most important witness. Jack had worked late into the night preparing for his cross-examination. He understood that tone would be as important as substance, and he hoped that his early arrival, while things were relatively quiet, would help his thoughts gel.

  Oliver Boalt arrived early as well. He walked straight to Jack’s side of the courtroom and laid the crime lab’s final report on the table in front of him.

  “Testing on the Croc is completed,” said Boalt.

  “What’s the bottom line?” asked Jack.

  “No DNA match to Mark Towson or Baine Robinson.”

  Jack played it cool, as if he’d known all along that no other result was possible. “Whose DNA is it?”

  “We don’t know. It’s obviously someone whose DNA isn’t in any available database.”

  That wasn’t bad news, but it wasn’t the case-breaking development that Jack had hoped for. “Do you plan to introduce the report into evidence, or shall I?” asked Jack.

  “I’ve already delivered it to Judge Teague’s chambers, along with a letter explaining how these findings are consistent with our theory of the case.”

  “Consistent with your theory?”

  “Yes,” Boalt said with a completely straight face. “It has been my suspicion all along that there was a third conspirator in the lynching of Jamal Cousin.”

  “There’s no allegation of a third conspirator in your indictment,” said Jack.

  “That will change if and when the third conspirator is identified. Until then, we will proceed against your client on the assumption that there is an unindicted co-conspirator.” Boalt turned and walked to his table.

  Jack opened the report. The DNA test results were obviously helpful to the defense, no matter how Boalt tried to spin them to Jack, the media, or the judge. But Boalt was right not to panic. It was common for conspiracy cases to proceed against a named defendant and his unidentified, unnamed partners in crime.

  Jack opened the written report. The most important matter at hand was the cross-examination of Brandon at 9:00 a.m., but he had time to skim. The results were as the prosecutor had stated. What Jack found almost as interesting, however, was the introductory section of the report. It was standard for an examiner to explain how the Croc had been located, collected, and taken to the lab for testing. Jack had been aware that it was a group of volunteers from the Divine Nine that had found the Croc and alerted the police. Until now, however—until seeing the name in black and white in the forensic report—Jack had been unaware of the exact fraternity brother who had actually found the Croc. It surprised him at first. And then his thoughts, which had been so unsettled all night, finally started to fall into place.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, reading the name one more time.

  It was Brandon Wall.

  CHAPTER 79

  Percy was deep in chilly river water. It was high tide, or close to it. Percy had found the strength to swim ashore, but the soggy bank that was his refuge had slowly disappeared beneath the rising river. He needed higher land, or he could die of hypothermia.

  Percy tried to stand but couldn’t. It wasn’t just exhaustion. The leg wound from the buckshot was worse than he’d first thought. He’d tied his shirt around his thigh to try to stanch the bleeding, but he was still losing blood, his life draining out of him.

  Not gonna die. Not here. Not now.

  Percy floated on his belly, moving like an alligator toward a log on the flooded riverbank. His hands stirred up the sediment below, but he couldn’t really feel anything. His fingertips had gone numb. He made it to the log and stopped, searching for the strength to pull himself up. It was dark beneath the leafy canopy, but Percy could see patches of sky. The stars were fading. The glow of sunrise was near. If he could slither like a gator, he could sun himself atop a log like one, too. He reached up, grabbed hold of a knot in the fallen cypress, and then stopped. He heard something. A whining in the distance.

  A boat?

  He listened more intensely. The steady noise was from upriver. Had it been from downriver, his spirits would have soared. Upriver could mean one of two things. Rescue. Or recapture.

  First things first—survival.

  He pulled with every ounce of strength, and the exertion made his leg throb as if he’d been shot all over again. But he worked through the pain, straining in the darkness, and managed to rest his chest atop the log. He lay there for a moment, legs dangling into the water, his body soaking wet. The night air was colder than the water, but he had faith that the sun would rise again. He had faith.

  The whining noise grew louder. His expenditure of energy, just climbing onto the log, had left his mind fuzzy. He struggled to focus. The sound was unmistakable. A motor.

  Definitely a boat.

  He found the strength to turn his head, his right cheek atop the cypress bark and one eye on the river. He didn’t know if the police were looking for him. But if it was a police boat or a park ranger, he would call out to them. If he could find a voice.

  Hang on.

  Percy lay perfectly still, fighting to keep his eyes and ears open as the boat drew closer.

  CHAPTER 80

  Mr. Swyteck,” said the judge. “You may proceed with cross-examination of the witness. Mr. Wall, you are reminded that you are still under oath.”

  The courtroom was silent as Jack rose and approached.

  Less than twenty-f
our hours had passed since Brandon’s testimony. The courtroom was just as packed, and the tension was equally high. But so much had changed, at least from Jack’s perspective—not only about the case, but also the way he saw Brandon Wall. The transformation had started with the prosecutor’s final line of questions, when Brandon had identified Mrs. Towson as the reason Shelly and Jamal had kept their relationship a secret. Since Jack’s meeting with Kelvin Cousin, little things had been falling into place, and the picture continued to come clear as he stepped toward the witness.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wall,” he said cordially.

  “Morning,” said Brandon.

  “You were the president of the Alpha house last year, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re very proud of being an Alpha?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re proud of the traditions and values of the Alpha fraternity?”

  “Of course.”

  “As a former president, you feel an obligation to uphold those traditions and values?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it fair to say that you think other Alpha brothers have the same obligation?”

  “That’s a fair statement.”

  “That’s especially true if we’re talking about the president of the fraternity.”

  “I suppose.”

  “The president should lead by example. Do you agree?”

  “I—yeah, sure.”

  “You would agree that one of those values is truthfulness. An Alpha president should be truthful?”