I was already thinking like a lawyer. I’d hoped I was over that, but I guess not. Three years of law school and a number of years in a courtroom tend to engraft a certain way of thinking onto one’s brain. I’ve found that what works well in a trial does not lend itself to interpersonal relationships. Both the women I have loved were sensitive to my almost irrepressible need to cross-examine them when we were having what I thought of as discussions and they assured me were arguments. Either way, I lost more of them than I won and I assuaged my bruised ego with the thought that they were simply bereft of logic and therefore not worthy foils for my incisive, legally trained mind. I actually have better sense than to burden them with my thinking on that issue.
My name is Matt Royal and I live on a little slice of paradise known as Longboat Key, an island that lies off the southwest coast of Florida, sixty miles south of Tampa and about halfway down the peninsula. The key, a barrier island separated from the small cities of Sarasota and Bradenton by the broad sweep of Sarasota Bay, is ten miles long and a half-mile wide at its broadest point. It is a small community that each winter swells to a rather large community with the arrival of the snowbirds, our friends from the north who seek refuge from the colder zip codes. Most of them leave by Easter, and we find ourselves nestling down and preparing for the heat and somnolence that summer brings.
Easter came in late March this year, and at the end of the second week of March, our little slice of paradise was a mixed bag of year-round residents and snowbirds who never left before Easter, regardless of when it arrived. The weather was at its most pleasant and would remain so until mid-May when the sun seemed to focus on us, bringing the heat and humidity that kept all but the hardiest souls cowering in our air-conditioned homes.
I was once an officer in the United States Army, saw some combat, got some medals, came home and graduated from law school. I practiced law in Orlando for a number of years, worked too hard, drank too much, and spent too many hours chasing what had become the holy grail of too many lawyers—the almighty dollar. I lost the wife I loved to divorce, quit the practice in disgust, directed mostly at myself, cashed out all my assets and my interest in the law firm, and moved to Longboat Key. If I were frugal, the money would last me for the rest of my life.
I worked diligently and successfully at becoming a beach bum, in the process garnering a lot of support from my new friends on the island, good people who were masters of idleness. During the course of my transformation, I met Detective Jennifer Diane Duncan, J.D. to the islanders, and fell in love for the second time. The great surprise to me, as well as to my island friends, was that she loved me back. Life was good on Longboat Key, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not seem to get the lawyer out of the beach bum.
I heard J.D. come in the front door of my cottage as I stepped out of the shower. She had spent the night alone in her condo, catching up with the endless paperwork her job required. There wasn’t much crime on our small island, but even the most mundane misdemeanor required pages of documentation. It was the part of the job that J.D. disliked the most, and sometimes it backed up so much that she had to hunker down alone and spend hours typing endless drivel into useless forms. Her words, not mine.
I shaved and dressed in shorts and an old Army t-shirt and walked into the living room. My cottage perched on the edge of Sarasota Bay, and the sliding glass doors that opened from my living room onto the patio provided a spectacular view east across the usually calm water. Today was no different. The bay was resplendent in its springtime mantle of turquoise, with not even a ripple to mar its flat surface.
J.D. was sitting at my computer, sipping from a mug of coffee. I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. The computer screen was filled with the online edition of The Villages Daily Sun, the newspaper of The Villages, the sprawling community that covered much of Sumter County and parts of two others in North Central Florida. “Good morning, sweetheart,” I said. “What’re you looking for?”
“Hi, sweetie,” she said. Her soft voice carried a hint of the Old South, acquired during her childhood years in Atlanta. “I was trying to find out if anybody had been murdered in The Villages lately. I found it on the Daily Sun’s website. There’s not a whole lot to the story in today’s paper. I don’t think they know anything yet. Somebody found the body of a woman named Olivia Lathom in the middle of Paddock Square in Brownwood at dawn yesterday. She was apparently killed and left there Wednesday night or early yesterday morning. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide, but there are no suspects, at least none that the cops are releasing to the press.”
“Where’s Brownwood and what’s Paddock Square?”
“Brownwood is the town square not far from where Aunt Esther lives in the Village of Collier. Paddock Square is the outdoors entertainment venue in the middle of the town. She drove us there in her golf cart when we visited just before Christmas.”
“I remember that. Scariest ride I ever took. I’ve had five near-death experiences in my life. Two of them were in the war and the other three were between Esther’s house and Brownwood.”
“Hush. That was a fun day.”
“It was,” I said. “Who is Olivia Lathom?”
“I Googled her. She is, or was, a mystery writer in Atlanta. She’s written a couple of books that were released only as eBooks. They did okay, but her latest one came out in hard cover and has taken off. It’s a top ten New York Times best seller.”
“What was she doing in The Villages?”
“The paper said she had a book signing at the Barnes & Noble store in Lake Sumter Landing on Wednesday. It apparently drew a big crowd.”
“What does Esther have to do with Lathom?”
“I don’t know. Esther spent most of her life in Atlanta. Maybe she knew some writers. She was a high school English teacher for thirty years. Maybe Lathom was a former student.”
“I’ll know more when I get to Bushnell. Does it say how she was killed?”
“She was shot.”
“Anything else? Like the caliber of the gun, location of the wound, that sort of thing?”
“No. Just some stuff about Lathom’s background and career. The story doesn’t have a lot of information. This was probably posted yesterday. Maybe we can find out more when they get around to posting this morning’s paper.”
“Did you get much sleep?”
She shook her head. “I turned out my lights around three and the phone rang just before I called you. I didn’t sleep well. Had a lot of crap running through my head from those cases I was doing the paperwork on.”
You hungry?” I asked.
“As a bear.”
“I’ll whip us up some breakfast.”
I’m not much of a cook, but I can scramble eggs, fry bacon, toast bread, and make coffee. I put it on the table and we dug in. “Tell me about Aunt Esther,” I said. “I know she’s your mother’s sister and the only family you have left, and that she lived in Atlanta her whole life and taught school. That’s about it.”
“She lived next door to us in Atlanta and was kind of a second mom to me. When I was twelve and we moved to Miami, she decided to stay in Atlanta. We were the only family she had and she and my mom were just a couple of years apart in age. They were very close and she spent the summers with us in Miami. She got about three months off every year and would head south when school ended in early June. My dad liked her a lot and encouraged her to stay with us.”
“She never married?”
J.D. smiled. “No, but she had several torrid affairs over the years. When I got older, she’d tell me about the men. I think she fell in love every couple of years, got that out of her system after a few months, and endured what she called her ‘doing without’ periods until the next right man came along.”
“Doesn’t sound at all like the spinster schoolmarm.”
J.D. laughed. “I think she was the exact opposite. Probably still is. There are a lot of single men in The Villages and she’s only sixty-two.”
I’d first met Esther about a year before when she had spent a few days with J.D. on Longboat. She had just bought a new house in The Villages and was waiting for it to be completed. Shortly before Christmas, after she’d had several months to get settled, J.D. and I spent a couple of nights with Esther at her new home. She was a gracious hostess, and I found her to be a delightfully funny and often ribald conversationalist. I liked her a lot.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” J.D. said.
“Do what?”
“Mount your great white steed and ride off to do battle for Aunt Esther.”
“Actually, I do. She’s family.”
“Not your family.”
“She’s your family, and that makes her my family, too.”
She put her hand on top of mine, looked closely at me, smiled, and nodded. “Yes, it does.”
CHAPTER 4
I CHANGED CLOTHES and put on a navy-blue suit, white dress shirt, and a red patterned silk tie, what we lawyers used to call our trial suit. Always look good for the jurors. That bit of wisdom also applied to the first contact with law enforcement. When the lawyer is jumping into the battle against all the forces of the state, the police, the prosecutors, the medical examiners, each with his or her own agenda, he wants to look his best. I’d saved a couple of expensive suits and wore them on the rare occasions that I found myself in a court of law. To be honest, I hadn’t planned on any more trials, but I always thought it important to look good at funerals.
The opening draw on the Cortez Bridge brought me to a stop three cars behind the barricade that controlled the eastbound traffic. A slight shudder ran the length of the bridge, a reaction to the rumbling of the machinery that operated the draw. I waited, enjoying the view of sailboats moored just south of the bridge in the lee of Anna Maria Island. They stood as still as a painting, their reflections etched lightly on the surface of the aquamarine water. God, I loved this place and I was always sad to leave it, even for only a few hours.
I opened my sunroof and savored the gentle sun and slight breeze and thought of my girl, Jennifer Diane Duncan. A couple of years before, she had slipped onto my island and into my life. I was initially intrigued by this woman who, after graduating from Miami’s Florida International University with a degree in criminal justice, had spent twelve years on the Miami-Dade police force, rising to assistant homicide commander. She was in her midthirties and had come to the conclusion that life in the fast lane that was Miami-Dade was burning her out. Her mother, the widow of a career police officer, lived in a condo on Longboat Key, and when she died of pancreatic cancer, her home devolved to her only child. J.D. decided to leave Miami and move to Longboat Key, and my friend Bill Lester, the island police chief, jumped at the chance to hire her to replace his retiring detective.
Jennifer Diane had been born in Atlanta, and in the way of the South, had been named for her two grandmothers. She was called by both names until her dad, an Atlanta cop, shortened that mouthful to J.D. It stuck and that was the name she preferred. She had grown into a beautiful woman, with shoulder-length dark hair and a trim body that she kept in shape by regular exercise. She had green eyes that flashed in anger or amusement, thankfully mostly the latter, but I was smart enough not to cross her. I think when it comes to the women we love, we men are essentially chickens. We’re not proud of that, but we accept it as the way of the world. I was perfectly happy with that state of affairs.
In due time, J.D. became part of that small circle of friends, the year-round residents of our little community, and we were thrown together regularly. Soon, my infatuation with her turned into love. I was the smuggest man on the island when I figured out that she felt the same way about me.
The draw span closed, the barricade rose, and I drove on toward I-75. It was a two-hour drive north to Bushnell, the seat of Sumter County, a small town of about twenty-five hundred residents. The county has a little more than one hundred thousand residents, with the majority of them living in The Villages, a planned retirement community that sprawls across parts of three counties and has more people than all of the rest of Sumter County.
Years before, back in my other life when I was more lawyer than human being, I had tried a case in the old county courthouse, a beautiful Beaux Arts edifice completed in the early twentieth century. Unfortunately, that graceful old building had been replaced by a new judicial center, a place with no soul. The old building still stood, and I suspected the county fathers had found a use for it that was far below the dignity it had enjoyed as the seat of justice in Sumter County.
My case had been tried in a grand old courtroom that boasted trappings serious enough for the murder trial that was taking place. My client was a local physician charged with euthanizing an eighty-nine-year-old woman with terminal cancer that was causing excruciating and unremitting pain. The old courtroom made me feel a bit like Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s wonderful character in 1930’s Alabama. It had been a tough week, but in the end, the jury acquitted my client.
The sheriff’s deputy, who became the lead investigator on the case, had responded to the 911 call placed by my client. He found the doctor, a man in his late thirties named Jeff Carpenter, sitting in a chair next to the bed of the elderly woman’s body, holding her lifeless hand. He didn’t deny his actions, but he refused to talk to the law enforcement officers. The deputy, a deeply religious man, seemed to think it was his moral obligation to see that Dr. Carpenter was convicted and sentenced to death. He once told me that God had guided him in his efforts to wipe my client from the face of the earth.
I pretty much destroyed the deputy on cross-examination, making the case that his religious zealotry had gotten in the way of good police work. And then I turned the religious aspect around, arguing to the jury that this good doctor had a moral obligation to end the woman’s pain, an obligation that transcended the dictates of the Hippocratic oath and even the law. Her life could not be saved, but she would have lived for another three or four weeks in pain that was beyond the understanding of most people. What purpose would be served by prolonging a life that had been lived well and was ending terribly? None of us can define the wishes of God, I argued, so we have to stumble through life, trying to live it in the most moral way possible. My client had been trained to preserve life, but that training also taught him to know when he had been defeated by that awful disease that in some manner touched us all. So even if the overdose of morphine he’d given her had not been accidental, he had acted in the best interest of his patient, who had long ago signed documents instructing her caregivers to refrain from extending her life when it was obvious that she was terminal. I never knew whether the jury bought my argument that the state had not proved that my client had purposely injected a lethal dose of morphine or the argument that, under the circumstances, the death was justifiable homicide.
As I drove along musing about the case, I came to the conclusion that the good news was that I had won the case. The bad news was that the deputy who had been the lead investigator on the case was now the sheriff of Sumter County.
CHAPTER 5
THE SUMTER COUNTY Detention Center’s supervisor came to the reception area to greet me shortly before noon. “Good morning, Mr. Royal. We’ve got your client settled in her cell and nobody talked to her. I told her you were on your way. She seemed a little taken aback, like she didn’t expect you.”
“I’m not surprised. I haven’t talked to her. The first I heard about this situation was when your department arrested her earlier this morning.”
“Have you represented her before?”
I looked at his name tag. “Good try, Lieutenant Ricks, but no. She’s a family friend.”
He laughed. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Not at all. Look, I just want to meet with her and let her know I’m going to handle matters for her. That is, unless she’d rather me not. Assuming she’s okay with me representing her, I want to meet with the sheriff before I spend too much time going over
things with her. And I guess we’ll have the first appearance sometime this afternoon.”
“The first appearance will be before a County Judge, Jim Mattox, at four thirty this afternoon. We’ll use closed-circuit TV. The judge will be in his chambers, and we’ll be here at the jail.”
“That sounds like a plan, Lieutenant.”
“The sheriff is in his office downtown. He wants to see you when you’re finished here.”
“How did he know I was coming?”
“I called him after you called me this morning.”
“Is that standard procedure?”
The lieutenant laughed. “No, sir. But I was a road deputy back when you tried Dr. Carpenter’s case. I watched you take the sheriff apart on the witness stand. I thought I ought to let him know you were going to represent Ms. Higgins.”
“Would you have any objection to my meeting with my client later this afternoon before the video appearance?”
“Not at all, Counselor. We have an open-door policy for lawyers. Come anytime you want. I’m going off shift, but the supervisor who comes on will be glad to help you. Follow me on back. We’ve got Ms. Higgins in an attorney’s conference room.”
Aunt Esther was sitting at a table in a small, windowless room. I knew she was sixty-two years old, but even in this drab and joyless place, she looked fifteen years younger. Her short blond hair was a bit disheveled and she wasn’t wearing makeup. The dark-blue jumpsuit the jail provided did nothing to add to the image. Still, as I entered the room, she smiled.
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