Vindication

by H. Terrell Griffin

  The jail supervisor I’d spoken to that morning had done as I asked and segregated her from the general population. I told Esther what I’d been told by Kevin Cook and what had transpired with Ruth Bergstrom. “Did you really tell her you were going to kill Ms. Lathom?”

  “No. I might have said something like ‘somebody should kill the bitch,’ but I would never have threatened the woman. If truth be known, I wouldn’t mind a whole lot if somebody killed Ruth, too. But I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Would anybody else have heard your comment other than Ruth?”

  “No. We were standing in her front yard. I’d gone over there to confront her about giving the manuscript to Lathom. She denied it, of course. Said that my book was a piece of crap and Lathom had written a book for the ages. For the frigging ages. Can you believe that?”

  “Did you go to the book signing at Barnes & Noble?”

  “No. I was afraid my temper might get the best of me and I’d create a scene.”

  “And you’re sure you’ve never met the woman?”

  “Positive,” she said.

  “Have you ever noticed one of those little commercial vans we see around sometimes? They’re usually marked up pretty good with company logos, that sort of thing, but I’m looking for a plain white one with no markings.”

  “I can’t recall ever seeing one. I probably have, but it just didn’t register. Why?”

  I told her about my conversation with Amber Marris, the bartender at World of Beer. “That may have been the vehicle somebody used to transport the body. I’d sure like to find it.”

  “Did the bartender get a tag number?”

  “No.”

  “There’re cameras all over the place. I know they have them at all the gates to the various villages. Maybe one of them got a plate number.”

  “I’ve thought about that, but I don’t think the people who run The Villages security are going to let me look at their videos or still pictures.” I looked at my watch. “Okay. We’re not going to accomplish anything else today, but we have the first appearance hearing in about thirty minutes, and then I’ve got a long drive back to Longboat. Do you have any questions?”

  “When do you think we’ll get to trial?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got to get a better handle on what evidence the state has. I’ll know more when we get past the hearing today and I have a chance to talk to the prosecutor. Then we can make a decision about filing a motion for speedy trial and asking for bail.”

  “So, I might be here for a while.”

  “Maybe. I’ll try to get bail, but don’t hold your breath on that.”

  “Thanks, Matt. I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”

  A deputy knocked on the door and stuck his head in. “Mr. Royal, we’re setting up for the first appearance. I need to take Ms. Higgins to the video area. It’s just down the hall. You’re welcome to come with us.”

  The hearing was short, only about five minutes. I told Judge Mattox that I would be representing Ms. Higgins and pleaded her not guilty. I waived the reading of the charges, and the judge asked me if I was going to apply for bail. I told him that I would file a motion in the next few days.

  After the hearing, I told Esther that I’d see her on Monday, kissed her on the cheek, and headed to Longboat Key. I had called J.D. while driving to The Villages and again as soon as I left the detention center to drive home. I told her about my conversations with Amber Marris, Ruth Bergstrom, and Kevin Cook, the firefighter, and we discussed Esther’s state of mind. By the time we broke the connection, J.D. knew everything I knew. Maybe we could talk about something more uplifting than murder when I got home. I needed a little downtime and would use the next two days, Saturday and Sunday, to get ready for Monday morning. I’d have to prepare a notice of appearance and some other documents to file with the clerk of court.

  I told myself to stop thinking about it. I wanted to put the case aside for at least a short time so that I could have a beer or two and relax with my girl. There I was, thinking like a lawyer again, planning to drown the stress in alcohol. Except that now, with the exception of a few times that had nothing to do with the law, I limited myself to just two or three beers for the evening.

  The day was dying as I crossed the Cortez Bridge. An onshore breeze, ripe with the smell of the sea, disturbed the bay’s surface, sending ripples under the moored sailboats and causing them to tug gently at their lines. The sun was sinking into the Gulf, its upper half lingering briefly on the edge of the horizon, giving the appearance of the top half of an orange that somehow had been set afire. I turned south onto Gulf Drive and crossed the Longboat Pass Bridge, marveling at the brilliance of colors the sun was spreading across the darkening water, a pastiche of nature’s splendor.

  I could feel the tension of the day leaving my body. I was home and a wonderful woman was waiting in my cottage. I parked and walked in the front door, bellowing, “Home is the hunter.” No response. I checked the rooms. She wasn’t there. I was about to call her cell when I found a note attached to the refrigerator door with one of those little magnets, this one bearing a generic police badge. The note said, “Come to Tiny’s. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  I walked the four blocks to Tiny’s, enveloped in the soft spring air and the glow of the fading light left by the receding sun. My little world was circumscribed by bay and Gulf and laid-back friends. We reveled in the peacefulness of our tiny dot of land on the edge of a great sea, and perhaps understood that we were merely taking up time and space until our lives came to their inevitable ends and others moved into the void left by our passing. Many of my friends, people in middle age, had first seen the island when they were children visiting grandparents who lived here. As the old ones died out, their children, and in their turn, the grandchildren, moved to the key and would live here until it was time to go to whatever lay beyond our earthly horizon. I guess it’s the way of nature, and none of us knew when the end would come. So the prime directive of Longboat Key was simple. Enjoy it while you can.

  Lights were coming on in the houses that lined the short and narrow street called Broadway. I often wondered about the person, now long gone, who must have enjoyed a sense of humor to come up with the name because it was so obviously too grand for this little street.

  As I neared Tiny’s, I could hear the din emanating from the little bar that took up the corner of a small strip-shopping center near the bridge that connected Longboat Key to its neighbor, Anna Maria Island. It was a place that tourists seldom ventured into, leaving it as a dive bar hangout for the locals who lived on the northern end of the island. One of my friends had once described it as the north end clubhouse. And she was right.

  I walked in and saw J.D. sitting at the bar, her back to me. A man sat next to her, a bottle of nonalcoholic beer in front of him. I smiled. Jock Algren was my lifelong best friend, a man I’d grown up with in a small town in the middle of the Florida peninsula. He lived in Houston now, but visited regularly. He was an agent of the US government’s most secretive intelligence agency, one that was so buried in the bureaucracy that it didn’t even have a name.

  “Is this man bothering you?” I asked J.D. as I walked to the bar.

  “Yes. And I’m enjoying it immensely.”

  Jock turned and said, “Buzz off, podna. I got here first.”

  Susie Vaught, the owner of the place, put a glass of Miller Lite on the bar for me. Jock stood and gave me a bear hug. “You doing okay, podna?” he asked.

  “Great, Jock. Glad to see you.”

  “I should have given you some warning that I was on my way, but my boss called early this morning and told me to go to Tampa and meet him. He had a new assignment. Turned out, by the time we got through with the meeting, the operation was called off. Apparently, they had handled it with a drone and a well-placed air-to-ground missile. I decided to just show up here for a few days.”

  “Glad to have you, buddy. Any time. You know that. Your room is always ready.”r />
  “J.D. was just telling me about her aunt. Sounds like you’re ready to suit up again. I thought you were finished with all that.”

  “Me, too. But Esther is family. And besides that, I think I need something to juice up my life a bit. A trial will certainly do that.”

  “Getting a little tired of J.D.?”

  “A little.”

  “Hey,” J.D. said. “You guys knock it off. You’re not nearly as funny as you think you are.”

  I took a stool at the bar and the three of us spent a comfortable evening doing what friends do. We drank a little, told and retold stories, laughed a lot, and talked to friends who wandered in.

  We walked home, the quiet of the evening disturbed only by the feeble noise of traffic on Gulf of Mexico Drive and the occasional otherworldly squawk of the peacocks that made their homes in our neighborhood. Jock had never met Esther, but he knew her relationship to J.D. and that she was the only blood family J.D. had left. “I need to run some facts by you two,” I said. “I need all the insight I can get on this case.”

  “I thought you might want the night off,” J.D. said.

  “I thought I did, too, but it’s not working. It keeps running through my mind.” I told them the facts as I knew them. “I don’t think she was killed in the square,” I said. “Somebody would have heard the shot. I bet the van was used to drop the body in the square. It’ll be interesting to see what the medical examiner arrives at concerning the time of death.”

  “If the cops turn up that van, maybe they’ll find some evidence that will lead us to the bad guys,” J.D. said.

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” I said. “That van could have hit the turnpike within ten minutes of leaving Brownwood and could have been on I-75 within fifteen minutes. It could be anywhere by now.”

  J.D. shrugged. “The sheriff’s detectives will be trying to figure out where Lathom was from the time she left the bookstore,” she said. “Maybe we ought to do the same thing.”

  “Ruth Bergstrom would be a good person to start with,” I said. “She must have spent time with her friend, both before and after the signing.”

  “Don’t the publishers usually send an aide on the tours with those big-time writers?” Jock asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the publisher is the place for us to start. If an aide was with Lathom, he or she would be able to tell us her schedule that day. We’ll have to wait until Monday to contact the publisher.”

  “Maybe not,” J.D. said. “After you left this morning, an update of today’s edition of The Villages Daily Sun was posted on the Internet. It didn’t say anything about an aide, but the reporter mentioned somebody by name who gave her a lot of information. Maybe that was the aide. I think it’d be worth giving the reporter a call and see what we can find out.”

  “Will you give it a try on Monday?” I asked.

  “Sure,” J.D. said. “I don’t guess you have any idea as to what kind of gun killed the lady.”

  “I don’t know. The paramedic who found the body told me the entrance wound was probably from a small-caliber slug. It might have been a twenty-two.”

  “Geez,” J.D. said, using what for her was an expletive. “Aunt Esther has a twenty-two-caliber revolver. A Smith and Wesson that my dad gave her twenty years ago. She wanted to learn to shoot. He took her to the police range several times.”

  “Does she still have the pistol?” I asked.

  “Probably. I haven’t seen it or even thought about it in years. But she’s kind of a pack rat, and I don’t think she’d throw away something my dad gave her. They were real close. Like a brother and sister.”

  “If that pistol was in Esther’s house, the cops will have it by now. I’m sure they’ve run ballistics on it to determine if it is the one that killed Lathom.”

  “If they did,” J.D. said, “that should be good for Aunt Esther. Even if it’s the right caliber, the ballistics will show that it didn’t fire the bullet that killed the victim.”

  “I’ll have to ask her about that on Monday,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are a lot of twenty-twos out there.”

  Turns out that I was dead wrong.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON MONDAY MORNING, I sat on my patio sipping coffee as the night slipped away. The world was slowly revealing itself as feeble light from an invisible sun lurking just below the eastern horizon leaked onto my small island. During the night, sea fog had drifted in from the Gulf, thick and opaque. I was isolated in a bubble of air, surrounded by a cloud so dense that I could not see the edge of the bay less than fifty feet away. It was dead quiet, as if no sound could penetrate the walls of mist the early morning had built around me.

  This kind of fog was rare in our latitudes, but not unheard of as we transitioned from winter into spring. The murk that sometimes enveloped the barrier islands along this coast rarely drifted inland. It would clear as I drove onto the mainland, but Longboat might be socked in all day.

  Our weekend had been uneventful. Jock had played golf with my buddy Logan on both Saturday and Sunday, probably leaving divots all over the manicured course at the Longboat Key Club. On Saturday, J.D. and I had taken my boat, Recess, south on the bay to downtown Sarasota for lunch at the Marina Jack Restaurant. We picked at our salads and talked at length about Esther and about how sad it was that she was sitting in the Sumter County Jail while we were enjoying a beautiful day on the water. “We are a long way from sorting all this out,” I said. “I wonder if I could convince a jury that Lathom committed suicide.”

  J.D. laughed. “Not a chance, buckaroo. Nobody in the history of the world ever committed suicide by shooting themselves in the back with a revolver. A person just can’t reach that far.”

  “Good point.”

  “We do know one thing,” J.D. said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Aunt Esther didn’t do it.”

  “I agree. Can you come up with anything else we might know?”

  “I know you’ll get her off.”

  “What if I don’t?”

  “Then I’ll know you did your very best. That’s all Esther, or I, for that matter, can ask for.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know. How could you not? That’s why I trust you with my only living relative’s life.”

  “You are indeed a bumptious woman.”

  She grinned. “I love you, too. It makes me hot when you go all lawyer.”

  “Time to go home,” I said. I dropped some bills on the table and we set sail. Or cranked the big Yamahas, to be precise.

  Sunday was a day for lying around doing mostly nothing. I perused the newspapers from Sarasota and Bradenton and fired up my computer and read up on the law in case I’d missed anything since the last time I’d done any legal research. J.D. and I walked to Mar Vista for lunch under the trees on the edge of the bay, went home, took a nap, and met Jock and Logan for drinks at Tiny’s. As I said, it was an uneventful weekend.

  The fog was not dissipating. I finished my coffee, looked at my watch. Six thirty. I decided I had time for one more cup before I started the trip to Bushnell. Monday morning was when the world woke from its weekend torpor and went back to work. Retirement changes that metric. Monday becomes just another weekend day when I could sleep in, jog the beach, fish, or just sit. Not today. I was back in the grind.

  The sliding glass door behind me opened, and I felt a pair of arms snake around my neck, a kiss on the top of my head, the warm breath of J. D. Duncan caressing the back of my neck. “Good morning, Counselor.”

  “Don’t start,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking about all the things I’d like to be doing today. Going to the Sumter County courthouse is not one of them.”

  “Want me to go with you? I don’t have anything going on today that somebody else can’t handle.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Do you think you could take some time off? Say a couple of weeks or so?”
/>   “I don’t think it’d be a problem. I’ve got a lot of comp time and vacation built up. Why?”

  “What would you say to an undercover operation in The Villages?”

  “Let me get a cup of coffee.”

  J.D. returned to the patio and sat in the chair next to me. “What have you got in mind?”

  “I’m worried that I won’t be able to get close enough to some of the people I’ll need to talk to up there. And I don’t think an investigator will either. These folks are retired and don’t want to be bothered with a lot of what they might perceive as legal nonsense. If we had you up there, becoming part of the community with nobody knowing you’re Esther’s niece or a cop, you might dig up something.”

  “You’ve got to be fifty-five to live in The Villages. Are you suggesting that I could pass for that age?”

  I laughed. “Not a chance, sugarplum. But I think I read somewhere that only one person in a household has to be over fifty-five.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you know the lady who owns the bookstore up there who is a friend of Aunt Esther’s?”

  “Judy Ferguson. Yes. I’ve met her a time or two. Don’t know her well. You met her when we visited at Christmas. She came to the Thursday-night driveway party at Aunt Esther’s.”

  It had become a tradition. Many of the villages that formed the neighborhoods set aside a couple of hours on Thursday evenings for a driveway party. The person hosting that evening would put some sort of sign on their front yard, a plastic flamingo perhaps, and at five in the afternoon the neighbors would show up with a bottle of whatever they were drinking and an outdoor cocktail party would ensue. The host might provide light snacks from the grocery store and perhaps some mixers for the liquor drinkers, but no host was expected to spend more than a few bucks. By seven, everybody was gone. It was a chance for the neighbors to get to know each other, to chat about unimportant things, and enjoy the company of other retirees from all over the nation.

  “I don’t remember her specifically,” I said, “but she and Esther are pretty close, aren’t they?”