Vindication

by H. Terrell Griffin

  I pulled up Google Maps and plotted a course to Douglas. I called Hertz and arranged to keep the car for another couple of days while I drove south, stopped in Douglas, before going back to the Tampa airport to retrieve my Explorer.

  The drive was brutal. I took I-85 South, enjoying sparse traffic until I neared the Atlanta bypass. Even at midday the cars and trucks were stacked up like so many ants swarming a donut morsel. I crawled through the bottlenecks and finally exited onto I-75. I stopped in Barnesville for a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke and ate lunch while I drove southward. I passed Cordele and after a few more miles, turned off the interstate for the fifty-mile drive to Douglas.

  The Coffee County courthouse was a modern building, like most of those in the small towns throughout the South. The communities had outgrown the aging buildings with their antiquated amenities that had served as courthouses for decades. These gracious old edifices had been replaced by buildings that looked more like a Walmart than a palace of justice. They had new wiring, new plumbing, furniture, and courtrooms that looked like every other one in the state. The old courtrooms, the dignified places where lawyers had plied their trade for generations, were at best consigned to the museums that the old courthouses had become. It was a pity.

  The clerk who waited on me was polite, helpful, smiling, and called me sir. A typical Southerner, not unlike the woman who’d helped me in Anderson a few hours before. I missed that. Florida was a southern state only in a geographical sense. The influx of Midwesterners over the past thirty years had edged out the southern influences that had once been endemic to Florida. That wasn’t all bad, because the newcomers were for the most part gracious people who had brought with them their innate amiability. Still, it was different, and being back in the state of my birth brought a sense of belonging that was often missing in a place peopled largely by untethered snowbirds whose knowledge of Florida was restricted to beaches and Disney World.

  I gave the nice lady a twenty and a five from my wallet and took the proffered death certificate. I sat in a chair in the waiting area and looked it over. It showed that Danny Lathom had died of cardiac arrest. Interesting. I think in the final analysis everybody dies of cardiac arrest, whether it is brought on by a bullet to the heart, a disease process, or some other calamity. That didn’t tell me much.

  The box for the name, including the last name before marriage, of the surviving spouse simply said, “Olivia Travers.” There was a name typed in the box for the medical examiner. I went back to the clerk and showed her the name. “Is the medical examiner still working for the county?” I asked.

  “No, sir. He died five or six years back.” Dead end.

  “Can you point me to the sheriff’s office?” She smiled and gave me directions.

  CHAPTER 25

  I WALKED INTO another modern building and asked the desk clerk if it was possible to see the sheriff. “Sure,” he said. “Name?”

  “Matthew Royal. I’m a lawyer from Longboat Key, Florida.” I handed him my business card. He walked through a door to the back of the building and returned almost immediately. “The sheriff will be right with you,” he said. I marveled at the fact that in small counties one does not have to go through layers of bureaucracy to see the top man in any department. It turned out that I was not going to see the top man after all.

  A uniformed woman came through the door the clerk had used a few moments before. She appeared to be in her midforties and was almost as tall as my six feet. She had a trim body, blond hair tied in a tight bun, and an engaging smile that brightened the room. Her uniform was devoid of any rank insignia. Probably another clerk, I thought. “Mr. Royal,” she said, approaching me with her hand extended. “I’m Sheriff Phyllis Black.”

  I was surprised. I guess there is some expectation in many of us that the person in charge will always be a man. I don’t think it’s a prejudice, just something that’s been a part of our culture for so long that we’re slow to accept the change when seen in a microcosm. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a woman governor on TV, but I guess when you’re in the small-town South, even if you were born in a similar place, you expect the sheriff to be some big-bellied good old boy with a backwoods drawl.

  We shook hands, and I followed her into the bowels of the office. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Black.” We stopped in a kitchen, poured a couple of cups from a pot that had probably already boiled the taste out of the brew, and went to her office, a compact affair mostly consumed by a desk and chairs.

  “How can I help you?” she asked after we were seated.

  “I’m representing a woman down in Sumter County, Florida, who is accused of murdering a woman who used to live here. Her husband died about twenty years ago and left her a sizeable amount of money. They’d only been married for a month or so when he died.”

  “Danny Lathom,” she interrupted.

  I guess my surprise showed. She laughed. “We’re a small county, Mr. Royal.”

  “I guess so,” I said, smiling. “Did you know the couple?”

  “I knew Danny pretty well. He and my dad were hunting buddies, so he was around our house a lot. I never met his wife. I was in college when he married her. It was kind of a scandal around town. Danny was well liked and everybody knew they’d eloped and gotten married a day or two after he met her. Then he died at the end of May. I graduated from Mercer University the same day. My parents were in Macon for my graduation, and Daddy got a call about Danny’s death. I rode home with them that afternoon. I met his wife briefly at the service the day after he died. She left town the very next morning, and I don’t think anybody’s seen her since.”

  I handed her the death certificate. “Have you ever seen this?”

  She looked at it. “Yes. My dad was suspicious of Danny’s death and asked me to look into it.”

  “You looked into it?”

  “Yes. After I finished at Mercer, I enrolled in the police academy up in Macon. When I graduated, I was hired on in this department as a deputy. Been here ever since. My investigation of Danny’s death was what I like to call quasi-legal. I didn’t burden the old sheriff with what I was doing in my off-hours.”

  “Did you come up with anything? Like who the widow really was?”

  “Nada. I did find out that Danny had a little over two million dollars in his accounts at the bank. Danny had recently turned all his accounts into joint accounts with his new wife. The day he died, she stopped by the bank and told them she would like the entire amount of all the deposits put into a cashier’s check payable to her. She picked up the check the next day, right after the funeral, and left town the next morning. The house keys were on the kitchen counter with a note saying that she wouldn’t be back and that the county should sell the house and furnishings and give the proceeds to charity. The problem was that after the mortgage note—the one Danny had put on the house a week before his death—was paid off, there was no money left. In fact, the bank had to eat most of that mortgage.”

  “You seem to know a lot about Danny’s finances. How did you swing a warrant working under the radar?”

  She winked at me. “I was sleeping with the man who had all the information.” She paused, smiled, waited for my reaction. I sat stone-faced wondering at the things that go on in small towns. She laughed, “Jack, my husband at the time, owned the bank. In fact, he still does and he’s still my husband.”

  “Poor Jack,” I said. “I pretty much live with a cop myself.”

  Sheriff Black laughed again. “Then you understand the tough position my poor husband was in.”

  “I surely do. Were you suspicious about the cause of death the ME put on his report?”

  “Sure. He died at home and a doctor who lived next door pronounced him dead. Natural causes, he said. The medical examiner, who never was great shakes at determining cause of death, went along with it. He just put in the cause of death as cardiac arrest because his heart sure did stop. Olivia had called a funeral home
to come get the body and ordered that he be cremated at once. The neighbor who pronounced him dead, the doctor, okayed the cremation.”

  “Was that normal procedure?”

  “No, but it didn’t break any law and it saved the ME some time. He didn’t have to do an autopsy.”

  “Who was the doctor? The one next door.”

  “Fellow named Bunky Allen. He’s dead now. Cardiac arrest.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Caused by a stab wound in the chest about five years ago,” she said. “Severed his aorta and he died in seconds.”

  “Do you think Bunky’s murder had anything to do with Danny’s death?”

  “It wouldn’t appear to be connected. A man who’d lost his wife through some action on Bunky’s part, or so the man claimed, stabbed him in the hospital corridor late one afternoon. Several people saw the attack. The perp is spending the rest of his life as a guest in one of Georgia’s finer prisons.”

  “Was Bunky really responsible for the man’s wife’s death?”

  “Maybe. Bunky wasn’t much of a doctor.”

  “What did you do about finding Olivia?”

  “Keep in mind that I didn’t get involved in the case until a year or so after Danny’s death. Our forensic people had dusted Danny’s house for prints right after his death.”

  “Wasn’t that a bit odd since the death was ruled natural?”

  “The old sheriff didn’t have a lot of faith in our ME and he thought something might pop up later about the death being suspicious. He treated the house as a crime scene for a few hours, got what information he could, filed it away, and forgot about it.”

  “Did the old sheriff run the prints?”

  “No, but I did. There were some that were most likely hers and I ran them. There were no matches in any of the databases. That’s not uncommon, you know. Unless somebody has to get an occupational license of some sort, or was in the military, or arrested, there might very well never have been a reason for her to be fingerprinted. I ran several other sets of prints I found in the house and got hits. They were all people who had reason to be there.”

  “How about other databases?”

  “I checked everything. Births, marriages, high school and college graduations, welfare rolls, you name it. She wasn’t listed. She was a ghost. The first record I could find that included Olivia was a marriage license issued in Anderson County, South Carolina, when she married Danny. The name on that license was Olivia Travers. I never found any other records of her under either Travers or Lathom.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got the marriage license. What about nicknames, like Liv? Did you run those?”

  “I did. I used every variation of Olivia that my computer and I could come up with. Didn’t find a thing. A month after that marriage, she was a rich widow who dropped off the earth.”

  “The Sumter County ME down in Florida didn’t get a hit either. A source I trust said Olivia’s prints weren’t on any database in the world. Did you follow up on the cashier’s check?”

  “Yeah. She deposited it in a bank in Atlanta and immediately transferred money into several new accounts in other banks. The accounts were in different names, and those accounts were closed within a few days of the money transfer. All the accounts were opened with small deposits during the weeks before Danny’s death.”

  “Sounds like evidence of premeditation,” I said.

  “You bet. But I couldn’t prove murder without a confession from Olivia. I didn’t have a body to exhume and no way to determine if Danny had been killed or actually died of natural causes. And Olivia was gone.”

  “What about the bank accounts and their dates of opening?”

  The sheriff shrugged. “You’re a criminal defense lawyer. How far do you think I’d get with only the bank accounts for evidence?”

  “I can’t even see you getting an indictment.”

  She nodded. “Neither can I.”

  “Were you ever able to find anything at all about Olivia?”

  “No. I tried for several years. Every year or two, I’d run the prints through the databases again, but she had just dropped off the world. Are you sure your victim is the same Olivia Lathom Danny married?”

  “I think so. Do you still have her prints on file?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll send you a copy of the print card on our victim. The one the ME took. Just to make sure.”

  “I’ll run it all again, once we verify that your dead woman is the one who was married to Danny Lathom—maybe we can pick up her trail.”

  “Did you know that Danny had a son?” I asked.

  “Yes. Well, I knew he had a child. That was kind of common knowledge around here. I don’t think anyone ever knew the baby’s sex.”

  “Do you know where he or his mother live?”

  “I don’t. That was a great mystery that was never solved. I don’t know how the word got out that Danny had a child, but he never denied it. He never told anybody where the woman and the baby lived or anything about them.”

  I grinned. “But you know something, don’t you, Sheriff?”

  “I found some records in his checking account where he had been sending the mother a check every month. At least I assumed it was the mother. It was a regular check in the same amount every month to a woman named Grace Hanna.”

  “Did you get an address?”

  “No. There were just canceled checks.”

  “Did you find the name of the bank where she cashed or deposited the checks?”

  “You think she might be able to help you find Olivia?”

  “Probably not, but it’s a loose end.”

  “I’m sure I have copies of the checks in my old file. Do you want to take a look?”

  “That’d be great.”

  Sheriff Black left the room and returned in a few minutes. “More coffee?” she asked as she walked in the door, file in hand.

  “No, thanks. Did you ever try to follow up on Grace?”

  “No. I didn’t see any connection between them. That child would have been a couple of years old before Danny even met Olivia.”

  “How did you get the child’s age? Was there paperwork somewhere with that information?”

  “Not that I ever saw. I didn’t even know the child’s gender until you mentioned that Danny had a son. How did you find that out?”

  “Danny’s brother, Charles, told me. How did you find out about the child?”

  “Idle gossip, I guess. It was the talk of the county for a week or so, and then everybody forgot about it. It wasn’t that unusual for a man to sow his oats, and sometimes those oats produced what we used to call yard children.” She pronounced “children” as “chillun.” “They were bastards that nobody cared much about or paid any attention to.”

  She passed a copy of a check across the desk to me. I examined it. It was in the amount of two thousand dollars, made payable to Grace Hanna. I whistled. “Were all the checks this big?”

  “Same amount, from about the time the child would have been born until a couple of weeks before Danny died. There were also several checks made out to Valdosta State University over a two-year period. The little ‘for’ line on the checks said they were tuition checks for a certain number, which looked like a student ID number to me.”

  “Did you follow up on the tuition? Find out who it was for?”

  She shook her head. “No. It didn’t seem important.”

  “Yeah, I agree. I can’t see how it would have anything to do with Danny’s death.”

  I turned over the check payable to Grace Hanna. The stamp was faded, but I could read the name of the bank. Farmers Mutual Bank in Cordele, Georgia, another small town about an hour and a half’s drive from where I sat.

  We finished our coffee and wound down our conversation. She gave me her business card with a phone number scrawled on the back. “That’s my personal cell. If you need anything, feel free to call.”

  It was getting late and I was tired. I sat in the park
ing lot and reviewed my day. I’d driven several hundred miles, kept my strength up with fast food and Diet Coke, and met some nice people in two counties in two states. I’d gotten some information, but it was as murky as a silt-filled tidal pool. I wondered if it had been worth the effort and the two days out of my life. Maybe the new facts would make more sense down the line when I’d learned more and the mosaic was coming together.

  I checked for messages on my phone. Old Charles, drunk as he was, proved to be a man of his word. He’d texted me the names and last known address of Danny’s son and his mother. The address was in Cordele. I drove a few blocks to another fast-food restaurant, got dinner to go, and found a Hampton Inn with an available room.

  I called J.D. and told her what I’d found out during my day on the road. She told me that she was planning to go to Longboat for the weekend and wondered when I’d get home. “Probably late tomorrow,” I said. “I’m beat and just checked into a hotel here. I’ve got to drive up to Cordele tomorrow morning and see what I can find out about Danny Lathom’s illegitimate son and his mother.”

  “You think they might be involved somehow?”

  “Not really, but it’s a loose thread. Pull at enough of those, and you’re bound to hit pay dirt.”

  “You’re really not very good at metaphors,” she said, “but I get your point. Guess that means I’ll be sleeping alone tonight.”

  “You’d better be.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got an old law school buddy who practices in Cordele. Tomorrow is Saturday, but I’ll call him tonight. He can probably help me find the people I need to talk to. He’s lived there all his life and knows everybody.”

  “When do you plan on getting back to the island?”

  “As soon as I can get done what I need to do in Cordele, I’ll head south. It’ll take me about six hours to get home.”

  “Why don’t you just stop off in The Villages? You can stay at Aunt Esther’s place. I’ll stop by for a visit. I can put off going to Longboat. The only reason I was going down there was because I thought you were heading home.”