Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  Dedication

  FOR TIFFANY

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by James Grippando

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Unbelievable was the word for her. Samantha Vine was unbelievably beautiful. It was unbelievable that she’d married me. Even more unbelievable that she was gone.

  It was also pretty unbelievable that I’d fallen in love again and remarried. But resilience is more the rule than the exception, isn’t it? People fall in love. People die. People somehow pick up the pieces and move on, accepting or not the soothing spiritual song that death is nothing more than a major change of address. But the most unbelievable thing about Samantha had nothing to do with us. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t even about her. It was about her father. Luther Vine was once an African-American slave.

  Bullshit, you say, and not because you think I’m just a crazy white guy trying to insinuate himself into black history through marriage. Or maybe that is part of your thinking. But mostly, it’s the generational disconnect.

  I totally get the skepticism. Slavery was outlawed in 1865 with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Samantha wasn’t even conceived until then president Jimmy Carter pulled on a cardigan sweater in a chilly White House and asked all Americans to be like him, conserve energy, and turn down the thermostat to fifty-five degrees at night. All winter long, Luther and Carlotta Vine had crawled into bed and heated things up the old-fashioned way. The point is that racism persists, but Samantha was so far removed from the end of slavery as an institution that she had never known a US Supreme Court without a black justice. She had no memory of the NFL without a starting black quarterback. She couldn’t even name a hit song by Prince until he was officially the artist formerly known as Prince, and she wasn’t old enough to party like it’s 1999 until it actually was 1999.

  So, back to that troublesome timeline. Even if Samantha’s old man was literally an old man at her birth, it doesn’t add up. In fact, it flies in the face of history. The last American slave died in 1971. Not one of Sylvester Magee’s children was alive to see the headstone finally laid in his honor in Mississippi more than four decades after his death—coincidentally, the same year I lost my wife.

  Samantha Vine, the daughter of a slave?

  “No way,” people tell me. “Not unless I’m missing something.”

  “You’re missing something.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know sugar.”

  “Fuck you, Abe. It’s you who doesn’t know shit.”

  “No,” I say. “You don’t know sugar.”

  I mean Big Sugar.

  In the fall of 1941 a group of men traveled across the Deep South and visited the black part of towns like Memphis and Biloxi, offering “steady employment” to “colored farm workers” eighteen years or older. It didn’t matter that Luther Vine was only sixteen. Nothing about the offer was legit. “Enjoy Florida Sunshine during the Winter Months,” the ads promised, “while harvesting Sugar Cane on the plantations of the National Sugar Corporation.” Luther wasn’t stupid. Swinging a machete all day, cutting down twelve-foot stalks of sugarcane as thick as a man’s wrist, and loading tons of cane onto a truck wasn’t for college boys. “Any way you slice it,” Luther often said, pun intended, “you’re talkin’ stoop labor.” But the company promised good wages, as much as thirty dollars a week. Good living conditions, free rent, free meals, free transportation to Florida, free medical attention, and recreation were all part of the package. He signed up and got on the truck with the other recruits.

  Their destination had been Clewiston, the “world’s sweetest town,” where thousands of acres of sugarcane butted up against the south shore of Lake Okeechobee in the Florida Everglades. The ride took two days. The men were fed twice, bologna and a slice of bread. Upon arrival, each recruit was handed a bill for eleven dollars—the cost of the “free” ride from Memphis. More charges quickly piled up. Seventy-five cents for a blanket. Fifty for a machete. Another thirty for a file to sharpen the blade. A dollar for a badge that identified a worker as a company employee. Fifty cents for water that wasn’t too dirty to drink. Recruits were up to their eyeballs in debt before the first workday, which started with breakfast at 3:30 a.m. They were in the field by 4:30, broke for a short lunch, and cut more cane until dark. Wages for the first day were a dollar eighty, four bucks short of the amount promised. Superintendents patrolled the fields, armed with blackjacks and pistols, threatening anyone who wasn’t working hard enough or who grumbled about wanting to go home. The best chance to escape was at night. After three weeks—twenty-one straight workdays, rain or shine, sunup to sundown—nine workers ran off from the barracks at the company camp. Luther was one of them. The plan was to hitchhike back to Memphis. They were arrested eighteen miles from Clewiston, fined forty dollars for “vagrancy,” and returned to the field. The only way to pay off the fine was to cut more cane. Naively, Luther asked for permission to convert the fine to prison time, preferring jail. The superintendent cracked him with a blackjack and told him sure thing, as soon as he paid off what he owed the company, a debt that was getting bigger every day because he drank too much water in the field and needed medical attention for a snakebite.

  There were enough runaways for word to trickle back home, and from there to the Department of Justice in Washington, DC. Herbert Hoover himself approved the FBI’s sixty-page investigative report. A federal grand jury in Florida ind
icted National Sugar and several employees for “conspiracy to violate the right and privilege of citizens to be free from slavery under the Thirteenth Amendment.”

  So, in my book, calling Luther Vine a former slave was no stretch, even if the indictment had technically been dismissed. “The grand jury was tainted,” the sugar lawyers argued, “because there weren’t any farmers on it.” Right. And Timothy McVeigh should have complained about the lack of terrorists on the grand jury that indicted him for the Oklahoma City bombing.

  Anyway, Samantha’s father was coming up on his ninetieth birthday. The old man and I were still close, or as close as we could be. Luther was showing signs of dementia, and even though he had good days, he still told folks at the skilled nursing facility that his son-in-law was Abraham Lincoln. A stretch, to be sure, even if I was a tall white lawyer with four score and seven murder trials under my belt. I just went along with whatever Luther said. It only confused him to hear that I was senior trial counsel at the Office of the State Attorney for Miami-Dade County, the go-to guy in capital cases.

  “I’m looking for FBI agent Victoria Santos,” I said to the state trooper.

  Her black-and-tan vehicle, beacons flashing, was one of six Florida Highway Patrol cars blocking the entrance to a mile-long bridge across the heart of the Everglades. The Tamiami Trail was the main route connecting east and west Florida below Lake Okeechobee, the second largest lake in the continental United States.

  “And you are?” she asked.

  “Abe Beckham, state attorney’s office,” I said as I flashed my badge.

  It wasn’t my job to visit every crime scene in Miami-Dade County, even when there was a possible homicide. But when the FBI was tracking a serial killer, it was critical for someone more senior from the state attorney’s office to stay on top of the investigation. The chief assistant to the state attorney had personally asked me to follow up on the report of a body in the Everglades that had all the markings of a fifth victim in south Florida.

  “That way,” the trooper said, pointing toward a gathering of law enforcement agents beside the bridge. They were standing on the old two-lane stretch of highway that ran parallel to the new bridge, and which was no longer in use.

  I thanked her, ducked under the yellow crime scene tape.

  “Abe, hey, what’s going on?”

  I stopped at the sound of the familiar voice. It was the crime-beat reporter from Action News. We were two miles from the western frontier of urban sprawl, too far from downtown Miami to discern even the tallest skyscrapers, but I could see the microwave towers of media vans in the long line of traffic that stretched toward the morning sun. Helicopters were sure to follow. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a camera crew or two arrive by airboat—anything to be first.

  “Nothing to say, Susan.”

  “Oh, come on, Abe.”

  Susan Brown had covered at least a dozen of my murder trials, and I usually gave her what I could. But I truly had nothing. I turned and continued down the embankment.

  The old road had undergone many improvements since Model Ts first rolled across it in 1928, and to many folks a new elevated bridge seemed a waste of money. But it was part of a multibillion-dollar Everglades restoration project, much of which was geared toward undoing the negative impact of the well-intended but catastrophic work of the Army Corps of Engineers in the twentieth century. Levees and canals built by the corps opened the saw-grass plains to sugarcane growers and other farmers, and roads like the 275-mile-long Tamiami Trail made the watery sloughs passable by motorists. The casualty in all the construction was the water flow essential for a healthy Everglades. The new bridge was raised on pilings, adjacent to the old road, to alleviate the damming effect.

  I hopped from the embankment onto the old road but came up short. I was halfway up to my knees in muck.

  “Ah, shit.” It wasn’t just the wet shoes and pant legs. It takes a thousand years of decomposition to create a foot of peat, and I’d just unleashed the rotten stink of nine hundred and ninety-nine.

  “Let me help you out there, pardner,” said one of the troopers. He tugged me by the arm, and the muck puckered like a suction cup as my foot emerged from the Everglades version of quicksand. I considered rinsing off the black mess in the standing water near a culvert, but the nine-foot alligator sunning itself on the bank changed my mind.

  “Welcome to Shark Valley,” said the trooper.

  I assumed that it was just a name, that there weren’t actually any sharks around, but I was nonetheless glad to be on dry land. Not that there was much of anything dry around me. From the southern lip of Lake Okeechobee, tea-colored water flowed for a hundred miles, south to the tip of mainland Florida and west to the Gulf of Mexico, much as spilled milk spreads across the kitchen table. Covering these millions of watery acres, flat as a Kansas wheat field, were endless waves of saw grass, a rare species of swamp sedge that has flourished for over four thousand years. This legendary “river of grass” divided the east coast of Florida from the west, an environmental marvel where visitors found exotic reptiles, manatees, and rainbow-colored tree snails, roseate spoonbills and ghost orchids, towering royal palms and gumbo limbos. Here, biblical clouds of mosquitoes could blacken a white canoe within seconds, and oceans of stars filled a night sky untouched by city lights. There was no other place on earth like it. I rarely went there, except when passing through at sixty miles per hour on the drive to Naples.

  Or, on a day like today, recovering a body.

  “Freakin’ cold out here,” I muttered, but my trooper friend had already moved on to pull some other moron out of the muck.

  Fifty-one degrees in February is downright frigid by Miami standards, and the FBI agents were readily identifiable in their dark blue windbreakers with yellow lettering. The feds were part of a much larger, multijurisdictional task force. Miami-Dade police were at the scene, including two homicide detectives I knew well and a team from the South Florida Homicide Clearing House, which played a key role in any investigation involving interagency cooperation. The medical examiner’s van was parked alongside the road. I saw only one woman who was marked FBI, and even though she probably had no memory of our previous meeting, I recognized Victoria Santos. I went toward her. She was talking to a member of the road-striping crew who had been repainting the markings on the new bridge. His sharp eyes had spotted the body in the saw grass alongside the old road.

  “Didn’t really look human at first,” the worker told her.

  I was standing off to one side, close enough to hear. Santos was a good-looking woman with short, dark hair that reflected hints of crimson in the Florida sun. As the coordinator in residence for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes, she was on the front line as primary liaison between the FBI and local law enforcement. She was new to Miami, however, and I’d met her only once before, as an FBI instructor in an invitation-only course for prosecutors presented at the national academy in Quantico. Santos was a twenty-year veteran and a bit of a legend at the FBI, not just because she was good, but also because she wasn’t afraid to buck the system, which didn’t always win friends at FBI headquarters. I had to wonder if that was the reason she’d been reassigned from the prestigious Behavioral Analysis Unit, a nationwide responsibility, to the field office in Miami, where her first case landed her neck deep, so to speak, in Everglades muck.

  “What I noticed first was the ring,” the witness told Santos. “The diamond caught the sun and gave off this sparkle that you really couldn’t miss. I was riding in the bed of the pickup truck, passing traffic cones down to the road crew. But when this sparkle down in the saw grass catches my eye, I squint to take a closer look, and I think to myself, What the hell? I’m pretty sure the ring was still attached to a hand, so I bang on the roof and says ‘Charlie, stop the truck!’ And then both Charlie and me walk over to the guardrail along the bridge, and we’re still a good twenty yards away, looking down into the swamp. And Charlie agrees with me. It’s definitel
y a ring on someone’s hand. And so I throws a rock in the general direction, and this monster bull gator scurries off thataway.” He pointed to a mound about twenty feet away. “That’s when we saw the rest of the body come floating to the surface.”

  Santos was a professional and showed little reaction, but the crime scene photographer was already doing his job, and I knew that someday—soon, if we all did our jobs—I would have to show a jury some pretty gruesome exhibits. I eavesdropped for another ten minutes and let Santos finish with the witness before introducing myself. She replied by telling me that she was leading the task force investigation of a serial killer known as Cutter. It was pretty much SOP for the FBI to remind local law enforcement that the bureau was in charge, but in this instance Santos wasn’t just posturing. Cutter’s four previous victims had been residents of Palm Beach County, seventy miles to the north, their bodies found in the sugarcane fields just outside Clewiston. Like everyone else from Miami-Dade County, I was an outsider to the larger investigation and not yet an official member of the task force.

  “Can we talk a minute?” I asked.

  Santos nodded, and we found a place away from the crowd. Behind us, beyond a copper-brown stretch of saw grass, a flock of egrets found a place to rest above the tangled roots of mangroves. The reflection of the white birds on the flat, black water was straight out of a Clyde Butcher exhibition.

  “You think this is victim number five?” I asked.

  “Hard to know just yet,” said Santos. “So far we have some common indicators. Young woman. Unclothed body. I count at least one grievous blade wound already, probably a machete. But it would be Cutter’s first strike outside Palm Beach County.”

  “Or it could be a Palm Beach County victim and the first disposal of a body in Miami-Dade,” I said. “Which would make some sense, wouldn’t it? After four victims dumped in Palm Beach County cane fields, it must be pretty risky to dispose of another body there. He has to believe that law enforcement is on heightened alert in that area.”

  “Totally with you on that,” she said. “But at this point, we’re very preliminary on whether it’s the same killer. Definite similarities, but we’ll have to wait for confirmation on sexual assault and some other indicators.”

 
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