Longboat Blues

by H. Terrell Griffin

  “Why are you looking for James?”

  “He was involved in a business deal that went sour, and I’m hoping he can give me some information I need about the company.”

  “I know who you are Mr. Royal, and that’s the only reason I don’t run you out of this office. I called Bill Lester, and he vouched for you. This county is clean. There was a time when it wasn’t. You must have been surprised that the sheriff was not some good ole boy about seven feet tall with a pot belly and a six shooter. I grew up here.” He went on to explain that his dad had been a shrimper. Tuten had played football at the high school and had made all-state his senior year. He was what they called a scatback in those days. He had been too small for college ball, but he had gotten an academic scholarship to Florida State. He earned a degree in Criminology and a commission in the Army Military Police. After the Army, he joined the Jacksonville police department and eventually became chief of detectives. He told me that his county had always been corrupt in small ways, but about five years before, some of the locals had gotten into the import business. They had been bringing in bales of marijuana in their fishing boats. The previous sheriff had been getting a nice percentage of the gross to look the other way. The governor sent in a special prosecutor who convicted the sheriff and about half a dozen others on drug charges.

  Tuten came home and ran for sheriff. He always thought James was deeply involved in the local importing operation, but the only thing anybody had ever gotten on him was a vote buying charge. He had been giving five dollars and a fifth of liquor to anybody who would agree to vote for the old sheriff in the last election before the whole thing fell apart. It was a misdemeanor, and James pled guilty. The judge gave him ninety days probation. He was still in Ware County, running his motel.

  “Now if I didn’t know who you were I would think you were here to start up the import business again. Are you?”

  “No, Sheriff,” I said. “To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not sure exactly why I’m here. I just want to talk to James and see if he can help me find a man named Hale Rundel.”

  I told him everything I knew so far about the Rundel Enterprises deal and James’ part in it. When I finished the sheriff shook his head and said, “There’s no way in this world John James could get hold of a million dollars legally. Let’s go talk to him.”

  We drove out of town on the main highway, which meandered southeast until it ran into U.S. 19. We turned into the dirt driveway of something called the James Motel. There were four separate tin roofed concrete block buildings, each of which held two rooms. The paint was peeling from the red doors of each room. A fifth building, with a sign in front announcing it to be the office, appeared to be the living quarters of whomever ran the operation. A rural mail box and a round newspaper box with a faded Tallahassee Democrat painted on its sides were attached to posts in front of the office. .

  The sheriff said, “James’ mother owns this dump. She used to make a small living out of it, but I doubt she’s had an overnight guest in years. She had a stroke about five years ago, and John pretty much takes care of her and the place. He lives out back in a trailer. Once in a while, some politician from Tallahassee will drive down with his secretary and rent a room for a couple of hours. That’s about all.”

  “How does he make a living?” I asked.

  “He worked at the local Ford dealer’s body shop until it went out of business. Now he teaches body work in the shop at the high school and runs the motel.”

  Behind the main building was an extra long mobile home set up on stacked concrete blocks. It was painted in alternating horizontal stripes of orange, white and brown. Each stripe was about two feet wide. There was a set of handmade wooden steps leading to the front door. There were gracious old oak trees surrounding the place, but grass only sparsely covered the ground.

  We parked in the yard and got out of the car. The door to the trailer home opened to reveal a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt, khaki trousers and a pair of white socks without shoes. He had a beer belly, sparse brown hair going to gray, and a face that had lost its teenage bout with acne.

  “Hello, John,” said the sheriff. “We need to talk to you about an airplane.”

  “Hidy, Sheriff,” said James. “Don’t know much ‘bout planes. I ain’t never had to fix one.”

  “We want to talk about the one you bought, John,” said the sheriff.

  “You got to be kiddin’, Sheriff. I hardly got the money to pay the light bill this month. Florida Power’s already threatened to shut it off. ‘Sides, what would I do with an airplane anyway?”

  “John, this is Mr. Royal. He’s a lawyer from Longboat Key. We have good evidence that you put up a million dollars for Rundel Enterprises to buy an airplane. You can tell us what you know about this, or I can get an affidavit from a lawyer in Sarasota named Jones and come back and arrest you. I don’t think you really want to screw around with me.”

  “Now Sheriff, you know damn well I ain’t never had a million dollars, or anything close to it. But y’all come on in and sit, and I’ll tell you all I know.”

  The trailer looked, as my mother used to say, as if a cyclone had struck it. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes, glasses, pots and pans. Several days worth of old newspapers had been discarded at random in the living room. There was a sour smell pervading the place, and I began to wonder if he had hidden the legendary Big Foot in a closet. There was an overstuffed sofa and two chairs in the room, each covered with a cloth cover that can be bought at Sears. Even the covers were old and worn. James sat in one chair, the sheriff in the other, and I took the sofa.

  “Tell me about Rundel,” I said.

  “Look,” he said, “All I did was to do a favor for a friend. He gave me the money, and I wrote a check for the whole thing. He gave me five hundred dollars for my trouble. If there was anything illegal going on, I didn’t know about it, Sheriff. I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Tell Mr. Royal about Rundel,” said Sheriff Tuten. “If you didn’t do anything wrong, and it checks out, you’ve got nothing to worry about from me.”

  James was obviously nervous. It was a testament to the power the sheriff held in this county. That is not always a good thing, but I thought this sheriff would use the power wisely.

  “I don’t really know this Rundel,” James said. “I only saw him a couple of times. He had me open an account over in Palatka and he gave me a check for a million dollars to put into it. He had me set it up so that the only way I could get any money out was to have another friend of his sign on the check too. About two weeks after I opened the account, Rundel and this guy named Cox showed up, and we drove over to Palatka. Cox was the other guy on the checks. We wrote a check to the bank and they gave us a cashier’s check. I didn’t see how it was made out. Rundel handled all the paperwork, and Cox and I signed everything and showed the bank folks our driver’s licenses. We drove on down to Sarasota and met with this lawyer Jones. Rundel told him I was an investor in something or other, but I didn’t pay much attention to what they were talking about. We gave him the check and left. Rundel had me sign my name to some sort of letter and we drove back to Gulfplace. He gave me five one hundred dollar bills, and I ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since. That’s all there is to it, Sheriff. I swear.”

  “What did the letter say?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

  “That was probably the letter of instruction to Jones,” I said to the Sheriff. “None of this makes a whole lot of sense, unless they were just moving money around in an attempt to launder it or confuse the paper trail. Where did you meet Rundel, Mr. James?”

  “My stepson introduced me to him up in Tallahassee. That’s when he asked me to help him out with this little money problem he had. Said something about trying to keep it out of the hands of his ex-wife. I got a couple of those, and I know how it is.”

  “Who is your stepson?” Sheriff Tuten asked.

  “John Noblin.”

&n
bsp; The name meant nothing to me or the sheriff. “He owns an insurance agency up in Tallahassee,” said James. I filed it away for future reference.

  We were back at the sheriff’s office. It was spartan. There were no pictures of the sheriff with various dignitaries, such as you usually see in a politician’s office. The desk was basic green metal government issue. There were two straight chairs facing the desk, and a vinyl covered swivel chair for the sheriff.

  Tuten had loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. His shoulder holster, with the nine millimeter semi-automatic pistol, was hung over the hat tree. He was sitting behind his desk with his feet propped up. I was in one of the chairs facing the desk.

  “James is probably telling the truth,” said the sheriff. “I think he’s scared enough of me at this point that he couldn’t pull off that big a lie. Besides, if he had a million dollars of his own, I don’t think he’d be hanging around here.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “But I don’t understand why the money was being moved around like James says it was. If they were trying to launder it, they sure weren’t doing a very professional job. I would think the bank might get suspicious about a guy like James coming in with a million dollars and then taking it out two weeks later.”

  “Probably,” said the sheriff. “But there was nothing illegal in what the bank did, and the float, the interest the bank earned while the money was in a checking account, makes for a pretty good chunk of change. The bank officers wouldn’t take any suspicions they had to the law, because they wouldn’t want to disrupt what could become a fairly lucrative pattern.

  “There is something that may be of interest to you, Matt,” the Sheriff said. “About 6 months ago, a man named Bud Dubose and his wife died in his place out near the beach. The place burned to the ground after an explosion. I think it was caused by a gas leak they didn’t know they had. But, I got a call from a lawyer down in Lauderdale a couple of months ago, who said she was Bud’s sister, and felt that the deaths were murder. She said that a man named Rundel was responsible. I don’t think there’s anything to it, but it is interesting that the Rundel name comes up twice in two months. It’s not a common name.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “Do you remember the lawyer’s name?”

  He pulled what appeared to be a call log from one of his desk drawers, and flipped through several pages. “Her name is Anne Dubose.” He gave me her phone number.

  I thanked the sheriff for all his trouble and headed back to Longboat. I ate a frozen microwave dinner, and collapsed into bed for a good night’s sleep. I noticed that the message light on my phone was blinking, but I ignored it. I was too tired to deal with whoever or whatever the phone call was about.

  The next morning was like most mornings in Southwest Florida - beautiful. I did my jog on the beach early, before it got too hot to even think about running in the sun. After my shower and first cup of coffee, I felt good enough to check my phone messages. There were two from people trying to sell me stuff, and one from Elizabeth Ferguson. I checked the time; 7:30. She’d probably be in the office by now. I called.

  “Matt, I appreciate your getting back to me. I have a proposition for you.”

  I was about to make a smart retort, but decided this prosecutor would not appreciate it. She was all business. “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “My boss said we would take your offer of producing Logan, but we go to trial a week from Monday. I’ll deliver the discovery material today.”

  “Good Lord, Elizabeth,” I said, a sense of foreboding flooding my nervous system. “I can’t possibly be ready to go to trial next Monday. It’s Friday already.”

  “You can bring him in, move for a speedy trial and get yourself ninety days to prepare,” she said.

  “Will you agree to bail for Logan?”

  “You know that’s not going to happen, Matt. My boss is up for re-election next year. I’m supposed to tell you that if you don’t produce Mr. Hamilton at the county jail by a week from Sunday, the deal is off.”

  I thought about it for a moment. If I didn’t buy the deal, Logan would have to come in and sit in jail for months before trial, or spend the rest of his life as a hunted man. “Elizabeth, I have to run this by my client. Can I get back to you?”

  “Gotta be quick, Matt. I can’t hold this together very long.”

  “I’ll give you a decision by noon,” I said, without much conviction.

  This was probably the best deal Logan was going to get, but I couldn’t make the decision. It was his trial, his life, and therefore his decision. If he didn’t call this morning, I’d have to make that decision myself. I might be putting his life in graver danger by agreeing to go to trial on such short notice, but the alternative was for him to remain a fugitive. I didn’t think Logan was going to come in voluntarily, unless the trial started immediately. No wonder trial lawyers learn to live with ulcers.

  My cell phone rang. It was eight o’clock, Logan calling. I would not have to make the decision. We discussed the pros and cons of the deal, and I urged him to turn himself in and go to trial in ninety days. That would give me plenty of time to get ready for trial.

  Most people don’t have any idea of the process that lawyers call “getting ready for trial.” Lawyer dramas on TV give the impression that the lawyer walks into the courtroom cold, and by dent of his superior intelligence and lucky witnesses, wins the case. That is not even close to the truth.

  A good trial lawyer has to know the law as it applies to his case, and be ready to instruct the judge. The law, though, is often painted in shades of gray, and the other lawyer will argue her case, trying to talk the judge into applying her view of the law to the facts. Witnesses are notoriously unreliable. Too often, a witness will make a statement from the witness stand that is directly in conflict with what he told investigators. The trial lawyer has to spend time with the witnesses in the days leading up to trial, making sure that memories don’t change, and the carefully laid plan of attack is sunk by a misstatement from the witness stand. Even then, it is a crap shoot.

  In this case, I did not even know who to blame, other than Logan, and truth be told, I wasn’t sure Logan didn’t do the deed. He was playing things awfully close to the vest, parceling facts out to me like a miser forced to spend a few pennies. Logan had something to hide, and he was hiding it from me.

  I explained all this to my client, lobbying hard for the ninety days I needed. Logan was adamant. He wanted to go to trial. He would be at the sheriff’s office to turn himself in on Sunday evening by six o’clock. We would start the trial at nine o’clock on Monday morning. I had nine days to get ready for trial.

  I called Elizabeth, and left word with Mavis, her secretary, that we would take the deal. Mavis assured me the discovery material would be at my condo by noon. A messenger proved Mavis’ word to be good.

  I spent the rest of the day pouring over the contents of the file sent by Elizabeth Ferguson. There were really no surprises in the material. I spent the weekend talking by phone to the witnesses listed in the prosecution’s witness list. I couldn’t see where any of them had much to add to the case.

  Chapter 17

  MONDAY

  Monday morning, the third Monday in June. A week until the trial starts. I awake with the feeling in my gut that every trial lawyer knows all too well. A feeling of not knowing enough, not being prepared, wishing he were anywhere but getting ready for a trial. Time always runs out. There is never enough time to prepare as much as you would like. Most trial lawyers, the good ones anyway, are paranoid and a little obsessive compulsive. We worry too much. We want to know all the facts, but we never do. I hoped that Anne Dubose could help in that department.

  I called the number the Sheriff gave me. The receptionist answered by reciting the first two names of the firm, a relatively modern means of shortening the names of firms that hadgrown too long with the addition of all the egos who are the major rainmakers. I knew the firm, and was impre
ssed that Anne was working there.

  When she came on the phone, I identified myself and told her I was a lawyer in Longboat Key, working on a murder case, and I thought she might be of some help to me.

  “What kind of help, Mr. Royal?”

  “The name Hale Rundale has come up in my investigation. Sheriff Tuten in Ware County tells me that you think Mr. Rundel may have been involved in your brother’s and sister-in-law’s deaths.”

  “Are you with a firm over there, Mr. Royal?”

  “No. Actually, I’m retired, but I’m trying to help a friend.”

  “Do you think Rundel had something to do with the murder you’re investigating?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s the only lead I’ve got right now.”

  “I can tell you a great deal about Mr. Rundel. Can we meet somewhere?”

  “I can come to Lauderdale today, if that’s okay. My trial starts a week from Monday.”

  “That’ll work. Where will you be staying?”

  “I like the Marriott Marina Hotel.”

  “Why don’t I meet you in the bar at about 5:00 this evening?”

  I threw my overnight bag into the Explorer and drove off the Key, through Sarasota and out to I-75. I headed south, and then west across the Everglades on Alligator Alley, now part of the Interstate system. I got off in Broward County on U. S. 1, and drove north to Seventeenth street, turning right toward the intracoastal waterway and the ocean. Just before reaching the draw bridge over the waterway, I turned left into the Marriott Marina Hotel.

  I checked in, found my room overlooking the intracoastal, hung up my spare suit, and jumped into a cold shower. I dressed casually in a pair of tan slacks, a white polo shirt and blue blazer. Brown socks and cordovan loafers with tassels completed my wardrobe. Good enough, I thought, for South Florida.