Mangrove Bayou

by Stephen Morrill

  Milo shrugged. “I was eating breakfast. Came as soon as I was done.” He looked down, found he was still clutching the coffee cup, and took a sip.

  “Milo, I don’t give a sweet damn if you were having gall-bladder surgery. When someone calls you, you answer right then. Or don’t you like this job?”

  “It’s OK. I’m only doing this until I can get on with the sheriffs.”

  “As I understand, you’re only doing this at all because the mayor is your uncle.”

  Milo grinned. “That’s the way it works here. If you got a problem with that, go back to Tampa.”

  “Good to know where I stand in the chain of command here. Now, I have some actual investigating for you to do. Probably want to add that to your résumé with the sheriffs. Get out to Wanda Frister’s house. Can you drive a stick shift?”

  “Well, yeah. I can. Why?”

  “I hope so.” Troy fished out his keys and peeled off his car key. He kept the remote beeper. “Use my car, not the Suburban. It’s a five-speed manual, and if you wreck my transmission I’ll hang you.” Troy copied Wanda’s address onto a fresh notepaper and handed that to Milo. “She says that she’s being stalked by a guy named Billy Poteet. Do you know him?”

  Milo nodded his head. “Yep. He’s an asshole. Works in the Snake Key boatyard. When he works.”

  “I think that’s Wanda’s opinion too,” Troy said. “Listen to whatever is on her voicemail. Look around the neighborhood for a red F-150 truck or Billy Poteet or anything else that seems out of the ordinary. Then come back and report.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “Oh. OK, Chief.”

  “I gotta call you Chief?”

  Troy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his badge. He turned his chair and held the badge angled sideways so the light from the window helped him read it. “Says right here. Chief. So, yes, a little courtesy would go a long way, Officer Binder.”

  “OK, Chief.”

  “And Officer Binder, one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s that, Chief” Troy said.

  “What’s that, Chief.”

  “Don’t ever again come to work without a clean shave. I’ll send you home and dock you a day’s pay for it. The ’stache is OK if it does not extend beyond the upper lip. But conservative haircut and daily shave, if you please.”

  After Milo left, Troy checked with DMV and, sure enough, William Poteet was the owner of a red Ford F-150 truck. Poteet had a record too, Troy learned with more research, for assault, D.U.I., assault, bad checks, a long list of traffic offenses, assault, a partridge in a pear tree, and more assault. Poteet had spent some time in prison for some of the charges. As a convicted felon he would not be allowed to legally buy a gun, but that never slowed anyone down in Florida. Troy hit the print button and added all that to the file he had started. Wanda sure knew how to pick ’em, he thought. It would probably take a court order to trace the phone that had called Wanda, and Troy assumed it was a cheap disposable cell phone anyway, with preloaded minutes and bought off some store rack. By now it would be in a Dumpster behind some apartments somewhere.

  He walked out to the lobby. “June, make a note on our shift log. Have patrols swing by Wanda Frister’s house a couple times per shift.” He handed June a note. “There’s the address. And have them look for a red F-150 truck there or anywhere else and note its tag, location and the time.”

  “You got it, Chief,” June said.

  “And put out the word. Tomorrow at eight a.m. I want everyone here. Total departmental meeting. Anyone not on duty gets an hour overtime.”

  “Ooh. Major damn announcement? You hiring more people? We could use two more at least.”

  “I’m only here on probation, remember. Was going to hire someone, I’d hire me. Just have everyone here.”

  Chapter 8

  Monday, July 22

  Troy was still standing next to June’s desk in the lobby when the phone rang, the 9-1-1 line with its distinctive ring. “Shit!” June said, staring at the phone as if it were a rattlesnake. Troy waited while June talked to someone. She mostly listened. She hung up and looked up at Troy. “That was the manager at the yacht club. Dead body on one of their boats.”

  “The Osprey Yacht Club?”

  “We got any other fucking yacht club?”

  “What’s the doctor’s name at the clinic?” The town medical clinic shared the long side of the town hall “L” with the town hall offices and the volunteer fire department.

  “Vollmer. Barry Vollmer.”

  “Get him headed that way ASAP, with a body bag and the town ambulance. Lights, siren.”

  “What’s the hurry? The guy’s dead.”

  “We don’t know that. Some yacht club manager thinks that. That’s not something we pencil in on our calendars for when we have a spare moment.”

  June dialed up the doctor and got him headed out. Troy watched. “We need to redo the phone lines here,” he said. “The clinic should be a one-button transfer. Same for the fire department. Shouldn’t have to dial them up on a regular phone number. Tom VanDyke is our evidence specialist, isn’t he?”

  “Yep. He was night shift last night. Probably home sleeping.” June looked at a schedule in her computer. June usually made up the monthly shift schedules. “He’ll be off until Wednesday now.”

  “Call him. Tell him he’s now on overtime and to meet me over at the yacht club with his evidence kit.”

  Troy took the one Suburban left in the lot and drove north across the 11th Street bridge to Airfield Key. The airport had one four-bay hangar, but there was no tower or terminal or anything much else. The single concrete runway ran east-west almost the full length of Airfield Key. A few small aircraft were parked in a large field on the far side from the road, tied down.

  Troy turned left onto Airfield Road. To his left as he drove were large homes set back on 200-by-400-foot lots that ran from Airfield Road back to the Collier River. Most of the homes were screened from the road, and from the aircraft noise, by trees and shrubs.

  The yacht club was a two-story concrete-block building with stucco, shaded a light brown, with the west side facing the Gulf of Mexico where the Collier River met the Ten Thousand Islands. The north side facing the parking lot had no windows on the ground floor, only a few small windows at one end on the second, and just a double front door. It looked about as nautical as a welding shop. On the east side, behind a chain link fence and member-only parking/unloading area, seawalls and three long piers on the Collier River provided docks for the members’ boats. The river’s deeper channel winding out between the islands was the only way for many of the boats to get out to the Gulf, several miles away.

  A man leaned on the fence smoking a cigarette by an electronic rolling gate that had been locked open. Behind him was some parking for boat owners, and a few small boats stored there on trailers. Troy drove into the fenced area and parked. The town ambulance truck, red with Rescue in shiny gold lettering on the sides, was already there, the back door open, nobody around. The man was about fifty, an inch shorter than Troy’s six feet, skinny and tanned and weathered with a mop of loose gray hair. Like Bubba, he was darker than Troy. He wore a white shirt with epaulettes and the club crest, tan chino trousers and tan Topsiders boat shoes. Embroidery on his shirt announced to the world that the inhabitant was Con Lohen, Dockmaster.

  Troy parked the Suburban to one side of the gate and got out. He was not wearing a uniform. “Who are you?” Lohen said. He eyed Troy and the truck. “And where did you get the police car?”

  “I’m Troy Adam, the new police chief. Truck was sitting out back of the station and I just sort of took it.”

  The man straightened up and dropped the cigarette on the ground. “You got some police identification?” With his right shoe, he scrubbed out the cigarette on the asphalt.

  Troy took out his wallet and showed Lohen his police I.D.

  “Ain’t you got a badge?” Lohen said.
<
br />   “I don’ need no steenking badge,” Troy said in his best Treasure of the Sierra Madre sneer. The badge was in his shirt pocket but he was getting annoyed. “Where’s the body?”

  Oh. Sorry. Just…a nig…a black police chief. Or sort of one. Lawsey me. I’m Con Lohen. Dockmaster.”

  “I deduced that,” Troy said. He put out a hand. Lohen stared at it a moment. He extended a callused hand to shake.

  “First day on the job?” Lohen said.

  “First month anyway. Where’s this body?”

  Lohen led him out onto one of the floating piers and to a forty-foot trawler design. The name on the boat was Wayward. A short, fat man, balding, with brown hair in a comb over, was standing on the dock by the boat.

  “This here is the new police chief,” Lohen said.

  “Troy Adam,” Troy said. “Adam with no s.”

  “I’ll be damned,” the man said, staring at Troy. “Well, anyway, I’m George Trapper, the club manager.” Trapper wore a navy blue yacht club blazer with embroidered crest, white trousers and black shoes. Troy, in his fishing shirt, jeans, and .45 semiautomatic in a concealed holster on his right hip, was feeling underdressed. Maybe, for a special occasion like a death at a yacht club, he should have put in new bullets.

  “Where’s Doctor Vollmer?” Troy asked.

  “Inside, with some helper. He already told me the guy’s dead. Which is what Con, here, told me too.” Troy deduced that George Trapper had not wanted to brighten his day by looking at a dead body. Troy could relate to that. Trapper was guarding the dock.

  “How did you find out about the body?” Troy asked.

  “I got a call this morning from Kathleen Barrymore,” Trapper said. “She said her husband hadn’t come home, that he had gone down to the boat to do some work on it last night and never came back. We don’t allow live-aboards here, but sometimes people sleep overnight onboard, especially if they’ve just had a fight with the wifey. I asked Con to check on it and he found John Barrymore’s body.”

  “The boat owner was named John Barrymore?” Troy asked. “Like the actor?”

  “There’s an actor named John Barrymore?” Con Lohen asked.

  “Not any more. He’s dead.”

  “Yeah, well, so’s this one.”

  “Had he just had a fight with the wifey?”

  Trapper shook his head. “I was just saying that. One of the dumbest things any woman can say to a man with a boat is, ‘It’s either me or that damn boat.’ The guys will take the boat every time. I see it a lot.”

  “Long as you have a boat,” Lohen said, “you can always get another woman. All the women you want. But once you got a woman you can’t afford a boat.”

  Troy looked at Con Lohen. “Well, Con, thanks for sharing that authentic maritime wisdom.” He turned to George Trapper. “Why don’t you stay here on the dock,” Troy said. “Keep away the curious.”

  “I really should be supervising this,” Trapper said.

  “You are. But let’s not trample any more over the scene than we need to. I have to go see. Con, here, has to show me. The doctor has to do his thing. You take charge out here.”

  “Well. Sure.” Trapper seemed relieved. “No one else actually knows about this yet. I haven’t even told the wife. I didn’t know quite what to say.”

  “Keep it that way for now. I have an officer on the way. Let him by. No one else.”

  The boat had an engine space under the aft sleeping cabin, reached by a hatch set into the cabin flooring there. The hatch was open and, looking down, Troy saw a heavyset man slumped over the engine. The man was wearing a yellow pullover shirt and blue shorts. The engine space was perhaps five feet high, wider at the top than the bottom where the hull curved inward. The engine was a big diesel and it and the transmission and a generator and a lot of piping took up most of the space. There was a foot of water over the flooring down there and Troy saw an electric drill lying in the water next to the body. The cord for the drill came up and out of the hatch. Troy looked and saw that it was unplugged. He leaned in to feel for a pulse. The instant he touched the man’s neck he knew he wouldn’t find one. The body was cold.

  Dr. Vollmer was sitting on the aft cabin double bed next to the open access hatch, writing up some paperwork.

  “Well, he’s as dead as advertised,” Troy said. “Any timeline yet?”

  Vollmer finished filling in a blank and looked up at Troy. “Rigor’s really strong. Probably this happened early last night.”

  “Cause of death?”

  Vollmer stopped writing and looked at Troy. “What do you think?”

  “Death by electric drill.”

  Vollmer nodded. “We don’t call it that. But, yes. Electricity, salt water, and a good ground like an engine block don’t do the heart much good. I’ll do up some fancy wording for the county M.E. and they’ll do an autopsy anyway. But John Barrymore died of heart failure caused by electrocution.”

  Vollmer and his assistant left and came back in a few moments with the gurney from the ambulance. Tom VanDyke walked up, his evidence kit slung over his shoulder. “Good timing,” Troy said. “We’re just about to get to the good part.”

  They waited while Tom took photos. Then they wrestled the body out of the engine space, out the side door of the boat, and onto the gurney on the dock. Hoisting two hundred pounds of dead weight vertically out of the engine space and then through the side door of the boat was hard work and they all sat down on a dock box next to the boat to catch their breath. George Trapper, Troy noted, had vanished. Troy almost smiled. People always had other things to do when it came to looking at dead bodies.

  Troy went through Barrymore’s pockets and took out a wallet; a pack of cigarettes, now very wet; a cheap lighter and a key ring. He flipped open the wallet. “About fifty bucks here, a couple credit cards. Driver license. It’s Barrymore all right. Bag the wallet and we’ll go through it all back at the station.” He handed the wallet and keys to Tom VanDyke. Vollmer and his driver rolled the gurney away down the docks.

  “Who has the code to that electronic gate?” Troy asked Lohen.

  “Me, staff. Members who got boats here.”

  “What about contractors, divers, repairmen, those people?” Troy well knew that B.O.A.T. meant Bring Out Another Thousand, and that large boats like these required a small platoon of maintenance and repair people to help the owners. Electronics, metal and fiberglass didn’t fare well in an environment of salt water, heat, ultraviolet, high humidity and barnacles.

  “Well, sure. Regulars got the code.”

  “When is the last time you changed the code?”

  Lohen thought. “Well…never, I guess. Why?”

  “So you, the current club staff, any former club staff, boat owners, boat owner families and friends, any visiting boat owners from elsewhere who used your transient docks and their families and friends, most of the boat maintenance people, and probably half the residents of Mangrove Bayou, can all operate the gate. How many people would you say that was?”

  “Now that you put it that way, a lot.”

  Troy nodded. “Not much point in having the gate at all.”

  Chapter 9

  Monday, July 22

  Back inside the boat Troy asked Con Lohen, “What did you find when you first saw all this?”

  Lohen pointed at the drill cord and at an AC receptacle set into a cabinet-side. “That was plugged in, up here, to the 120-volt shore power line. These boats have both 12-volt DC internal systems and the AC shore power for when they’re tied up at docks.”

  Troy nodded. “I know the system. Do you have 30-amp or 50-amp shore power?”

  “Got both on this dock. Only 30-amp on some of the docks for the smaller boats. He’s hooked to the 50-amp. But it doesn’t matter. Either one would have killed him.”

  “You unplugged the drill.”

  “Damn right. My momma didn’t raise no stupid chillens. Not reaching down and grabbing some fella sitting in water over an engine bloc
k that makes a perfect ground, with that thing still plugged in.”

  “Smart. There’s no GFI—a ground fault interrupter—on the circuit? Like you probably have in your bathroom at home?”

  “Nope. I guess that’s not required.”

  “Not required? I guess it’s only a very good idea. But it would have set the club back eighty cents per slip. Did you notice anything else that was different from what I’m looking at now?”

  “No. But you see that water? That’s not right.”

  “No. It’s not,” Troy said. “But it’s not rising.”

  Lohen pointed. “Hose came loose. Engine’s freshwater-cooled but there’s a heat exchanger. This line brings in salt water to that. When this through-hull hose came off, he had a leak straight overside.”

  Troy was puzzled. “Why would a hose just come loose like that? It was clamped on.”

  “It happens,” Lohen said. “Clamps get old or rusted or weren’t put on tight in the first place. Rubber hoses get real hard and don’t make a good seal any more. Usually happens when you’re underway and got the engine vibration and the water pumping through the hose. Kinda odd for a hose to just let go when the boat’s sitting here and the engine’s shut down.”

  “Unless it came loose just as he pulled into the dock and then he shut down without noticing.”

  “It would be pretty obvious,” Lohen said. “It’s a one-inch pipe. That makes for a good squirt coming in here. You would hear it in the cabin above. Forward, I don’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t sink the boat, would it?” Troy asked. “He’s got bilge pumps.”

  “Sure. Automatics. One in here that doesn’t seem to be working. Should also be one in the bilge under the main salon. Probably got a manual ‘Whale Gusher’ in there somewhere too. A leak here would run the pump all the time, though. It’s not running now. Let’s look.” Lohen took off his boat shoes and climbed barefoot down into the engine space. Troy nodded; he was a no-socks man himself when he was wearing boat shoes. Lohen felt around in the water for several minutes and came up with a small rag. Troy heard the bilge pump start up and the faint splash overside that always sounded to him like someone taking a giant pee. “Got it.” Lohen said. “This was jammed into the float switch on the bilge pump. Stopped it from working. There’s an overflow, so when the water got this high it ran into the main bilge forward and that pump kicked in, pumping the water overboard.”