Mangrove Bayou

by Stephen Morrill

  Thomas Dolfe, the foreman, came to stand beside him. “She decided to keep on with the expansion,” he said to Troy. “I mean, what else? Can’t walk off and leave a half-built addition.”

  “And it also keeps up that all-important resale value,” Troy said.

  “Well, these people can afford it anyway. Maybe she can use it for something else. Twenty-by-twenty space and it’s got a stall with toilet and shower in one corner.”

  “You do much work on Airfield Key?”

  “Sure,” Dolfe said. “Economy stinks but the rich always get richer. They always got something new to add, or repair. I make good money off work over here. Snake Key folks, not so much.”

  Troy laughed. “I imagine not. Got a question. Have you ever seen Kathleen Barrymore riding a bicycle?”

  “They got a couple in the garage, I think,” Dolfe said. He stepped to one side to look in. “Guess I was wrong. One bicycle.”

  “But there are two hooks in the ceiling,” Troy said.

  “Well, people put up stuff like that, hooks for various things. And they never take them down. You ought to look in some of the older houses here. Gas wall sconces converted to electric. Seen knob-and-tube wiring still in the attics of some. Scary. So what?”

  “Maybe. But have you ever seen her actually riding a bicycle?”

  “No, can’t say as I have. But only been on this job site a few days. Actually, can’t recall ever seeing her before at all, anywhere. And I work on Airfield Key a lot. But that doesn’t mean much. Most people here stay to themselves behind all these bushes.”

  “Ah well. Just curious.”

  “You get my prints off my drill yet?” Dolfe asked.

  Troy nodded. “Yours and Con Lohen’s. He’s the dockmaster at the yacht club. He had unplugged it. Didn’t get anything else useful.”

  “So am I a suspect?”

  “In your dreams. Autopsy says it was an accident.”

  “Well, swell. And yet you don’t look like a police chief who believes that.”

  Troy looked at Dolfe. He shook his head. “You’re plenty smart for a guy wearing a painter’s overall. The number of things I believe about a possible homicide are very small. There are a few things I’d like to clear up.”

  “Well, at least the fingerprints are clear now.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Troy said. “You guys come up short anything else besides that drill?”

  “Hard to tell, usually. We always order a few extra blocks, ’cause we occasionally break one. No way to tell there. We did come up short some plumbing pipe. We had measured and bought just enough. My plumbing guy had to go back to the store to get another piece. Piece about three feet long. He was sort of annoyed about that. Couldn’t of mis-measured by that much.”

  “Pipe was PVC?”

  “Yeah, ’course.”

  “Don’t you guys just buy it in long lengths and then cut and join it yourself, with those sleeves they sell?” Troy said. “Done it myself with that purple goop you put in to weld it all together.”

  “Actually there are several colors of goop, as you call it. Prep and then glue. Simple jobs like this we already know how long each pipe needs to be and we get only exactly that amount. We had already cut it up to work with it. That’s why we noticed a missing piece.”

  “Can I see one from the same batch?”

  “Suppose so. It’s all put together now but you can look at it. We haven’t walled it up yet.”

  Troy took out his iPhone and photographed the pipe markings on one pipe where he could see those. “Anything else odd happen around here?” he asked.

  “Hell, even that ain’t odd,” Dolfe said. “Every hardware or plumbing supplier in this part of the country probably sells the same pipe.”

  “Fascinating,” Troy said. “Well, excuse me.” He walked around to the entry door and rang the bell. Kathleen Barrymore answered. She did not look pleased.

  “I already filed a complaint about you,” she said. “I want the boat released. I want my husband’s body back so I can have him cremated. He wanted his ashes scattered out over the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Working on the boat issue. The autopsy’s done. Surprised they haven’t called you. But if you call the county medical examiner’s office they can tell you when they release the body and someone can pick it up. Mind if I come in and look around a little?”

  “What did they say…what do you mean, come in? No, of course not. You got some sort of warrant? My lawyer says you need that.”

  “The autopsy said your husband died of accidental electrocution. But, truth to tell, not all lawyers actually know about police entry and warrants. Only some have the specialized background. What’s your lawyer’s name; I could check the list to see if he’s qualified.”

  “Bullshit. My lawyer’s one of the best. Paul Pindar. If he needs some special qualification then he’s got it.”

  “Ah, well. Perhaps I was wrong about that.”

  “You’re pretty much wrong about everything, I think. Now get out.”

  “I am out. Where’s the second bicycle?”

  “Hunh?”

  “The second bicycle. Last time I was here you had two in the garage. Now I see only one. Your garage door is open and I happened to notice as I was walking up to your door.”

  “You’re wrong about that too. There never was but one.”

  “Ah. Well. Appreciate your setting me straight on a few things.”

  “You’re welcome. Gawd, you’re stupid. Now get my boat back to me.” She slammed the door in his face. Troy stood there thinking, staring at the door six inches in front of his nose, for several minutes, then got into his car and started for his office.

  He had barely turned onto Airport Road and was shifting up through the gears when a red Corvette blew past him doing at least sixty. “Damn!” Troy said as the Forester rocked in the wind-blast. He noted the license number, pulled off to one side of the road, and got out his notebook to record it. Ahead of him the Corvette turned suddenly into the airfield, drove across the runway and parked next to the one large hangar.

  Troy considered driving in after but he was not in uniform and not driving a police vehicle. He didn’t even have a ticket book. Across the field he saw a tall, thin woman climb out of the Corvette. She was a redhead, he could see. She unlocked a side door in the hangar and disappeared inside. Troy drove on back to his office.

  “Been thinking on your taxicab idea,” June Dundee said when he walked in. “Gonna talk to Bob about that. He needs a hobby. Maybe he knows someone else to help out.” Troy had gotten a few calls and June handed him some pink You-Were-Called slips.

  “Hey,” Troy said. “From tiny acorns mighty oaks do grow.”

  “You’re full of sayings. Who said that?”

  “I did, just now. Weren’t you paying attention?”

  “C’mon.”

  “Chaucer said something like it, in Troilus and Criseyde, but I don’t recall it exactly. Sorry.”

  Back at his desk, Troy took care of the phone calls. When that was done he looked up the red Corvette’s license tag. It was registered to one Lee Bell, with an address on Airfield Road. A name like Lee could be either sex, but Troy bet that the redhead he’d seen go into the hangar was the Lee Bell, speed demon, he had seen. Curious, he looked in the appraiser’s office and found a property on Airfield Key that was owned by Lee Bell, an unmarried woman, in the quaint terminology of the deed books.

  “Humm,” Troy said.

  Chapter 22

  Friday, July 26

  The man shook his head. Troy had his Glock lined up on the man’s right ear, about the only thing he could clearly see behind the terrified woman’s head. The man was taller than the woman but he had crouched to use her as a shield.

  “You win,” the man said. “I don’t really want to do this.” He took away the knife. He let the woman go. And Troy’s Glock went off and killed
him.

  Troy always woke up at that point, always sweating. He barely made it to the bathroom before he vomited into the sink because he didn’t manage to get the toilet lid up in time. He never seemed to learn, in the dream at least, what the other officers present had seen. They had said to the Internal Affairs board after the actual incident, that they could not see the ex-husband’s face because he was turned toward Troy.

  The woman had suffered only a scratch on her neck and was not decapitated. Whether that was because Troy killed her ex-husband or because the ex started to put down the knife, was up for discussion. When that discussion ended, Troy had a disciplinary action letter in his file and a week off without pay. He hadn’t cared about the docked pay, but that letter came back to haunt him, years later, when he shot the teenager with the squirt gun.

  He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and sighed. He knew he would be a long time getting back to sleep. Always took a long time when he had these dreams. He put on some shorts and one of his fishing shirts and picked up his car keys. He drove over to Snake Key and to his rental storage shed. The canoe was stored upside down on a rack to one side of the sailboat. He wrestled out the single-seat canoe, not hard because it was made of Kevlar and only weighed thirty-five pounds, and put it onto the roof rack on the Subaru. He tied it down, then tossed into the back of the car a lifejacket, a Grey Owl paddle, and also the cheap plastic one he used to push off from oyster bars and, once, years ago, to beat off a protective mother alligator when he had come too near a nest. He locked the shed, and drove the one block to the Snake Key boatyard, where he knew the combination to the gate.

  An hour of slow paddling later he came out of the few mangrove islands that lay between the western edge of town and the Gulf of Mexico. He could have just paddled over to the yacht club and then taken the Collier River and been here sooner but there was no challenge to that marked channel. Paddling through the twisting and oyster-bar studded channels between the islands was more work, but this was something he was good at, something he enjoyed testing himself against.

  Troy could paddle, by memory, many of the Ten Thousand Islands narrow passages and even down into the Everglades National Park, all of which looked exactly alike to outsiders. He knew of a dead tree with a large white trunk here, an oddly shaped oyster bar there, a tree favored by bald eagles and with guano-covered leaves on that island. There were obvious road signs for the person who knew how to read them. Lester Groud would be a lot better at it, Troy knew.

  Tonight, having to concentrate intently on the narrow, twisting channels, in the dark, got Troy’s mind off the dream, at least for a time. Finally he rested, bobbing gently on a swell, a hundred yards out into the Gulf, the living, breathing mangrove forest at his back. The tide had been low and was just starting to come in, and behind him he could make out several raccoons foraging on an oyster bar. Even though the tide could come back with a rush across the shallow mud flats, raccoons never seemed to get caught out. Troy had sometimes been solidly aground on his flat-bottomed sailboat, having grounded intentionally so he could sleep, and when he saw the raccoons scampering for the trees he knew he’d be afloat again in minutes. Several pelicans, nesting in the trees, murmured in their sleep. Troy wondered if pelicans had nightmares.

  He looked west. The moon was down and the stars brilliant overhead. He could just start paddling west, he thought. Someday he would reach Mexico. Might be a little hungry by then. Might be a little drowned by then, first storm he hit. Might not care. Troy shook his head. Don’t even go there. Two dolphins surfaced beside the canoe, snorting air out and sucking air in, then silently as they had come, disappeared again. He waited and they reappeared for a few seconds some fifty yards ahead, then a hundred yards, then he lost track of them.

  Troy stretched his arms and shoulders, unaccustomed to the paddling after several months. He dug in the paddle for a C-stroke and turned the canoe and headed back to town. At least the incoming tide would be with him. He could always paddle to Mexico on another day.

  Chapter 23

  Friday, July 26

  Troy drove up to Naples Friday morning, his canoe still strapped to the roof of his car. By the time he had gotten back to the Snake Key boatyard he had felt sleepy and had gone straight home. On nightmare nights he grabbed what rest he could, and when he could.

  Tropical storm Donald was approaching Florida, still far out in the Gulf of Mexico. The grocery stores were busy, as were the Home Depots and Lowe’s. In a day or two it would be hard to locate a flashlight battery or a can of soup in the stores.

  He had breakfast in an IHOP on Davis Boulevard just off U.S. 41. He rarely ate much breakfast but he decided to splurge, and he had a few moments to kill. Paul Pindar, the Barrymore lawyer, had an office in Naples and Troy stopped by there at 9:30 in the morning. Pindar’s receptionist/secretary was a young and chubby blonde woman whose notion of a good breakfast appeared to be a large wad of bubble gum. She was just making the coffee. Pindar walked in right behind Troy. Troy introduced himself and Pindar waved Troy back to his office.

  “Coffee?” Pindar asked.

  “No thanks. Just ate.”

  Pindar went out front and came back with a coffee mug. He sat and sipped and looked at Troy. “That your Mad River canoe out there?”

  “Yep. Solo canoe. Sixteen feet.”

  “Kind of long for these parts,” Pindar said. “Most folks use shorter in the cypress swamps.”

  “I like my canoe.”

  “The wife and I use a Lotus. Thirteen feet and two-seater. Bent-shaft paddles.”

  “Nice boat. Don’t make those any more.”

  “Yeah. Damn shame.” Pindar took a sip of coffee and looked over the top of the mug at Troy. “What brings the Mangrove Bayou police chief out of the swamp and to our town?”

  Troy politely explained to Pindar that he wanted a look at the John Barrymore will. Pindar politely explained that Troy could go to hell.

  “Oh, come on,” Troy said. “You’re going to file the thing at the courthouse today anyway, at which point it’s public record. By the way, are you related to the Greek poet?”

  “In fact, I was planning…oh. The poet? You mean Pindar? My people were Greek, yes. The name aside, how would I know if I am related to some poet from 500 B.C.?”

  “No idea. But didn’t he comment on the importance of getting the story out even if doing so was dangerous?”

  Pindar stared at Troy a moment. “Yes, he did. He once wrote ‘Story is vast in range: new ways to findand test upon the touchstone. Here danger lies.’”

  “See?” Troy spread his hands. “I knew he would agree with me.”

  Pindar laughed. “I can’t believe you can turn some ancient Greek poet against his own namesake. For a small-town policeman in southwest Florida who drives a crap car with an expensive canoe on the roof, you seem to be well read in the classics.”

  “I once read all the Classic Comic Book series.”

  “Ah. I see. Well, the danger in this story is to my reputation if the word gets out that I babble my clients’ secrets to policemen.”

  “Might help your conscience to remember that your client was John Barrymore and his estate, not Kathleen Barrymore. So, since you were planning to file the will today anyway, tell me if there is any reference to a time period of one year from the date of John Barrymore’s wedding to Kathleen Pragga.”

  “How do you know what I’m planning to do today?”

  “I’m the chief of police of Mangrove Bayou. I know everything. Also, I know how impatient Kathleen Barrymore is. She’s probably been on your back all week about this. John died Sunday. We found the body Monday morning, the autopsy results came back yesterday, and this is the last business day of the week at the courthouse.”

  Pindar nodded. “I see the chain of logic there. I was…er…waiting on the autopsy results myself. Not that there would have been much I could have done as an attorney had they been…er…negative. But it seems John electrocuted himself.”


  “To answer your question, John Barrymore’s will left about a third of his estate to his two grown children up in Massachusetts. There were several other bequests to favorite charities. But about half the estate went to his current wife, Kathleen Barrymore. But there was a codicil. The bequest to Kathleen Barrymore kicked in only after a year and a day had passed from the time of the marriage. Should they divorce before then, she would receive a small sum, but most would go to the children.”

  “So how much will Kathleen Barrymore inherit as of today?”

  “About four million dollars.”

  “Not shabby for an ex-laundress from Goodland. John Barrymore might as well have put a pistol to his head as written that will and codicil.”

  Pindar looked mildly pained. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Now, then. Was that so hard for you to say?”

  “Actually, yes, it was. But for a student of the classic comic books, I can bend the rules.”

  As he was walking to his car Troy’s department cell phone buzzed. “Yes, June,” he said.

  “Corporal Rivers called from the sheriff’s. Said to tell you that they had searched that truck found out on Forty-One by the Collier River bridge.”

  Troy waited.

  “Aren’t you curious as to what they found?”

  “I figured you would tell me. That is why you called, right?”

  “Right. They found a cigarette butt, really more like half a cigarette, with blood on it.”

  “Probably was a Winston Gold 100.”

  “You know that I hate it when you do that. Spoils all the fun.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to be dumber next time.”

  “Don’t have to be dumb. Normal would be nice. Nobody likes a smart-ass.”

  “That’s a dollar to you.”

  “I know. I’m getting out two bucks because you’re the only police chief I know who’s in fucking Mensa.”

  Chapter 24

  Friday, July 26

  Jeremiah Brown got a hit on the photos on Friday afternoon. A desk clerk on Marco Island recognized both Tats Michaels and Katie Pragga, now Barrymore. In fact they were regulars, he had told Jeremiah. The room had always been rented by Tats Michaels. Jeremiah brought back a list of dates the two had shared a room.