Bitter Legacy

by H. Terrell Griffin

  We’d made a pact that we’d tune out the world. We turned off our cell phones and refused to watch TV or read newspapers. If somebody dropped the big bomb on New York or Washington, we’d probably hear about it from somebody at the marinas we visited. Anything less than that wasn’t worth our attention.

  We’d had more than our share of wine and beer and good seafood and outstanding sex, but our idyll was about to end. Jessica would leave the next day for Paris and her job at the American embassy there. I would rejoin the slow rhythms that make up life on my slice of paradise, Longboat Key. My buddy Logan Hamilton and I would fish, walk the beach, eat good food at the island establishments, drink our share of beer, ogle the women, fish some more when the mood struck us, and on occasion talk of things deep or amusing or silly. We’d spend time with our friends at Tiny’s, the bar on the edge of the village, eat lunch at Mar Vista or Moore’s, and gobble up the days that seemed to stretch endlessly before us.

  My name is Matt Royal. When I was a young man, I’d been an officer in the United States Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, the toughest fighting men on the planet. I’d been to war, killed some people, lost some friends, got shot up, and came home and tried to put it behind me. I was mostly successful, but some nights the dead visited me, the ones I’d killed and the ones I’d lost. The ones I’d killed didn’t have faces, but I knew who they were. My men came dressed as they were on the day they died; grimy jungle fatigues, floppy hats, boots, and belts full of gear. Their faces were stubbled with several days of beard, and sweat pooled at their necks. They carried their M-16s with an ease born of repetition. The rifles were the only thing about them that was clean.

  During those dark nights in my sweaty bed, they’d discuss their lives with me, just as they had on the long evenings of boredom that interspersed the firefights. But their lives had ended on a hot day in a jungle far from home. Mine went on. I never remembered what the dead enemy said and, truth be told, I did not want to know, could not bear their opprobrium.

  The government that wouldn’t let us win the war gave me some medals when I got out of the military hospital and helped me finish college and law school with the G.I. Bill. Those medals were stashed somewhere in a drawer with a piece of the shrapnel the docs had dug out of my gut and a picture of my team standing in front of a Huey, the helicopter that took us into that last patrol. They were all there, those tough young men, grinning and cavorting for the signal corps guy with the camera. For five of them, it was their last flight, if you didn’t count the one that brought their bodies back several days later.

  I found a career as a trial lawyer, but over the few years became disenchanted with the profession that was becoming a business. Finally, I tired of the rat race, retired early, and moved to Longboat Key, a barrier island off the southwest coast of Florida just below Tampa Bay, about half way down the peninsula. Life is easy in our latitudes, where it never gets cold in the winters and the Gulf breezes cool the summers enough to make them bearable. Island living was pleasant and tranquil and fulfilling. I wasn’t rich, but I had enough money to live modestly without working.

  I’m a bit of an exercise nut, trying to keep the old body going as long as possible. I try to run four miles a day on the beach, work out in the island gym a couple times a week, and take martial arts lessons once a week. I’m six feet tall, weigh the same 180 pounds I did when I got out of the Army, and have a face that has been described as nice, not handsome mind you, just nice. My nose is bigger than I’d like it to be and a little off-center and I think my eyes are too small. My hair is still dark and covers my head the same way it did twenty years ago. I have a mouthful of good teeth and a smile that I like to think melts the hearts of the young ladies. That may not be true, but I do smile a lot, because living on my island makes me happy. I tend to grow on people, it seems, and the women don’t find me completely unattractive.

  Our island is small, about ten miles long and a quarter-mile wide. Life is easy on the key, one day rolling into the next, the sun diligent about its daily arrival. Our pace is slow, without stress, our lives filled with friends and good food and beer and booze and fishing and beachcombing. We are separated from Sarasota by a wide bay, and one has to cross two bridges and another island just to find the mainland. We like it that way and live with the conceit that the real world seldom finds its way into our bit of paradise.

  I’d met Jessica some months before when I was in Europe. She’d visited me on Longboat Key at Christmas and had wrangled another week away for what she called her spring fling. She’d arrived on Saturday and we’d left on the boat on Sunday morning. Our six days of idleness seemed to reenergize her, and she was anxious to get back to work. And as much as I enjoyed her company, I was looking forward to some time alone and to readapting to the ever-present rhythms of island idleness.

  We piled our stuff on the patio that ran the width of the back of my cottage. I went around to open the front door. There was a note taped there:

  Matt, call me on my cell ASAP!!! Very damned important!!!!!

  Bill Lester

  Bill was a good friend, but he was also the Longboat Key police chief and he wouldn’t have left such a note unless it was urgent. Jessica followed me inside and went toward the bedroom, shucking her bikini as she walked. I heard the shower in the master bath come on as I dialed Bill’s cell phone. He answered on the first ring.

  “Matt, are you back?”

  “Yeah. What’s up?”

  “Meet me at the Market in five minutes.”

  “What’s this about, Bill?”

  “I’ll tell you when I see you.” He hung up.

  I put the phone down, confused by his abruptness. I went into the bathroom and stuck my head into the shower. Jessica’s sleek body was soaped up and she was standing under the water, her head thrown back letting the shampoo rinse out of her hair.

  “Come on in.”

  “Can’t. Gotta meet Bill Lester at the Market. I’ll be back soon.”

  “What’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jason Blakemoore closed the office door behind him, jiggled the handle to make sure the lock was engaged, and trudged off into the mid-afternoon heat, warm for late March. He wore a white shirt, red tie, and navy pants over wing-tipped shoes. He was about six feet tall, two hundred pounds, blond hair, early thirties. He looked back at the squat cinder-block building that housed his office. It was small, nondescript, flat roofed, its white paint glaring in the South Florida sun. A large sign over the door announced that the building was a law office.

  Belleville wasn’t much of a town, but then Jason Blakemoore wasn’t much of a lawyer, so it all seemed to fit into the cosmic plan. The town was small, its few buildings old, decrepit, many of them empty. One could walk from the town square to the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp in under ten minutes. The Tamiami Trail ran near the southern edge of town, lightly traveled since the opening of I-75 through the Everglades.

  Blakemoore had grown up in this dismal place, the son of a waitress over at the truck stop on the Trail and a fishing guide out of Everglades City. Jason wasn’t real bright, but he knew how to play football. He’d been an outstanding linebacker in high school and was recruited by several colleges. His academic credentials were nil. He’d made the same score on the SAT that he would have if he’d just written his name and walked out. He missed almost every question.

  The glaring lack of college preparation doomed his chances of playing for a major university. A coach at the University of Florida managed to get Jason a scholarship to a junior college in Kansas, where he excelled in football and made passing grades in class. As long as he played well, his grades were good. Good enough to allow him to transfer to the University of Florida for his junior year. He was red-shirted, which meant that he didn’t play his junior year, but his eligibility would not be threatened. He could still play two years at Gainesville. Again he excelled on the field and his grades were me
diocre, not bad for a guy with no intellect. Against all odds, he graduated. He still had a year of football eligibility left and the Gator coaching staff thought this would be his year to shine. They talked the law school into taking him.

  Jason’s last year of football was indeed stellar. He made all conference as outside linebacker and his law school grades, while very low, were enough to maintain his eligibility. When football was over, a grateful university administration ensured that he could stay in law school. When he graduated, he took the state bar exam and failed. He took it again, failed again. On his last try, he passed with the minimal grade needed. Apparently, some of the bar examiners were Gator alumni.

  No firm would hire him, so he came back home, back to Belleville. He opened his office and managed to survive on the crumbs cast off by the area law firms. He represented the occasional Seminole Indian from the nearby reservation who ran afoul of the local law. He took assignments from the courts for misdemeanor cases that the public defender was too busy to handle. He lost most of the trials, but he always figured the people he represented, or at least most of them, were guilty anyway, so the conviction didn’t upset the delicate balance of his universe.

  Jason’s parents were dead now, and he’d never married. It wasn’t that he didn’t like women; it was just that he had a very low sex drive, perhaps the result of certain steroids he’d taken daily while playing football. He also liked his solitary life, didn’t need a woman to nag him about being home for supper, to slow down on his drinking, to work harder, make more money.

  Jason Blakemoore was a happy man. He whistled as he walked across the square, heading for the town’s only bar, the Swamp Rat. He’d been into Naples to visit a client in the county jail, an unusual event for Jason on a weekend. The judge had called on Friday afternoon and said the public defender had assigned the case to Jason and the client needed a bail hearing at ten on Saturday morning. Jason went and got the judge to release the man without bail. It was a petty theft charge, shoplifting from a Wal-Mart. The old guy was eighty years old and this was his first offense. He was confused and didn’t understand where he was or why he was there.

  Jason had stopped by his office to check his mail for any checks that might have come in, but there had been none. The Swamp Rat Bar was beckoning him. People he’d known all his life would be there, drinking the afternoon away. He usually scored a few free beers from those who remembered him as the high school star.

  He stopped at the curb waiting for a car to pass before crossing the street for the air-conditioned refuge offered by the bar. A black Mercedes was driving slowly down the street, two men in the front seat. Jason was watching them idly, wondering why such an expensive car was in Belleville. The car slowed more as it approached Jason. A shotgun poked out of the passenger-side window, a blast cut the air, sending to wing the pigeons that inhabited the park in the square. A red splotch appeared on the white shirt worn by Jason, his tie turning to ribbons of red, his face showing surprise and consternation and puzzlement. He stumbled, fell, and was no more.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Market was a unique place, part grocery store, part delicatessen, coffee shop, ice cream shop, butcher shop, and meeting place for the village residents. It took up one end of the small shopping center at Whitney Beach on the edge of the village near the north end of the key, sharing a parking lot with Tiny’s bar, a video store, two restaurants, an art and framing shop, dog grooming parlor, and a T-shirt shop.

  The village itself is formally known as Longbeach Village and it is the oldest residential area on the key. It’s a place of small cottages and homes, many built in the 1920s and ’30s and a few before that, a couple of restaurants, and a world-class art center; a place where working people and retired middle-class folks can still afford to live in houses they bought long before the price of island real estate climbed into the stratosphere. They are an eclectic bunch, the villagers, proud and stubborn and against the change that seems to be a constant condition on our key. They take life as it comes at them, with a certain stoicism that is absent in the key’s higher rent precincts. They’re my kind of people.

  I’d recently moved to my cottage in the village from a bayside condo just to the south. I hadn’t intended to make the move, but life sometimes throws you a curve ball. And that curve ball, on occasion, will provide you with the opportunity for a home run. Such was my case.

  Rose and Ed Peters had come to our island when he retired from a distinguished career in the U.S. Army. They bought a small home in the village and settled in to live out their lives.

  Ed, or the Colonel as he was known to most, became a regular at Tiny’s, my favorite little bar that sat on the edge of the village. He was always home by six in the evening to have dinner with Rose. His daily hour at Tiny’s, he often said, was the substitute for his officer’s club routine, honed during the thirty years he’d spent doing his duty for all of us.

  For twenty years after he retired from the Army, Ed gave himself to the community, serving for six years on the Town Commission and for a two-year term as mayor of the Town of Longboat Key. Shortly after he retired from the commission, on a bright morning in December, while taking his morning walk, he dropped dead of a massive stroke.

  Rose’s grief was overwhelming. They had no children, and each was an only child. They were the only family each other had. The people of the village came to the rescue and Rose slowly recovered. Her smile came back and her kindly disposition once again radiated over the North End.

  She called me one day about a year after Ed’s death and asked if I had time to stop by her house. She had a problem she wanted to run by me. I told her I’d be there in an hour.

  Rose’s cottage hunkered under an ancient Banyan tree, its limbs shading the house. Tropical plants flanked the crushed-shell walk, a large bougainvillea painted the spring air with its red blossoms. The bay shimmered behind the house, the sun reflecting off the still water in a blinding burst of light.

  She met me at the door, a small trim lady in her seventies. Her gray hair was cut short, a pixyish styling that set off a face that was still beautiful, the few wrinkles providing a sense of character. She was wearing white shorts, a sleeveless pink blouse, and sandals. She made the attire look elegant, because she was a lady of grace.

  She hugged me. “Thanks for coming, Matt.”

  “It’s good to see you, Rose.”

  She escorted me into the living room. Bookcases lined one wall, the titles running to military history and Florida crime fiction. A large flat-screen TV sat on a shelf amid the books. A fireplace with a brick hearth dominated the other end of the room. Two photographs sat on the mantel, one of the colonel in a dress blue uniform and the other of a young couple in wedding attire, the man in the uniform of a second lieutenant and the woman a beauty in a white gown and veil holding a spray of flowers. A matching sofa and love seat and a recliner took up space on the Oriental rug spread over the hardwood floors. Sliding glass doors opened onto a patio overlooking the bay. A dock ran along the seawall enclosing an empty boat slip.

  Rose motioned me to a seat on the sofa. “Can I get you something to drink, Matt?”

  “No thanks. How have you been?”

  “Not too good. I’ve done something really stupid, and I’m about to lose my home. I know you’re retired, but you’re a lawyer, and I’m hoping you can show me a way out of this. I can pay you a fee.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you know anything about reverse mortgages?”

  “A little,” I said. “If your house is paid for you can get most of the equity out of it in cash paid in equal monthly installments. When you die, the house is sold and the mortgage holder gets its money back, plus interest, and the remainder of the sales price goes to the heirs.”

  “That pretty much sums it up. I got one of those after Ed died. But this one paid me a lump sum in cash, not monthly installments.”

  “Then you should be pretty well set up. When you die, the house
will be sold and the loan paid off.”

  “Supposedly. I’m afraid I didn’t read the paperwork too closely.”

  Her story was shameful. Shortly after Ed’s death, a young man came to see her, told her about the reverse mortgage, and explained how the money would help her live out the rest of her days worry free. Ed’s pension from the Army died with him, and she only had Social Security to live on. The Army is not a generous employer, and like most who dedicate their lives to the country’s service, Ed did not retire wealthy.

  Rose signed the papers, got the cash, invested some of it, and gave pieces of it to several charities. Some of the investments didn’t do well, and she lost a lot of the money. She moved what was left into a savings account and would be able to live frugally for the rest of her life.

  She handed me a letter. “This came in yesterday’s mail.”

  According to the letter, her mortgage was now due, and she was required to begin making monthly payments. In the event she did not, a foreclosure action would be filed and she would lose her house.

  I shook my head. “This doesn’t sound like a reverse mortgage. Have you got the paperwork you signed?”

  She handed me a file folder. I began to look through the documents, my heart dropping a little with each page. She’d been swindled. All the correspondence from the mortgage broker discussed a traditional reverse mortgage, but the documents themselves provided for a standard mortgage with an extremely high interest rate. The payments would be delayed for one year, but then the loan would have to be repaid over a period of ten years with an interest rate of 12 percent. I knew that standard mortgage rates were running about 6 percent for thirty years, and less for a shorter time period.