Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  I punched off the cell and wrinkled my forehead. “Aloha”? Where the hell did I get that? I pulled out onto the interstate, and any thoughts of misplaced levity quickly disappeared. In the few years I’d lived in South Florida I had never experienced I-95 when part of it was not under construction. And despite the constant presence of orange cones, disappearing lanes, ramp signs with burlap slung over them and the inevitable group of yellow-vested construction workers, I also have never experienced traffic doing less than sixty-five in a fifty-five-mile-per-hour zone. I eased into a spot in the middle lane and tried simply to keep pace.

  An hour or so later I was in Miami; got off on Eighth Street heading west. The Spanish signage for everything from food markets to computer stores, dry cleaners to haircutters, restaurants to movie theaters, had lost its novelty for me. Miami-Dade County is now 54 percent Hispanic. Those who have danced to the luscious and lively beat of Afro-Cuban music in the street concerts or tasted a homemade salteña outside the American Airlines Arena, have no argument with multiculturalism. To think that Cuban- or South American-influenced politics is any more corrupt or two-faced than many homegrown administrations is to forget the good old boy history of Miami. I grew up in the days of Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia. To borrow from the NRA slogan, the linguistics and the melanin content of the skin don’t devalue people; people devalue people.

  I kept driving west through the typical Florida one-story commercial district, through the miles of three- and four-story apartment complexes, and finally through the construction zone of yet another expanding development of “town homes for luxurious country living starting in the low $90s to $120s.” Then, in the span of a quarter mile, the road narrowed to a two-way macadam, and I rolled over the first of several water-control dams, through which man now decided how much flow was let loose into the lower Glades and on to Florida Bay. Eighth Street had turned into the Tamiami Trail. The vegetation crawled onto the side of the road and I could see the canal water on the north side, the ditch that the Moneghan dredge had originally dug. Beyond the ditch were acres and acres of land, some open and filled only with low sedge grasses and the occasional outcrop of cabbage palms, some grown thick with strangler fig and pond apple trees. The sun was directly overhead, and even though the temperature had climbed into the eighties, I rolled down the window and stuck my elbow out. Out of the city the air again felt worthy of letting in. Another thirty miles and I began looking for the turn to Loop Road.

  Back in the early 1900s, an optimistic developer had laid out Loop Road as a hub of the future that would equal Coral Gables to the east. When the Trail project faltered during WWI, the long loop into the deeper Glades fell to whomever might use it. For the next few decades it became a jump-off point for illegal whiskey runners, gator poachers, small-time criminals or just societal dropouts looking to hide. The city to the east was where governments and laws were made. Out here in the wide-open Glades, those conventions were ignored.

  Partway down the loop, I turned into the white-shelled parking lot of the Frontier Hotel. There were two old, mud-spattered four- by-four trucks pulled up near the entrance and a sun-faded Toyota sedan off to the side. Business was slow and it made me optimistic. My last trip here had included an ugly encounter with some young locals. It wasn’t, and had never been, a place for outsiders. I pulled up next to the other trucks, rolled up the window and locked the doors before heading in.

  Inside the entryway I had to stop and let my eyes adjust to the sudden dimness. I remembered the cramped “lobby,” which gave up registering guests many decades ago, and I followed one of those long, rolled-out, industrial-strength carpet runners into the adjacent barroom. It was even darker in here. There was not a single window to the outside, and the electric sidelights glowed a dull yellow. Somewhere in the back a window air conditioner rumbled. A handsome mahogany bar ran the length of one wall, and two elderly men sat on stools at one end studying a cribbage board. I sat at the middle and watched the woman bartender ignore me at first, then cut her eyes my way too many times, like she was trying to remember an old one-night stand. Finally she moved my way, shuffling a wet bar rag from hand to hand.

  “Can I get cha?” she said. She may have been the same woman from my last visit, but her hair color had been changed to a hue of red not known to nature. She was wearing a tight cotton pullover that formfitted her breasts and didn’t make it down to the waistband of her jeans. Her other nod to contemporary fashion was a silver belly button ring, through which was looped a matching chain that circled her waist. The rolled skin of her flabby stomach was too soft and too pale for the look.

  “Nate Brown,” I said in answer to her question.

  She narrowed her eyes and tilted her head just so.

  “Thought I recognized you,” she said. “You was in here just the other day. Gave them Brooker boys a ass-whippin’.”

  While she talked she reached down into the stainless cooler of ice, pulled out a longneck bottle of beer and opened it.

  “Mr. Brown said you was all right.”

  “It was a couple of years ago,” I said.

  “Yeah?” she said, putting the cold bottle in front of me.

  The two men at the end of the bar had turned their attention to us. I met their eyes and they both carefully, almost imperceptibly, nodded their respect, maybe to a man who Mr. Brown had said was all right or maybe to someone who could ass-whip the Brooker boys. They returned to their cards. I took a drink from the bottle.

  “Have you seen Mr. Brown lately?” I asked the bartender. “I’m trying to get a message to him.”

  She straightened her look this time, being careful.

  “Maybe,” she said. “The other day.”

  Nate Brown had some kind of native status in the Glades. His ancestors were some of the first white people to settle here. No one seemed to know how old he was, but a logical guess put him in his mid-eighties. Still, I had personally been pole-ferried by him in a Glades skiff over a dozen miles or more of canals and water routes into the heart of the swamp. I had seen him appear from nowhere and then disappear into the emptiness of four thousand acres of sawgrass without so much as a compass.

  “If I leave you a phone number, could you get it to Mr. Brown along with a message that Max Freeman needs to see him?” I said to the woman.

  “Maybe,” she said, glancing down to the cribbage players.

  I took a bar napkin off a stack, used my own pen to write down my cell number and handed it to her.

  “I appreciate it,” I said, finishing the beer and putting a twenty- dollar bill next to it. As I turned to leave I gave the eleven-foot gator skin mounted on one wall a cursory look, but below it I noticed a pair of framed black-and-white photographs. I bent closer and could make out a group shot of a dozen men, standing stiff and posed before the raised iron neck of an ancient dredge that had the word NOREN painted on one side. The photo paper was dulled with age, but I could make out the thin figures of the men, dressed in dungarees and long-sleeved shirts. Some sported thick, handlebar mustaches; some showed dark hair pasted across their foreheads. There were old ink scratchings at the bottom of the picture, but the letters were indecipherable.

  “Are these the old road builders?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” the bartender said. “Them pictures been up there before that gator probably.”

  “Anybody out here have family in the photos?”

  She looked at me oddly.

  “They’s just a bunch of old-timers,” she said. “Nobody knows ’em.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  I kicked up the AC and was on the trail back to the city when my cell phone rang.

  “Freeman,” I said.

  “Aloha? What the hell is Aloha?”

  “Hey, I don’t know, a guy tries to be humorous, sometimes it doesn’t work.”

  “You’re not a funny guy, Max—face it.”

  “You’re right, Detective, I’m not.”

  “So don’t try.”


  “All right then, seriously. Can I see you tonight?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “On whether I can get this case paperwork done on time and whether seeing means we can go see a movie or you just want to sleep with me.”

  “Oh, your turn to be funny,” I said.

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “In that case, how about I pick you up in the parking lot at seven? It’ll give you more desk time. We’ll eat at Canyons, then walk around to the movies at eight fifteen.”

  “What? No sleeping?”

  “We’ll have to see how the evening goes.”

  “You’re a true man of mystery, Max.”

  “True,” I said, “See you at seven.”

  “OK.”

  Jesus, I thought, and clicked off the cell.

  Richards and I had met during an investigation of a series of child abductions that brought her task force to my river. I’d tried to avoid her. I had once been married to a cop. The romance had been short-lived. Richards had also been in a police marriage. Her husband was killed in the line of duty by a kid who wasn’t old enough to grasp the true difference between pulling a real trigger versus the one in an arcade game. The kid was still in a Florida prison, a real one, doing a man’s life sentence. My ex was still in Philly, and I had not talked with her since before I left.

  Despite some effort to keep our distance, Richards and I had been seeing each other more and more often. The emotional distance was closing, but we were both carrying a lot of baggage. We were working at it, letting it come if it was going to.

  In a few minutes my 7:00 P.M. promise was being broken. The only time traffic on I-95 isn’t running ten miles over the speed limit is when it’s locked up at five miles per hour and the bumper-to- bumper wall of commuters makes it physically impossible. It is a time when South Floridians collectively curse railroad baron Henry Flagler for bringing civilization to the subtropics in the first place and his friend Henry Ford for engineering cars that were cheap enough to let just about anyone pack up and drive on down.

  The only advantage to a South Florida traffic jam during the evening rush hour was the chance to see the sunset. Because the state is as flat as a pool table and the interstate overpasses are often higher than the one-story buildings, you often get treated to a spectacular swirl of purple, orange and soft lavenders in a stubborn cobalt blue sky that hangs on to the late light. I thought of the Tamiami Trail workers eighty years ago who must have seen a similar sight lose its grandeur in their desperate daily labor. By the time I reached the Broward Boulevard exit to downtown Fort Lauderdale, the sun was bloodred, and from the top of the interchange I could see a necklace of bright, starlike lights strung out in its glow. They were the landing lights of airliners stacked up in their approaches to the international airport. More tourists and a returning business class flowing into paradise.

  Three blocks off the interstate, I pulled into the sheriff’s parking lot, fifteen minutes late but lucky enough to arrive during a shift change. I found a space near the front entrance and backed in. I watched the employees coming and going, mostly civilians with an occasional uniform of dark green trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt. The men tended toward the thick-armed variety, their sleeves tight around the tops of their biceps and their chests expanded by the bulletproof vests under their shirts. Most of them looked young to me.

  While I watched, my fingers unconsciously went to the side of my neck and found the small soft spot of scar tissue that the bullet had left after passing through skin and muscle and then smacking into the brick wall of a Philadelphia dry cleaner. My eyes were unfocused until I picked up the familiar movement of Richards’s long- legged gait. She was halfway across the broad courtyard. Her hair was pinned up in the way of a good professional and she was dressed in a pair of slacks done in some light fabric, with a jacket to match. There was a bounce to her step, an unmistakable athleticism in the slight swing of narrow hips and the squared stillness of wide shoulders. I liked the look.

  She almost made the curb, swung her head to scan the lot for my truck and spotted me. I had the window halfway down to wave when something grabbed her attention. She spun on one heel and looked back toward the entrance at a deputy in uniform who was jogging to catch her. He was barely taller than she and had the biceps and the chest. He was also carrying a 9 mm on his hip and a radio microphone clipped to the epaulet on his right shoulder. Patrol cop.

  I watched as he started the conversation in earnest, though they were too far away for me to overhear. When I saw Richards square her stance and cross her arms I knew it was no Sunday chat. I’d seen that body language before and it wasn’t pretty. The tight knot of Richards’s blond hair was bobbing on the back of her head as she spoke. The cop half turned away in one of those, “I don’t have to listen to this shit” moves, but then he snapped back, putting his hands on both hips and leaning his chin into Richards’s space. She never gave an inch and instead uncrossed her arms and raised a pointed finger, and this time I could read her lips saying “back off.” The cop flattened out a hand and raised it, as though he was going to slap the finger out of his face. My instant reaction was to open the door of the truck, but Richards, always observant of movement around her, turned an open palm my way without looking around.

  The sound of her voice caused the heads of two passersby to turn toward her, and the cop quickly put his hands out, palms to her, and took a step back. He was in midsentence when Richards turned on her heel and stepped off the curb, giving him her back. She walked directly toward my truck, with the dissed officer watching her and me, opened the passenger door and let herself in. Her face and throat were flushed, and if she had looked me in the face, I knew I would have seen her eyes flashing that green color that always came when she was pissed.

  “Hi, honey,” I said. “How was your day?”

  “Shut up, Max. You’re not funny.”

  I pulled out and drove, sneaking a look at the pulsating artery in her neck, waiting for it to trip down a few beats before opening my mouth again. I drove east into the city, crossed Federal Highway and took the back way to Canyons, passing the park and the old Florida- style homes along the river. I parked in a lot behind a line of Sunrise Avenue stores and walked around to open Richards’s door. She stepped out and into my extended arm and kissed me on the mouth without saying a word.

  “Apology accepted,” I said.

  I closed the door and could see a grin come to the corner of her mouth before she turned away. We sat at the bar waiting for a table. I was drinking coffee, and she waited until she was well into her first margarita before she finally spoke.

  “David McCrary. And I don’t care what Lynn says, if he touches her again, he’s canned.” Her eyes had gone back to their bluish hue, but there was still some fire in them.

  “McCrary’s the cop in the courtyard?”

  “Control freak,” she said. “And all the shit that comes with it, including physical abuse.”

  “And Lynn is, who? A friend?”

  “She’s a good cop, a real sweetheart, and she’s in love with this asshole.”

  I waited for Richards to take another couple of sips of her drink.

  “She tell you he’s hitting her?”

  “Not in so many words, but she’s just leaving that part out. All the signs are there. He calls her constantly on her cell, even when he’s on duty. If she’s with us at Brownies, he shows up and cuts her right out of the group like some damn sheepdog separating the flock. Hell, these days she’ll rarely come out alone.”

  Control and ownership, I thought. The cornerstones of an abusive relationship. These days every cop gets the lessons, takes a class on dealing with domestic violence. Some of them don’t pay attention. Some don’t want to pay attention. Some can’t see in themselves what they’re trained to see in others.

  “You want to talk about it?” I said.

  “No,” she said, but she did.

 
When we were seated at a window table, she talked about her friend between bites of black beans and rice and a mesquite-grilled snapper. I had a wood-grilled filet—I liked to take advantage of steak when I was off the river. We split a bottle of chardonnay and I ate slowly, mostly listening while she argued with herself over reporting the cop to internal affairs.

  “You realize your friend is the one who’s going to have to file a complaint,” I finally said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tough thing to do, being part of the blue crew and all.”

  Every cop knew that if a wife or girlfriend filed a domestic assault charge against him, his head would be on the block. If the charge was upheld, forget it. A conviction meant you could never carry a weapon again. Your career was over. It was a tough decision, holding a fellow officer’s career in your hand. It’s why so many incidents got swept under the rug, or dealt with internally and off the books.

  “I warned him if I ever saw a mark on her that’s exactly what I’d do,” Richards said.

  “And?”

  “He denied he ever touched her. Said Lynn was upset. Said he loved her and wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “They all do,” I said, finishing the wine.

  “Voice of experience?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I’ll tell you about my father sometime,” I said, getting the waiter’s attention. “You ready to hit the movies?”

  “I don’t think so. How about if you just take me home and let me jump your scrawny bones,” she said, taking me by the arm.

  “I really didn’t have any such thing in mind,” I said, leaving a tip.

  “Liar,” she said, pushing me toward the door.

  We made love in the hammock on her back porch, surrounded by the nighttime arboretum of oaks and transplanted palms and birds of paradise that lined her city yard. The breath of night- blooming jasmine was in the air, and the aqua light from her swimming pool danced in the tree leaves above. In the wake of our dinner conversation I tried to be tender, but she was having none of it. We ended up on the wooden planks of the patio deck and then in the chlorine-scented water. We were in her bed when I automatically woke at dawn. I rolled onto one shoulder and watched her sleeping. She hated it when I stared at her. I had not brought up the subject of my shack fire or the new investigation Billy had me on. Both were too tentative and given her mood, not worth the interruption. I knew it would come back on me, that I wasn’t sharing.