Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  That ship had pretty much sailed, I figured, what with the earlier scene with Dolly and Delvon duking it out in front of my house.

  But Miguel slipped his shirt back on and buttoned it in haste, but not before all three of us took a good look at his chest. Though his build was slender, his stomach was flat and muscled, and his chest was sprinkled with a light fluff of jet black hair. I mean, was this man perfect or what?

  Despite Jimmie’s hovering and sputtering, I followed Miguel outside. “I need to know how to get in touch with you. And we need to talk. I want to know about Lenora and Angus, and that night your boat blew up—”

  “Lilly, I’m a running target. But I’ll catch up with you.” Then he took off, jogging away down Tulip Street.

  A little dazed, I wandered back into my own house, and my own kitchen, where Delvon was eating frozen peas straight from the freezer bag. “Tasty, but a bit chewy,” he said.

  “I done told you we’d need a second pizza,” Jimmie said to Delvon.

  “It was an extra large,” Delvon said. “You want to call out for another one?”

  Jimmie turned back to me. “What you doing with that crazy boy when you got a nice fella like Philip?”

  Well, exactly. What was I doing with Miguel?

  Or, not doing, as the case seemed to be.

  Chapter 12

  Sherilyn Moody, the good widow of the man who had ended his life facedown in a pond of toxic waste he himself had created, had called me.

  Had, in fact, called me twice. And early. And without leaving any message except her private phone number.

  This I learned as Bonita gave me the early-morning report and then shifted her gaze to the clock on the wall.

  Okay, so, of course I was late to work, what with having to stumble around a stoned airport outlaw, a hungover homeless handyman, and a chirpy juvenile jay on a trail-mix-bar high.

  Late though I was, two calls from the former beauty Sherilyn raised my curiosity level a notch. I mean, I doubted she was extending a personal invitation to the funeral of her late husband.

  “You sure she didn’t leave any message? No hint what this is about?”

  “Yes. None.”

  Of course, calling her back would probably have solved the mystery, but I didn’t want to appear unbusy, or eager. In fact, I wanted to make her wait. I wanted her to leave a message that explained why I was supposed to call her back so I could be perfectly prepared. I wanted to deal with her when I was in a better mood—say, five or six higher evolutionary lifetimes from now.

  “When she calls back, don’t put her through to me until you get a reason,” I said, and then fled into my private office, closing the door behind me.

  I was desperate to be alone.

  But before I could turn around twice, Olivia poked her head in without knocking. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “Sure. And you?”

  “I’m all right. I’m very sorry about Angus.”

  “Me too. He was your friend also.”

  “Not a friend, not really, he kept to himself. But an admirable environmental soldier.”

  Being as how Olivia stayed in tune with the local environmental soldiers, maybe I could pry some useful information from her before I ran her off. “So, what was with Angus and Lenora?” I asked the easy question first.

  “I’m not really sure. Funny, but I never saw them together.”

  I nodded.

  “Funeral arrangements are up in the air, apparently,” Olivia said, “but my conservation group is planning a memorial. I hope you will come.”

  “Of course.” I paused, waiting to see if Olivia would volunteer anything. When she didn’t seem likely to do so, I asked her, “Do you know anything about Angus and the explosion?” I trusted Olivia, of course, but decided to keep it just between me and Jimmie, oh, and Philip, that I’d been on the pier the night Miguel’s boat blew up, never volunteer anything you might have to deny later having been an early lesson in my career.

  “No. Just what I read in the paper,” Olivia said. “But it seems strange, maybe suspicious, that he got killed so soon after M. David’s murder. Both of them being, you know, involved in that Antheus mine project. Think there’s a connection?”

  “Yeah. But I can’t imagine what, since they were on such diametrically opposed sides of the mine project. Still, it does seem too coincidental,” I said. “Detective Josey Somebody apparently thinks that M. David was killed by an enraged former business cohort.” Actually, come to think of it, that was my theory; Josey had not offered me any insider theories of her own to amount to much.

  “Well, frankly, I’m more concerned with who killed Angus John,” Olivia said.

  “Maybe,” I speculated, “the mine owners blew up the sailboat, hoping to take out both Angus and Miguel and end the local opposition to the permitting process.”

  “No, I doubt that. Phosphate companies hire lawyers, not killers, to stop environmentalists.”

  “Yeah, I’m surprised that Antheus hadn’t slapped a SLAPP suit on Angus and Miguel. Seems like Antheus had more at risk from Angus’s and Miguel’s activities than the orange groves. I mean, those protests at the orange groves were last year and old news.”

  “Well, I wondered about that. But it’d be such bad publicity for Antheus to sue people like Angus and Miguel when part of what the company is doing now is just public relations. You know, ‘Trust us, we’ll bring jobs and taxes. Phosphate feeds the world.’ All that,” Olivia said.

  “Yeah. I guess.” I let the sound of someone, i.e., me, who didn’t necessarily want to pursue conversation, hang there, silent in the air.

  But as I did, the little gray and white swirls of my cerebrum hummed and twirled to connect the random dots into a straight line.

  Antheus didn’t want the editorial pages of the newspapers calling them bad sports if they sued people like Angus and Miguel. Also, as a practical matter, Antheus couldn’t very well sue anybody under the veggie libel statute because phosphate wasn’t a Florida agricultural product like the oranges.

  Angus had told me others had been sued by Delilah Groves, and now I wondered about them. “Olivia, the other folks sued for protesting about the gyp waste on the oranges, were they also involved in protesting Antheus?”

  “Oh, sure. Same group. For the most part. Well, not a hundred percent, I guess.”

  “The people who protested the groves, but didn’t protest the mine, did they get sued?”

  “Er…a couple named Susie and Rick, big on food safety. Real nice couple. They didn’t get sued. But they aren’t involved in fighting Antheus. Why…” Olivia redistributed her facial muscles thoughtfully for a moment, and I watched the way her mental processes played across her expressions.

  Beating her to what now felt like the obvious punch, I said, “I bet that’s what those orange-defamation lawsuits against them were really about.”

  “You mean, like a SLAPP suit, but to shut them up over Antheus and not the oranges?”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding in rhythm to my ping-ponging mental functions. “A suit designed to tie up their time and their limited finances so they couldn’t keep agitating over the proposed mine. Maybe it didn’t really have anything to do with the oranges.”

  “Why didn’t I get sued?”

  “Olivia, maybe because your husband is a partner in Sarasota’s biggest and best law firm?” Yeah, that made sense. Bullies generally prefer to pick on people who cannot effectively fight back. And Olivia, bless her well-connected heart, could have hurled all of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley back at Delilah Groves.

  “Let me check the corporation papers,” I said, “and see who really owns Delilah, if there’s a link between it and Antheus, then we can—”

  “Oh, let me do that for you. Just point me to a computer and I’ll dust off those old paralegal research skills. I can look up the corporation info on LEXIS or Westlaw.”

  Good deal, I thought, and led Olivia to the central computer in the library, i
n the process brushing off a law clerk dawdling over the keys. Then I practically skipped back to my office, not entirely sure what effect this potential new discovery had on anything, but sure somehow that it did.

  Bonita had my French press full of fresh coffee by the time I got back to my office. And as the coffee further percolated in my brain, I sat down at my desk with firm instructions to myself: Do some actual, billable work for paying clients.

  But as I piddled around with my piddling files, my mind kept ricocheting back to the notion that maybe the orange-defamation suit had something to do with Antheus Mines and the big-picture notion at play in the field of the SLAPP suit was to shut Angus and Miguel up about the phosphate mine. And not the oranges. After all, hadn’t that man who claimed he owned Delilah Groves said that they shipped most of their oranges up north? Presumably, a handful of Floridians marching with banners and slogans about glow-in-the-dark fruit wouldn’t have made the morning paper or the evening network news “up north.”

  And what in the world was taking Olivia so long to find out who actually owned Delilah Groves? While she was practicing her computer skills, I figured I’d polish my people skills, and I had Rayford Clothier, alleged owner of Delilah, on the phone before Bonita could ask me what I was doing.

  “Yeah,” Rayford the charmer said, by way of initial greeting.

  “Hi. My name is Bunny LeCroy, and I’m with the Better Business Bureau, and I just need a smidge of your valuable time.” With just so much perky charm that I almost choked myself, I explained I needed some answers to some very basic questions for the bureau.

  Like, hey, are you just a cover for Antheus?

  “What do I get out of this?” Rayford said, not at all like an eager businessman seeking goodwill and an expanded local market.

  “Oh, I promise your orange groves a prominent mention in our annual citrus publication, which is county-wide publicity. Free publicity.”

  “It’ll be sold by then, and full of big, pink houses.”

  Sold? For more development? Then Rayford the silver-tongued devil really had been trying to defraud me during our first conversation when he wanted a check as a deposit on next year’s crop of oranges. Okay, so that made me feel a lot better about my serial lying to the man.

  “Well, please, sir, all this is public record. But you’d really be helping me out by answering my questions, saving me the time of digging in those old records.”

  “You don’t listen. The groves are being sold.”

  “Well, sure, but my boss says to find this out, and as long as you are an operating grove right now, I need to list you in our publication. You don’t want to get me in trouble, do you?” I pitched my voice up a tad, trying hard to project over the phone the picture of a young, pretty woman in need of Rayford’s kind assistance.

  “Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Just having a bad day. What do you need?”

  Okay, so he wasn’t a total jerk. “First, could you tell me who owns Delilah Groves?”

  “Me. I own half. And Plantation, Inc., owns the other half.”

  “And who owns Plantation, Inc.?”

  “That, little darling, I don’t know. I just have to deal with their lawyer.”

  “Oh, and who might that be?” Oh, yeah, like the Better Business Bureau would need that info for its alleged citrus publication. Rayford’s long silence told me I’d pushed it too far.

  About the time the silence got really awkward, Rayford said, “Listen, my other phone is ringing.” And then the line went dead. And I was glad that Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley had invested in that high-techie stuff that blocks others from using caller ID on us.

  So, what had I learned? Delilah was being sold, and Rayford was a semijerk, but not all together stupid enough to tell me who his real partner was.

  I didn’t necessarily feel any closer to answering any of the pressing questions.

  Then Olivia burst back into my office, with not even a knock. “Wow,” she said. “I can trace an ownership interest in Delilah Groves back to M. David, who also owned fifty-five percent of Antheus. The corporation that owns Delilah has two shareholders, one corporation that owns fifty-two percent of Delilah and an individual. But M. David was the sole shareholder in the corporation that owned over half of the groves.”

  Oh, huh? I thought, but nodded as if what she had said also appeared in black ink on a chart in front of me and made perfect sense.

  “See, M. David owned the controlling interest in the orange grove with just one other guy, but M. David’s ownership was cloaked by that privately held corporation, something called Plantation, Inc. A corporation that owns fifty-two percent of another corporation,” Olivia said, making it clearer.

  “M. David must have made his attorneys very happy, all this incorporation work,” I said.

  “You’re missing the point,” Olivia said. “I really do worry that you might have that attention deficit disorder, you know, ADD.”

  No, I wasn’t missing the point, I thought, I was making a joke, forgetting momentarily that Olivia could be as humorless as most lawyers.

  “Like you suspected,” she said, “the orange-defamation suits were just harassment against Angus John and Miguel. Because Antheus wanted to shut them up about the mine, M. David decided to use Delilah Groves, Inc., as a plaintiff and grind Angus and Miguel up in litigation. That made sense since Angus and Miguel were the ringleaders in the fight against the Antheus Mines. If all their money and time was sucked up in depositions and hearings, Angus and Miguel wouldn’t have the energy or the money to keep fighting Antheus. Any litigation pursued hard enough would pretty much do the trick, it wouldn’t have to be Antheus that sued them. Plus, if the groves actually got a judgment against them, it could hound them mercilessly, trying to collect it, and basically put those two out of the protest business.”

  I nodded, thinking it was pretty gracious of me to listen to Olivia as if she were the attorney and I was not. Also I thought that was a pretty clever idea on the Antheus people’s part. No doubt M. David’s idea.

  “A SLAPP suit by proxy. Get the benefits without public outrage. Strategically sound from Antheus’s point of view. But probably all for naught,” I said. “Angus is dead, and Miguel on the lam. And, Delilah Groves is being sold for big, pink houses.”

  “It’s already being sold?” Olivia asked. “This soon?”

  “Yeah. I guess the late M. David’s good widow and her new orange-grove partner didn’t waste any time on that.”

  “How do you know it’s being sold?”

  “I just had a delightful chat with the other owner, Rayford Clothier. Just then.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that was the other name.” Olivia squinted behind her glasses, in deep thought. “I’m still not sure we really know anything that helps.”

  Well, yeah, that was often typical of lawyerly activities.

  “Let’s just cogitate on it some more,” I said.

  “Let me get in touch with the right offices in Tallahassee and see if I can’t get a copy of the Delilah corporate bylaws. Don’t they have to file those by law?”

  I nodded yes, though being a malpractice-defense attorney, the truth was that I was clueless. But the bylaws would be interesting, and who knows?

  In the ensuing silence, I began to be acutely aware of the fact that I hadn’t really billed anything to a paying client all day. I tapped a pen on my empty time sheet, and Olivia watched the motion.

  “I need to let you get back to work,” Olivia said.

  In short order Olivia said good-bye, and left me to my cold coffee and cogitation.

  Naturally, then, the cosmic forces at play in the field of the lawyer had to fling another raw egg at me.

  Philip tapped on my window.

  “There’s a front door, why doesn’t anybody use the front door?” I shouted to the empty air. Yelling calmed me down somewhat, so I went through Bonita’s office and let Philip inside.

  Peeved as I was by these interruptions, I suddenly felt guilty when I looked
into Philip’s deep black eyes. He was a good man, he loved me, and I had gleefully, albeit briefly, made out shirtlessly on my couch with another man.

  While I pushed my shame at bay, Philip said all the nice, normal things one says in greeting. After I returned the favor, Philip got to the point. “The Bradenton police have officially narrowed their investigation into Angus’s murder to Miguel as the prime suspect. He’s wanted for questioning.”

  “What? What?” Okay, but “what, what?” is better than “ohshitohshit.” I mean, it was one thing for me to wonder about Miguel, my client and make-out buddy, but wholly another to have Officialdom after him.

  “My informant in the police department tells me it looks like the explosion that killed Angus on the boat was a primitive, homemade bomb. Forensic evidence at the explosion showed significant traces of ammonium, which naturally led the investigators to believe it was a fertilizer bomb, fresh from terrorism 101 class,” Philip said.

  Nearly simultaneously, I flashed on Miguel looking more like a potential client for Philip than a future lover for me and those damn receipts I’d taken out of his pickup. The ones showing the purchase of way more fertilizer than a man on a boat had any logical need to buy. Rather than confess to Philip that I was hoarding evidence in a pending murder case, I asked, “How was this bomb ignited?”

  “Maybe dynamite, which can be had fairly easily from criminal sources, or plain vanilla gunpowder. Because the bomb apparently went off as Angus was opening the hatch, they suspect some type of a motion-activated device was used to trigger it. Probably something as simple as a clothespin with two wires separated by an insulator attached to a cord on the hatch.”

  Damn, damn, damn, this was getting worse by the minute. Miguel had receipts for clothespins too.

  Philip, oblivious to my mounting distress, explained that the police were zeroing in on Miguel because of an old arrest of his. “He and a relative, an uncle, I believe, used a fertilizer bomb, a smaller one, to blow up an equipment warehouse in the Everglades. Nobody was hurt, but he destroyed an earth-digging machine of some sort. He did some time for it.”