“Don’t you get it?” he yelled at me, and shook the paddle near my face. “Don’t you fucking get it at all?”
“Get what?” I yelled back, not one to be easily outshouted thanks to my early childhood training.
“It’s all dying, going to hell, and I can’t save any of it. Nothing I do, nothing, I can’t save any of it. Not a damn piece of it, not the Glades, not the Peace. Hell, they’re even fucking up the Suwannee River, mining the water for Miami. Between the doughfaces and the greedy motherfuckers, it’s all but all gone.”
It?
Florida? I wondered, studying Miguel’s face closely.
“The Everglades aren’t even there anymore, just some dried-up little park with boardwalks and airboat rides for tourists,” he yelled, but a notch lower on the shouting index. “Gone. Dead. And they’re going to dump that gyp shit in the Gulf and finish it off. The coral reefs are dying, the whole fucking Gulf is dying. Do you know what it takes to kill an eco system that big?”
Then he gulped air, and, holding the canoe paddle like a baseball bat, he raised it like a weapon.
I flinched, and jerked backward, thinking my head was the target.
But Miguel spun away from me and smashed the oar into the concrete edge of a nearby picnic table with a splintering whack that definitely commanded my attention.
Yeah, and maybe some attention from the folks loitering about.
Miguel flung the piece of the oar he still held at the table, and I saw something like a shudder pass through his shoulders.
I did not want to face his hard-core rage. What I wanted was to leave. But I stood my ground and waited.
The thing was, for once, I totally got him. Like Olivia, in love with her sweet, little, blue birds, the scrub jays, Miguel loved something that was doomed. The whole damn natural state of Florida. And I thought of my grandfather, for once sober as a Methodist minister, out in the backyard, firing off every gun he owned, and being a red-dirt Georgia farmer, that was a goodly number, blamming at the stars and the sky and the dark clouds and the half-moon the night the cancer finally finished eating up my grandmother. He kept shooting and raging until finally Delvon and I tackled him and threw him in Delvon’s truck and got him away from there, not five minutes ahead of the deputy sheriff the neighbors had called on him.
Later, I asked my grandfather what he was shooting at, and he said, “I was trying to kill God. Stupid, huh?”
Yeah, stupid. Like blowing up Bush-hogs, trying to save the Glades.
But waste and destruction and dying can make us angry.
And anger can damn sure make us stupid.
Finally, Miguel turned back around toward me. Over his shoulder I could see a few stragglers watching him. Luckily, nobody official was running up, and nobody appeared to be punching in 911 on their cells.
He glared at me, and his expression scared me.
“Look, they think I blew Angus up.”
“Why would you possibly want to kill Angus? He was your friend.” I tried to sound calm, even soft, as if I were soothing a distraught child, which maybe I was.
“I didn’t kill him, my God, Lilly, I loved that man like a brother. He was a pissed-off little genius when it came to fighting the phosphate mines.”
I thought about the fake cat paws, and nodded. Yeah, he had been a pissed-off little genius.
“But I, ah, blew up some…some sugar grower’s machinery in the Glades. I destroyed their bulldozer and a Bush-hog. We were careful not to blow up anything where people or animals could get hurt.”
“How’d you blow them up?” Though, of course, thanks to Philip’s resourcefulness in having a high-quality snitch in the Bradenton PD, I knew the basic answer, I thought I’d fish around in Miguel’s confession and compare what he’d tell me with what I already knew.
“Fertilizer that we did stuff to so it would be more explosive. My uncle, my mom’s brother, taught me how to do it. He was…ah, a low-bid demolition guy. Did a lot of…building…work in Miami.”
Uh-huh. He was an arsonist and outlaw bomb guy, I translated.
Then I began thinking like a lawyer, which is, after all, what I am, and I wondered how I could exclude evidence of Miguel’s past incarceration during the orange-defamation trial—if we ever had a trial—because, to a trial attorney, something isn’t necessarily a fact unless you can prove it in court. Then I realized the more immediate need was to keep Miguel out of jail right now.
“You need help. If I can’t help you, Phillip Cohen can. He is an excellent criminal-defense attorney.” Sidestepping mentally the fact that having my lover defending a guy I’d made out half naked with on my couch might not be the best idea I’d ever had, I said, “Miguel, please. Follow me home. We’ll call Philip Cohen. He’s the greatest criminal-defense attorney in the whole state. He’ll represent you. I’ll see to that. And I’ll tear up those receipts.”
Miguel grabbed me by both of my arms. “What are you talking about?”
Oops.
I hadn’t meant to say that. Though I thought Miguel had surely already figured out I had taken the receipts from his truck, on the off chance he was stupid or something, I hadn’t seen any point in highlighting the fact that I possessed evidence he might be a bomb murderer.
Sometimes my mouth just works faster than my brain.
With a tight grip on my arm, Miguel shook me. “What receipts?”
Suddenly I was glad there were other people milling around.
“Take your hands off of me,” I said, deliberately lowering my voice and pacing the words.
He dropped his hands. “Sorry, Lilly, I’m sorry. But, what receipts?”
“The, er, the…” Where was my famous ability to conjure up alt-realities out of small factual details when I needed them?
But then I decided to tell him the truth, and check for reactions. After all, he would hardly choke me in plain view of people who looked like good potential witnesses. “The receipts for fertilizer and stuff. Diesel and clothespin and potassium something.”
“Where’d you get them?” Miguel’s face was a perfect blank screen.
“In your truck. In the glove compartment.”
“They aren’t mine,” he said, and I took careful note of his eyes, which were angry, and I simply could not tell if he was lying or not.
“Look, this is over my head,” I said. “You really need to speak with Philip.”
“I’ve got to go.” Miguel turned and started jogging away from me.
“Wait,” I said, and ran after him. “How do I get in touch with you? Where are you staying? You’re still my client, you know. About those receipts, I can’t testify against you. Wait.”
Miguel stopped and faced me, giving me that look again, the one that scared me. “I’ll catch up with you somewhere down the road.”
Funny, it sounded just a tad like a threat.
But threat or no, with that, Miguel left me standing at high noon in a parking lot with a questionable coat of sunscreen melting into my burning eyeballs and some potentially damning receipts in my desk drawer.
And a whole new peek at Miguel’s soul.
“Damnation to hell,” I said, using my grandfather’s favorite curse. Then, ducking the failure of the whole stupid canoe trip and the burning UV rays, I crawled into my little Honda, squishing river water in the seat. From inside my car, I did the only thing left that made any sense at the moment. I called Olivia on my cell phone and reported to her that I was safe and that Miguel had driven off. Then I turned and drove home.
When I got to my house, there was no sign of Jimmie or Delvon, and so I took a shower, dressed, fed Rasputin a trail mix bar and a handful of sunflower seeds, ate some yogurt and blueberries, and headed to the law office.
I’d hardly gotten inside the back door before Bonita was telling me that Sherilyn Moody had called again. I sighed. Bonita sighed.
“What did she want?”
“She will not say. You really need to call her back.”
“You really need to get her to tell you why she wants to talk to me,” I said, a little snappy at the edges what with my futile but still taxing morning.
“The most efficient way to do that would be for you to call her. She will not tell me why she is calling. I’ve tried.”
Bonita smiled softly, patiently, not at all mad at me for my bad manners, which, of course, immediately made me ashamed of my snappishness.
After making nice, I retreated into my office.
Officially, so far my day sucked. While I was sitting behind my desk contemplating the details of that assessment, and fuming over the lost cooler, the lost Glock, the lost opportunity to learn something from, or about, Miguel, I heard the soft voice of Henry Platt, the insurance adjuster who was courting Bonita, drifting through my closed door. I have uncannily sharp hearing, and I stood up and tiptoed closer to eavesdrop on Henry as he attempted to woo Bonita in her little cubbyhole office. At the first reasonably polite moment, I planned to lure Henry into my office on business. My business.
After all, although Henry’s current obsession was convincing Bonita to marry him, he was still my friend and a steady hand at referring medical-malpractice cases for me to defend. He’d obviously come by to see Bonita, so I would give them a few minutes alone before I went out to greet him and renew my request for an Official Big Case. I needed a med-mal case, and he was just the man to give it to me.
Judging that he’d had enough courting time, I sprang out of my office and watched him flinch. “Good afternoon, Henry,” I said, my face beaming.
“Er, um…hello. I, er…got your message. About getting…giving…assigning you a med-mal case.”
“Good. So you’ve got one coming down the pike for me?”
After his usual start-and-stop conversational style, Henry said that his office had had two incident notices from their doctor clients filed in the last few months that he was watching closely, but so far no new suits had been filed.
“One of the incident reports mentioned a badly blotched face-laser procedure. I believe…think…that is, my professional opinion is”—he smiled at Bonita as if he was particularly proud of coming up with that last phrase—“is that one will surely…maybe…more than likely…end up in litigation.”
A blotched face laser? Yeah, that’d be worth a couple years of discovery and pretrial billings and high stepping, but blessedly without the emotional drama of anybody actually dead. “What happened?” I asked, my interest definitely piqued.
“The plastic surgeon was using lasers to, er, erase…er, smooth out…this woman’s wrinkles and he says…er, claims, the woman didn’t follow postop orders.”
“I’m sure her attorney will have a different story if she sues. How bad does she look?”
“The doc admits, er, doesn’t admit, er, but, er, says, er, reports…She looks pretty bad.”
“Like a really bad sunburn that peeled and left the skin three or four different shades of red, pink, and blistered?” I asked, remembering Ms. Moody’s face at the antiphosphate rally.
“Yes, something like that.”
“What’s the woman’s name?” I mean, really, how interesting would it be if I ended up defending a doctor Mrs. Moody ended up suing? There was a karmic circle in there someplace.
Naturally, Henry couldn’t remember the client’s name, though he did remember it was a woman.
But come on, how often could that happen? Well, in Sarasota, where plastic surgery ads in the newspaper far outnumber actual news stories, maybe it happened more than once. Still, I thought it had to be Mrs. Moody. “Go, scoot, look it up and call me,” I said to Henry, prompting him to promise to call me as soon as he had that information.
Bonita walked Henry to the back door, and returned.
“So, what’s with you and Henry?” I asked.
“So, what is with you and Philip?” Bonita asked.
“Same old, same old,” I said.
“There is a story in the newspaper you might want to read,” she said, effectively ending our gossip as she handed me the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Back inside my own office, I laughed out loud when I read the lead story in the B section announcing to the readership at large that a second panther at the Antheus proposed phosphate-mine site had been confirmed by Fish and Wildlife federal agents. This, the story proclaimed, though without any attribution, had apparently put a stop to the forward progress of the proposed mining permits for Antheus. Protected species, protected habitat, et cetera, et cetera. Then the article superficially reviewed the endangered-species regulations and habitat protection and such things as I’d learned from Miguel and Angus about the Florida panther, and the efforts to save it from extinction. But I wondered why the article didn’t mention the first panther, the one someone had gut-shot and pitched out by the public road next to the locked gate to the Antheus property.
Still, the important thing was that the findings by Official People had at least temporarily put a stop to the mining-permit process. And rallied the animal lovers to the cause.
And, I thought, this time nobody can kill the panther, because it wasn’t real.
While I was basking in the glory of thinking I had done something that was useful in a cosmic sense, Henry called me.
“Er, that woman, the one with…the blotched…the face—”
“Henry, just tell me her name.”
“Er, it’s, her name is, she’s…Sherilyn Moody.”
Aha.
I knew it. Mrs. M. David Moody, of all people. That’s why the good widow had looked so bad at the phosphate meeting.
“Promise me, Henry,” I said, trying to keep the eagerness in my voice under some control, “that you will refer that case to me. Promise me it’s my case.”
Henry chirped, “You’re first on my list.”
We made the usual nice, nice and then I transferred him to Bonita so they could finish their chat that I had interrupted when I sent him to his office to get Sherilyn’s name, and I hung up my phone.
Oh, good. Plastic-surgery malpractice. I’d never had one of those before, and it would be exactly the kind of tricky, high-profile, and high-billing case I needed. So, yeah, call me a trial attorney, but I felt a surge of pure excitement.
But as I leaned back in my red leather chair with a sense of anticipation, an eerie feeling went thunk in my gut and my brain.
Mierda. I knew why Sherilyn Moody had been calling me.
And, no doubt, why M. David had my firm brochure and a note to make an appointment.
Not an appointment for him. But for her.
I stewed on it for a minute or two, hopped up, stuck my head out of my office and stared at Bonita until she put down the phone and gave me a worried look. “Don’t, under any circumstances, none, let Sherilyn Moody into my office, or put her through on my phone.”
Bonita nodded, and I ducked back into my office, swallowed the unpleasant sense of déjà vu narrowly averted, and made myself get back to work.
Before I knew it, Bonita came in to remind me that I had a hearing in Bradenton tomorrow morning, and to say good night. A few minutes later Jackson stuck his head in to say good night, and a few minutes after that I packed up the hearing file to rememorize in the comfort of my own sanctuary, and I went home.
Though Rasputin greeted me raucously, there was no sign that Jimmie had been in the house since he had left shortly after me that morning. Worrying about Jimmie, I fed Rasputin and fixed myself some salad.
By the time I had finished eating, there was still no Jimmie, and this increased my concern threefold. I chided myself for being anxious about him. After all, he was not my teenage son. He was a competent adult, one old enough to be my grandfather, and presumably able to take care of himself.
Thus, telling myself Jimmie was just off on an old-man frolic, I sat down with my hearing file, studied it until I could recite the important aspects backward, and glanced at the clock. Late. And still no Jimmie. So, I called Dolly. After she assured me that s
he had not seen or heard from him all day, I hung up and worried in overdrive. Finally I called the police department’s nonemergency number, and an officer asked a few polite questions and then informed me that grown men frequently stayed out late by themselves, and I shouldn’t worry, and I most assuredly shouldn’t call him back.
Thinking Jimmie might be with Delvon, I found the scrap of paper with Lenora’s phone number. When I called it, Delvon answered, said something that made no sense whatsoever, and then assured me that he had not seen Jimmie all day.
While I wondered where Jimmie was, Delvon said, “I’m gonna get my hair cut.”
“Cut your hair?” I asked, not really completely listening to him.
“Yep. There’s this organization in Tampa that takes donations of real human hair and makes wigs out of it.”
“Why would you want somebody wearing your hair?”
“For Lenora. So that someone could use my hair to make a wig for Lenora. How do you think she would look as a redhead?” he asked.
“Fine, I guess. I don’t know. What color was her hair before it”—okay, the truth is the truth—“all fell out?”
“Why, she was a redhead.”
With Delvon, conversation is sometimes like that, and I decided just to let it go. But I was thinking that Jimmie was surely right, that Delvon must be deeply in love with Lenora. After all, Delvon had had long hair since he was eight years old. He had mostly grown it long because no one ever bothered to take him to the barbershop. But when the principal of Bugfest Elementary had called our home and made a ruckus about the fact that Delvon’s hair was swinging below his shoulders, the long hair had become a conscious choice. Though our parents had not been concerned enough to defend Delvon against plans to expel him, or to cut his hair forcibly, my grandmother dragged my grandfather down to the principal’s office to stick up for Delvon and his hair. Before they got to the principal’s office, Grandmom had gone into the social studies room and yanked off the portrait of Jesus that hung there on a wall—separation of church and state had never played big in my little Georgia hometown—and Grandmom toted the picture of Jesus in to the principal. As if the principal was blind, Grandmom had pointed out to him that Jesus had long hair.
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