Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  “Get back inside,” Josey said, rather calmly given the situation. “We don’t want the cat coming after us.”

  Olivia and I scurried back inside the door, with Josey bringing up the rear. We huddled in the kitchen while Josey phoned Adam, told him Samantha had escaped from her trailer cage, and that he should bring the tranquilizer gun. After giving him the address, she said, in a bit of a classic understatement, “It’s a long story. Get here as soon as you can.”

  As soon as she hung up the kitchen phone, we all ran to see about Miguel.

  Olivia was the first of us to collapse beside Miguel and cradle his head. Then I fell down beside her.

  “He’s not shot, just knocked out,” Josey said. “I was checking him when Rayford got the jump on me.”

  “I already called 911. For an ambulance and the law,” Olivia said.

  “Okay. Good job,” Josey said. She was still holding the gun, and she was staring at Miguel with the eyes of someone snapping the last few pieces into the jigsaw.

  Olivia stroked Miguel’s face and made soft crooning noises.

  So she was his lover, I thought, with a peculiar sense of betrayal. But then I looked again, with careful consideration and not like a cuckold. No, her acts were more like a mother than a lover. Olivia, the den mother for all of us. Naturally she would have let Miguel hide out with her, use her toiletries, and she could have hidden that from her husband if she had needed to.

  “All right, let’s see how badly hurt he is,” Josey said, and knelt beside Miguel.

  “I’ll get a glass of water from the kitchen,” I said, and I did, and I threw it on him.

  “Works in the movies,” I said when Miguel still didn’t move.

  “He needs an ambulance,” Olivia said. “Where the hell are they?”

  Josey checked Miguel’s pulse. “It’s steady and regular, like his breathing.”

  For want of something more productive to do, I got another glass of water and threw it in Miguel’s face again. This time, Miguel moaned, slowly rolled his head, and gradually came awake.

  “Olivia,” he said, his voice so soft I could barely hear it. Then he saw me and reached a hand out. I took it; his skin felt cold, and a bit damp.

  “Lilly, I wouldn’t have hurt you,” he said. “That night…no harm…meant.”

  If circumstances had been different, I might have pointed out that he could have conveyed that sentiment a tad better if he hadn’t busted down two doors and then chased me first on foot, then in his truck. But he was shaky, weak, with the dazed look of a man recently unconscious. I squeezed his hand, and said, “Yeah, I know that. Now.”

  Josey went Official then and asked him questions about dates and names and who was president and how many fingers, then when he drooled out his answers, she pronounced him oriented as to time and place.

  “I’ll go get you some water,” I said, “to drink.”

  “Make it whiskey,” Miguel said.

  I went into the kitchen in search of whiskey, and left Miguel with his head resting in Olivia’s care.

  In no time, I found the bottle, poured a jigger or so into a glass, and returned to the den, where Miguel was now sitting up, though Olivia braced him with her own body.

  Miguel looked around as he sipped the whiskey. “Where’s Rayford?”

  “Outside. Dead,” Josey said.

  Miguel dropped his head and struggled with his breath before he looked up at Josey. “I’m sorry you had to kill him.”

  “No, the panther got him.”

  “Samantha?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Man, talk about your poetic justice,” Miguel said, and attempted a smile he could not quite make work.

  Again, I thought about the trophy animal heads along the walls in Rayford’s house.

  Rayford. An evil man who could track and kill a panther to grease the path of the phosphate-mining permits. A bodyguard with a dollar in his shoe and dreams of Florida riches who suddenly owned 48 percent of an extremely valuable chunk of real estate, just days after a gut-shot panther died at the gate to Antheus, the would-be phosphate mine.

  “Here’s how I’ve got it figured,” I said. “Jump in if any of y’all know anything more than I know.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Rayford Clothier was M. David’s toady for years. Rayford killed that panther, the one with the kittens, back on the Antheus property. He’s the tracker and hunter. Didn’t y’all see the stuffed heads?”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Josey said.

  “M. David gave Rayford forty-eight percent of that orange grove. Gave it to him. Property-office records show that M. David transferred the ownership right after the panther was shot,” I said, fighting the urge to gloat over Josey the Official Law-Enforcement person.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that deed?” Josey asked.

  “I thought…I thought Miguel was involved. He was…is my client. I didn’t, couldn’t, make it worse for him.”

  “Well, there was that.” Josey smiled at me then, not with an Official Law-Enforcement smile, but with a woman who has been in love smile.

  “One thing I don’t quite understand,” Josey said, “was why Rayford killed M. David. Why didn’t Rayford just sell his half? It wasn’t like killing M. David meant he got the whole grove, right? Just his half.”

  “Forty-eight percent,” the technical lawyer in me corrected her. “And with M. David having the controlling interest in the corporation, I figure Rayford couldn’t sell.”

  “Lilly’s right,” Olivia said. “Under the Delilah Groves, Inc., bylaws, the groves were not divisible. And M. David wouldn’t sell them because he needed the groves to hassle Angus and Miguel with that stupid orange-defamation lawsuit.”

  Josey and I both stared at her.

  “Rayford had…kept files. It was all in there,” Olivia said.

  “Files? How’d you get his files?” Josey asked.

  But I knew. I’d dropped them running from Miguel the night I’d broken into Rayford’s office. No doubt Miguel had picked them up and presented them to Olivia.

  “I gave them to her,” Miguel the suddenly chivalrous said. “I stole them and gave them to her to take to Lilly, my lawyer. Only, Olivia didn’t have time. She didn’t know they were stolen.”

  “Ah, the break-in at the groves,” Josey said. “Still, that much real estate seems a pretty high bounty for one panther.”

  “So maybe Rayford had some kind of blackmail thing going. No doubt Rayford’d been doing M. David’s dirty work for years,” I said. “But one thing’s for certain. M. David didn’t count on Rayford getting so pissed when he wouldn’t agree to sell.”

  “Or Rayford just beat M. David to the punch. Could be M. David was planning to kill Rayford and recoup full ownership of the groves and get rid of whatever blackmail was involved,” Josey said.

  But then some silent synapses fired in my brain. I remembered what Angus had said, that M. David’s dumping the toxic gyp in the orange grove was turning the land into a Superfund site.

  Rayford didn’t own any part of Antheus and wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about M. David’s using the Delilah lawsuit to stifle opposition to the mine. What he had was nearly half of an orange grove he wanted desperately to sell for top dollar. And M. David’s SLAPP suit would have brought publicity about the gyp dumped there. Bad publicity about radioactive toxic waste sitting in the soil of the future Big Pink Expensive Homes subdivision where little children would play in the sunshine. Even in Florida, that would surely have brought down the selling price.

  M. David had so much at stake in Antheus that he didn’t mind devaluing the groves, but it sure looked like Rayford had minded.

  Minded considerably, apparently.

  “So, okay, Rayford wanted to turn the grove around fast, and he didn’t want the publicity of the orange-defamation lawsuit as a taint on the property. No doubt he figured he could talk Sherilyn into dismissing the suit more easily than M. David. So, it was all gree
d, sell the grove at top dollar before the Sarasota Herald-Tribune exposed Boogie Bog’s dumping toxic waste in the soil,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay, we get it,” Josey said. “Why Rayford killed M. David. But—”

  “Why’d he kill Angus?” Olivia interrupted.

  “That explosion was meant to kill both you and Angus,” I said, looking at a dazed and stunned Miguel. “You two were the natural suspects, but Rayford couldn’t take the chance y’all could talk him into the picture.”

  Miguel perked up, and almost stopped looking like a man recently knocked out. “He had to kill us to cover up his setup. Keep the police from learning about how Rayford called us out to the groves, talking settlement. Offered us beer, and a can of peanuts, which we took, leaving our prints all over everything. Rayford said if we’d shut up about the groves, he’d drop the suit. We said—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about that? I am your attorney, you’re supposed to—”

  “We’d’ve told you, only Angus got killed, and then it all spun out of control.”

  “You should’ve—” I started to say.

  “Okay, I get it,” Josey said, staring at Miguel. “Rayford carried those beer bottles and the can of peanuts to M. David’s house, with a few bottles thrown out at Boogie Bog. Easy enough for Rayford to get a bottle with M. David’s prints, being his bodyguard and all. Only, Rayford didn’t know getting latent prints off beer bottles is tough. But even getting M. David’s and Angus’s prints was enough to point at Angus. And by association, you, Miguel.”

  “And, the phone call from the pier. Did you or Angus call M. David from the pier the night you met Rayford?” I asked.

  “No. We never called M. David.”

  “So, Rayford figured the law would track the phone call and think you or Angus made it,” Josey said. “Think you’d invited yourself over for beer and to kill him.”

  Remembering what Olivia had told me about the night Miguel attacked M. David, I said, “Rayford was there the night you threatened M. David over the panther killing. Maybe that planted the idea. Plus, Rayford probably learned about your Everglade’s fertilizer-bomb episode from the police after that night.”

  “Yeah,” Josey said, slapping me on the back. “You’re pretty good at this, you know? You want a change of careers, I’ll put in a word for you.”

  “Ah, so you weren’t lying about those fertilizer receipts, were you?” I asked Miguel. “That was just something else Rayford planted in your truck.”

  “What receipts?” Josey said, and snapped her face around to stare at me, the congratulatory moment quickly having passed.

  Uh-oh. While I did a risk calculation on telling Josey the truth, Miguel saved me the trouble.

  “I found some receipts in my glove compartment, in my truck. Showing a big purchase of fertilize and potassium sulfate, some diesel. A cash sale. The receipts could’ve been anybody’s, except they were in my glove compartment. I told Lilly about them,” Miguel said, lying as smoothly as any veteran of the criminal-justice system, to protect me, just as he had already done for Olivia.

  “You should have told me about them,” Josey said to me, sounding a tad pissed off.

  “Attorney-client privilege,” I said, though I wasn’t certain the doctrine applied when I had taken the receipts without my client’s knowledge or permission. But Josey didn’t need that level of detail, so I launched another distraction.

  “So Rayford meant to kill you and Angus both, and hoped the police would think you made the bomb, and then accidentally blew yourselves up by mixing too much potassium sulfate in with the fertilizer.”

  “Only Angus went aboard before I did.”

  “So after Angus was killed, you started your own…investigation. That’s why you went snooping around at Rayford’s and found the fertilizer in the shed,” I said.

  “Yeah, when I thought back on how he’d invited Angus and me over earlier in the same night M. David got drowned, I knew he’d been up to something. But how’d you know about me breaking into his shed?”

  Oh, yeah, Miguel didn’t know about Jimmie’s tape, or my trip through the lion’s den. With a somewhat curtailed dramatic flare, I explained that part of the story, and then summed up: “So naturally Rayford had to get the tape. Plus a break-in at his shed and his office had to make the man paranoid. And maybe, he was afraid you’d told me about the night he invited you over, being my client and all, and that I might connect those beer bottles with the ones at M. David’s. So yeah, Rayford had to kill me and Jimmie because we could connect him with you, and you connected him with M. David’s and Angus’s murders. Only Jimmie was next door when he broke in, and the panther didn’t eat me. And here we all are.”

  Off in the distance, faintly, I heard a siren, and stopped talking to listen.

  Miguel struggled to stand up, and with a little shoving and holding from Olivia and me, finally did.

  “Listen, I…you. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt. So you might not want to let anybody go into Rayford’s garage.”

  Mierda, so that was why Miguel had stolen all that fertilizer and potassium from Rayford’s shed. “You made a bomb in Rayford’s garage?” And then I thought like Philip would have. “Did you wear gloves when you put the bomb in the garage?”

  “Nope. I figured the explosion would destroy my prints. Look, I knew Rayford would kill me if he ever found me. The cops weren’t going to believe me. I figured it was self-defense.”

  “Perfect,” Josey snapped. “Now we’ll need the bomb squad.”

  I looked at my client, who had just confessed to an Official Law-Enforcement officer that he had planted a bomb with the intent to kill. Definitely I needed Philip to give me a primer course in criminal defense, but right now I had to wing it. “Miguel, shut up. Josey, you didn’t read him his rights, so that…that statement is inadmissible.”

  Josey didn’t even look at me.

  “Get out of here. Now,” Josey said, staring at Miguel. “You’re not going to end up in jail for planning to blow up that cat-killer son of a bitch.”

  We all looked at Josey. The sirens were closer.

  Miguel, showing no more indecisiveness than Josey had, gave me a quick kiss, whispered “Chokoloskee” in my ear, and jogged unsteadily out the door.

  I hoped he had a full tank of gas, and that his wallet was still stuffed with bills.

  And I thought, so, oh, okay, how are we going to explain all this?

  “Josey, you do look stunned, all that beating you took,” Olivia said, as if reading my mind. “We should just let Lilly figure out how to…to tell them what happened.”

  Why me? I thought. But I knew.

  I was the lawyer.

  And in any given crowd, the lawyer is usually the best storyteller.

  As the sirens came closer and closer, I knew I needed to invent a good story.

  A really good story that hid the fact that the three of us had just let a would-be murderer run off into a stormy night in a red pickup. Because none of us had the heart to think of Miguel wasted and battered in jail. And, none of us thought trying to kill Rayford really counted as a crime.

  And then, maybe, there was the fact that we were all at least a little bit in love with the man.

  Epilogue

  When the gyp sludge hit Tampa Bay and the big fish kill-off started and the bay stank and the fishermen and the tourists all fled and the economy took a hit and the citizens raised holy hell about the stink and the mess, Official Government did what it always does in a crisis. Its personnel pointed fingers and hired lawyers.

  Everybody was suing everybody, while the DEP and the environmentalists and marine scientists went to work trying to salvage the life of the bay.

  Olivia even tried to get some smidgen of justice and grab me a piece of the legal action by convincing her conservation group to hire me to sue somebody for the big, stinking mess on their behalf, but despite all the research that Rachel and I did, we couldn’t find an angle. Angry citizens just
don’t have any standing in the law to sue the officials of a bankrupt corporation—or anyone else—for killing off an entire marine waterway.

  However, failing on that project didn’t stop me from trying to keep alive the goals of Angus and Miguel. That’s why Olivia and I were out at the Antheus land at dawn with little Baggies of panther poop and the plaster casts of the cat’s paws that Miguel had hidden at Olivia’s. We intended to put the casts to good use.

  I held the barbed wire down as Olivia crawled over it. Then she did the same for me. We walked a bit in the thickets and the heat before I gave voice to something I’d been very curious about.

  “So, okay, Olivia,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me you were hiding Miguel?”

  “Oh, Lilly, I thought he might have killed M. David, he and Angus. I didn’t want you to be in a position to have to lie to the police, or to turn him in. I was the one who told Miguel and Angus to hire you as their attorney, and I didn’t want you getting hurt because of it.”

  Noble, but fishy, all at the same time.

  Pushing on the fishy part, I asked, “Why’d you send them to me after M. David was killed?”

  “Because when they told me M. David was dead, I was afraid they’d done it, and so I brought Angus right to you—Miguel had to go do something, but agreed to come by the law offices later. See, I wanted them to hire you on the orange-defamation case, but also I knew you’d know how to help them, no matter what they’d done.”

  Oh, frigging great. So it wasn’t all some giant, stupid coincidence that pulled me into the multiple orange-grove-sales-profits murders. It was one of my best friends, in a misguided attempt to help her fellow environmental soldiers, and, perhaps, an overinflated belief in my abilities.

  Signaling a change of topic, Olivia asked, “You lonesome now that Jimmie’s living with Dolly?”

  “No, Jimmie and Dolly come over all the time. But I’ve got to say, first that woman steals the affections of my dog and then Jimmie.”