Shadow Men (8 page)

CHAPTER

9

“C
iao,” I said to Billy, and he gave me one of those quizzical looks that when held long enough by an intelligent man makes you feel stupid enough to ruin your attempt at humor.

“Ramón and his electronics crew down in Forest Hills,” I said.

“Ahh. Ramón Esquivil. How is m-my young inventor friend?”

My turn to look quizzical. Billy was pouring a boiling pot of angel hair pasta into a colander at his sink and waiting for the billowing cloud of steam to rise to the ceiling.

“I represented him in a patent c-case. Some b-big electronics company trying to claim the r-rights to a pneumatic bypass switch that Mr. Esquivil had invented in his g-garage.”

“And?” said Diane McIntyre, Billy’s attorney friend who was standing at the counter sipping chardonnay and watching him cook.

“And w-we were quite successful,” he said, shaking the colander and flopping the pasta into a bowl. “And so is Mr. Esquivil, if I r- recall correctly that the c-contracts he eventually signed were worth over seven figures.”

I took a long drink of beer and filled Billy in on the discovery of the tracking devices on my truck and Ramón’s guess that we were probably dealing with civilians.

“S-So. Your suspicions of the van and the c-call to Ms. Richards?”

“And your attempted buyout.”

“That’s why our f-folks at PalmCo are very, very n-nervous,” Billy said, stirring a saucepan of sautéed bacon, scallions and garlic into the pasta.

“Sounds like you boys have your fingers into something nasty again,” McIntyre said, scooping up the bowl and taking it to the table. She was dressed in the conservative suit she’d probably worn in court that day. And as was her habit, she’d kicked off her shoes at the door and was padding about in her stocking feet. She smoothly shrugged out of her jacket, laying it carefully on the back of the sofa, and then sat herself in front of one of the places she’d set.

“Please, gentlemen,” she said, her fingers splayed out in invitation. “Sit and tell me all about it. I am freakin’ starving.”

Between bites and compliments to the chef and several glasses of wine, we hashed through the discovery by young Mr. Mayes of his great-grandfather’s letters and their allusion that extraordinary means had been used to keep the laborers on the brutal job in the Glades. Billy had as much luck as Mayes finding death certificates, employment tax records or any public notice of even a pauper’s gravesite.

“PalmCo is big, Billy,” McIntyre said. “They could stonewall you forever, even if you did file suit.”

“At this point we don’t have anything t-to file about,” he said. “But if we f-find proof that Cyrus Mayes was indeed there, and that he and his s-sons and other workers were trapped out in the Glades by Noren or their representatives, and that they d-died out there eighty years ago and were n-never accounted for, then we’ve g-got a wrongful death suit, and a possible payday for our young Mr. Mayes.”

“And that’ll hold up?” I asked. “Even after eighty years?”

“Corporate ties,” said McIntyre. “All the advantages and all the liabilities follow.”

She raised her half-drunk glass. “Sins of the fathers,” she said. Neither Billy nor I looked up from our plates, and McIntyre quickly read the reaction and gathered herself. “But you’re saying you haven’t got any of those pieces together yet.”

“Which begs the question. Why w-would these PalmCo people be tailing and snooping and tossing out b-bribes to cover something no one can p-prove, even if it is t-true?”

“Hedging against the possibility of a multimillion-dollar suit,” McIntyre said. “Remember the Rosewood survivors v. the state?”

Billy had schooled me on the case. In 1923 in the northwest part of the state, an entire town had been burned to the ground and many of its black residents killed in a racist attack that was essentially ignored by local and state law enforcement. The shame and bloodletting had been buried by the years and the dream-soaked fears of those who survived. The story had remained untold, whispered only by a handful of the old like a secret nightmare, until a group of historians and journalists revived and proved its truth nearly seventy years later. The state had broken its essential promise to all of its citizens of a lawful protection.

“The state legislature finally paid two million in compensation to the survivors and the heirs of those people who died,” McIntyre said. “But the public relations hit was the worst of it. Imagine that happening to a private company. That’s why PalmCo wants to nip this thing early. How about a new slogan: ‘We built Florida on the bones of our workers.’”

Billy and I looked at each other while McIntyre looked with dark, innocent eyes over the rim of her wineglass.

“Have you ever considered a career in t-tabloid journalism, m- my dear?”

She did that thing she does with one eyebrow.

“Possibly.”

We triple-teamed the dishes and then moved out to the patio. The wind was nonexistent, and even from this height you could hear the slight shore break brushing the sand in rhythm. The sky was moonless and the ocean black and vast, with only a few scattered flickers of light from overnight fishermen out on the shallow swells.

“The Everglades is like this, black and silent, late at night, isn’t it, Max?”

McIntyre was sitting on the chaise, her back propped up against Billy’s knees and shins as he sat back with a brandy.

“If you’re far enough in it, yeah,” I said. “And most of the time even quieter.”

“I can’t imagine those men out there, not knowing quite where they were or what the next day was going to bring.”

“I can,” I said, sipping the cold bottle in my hand. “More of the same. Day after day until they got desperate.”

Then we were quiet. Maybe all three of us were looking out on the blackness and trying to visualize what desperation looked like. After a time, Diane got up and made her apologies to leave. “Court again at eight.”

She and Billy walked back inside. I stood up at the railing and found one of the boat lights out on the blackness, and as I watched it flicker I tried to put myself into the head of a man in the hot, choking and foreign Glades, his sons next to him, working through his hope of money and the stability it might bring his family as the only motivation to push back his fear. The light in the distance would fade and then come back again. I knew it was the rise and fall of the swells. Sometimes it would disappear completely, but then come back. It didn’t move north or south. The captain must have her anchored, I thought. Maybe over one of his favorite night spots. A place he felt lucky or comfortable.

I heard the foyer door close and a minute later Billy came back out and the aroma of coffee came with him. He set a cup on the small glass-topped table beside me and leaned his elbows on the railing, his own cup in both hands, extended out over the empty one hundred feet to the pool below. He may have been watching the same floating light I was.

“You tell any of this to Mayes?” I asked.

Billy nodded. “He r-reacted very quietly. Not w-what I had expected.”

“You tell him it was going to be a long haul?”

He nodded again. “I told him it c-could eventually l-lead to a civil suit. But I’m not s-sure our Mr. M-Mayes wants to s-see this through,” Billy said. “He has t-told me that he is d-debating whether to enter the s-seminary in Georgia. He s-seems quite at odds with the p-proposition.”

The cross at his neck, I thought.

“Can’t make up his mind until he finds out what happened,” I said, guessing.

“No. I b-believe he is looking for something m-more than that,” Billy said. “Something about m-motivation.”

The surf was like a soft broom below. We both listened for some time.

“You ever think about your father?” I finally said. “I mean, I know he wasn’t there when you were growing up. But, you’ve got him in you.”

Although I had not met Billy until we were grown men, our mothers—a white Irish Catholic from South Philly and a black Baptist from the north side—had cemented our friendship.

“He p-played chess when he was young,” Billy said. My question did not unnerve or offend him. “My mother said it was one of the th-things that attracted her when they m-met in high school. Once, without her knowing, I l-looked up his picture in an old school yearbook. He hadn’t m-made the official photos, b-but he was in the back row of the chess team picture.”

I was quiet and let him look out at the darkness, and the picture.

“I think of him w-when I feel anger, M-Max. The uselessness of it.”

I sat and picked up the coffee.

“You’re m-meeting with your Mr. Brown tomorrow?” Billy said, moving to the door.

“Noon,” I said.

“I h-hope he is helpful. Good night, m-my friend.”

I remember the uniforms. Men, all lined up in a row, all with the same dark blue uniforms. They all seemed tall to me, as an eight-year- old sitting on a folded chair trying, at first, to pry my mother’s hand from mine and then forgetting and letting her hold it as the line of men took their places on the small stage. My father was the third man on the right, his own uniform brushed and creased, the buttons polished and shoes buffed to a gloss by my mother late into the preceding night. I remember being fascinated by the lights from the television crews gleaming off the brass buttons and bars and yellow gold stripes on some of the men’s sleeves. They were all wearing their hats, what my father called his lid, even though we were inside and my mother would have called it impolite. I remember the man at the microphone beginning to speak and my father looking out to find us, and under the brim of his lid he winked at me. The man at the microphone told the story that I had already heard so many times, though he did not include the harsh laughter and cussing that my uncle and my fathers other policemen friends used in the backyard when they were drinking beer. The man used my father’s full name and when he was finally called to the podium, he dipped his head and the man draped a gold, shining medal around my father’s neck and everyone clapped and I looked at my mother’s face to see her reaction and saw a single tear that she caught halfway down her cheek with a gloved finger, and I did not know as a child whether she was too proud or too sad.

For years afterward I would secretly seek out that piece of gold with the red-striped ribbon. I would wait until the house was empty and go into my parents’ bedroom and open the bottom drawer of the bureau and find the dark blue case pushed hard against the back corner, buried under the old Arnold Palmer sweaters that I never saw my father wear. I would take out the case and lay it in my lap and open it and stare at the thick carved gold that seemed to grow richer in color over time. Then I would again unfold the newspaper clipping that showed the uniformed men in a line and I would read the story.

     Philadelphia police yesterday awarded the medal of valor to one of their own in a ceremony to honor the officer credited with killing the celebrated Mifflin Square Molester in a shootout last spring.
     Anthony M. Freeman, 28, a six-year veteran of the department and the son of another decorated officer, was wounded in the gun battle with Roland Previo after Previo was confronted with evidence that he was the man who had brutally raped and killed four young girls in his own South Philadelphia neighborhood three years ago.
     Freeman, assigned to the detective unit just days before the discovery of the first victim in the killings, had “tirelessly pursued the case with the dogged determination of a true veteran,” read Det. Commander Tom Schmidt.
     Although the case had run dry of leads and legal evidence, Freeman’s superiors said the young detective developed his own information over two years. While confronting Previo with newly discovered stained clothing that tied the ex-convict to two of the slayings, “Freeman, acting without regard to his own safety, attempted to make an arrest and was twice wounded by his suspect before returning fire and mortally wounding his assailant,” Schmidt read during the ceremony.
     When asked later for his reaction, Freeman said he did not consider his actions to be heroic and that his determination to find the killer had been a simple pursuit of the truth.
     “I just wanted the truth to come out. There were a lot of rumors and lies and legal bull—being passed around over the years. But the families of those little girls deserved the truth,” Freeman said.
     Freeman’s father, Argus, was also a decorated officer for the department. He had been awarded a medal of distinction for his work as a street sergeant during the years of racial unrest in the late 1960s.

I would refold the clipping, pat it against the golden medal and return the box to its place tucked deep in the drawer, and wonder again why my father hid it there.

I was still sitting up in the patio chaise when I woke. The purple gray light of a dawn that was still an hour away glowed dusky and cold out past the horizon. My mouth was dry and my knees cramped. I rubbed my hand over my face and got to my feet, gathered a half-empty coffee cup, and placed it in the sink before making my way to Billy’s guest room. I lay down on the bed with my clothes on and fell into a hard and dreamless sleep.

CHAPTER

10

T
he sun was high and hot and reflecting off the white-shell parking lot of the Frontier Hotel like heat off a stove. I cracked the truck windows before I got out and knew it would make little difference. I’d still be climbing into a hotbox when I got back. Inside the bar it appeared that the same two card players were still at the same game. The bartender appeared to have added an earring to the other seven. I sat on one of the stools and let my eyes adjust to the dark and the woman pulled a cold beer from the cooler and walked down to set it in front of me.

“You’ve got you some ugly enemies, Mr. Freeman. An’ that’s your business,” were her opening words. No hello. No “Can I get cha?”

“But folks here don’t like you draggin’ ’em round behind you.”

“Is there a message in there somewhere?” I said, not reaching for the beer.

“There was a couple of city boys come in after you left last week, askin’ questions.”

“Yeah?” I was trying to get the rhythm of the conversational rules here.

“They wanted to know who you were talkin’ to and whether you were a regular.” She was wiping her hands with the gray bar rag, looking first at my face and then at the untouched beer bottle like I’d sinned by leaving it there alone.

“And you told them what?”

“To fuck off,” she said.

The cribbage boys sniggered down at the end, nodding their recollection of the conversation and their approval.

“Can you tell me what these two men looked like, other than ugly?”

“No, sir. Just that they didn’t belong out here. They were from the city.”

“Do you happen to know what they were driving?” I said, this time reaching into my shirt pocket and pulling out a fold of bills.

“A new, dark-colored Buick sedan when they come in. And a dark-colored Buick sedan with a busted out back window when they left,” she said, and the boys chuckled their approval again. Rag woman knew I understood the distinction. I had experienced the parking lot etiquette myself in the past. I stayed quiet and put a ten- dollar bill next to the bottle and lifted it to my lips.

“We don’t like visitors round here, Mr. Freeman. Y’all are here cause you got a friend,” she said, this time tipping her head to the back of the room. I turned and the adjustment of my eyes allowed me to see the shape of Nate Brown sitting alone at a table in the corner.

“Thank you,” I said to her, but she had already turned away with my money and was not bringing back change. I picked up the bottle and joined Brown. The old man stood when I approached and I shook his leathery hand.

“Nice girl, eh?” he said, nodding at the bar.

“A true charmer,” I said, pulling out a wooden chair. The table was a polished raw mahogany like the bar. The wood was native to the hardwood hammocks of the Glades, but the early loggers had recognized its beauty and sales potential, so little of it was left in the wild these days. A fat, cut-glass tumbler of whiskey sat before Brown, soaking up the yellow light from a nearby wall fixture and holding the glow. Another sat next to it, empty.

“How much you wanna poke round in this here look at Mr. Mayes, Freeman?” he said after a few quiet seconds.

“Depends on what the poking tells me,” I answered. “Why?”

I had forgotten Brown’s penchant for abruptness. He was not a man who had survived in a rough wilderness for eighty years by being subtle. He had also not survived by being stupid. He reached down beside his chair and came up with a bottle and half-filled my glass. I thanked him and sipped some of the smoothest whiskey I had ever tasted.

“I’m trying to find the truth, Mr. Brown,” I finally said.

My answer seemed to stop him, and an amusement came to his eye.

“The truth,” he repeated. “The onliest truth is the sun comin’ up and the ocean moving, son. I know y’all are smart enough to know that.”

I let him watch me drink. I knew he was right, but such philosophy was not on my timetable yet.

“Do you think Cyrus Mayes and his boys died out here, Nate?” I said instead.

“More’n possible.”

“Do you think they were killed?”

“They’s a lot of scar out here, Mr. Freeman. Some of them deserve to be healed and some don’t.” It was not a question and I knew he did not expect an answer. I waited while he sipped his own drink. “That’s why I asked you how much you want to find out.”

The skin on his face was nearly as dark as the whiskey and had captured some of the same glow.

“I consider what you done before with me was an honest collaboration. An’ that might be the onliest way to do this one,” he said. “I believe maybe I owe you. But it ain’t just for you neither, just like before.”

“So what do you suggest?” I said.

“Let’s go.”

As we walked to the door, the bartender called out, “Good afternoon, Mr. Brown,” with more politeness than I would have thought she possessed. He waved and got the same response from the card players. As I passed the bar I looked for the old construction photograph but it was missing from the wall. When I turned and asked the bartender about it she looked past me at the clean, empty rectangle its removal had left on the wall and shrugged her shoulders. “I hadn’t noticed,” she said.

Outside we got into the truck and Brown directed me south. I had never seen the old Gladesman in anything other than a boat and he looked small and uncomfortable in the passenger seat. He rolled his window the rest of the way down and I half expected him to thrust his head out like a retriever. He was not a man for closed- in places. He soon had me pull off onto a dirt track and we bounced a quarter mile west into a thick stand of rimrock pines. When we ran out of trail I stopped and he simply said, “You might want to slip right there under them boughs. Keep her out of the sun some.” I did as instructed and we got out. I could see no path or obvious opening beyond the trees, and when Brown started to move off I said, “Should I lock it up?”

“Suit yerself,” he said, and kept walking. I had learned in my last encounter with Nate that in his world, you were best off just to trust him. I locked the truck and followed.

He slipped into the trees, moving with a slow and steady grace that I could not match. I stepped where he did, ducked under the same limbs and avoided the same ankle-breaking ruts and holes, but with only some success. About fifty yards in, the pines thinned and the ground turned moist. We skirted a patch of cabbage palms and in seconds were calf-deep in standing water. I was about to break my silence when I spotted the white fiberglass of a boat hull. Nate had left his center console runabout floating along a wall of cattails in crotch-deep water. He clambered up over the stern and I followed. I watched as he wordlessly pulled in the anchor line and then used a pole to push the boat backward into some kind of natural channel. When he seemed satisfied with the depth, he stood at the console, cranked the starter, and at idle speed began to guide us along the snaking ribbon of water. Soaked to my waist and now completely lost I finally checked my patience.

“If you don’t mind my asking, Nate, where the hell are we going?”

“We’s headin’ over to Everglades City, son,” he said, not taking his eyes off the water, studying, I assumed, its depth and direction. “I got you a man you need to talk with.”

I could tell from the sun’s position that we were moving generally to the southwest, even though the serpentine route of the water sometimes spun us in near circles before turning and heading again toward the end of the Florida peninsula. The cattails soon gave way to sawgrass that often sprouted six feet tall from the water. Tucked down in the brownish green maze it was airless and hot. The only breeze was from our own movement, and the air held the sweet, earthy odor of wet decay and new growth like some freshly cut vegetable just dug from a rain-soaked row.

At times the water became so shallow that both of us would have to pole the boat forward. Other times Brown was able to use the electric motor tilt to raise the propeller blades until they were barely churning and spitting the water. When it deepened again he would lower them back and we would gain speed, and the breeze it created was a luxury.

Above, a bowl of blue sky covered us from horizon to horizon, and while the sun traveled across it, Brown told me the story of John Dawkins.

“He was the colored man that was in them letters,” he said. “The one that trucked the dynamite out there on the trail ’cause there weren’t another man alive out here could have done it.”

John Dawkins might have been from the Caribbean Islands or from New Orleans, but he and his family’s blackness made them unique. But there were few enough families living in the Glades in the early 1900s, and those who had made it their home and braved its harshness knew one another as community.

“My daddy and John Dawkins was friends ’cause they needed to be. Out here, the onliest way a man got judged was by his work, and Mr. Dawkins was judged high on that account,” Brown said.

Slope-shouldered and thick in the chest, with legs “like a full growth oak,” Dawkins never turned down a job for which he would be paid with money or trade and was often called when the strength of other men flagged.

“Onliest time the man wouldn’t work was on the Lord’s day, and Daddy said everbody knowed that. Said Mr. Dawkins had a contract with God.”

I waited for the story to continue as Brown pushed up the throttle in the now widening creek. The sawgrass fields were beginning to change.

“We’re comin’ on to Lost Man’s River,” he said as the stands of spidery-legged mangroves began to appear. With his own bearings set, he continued.

“I remember Daddy’s stories ’bout John Dawkins bein’ the man that hauled dynamite. He knowed the country as well as any and he had them oxen. I member ridin’ in that there cart with his kids and ours comin’ up with loads of mullet from the docks.”

“So this Mr. Dawkins has relatives who are still living?” I said, hoping he was finally getting to his point.

“He got a son still livin’.”

“And this son might have some recollection of his father transporting mail for Cyrus Mayes?”

“Don’t know,” Brown answered. “You gon’ have to ask him yourself.”

Now the river had widened and so had the sky. Brown pushed up the throttle and it was impossible to talk without shouting. We cleared a point of high mangroves and the water opened up onto Florida Bay. I settled back onto the gunwales and breathed in the stiff salt wind, while Brown remained standing, guiding the boat north through what was known as the Ten Thousand Islands region along Florida’s southwest coast. The name comes from the uncountable patches of mangroves. From the air or at a distance they look like thick, green lumps of land, but up close there is little if any dry soil around the mass of roots that support and feed the leaves. The semiprotected water that flows through the green islands is a perfect breeding ground for fish. But the area has no beaches, no hard sandy shores on which to build. It is not the stuff of Florida postcards. And the few people who have chosen to live here over the past century like it that way.

Farther north, Brown swung the boat into what he called the Chatham River and again began spinning his way through thin waterways and around piles of mangroves. Again there were times he would have to use the electric motor tilt to skirt over sandbars that were hidden to an untrained eye. The old Gladesman would look back on occasion; I thought it was to check his trailing wake until he called out to me.

“Them those enemies the gal at the hotel was warning you on?”

I instinctively looked back at the water behind us, but saw no sign of another boat. When I turned back to Brown he was pointing one finger to the sky. High behind us a helicopter hung in the sky. It kept a distance but swayed back and forth to keep its line of sight and our V-shaped wake in view. It was too far away for me to make out the number on its belly or tail.

“It ain’t the park service or the sheriff,” Brown yelled above the whine of the outboard.

“Some kind of tourist ride?” I said. He shook his head.

“I know ’em all.”

He pushed the throttle up another notch and seemed to take a line that cut much closer to the mangrove walls.

“It ain’t the DEA neither,” he said, and I’d heard enough of his reputation to believe he knew what he was saying. Brown jacked the engine to a higher pitch and I squatted down and got a firmer handhold on the rail. White water was cutting deep off the prop wash. The old man banked the boat into the next turn, sending our wake surging into the mangroves, and I watched the chopper slide into the same movement. At this speed the green walls beside us were blurring and I couldn’t make out the turns ahead. Suddenly Brown turned his head and yelled: “Hold on!”

I had just shifted my weight when he cut the wheel to the right and killed the engine. The instant silence might have been peaceful, but for the sleek glide that was sending us into a mass of mangrove. Brown leaned his weight hard into the starboard gunwale and said “Duck,” and the boat seemed to buck against its own wake then slide to the right onto a partial water path and plow into the outcrop. When she hit the thick roots the bow made a fingernails-on- chalkboard screech and I tumbled forward. Brown kept his feet.

I lay still for several seconds, not as stunned by the crash as by the change. One minute we’d been just short of flying across sunlit water in front of a screaming, full-bore outboard, and the next we were stock-still in a dark, silent cocoon of tangled leaves and roots.

“Y’all OK?” Brown said, still crouched on the balls of his feet.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting up and pushing my back against the console.

The old man looked up and specks of sunlight danced on his face.

“Let’s just see if they was trackin’ us or not.”

We waited without speaking. I watched a family of spiders shaken from the mangrove branches scurry across the deck. Any birds or nearby gators would be long gone, scared the hell away. It took a few minutes, and then I could hear the patterned woofing of the helicopter blades. The sound grew but I couldn’t see through the ceiling of green. The pilot had circled back but kept his altitude and never came close enough to stir the leaves with his downdraft. I swatted at a gang of mosquitoes on my face and checked my fingers for the smear of blood. We listened to the chopper circle and hover for maybe ten minutes, until it finally flew off to the northeast and did not return.