dog island

by Mike Stewart

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe you got the lowdown on the cops in Apalachicola, or you fished around for some general information about whether they’ve had any trouble down that way.”

  “No cops. Just a sheriff’s office. Sheriff Todd Wilson.”

  “Todd? They got a yuppie beach sheriff?”

  “From what I could find out, Wilson wouldn’t know a yuppie if he ate one. Word is, though, he’s a good enough guy. Probably as honest as most small-town sheriffs along the coast.” Joey paused to drain the rest of the orange juice from the carton he had lifted from my refrigerator.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “What’s what mean?”

  “What do you mean he’s as honest as most sheriffs along the coast?”

  “It means he keeps the peace. You know, keeps the streets safe for old ladies and tourists. But the rumor is that he also takes a little money every now and then to ignore the Bodines.”

  “The what?”

  “Kind of a redneck mafia. The cops down there call ‘em ‘the Bodines.’ You know, like Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies. Lots of jokes about this bunch of rednecks ‘ciphering’ their profits and that kinda shit. But they run the coast down there. And they’re organized—half of ‘em are related to each other.”

  “And that’s all you know right now?”

  “That’s it. No murders, no bodies, nothing.”

  I asked Joey to lock up and left him sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee and reading my morning Mobile Register. By seven, I was in my Cherokee cruising down Scenic 98 toward Apalachicola and the causeway to St. George Island. I flipped on the radio to drown out the whine of mud grips on blacktop. National Public Radio out of Mobile lasted through Foley and Pensacola, across Pensacola Bay, and into Navarre.

  Outside Ft. Walton, static drowned out NPR. An oldies station out of Panama City filled the Jeep with a different noise as 98 wound next to Choctawhatchee Bay, past the new-money, Easter-egg villas at Seaside and the old-money resort at Grayton Beach, and then cut through the spring-break motels, neon signs, and giant water slides that pollute Panama City Beach.

  East of Panama City, used car and mobile home lots with hand-painted signs, boxy fast-food joints, and staccato stoplights dissolved into pine forests that sporadically separated the pavement from a clear view of the Gulf. After an hour of nothing, the road bumped into the quick-mart-and-fast-food outskirts of Apalachicola and then eased into that quaint seaside town’s Victorian architecture and palm-lined streets.

  I killed the radio and tried to think about what I would say to Susan and her friend about witnessing a crime and the best way to handle involvement with the police.

  I couldn’t think of anything.

  Without music, the mud grips whirred again on the causeway that stretches from the east end of Apalachicola to the bay side of St. George Island. I drove to the ocean side of the island, turned right away from the state park, and cruised between rows of stilted, hurricane-ready vacation homes. As the road moved away from the center of the island, the houses grew generally newer and larger until I turned away from the ocean and then left into The Plantation.

  An overstuffed guard’s uniform shuffled out of the gatehouse and asked my business. I asked for directions to Susan Fitzsimmons’ house. He found my name on a clipboard, handed me a green tag to hang from my rearview mirror, and told me how to get where I was going. Back over on the Gulf side of the island, I found a two-story Caribbean-plantation-style beach house with the right numbers.

  Latticework and tropical plants camouflaged the hurricane stilts. Above the crisscross pattern, weathered gray siding contrasted with white trim work around windows and doors and highlighted an oversized round window suspended beneath a gable’s point above the back entrance. A banistered crow’s nest stretched twenty feet across the apex of a green copper roof, providing what had to be one hell of a view of the water.

  I smiled. Sticking out of the carport beneath the house was Susan’s antique step-side pickup. I parked on oyster-shell paving behind Susan’s truck and climbed wooden steps to the main door. I pressed the doorbell. Someone was moving inside the house.

  chapter three

  Susan Fitzsimmons opened the door and smiled with perfect white teeth and sun-crinkled eyes. She stepped out, gave me a quick but exuberant hug, and stepped back to look at my face.

  I said, “You look great.” And she did.

  The last time I had seen Susan, she had been lying in a hospital bed with clear plastic tubes looped into her arms and nostrils. She had been pale and tired and frightened. Now Susan looked like Susan again—sun-streaked blonde hair worn short and shaggy, tanned cheeks, and intelligent blue eyes.

  Susan is from the Midwest and has never had the penchant for small talk that Southerners think is part of good manners—or, as she describes it, talking until you can think of something to say. Now, all Susan said was, “Come in. Carli’s inside.”

  The door opened into a cavernous room featuring a large circular staircase made of polished aluminum that swirled upward against the left wall. Twelve feet up, metal stairs connected to a wooden catwalk that hung from the left and right walls, wrapped around the back wall that held the door we had come through, and, apparently, provided access to bedrooms on the second level. On the right wall, a six-foot oil painting of nothing but dozens of beautifully detailed seashells flooded the room with color. Glass stretched across the front of the room, showing huge rectangles of ocean and sky framed by rough-cut beams.

  Susan’s kitchen lay to the right and against the back wall. It was separated from the main living area by a long, antique butcher’s table surrounded by brushed aluminum chairs that echoed the staircase. Next to the table sat a striking teenage girl with blue-black hair, dark brown eyes set in a pretty oval face, and suntanned legs that she displayed beneath blue jean cutoffs with slits up the outside seams that ended high enough to show just a hint of where her panties curved around her hips. Above the jeans, four inches of skin and a very attractive navel were on display beneath a green knit shirt designed to show off young navels. She sat with her ankles crossed and her legs extended toward us as we entered. She wore black sport sandals with blue Aztec designs on the straps, and her toenails were painted pink. A yellow windbreaker hung across the back of her chair.

  “Tom. This is Carli. Carli, this is the friend I told you about.”

  She uncrossed her ankles, recrossed them with the other foot on top, and smiled a strange, somehow inappropriate smile. Her pelvis seemed to rise up in the chair as she moved her legs. She said, “Nice to meet you.” She had some kind of working-class Northern accent.

  I was suddenly a little irritated. I said, “Can your friend excuse us for a minute?” Carli stopped smiling. Susan asked her to please step outside for a moment, and Carli stood and walked out onto the deck. I said, “What was that about?”

  Susan said, “A brave front.”

  “That didn’t look like a brave front. That looked like plain old come and get it, which I guess is fine and maybe she’s old enough to advertise if she wants to, but don’t you think the Lolita routine is a little out of place considering what she says happened to her last night?”

  Susan studied my face. She was thinking, and I was standing there waiting for her to do it. It’s her way. Some time ticked by, then Susan spoke softly. “Carli’s a good person, and she’s a lot smarter than you’d think when you first meet her. She waits tables at the Pelican’s Roost. I eat there a good deal when I’m down here, and I’ve gotten to know her. Carli doesn’t know I know this, but she used to switch tables with other waitresses so she could wait on me whenever I came in.”

  “What’s that, some kind of mother complex?”

  “No. At least, I don’t think that’s part of it. She wants to be an artist, and somebody told her Bird Fitzsimmons had been my husband. We started talking, and she knew all about him. Carli was kind of proud of the fact that she was once thrown out of the g
allery in New Orleans that handles Bird’s paintings because she hung around there for half a day just looking.”

  “Why would they throw her out for looking? I thought that was what you were supposed to do at galleries.”

  Susan smiled. “You’re innocent. You’re supposed to buy art at commercial galleries. Looking is only foreplay for people who can afford to consummate. And, as Carli said, she had ‘broke runaway’ written all over her. I’m telling you, Tom, Carli’s got a lot going for her. But however smart or artistic or sensitive she can be, for some reason, what you just saw seems to be the only way she knows how to act around men.”

  “Well, nothing has been reported to the authorities that supports her story, which could just mean the killer is either lucky or good. But, take it all together, and you have to wonder if we’re wasting our time here. You have to admit, she doesn’t exactly look traumatized and desperate for help.”

  Susan said, “Go talk to her.”

  I walked out onto the deck and closed the glass door. Carli was leaning against a weathered railing, staring down the beach to her left. I asked, “How old are you?”

  When I spoke, she turned to face me and propped her left hip against the rail. Tears had drawn dark wet trails across her cheeks down to her jawline, but I couldn’t decide whether she was upset or angry. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She didn’t need any.

  She said, “What difference does it make?”

  “Susan says you’re a minor.”

  She repeated the same question.

  “Look, Carli. Susan asked me to help you. And she says the reason you can’t just go to the police and tell them what happened is because you’re a minor and you’re a runaway. So, I’d like to know how old you are. It could make a difference, a legal difference, as to whether your family has any right to come get you. Also, if I’m going to help you, you’ve got to trust me enough to answer some questions. And we don’t have time to argue about whether everything I ask you makes a difference.”

  “Sixteen. I’m sixteen.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “What diff… It’s in May, The fifth.”

  “So you’re going to be seventeen in May.”

  “No. I mean. I guess I’m not really sixteen yet. I’ll be sixteen in May.”

  “You look older than fifteen.”

  “Yeah. They let me serve beer at the restaurant. Nobody’s said anything.” She seemed to focus on the pupils in my eyes. “I guess I’m more developed than most girls my age.” As she spoke, Carli began to stroke her bare stomach with her index finger in a calculatedly absentminded way. She noticed that I noticed, and her expression changed. She looked like maybe she knew a secret that I didn’t.

  “What happened last night?”

  “I was down on the public beach with this guy I met.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bobby. Anyway…”

  I interrupted. “Bobby what?”

  “Oh, uh, I don’t think he told me. He’s a local. Works at the Chevron station in town. Anyway, he picked me up at one after I got off at the Pelican and we drove down to the parking lot at the public beach. After a few minutes, we got out and walked down to the beach. I like it at night. Anyway, we stayed there awhile and Bobby left.”

  “He just left you there on the beach when you two were done?”

  Carli’s face flushed red. “We weren’t done the way you say it. I don’t just do it like that.”

  “No offense, Carli. I’m not judging you. It just sounds like the guy acted like a jerk.”

  “He left ‘cause I wouldn’t do it. In case you’re wondering.”

  It had been a long time since I’d talked to a fifteen-year-old girl about her sex life. In fact, I had never talked to a fifteen-year-old girl about her sex life. I said, “Let’s talk about what happened after Bobby left. How did you get from there to witnessing a murder?”

  Carli told me she had walked on the beach, tried to crash on the patio of a seemingly empty beach house, and ended up witnessing a murder through a bedroom window. She described the men who came out and searched the beach while she darted from one dark house to another, finally making her way to Susan’s door.

  By the time Carli finished her story, tears had overfilled wide brown eyes and begun rolling down her cheeks. Susan was right. As Carli talked, she had become the adolescent she was, and she looked genuinely frightened. Carli rubbed the tears away with her palms while I stood there feeling impotent and wishing I carried a handkerchief in my back pocket the way my father always did.

  When she was composed, I asked, “What is it you want to do here, Carli? I checked this morning, and nothing has been reported to the police. They have no idea that a murder even happened. So I want you to consider that the easiest thing—the safest thing for you—would be for you to walk away and forget the whole thing.”

  Carli focused hard on my pupils again, but this time the look wasn’t seductive or affectionate. “You’re telling me it doesn’t matter if somebody got the back of his head shot off?”

  “Hell, no, Carli. But I’m here to look after your interests, and I’m telling you the safest thing for you to do. If you want me to report the crime, I think I can protect your identity from the police. But if you step into the middle of something like this, there’s always a chance somebody’s going to find out who you are. And, if they do, you’ve got to realize that being a witness in a murder trial is dangerous under any circumstances. Plus, if you’re that scared of being sent home… Well, that’s one more reason to just walk away.”

  Carli turned to look out over the water. “Mr. McInnes, would you run away and hide if it were you?”

  “It’s not me.” It was a lawyer’s answer.

  Seconds passed as my young client scanned the curving blue horizon where ocean met sky. “I want you to tell the police about the murder and get them to … to investigate it. Just don’t tell them who I am. Can you do that?”

  Tough kid. I said, “Yeah, Carli. I can definitely do that.”

  While we were outside, Susan had piled brunch on the long butcher’s table next to her kitchen. We all ate and made polite conversation. Afterward, Susan walked me to the Jeep. We were back on the driveway, well away from Carli, when Susan simply said, “Well?”

  “I’m pretty sure something happened,” I said. “I don’t think she’s just looking for attention, but, if she is, she’s got me fooled. Maybe she’s that good. Who knows? Anyone who claims they can tell if a truly dishonest person is lying is full of it. You just can’t.”

  Now it was Susan’s turn to sound irritated. “Carli’s got some problems, but I told you she’s basically a good kid.”

  “I’m not calling her a liar. Like I said, I think she saw something, and I think whatever it was scared the hell out of her. It’s exactly what she saw that’s in question.” Susan started to argue, and I held up a hand to stop her. “Just hang on. I’m only saying eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable evidence you can have, particularly in a murder trial. Emotions take over and color and distort perceptions and memories. Jurors love to hear somebody say they saw what happened, but lawyers and judges know how shaky that kind of testimony usually is.” I scratched at the oyster-shell paving with my shoe. “Look, you and I don’t know for certain what happened last night. Only Carli knows, and she wants me to go to the cops. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Susan just looked at me.

  “Let’s say I stop by the sheriff’s office in town and tell him I have a client who saw some shady-looking guys up to no good last night at this particular beach house, and we’re just concerned that someone may have gotten hurt. If the sheriff checks it out and it’s nothing, then Carli probably need never come forward.”

  Susan said, “That’s fine if it works out that way, but what if it’s not nothing?”

  “Well, if we find blood splattered all over the walls then we’ll negotiate some kind of deal to keep her identity secret. She’s
a minor, so that’s possible. Maybe we could also get you appointed Carli’s guardian ad litem until this mess is over.”

  “Is that the best you can come up with?”

  I smiled. “No. There are other things we can do, including just telling them that my client refuses to testify. The DA can’t compel her testimony if he doesn’t know who she is. And, as her attorney, I don’t have to tell them. But first we need to find out if…” Susan raised an eyebrow. “Okay, first we need to find out what actually happened last night. Don’t worry. If the cops find blood all over the place, then I’ll either negotiate a deal to keep Carli’s name out of it, or we just won’t let her talk to them.”

  Susan told me the name of the house in question—in resort towns every little hovel has a desperately cute name—and I prepared to dance my jig for the sheriff.

  chapter four

  I drove into Apalachicola and found the sheriff’s office—a squatty yellow-brick building wedged between two Victorian homes that had been converted into offices for a few lawyers and accountants and a couple of real estate agents.

  Inside at the front desk, a pleasant young woman wearing a telephone operator’s headset and an overbite asked if she could help. I said I was hoping to see a deputy. She pushed a button, waited, and spoke into her headset. A few seconds later, a friendly red-headed guy came through the door. He looked like he smiled a lot, and that’s what he did as he introduced himself as Deputy Mickey Burns. He looked strong, and he had a scattering of faded-blue, Marine Corp tattoos competing for space among a few hundred freckles and a carpet of reddish-blonde hair on his forearms. I told my rehearsed story. He smiled some more and said, “Let’s go have a look.”

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled onto the driveway of “See Shore Cottage” in the deputy’s patrol car and parked behind a white truck with a chrome toolbox installed behind the cab. Two five-gallon, plastic paint buckets lay on their sides in the sand and clover that made up the front yard. The deputy said, “Looks like they’re having some work done.” I agreed that it looked just like that. He thought for a few seconds, and asked, “You think maybe your client saw some construction workers horsing around and got the wrong idea?”