A Death in Live Oak

by James Grippando

  On the table, beside their clasped hands, lay a copy of the press release from the University of Florida’s president, announcing the immediate expulsion of Mark Towson: The hateful, disgusting text message from Mr. Towson to fellow student Jamal Cousin has no place at our great university. While I am in no way prejudging the criminal investigation into the murder of Jamal Cousin, we must have zero tolerance for blatant bigotry and racism.

  “Amen,” Jamal’s parents said in unison.

  The Cousin family had been in Highsmith’s hands since Saturday afternoon. It was Highsmith who’d accompanied Jamal’s father to the morgue, and it was Highsmith who’d kept Edith from falling to the floor when Lamar stepped out and told her, “Dear God, honey, it’s him.” Highsmith had arranged for their overnight stay with his friends in Live Oak, where they’d awakened on Sunday morning to the harsh realization that it wasn’t just a terrible nightmare. They were living it.

  “Mr. Highsmith, can I speak to you in private for a moment?”

  Standing in the doorway was Quinton Press, the brightest star in the cast of talented young lawyers at the Highsmith Firm. Quinton accompanied his boss wherever he went and was the odds-on favorite to become the firm’s next partner. Highsmith excused himself from the table and followed Quinton down the hallway and out onto the front porch. If Quinton’s plan had been to speak to Highsmith alone, it failed miserably.

  “Looks like the media figured out where we’re staying,” said Quinton.

  At the press conference following the church-to-courthouse march, Highsmith had asked the media to give the Cousin family some space. The response was a forest of mobile transmission towers, outside-broadcast vans, and TV crews parked on the street in front of what was supposed to have been an undisclosed place of retreat. They respected the property line, at least, firing questions across the front yard from the edge of the pavement.

  “Mr. Highsmith, how’s the family doing?”

  “Is the expulsion enough?”

  Highsmith waved without comment—but no, expulsion was not enough. Sure, the president had also directed the Office of Equal Opportunity to investigate whether Mr. Towson’s text message was an “isolated action” or part of systematic racism by a white fraternity. But Highsmith knew what that meant. Damage control. It was the typical university doublespeak when it came to the three Rs—rape, racism, and recruiting violations.

  “To the garage,” he told Quinton.

  The possible involvement of three white college students in a modern-day lynching had pushed the news coverage way beyond facts—even beyond speculation. Since 5:00 a.m., every development and possible future development had been picked apart by pundits, analyzed by trial lawyers, and debated by civil rights activists on television. Only occasionally was it mentioned that the sheriff had yet to announce an arrest.

  “They hired Governor Swyteck’s son,” said Quinton. They were alone in the one-car garage, standing on an oil stain that was as big as an area rug, at least half a century in the making.

  “Thank God they picked a lightweight,” said Highsmith. “How soon ’til an arrest?”

  “Ms. Weller says she doesn’t know.”

  “Bullshit. Quinton, I can’t confer with Oliver Boalt every two hours. He doesn’t have time, and neither do I. But he promised me that Marsha Weller would keep the family updated. You have to press her.”

  “I did.” Quinton checked his notes on his tablet. “She said that Boalt wants zero lag time between arrest and indictment. So there will be no arrest until they’re ready to take the case to the grand jury.”

  “That’s lame. This isn’t opening night on Broadway. Any half-assed prosecutor can get an indictment just by asking for it. Really. It doesn’t take much more than that.”

  “They need time to bolster the evidence on motive.”

  “Motive?”

  “Technically motive is not an element of the crime of homicide, but in any murder case, motive is important.”

  Highsmith stepped away, breathing out his anger. “This isn’t a fucking murder case.”

  “Excuse me?”

  His anger was turning to energy. He paced from one end of the garage to the other, then looked the young lawyer in the eye. “You don’t get it, do you, Quinton?”

  “Get what, sir?”

  “Millennials,” he said, almost spitting out the word. “An entire generation of entitled motherfuckers. You and everyone your age think it’s normal that a black superstar athlete gets a seventy-million-dollar shoe contract. You think it’s normal that a smart black kid gets into Harvard.”

  “I really don’t know what—”

  “Black folk died to make that happen, Quinton. There’s no motive to figure out here. This is not a murder case.”

  Quinton blinked, confused. “Then—what is it?”

  “It’s—oh, the hell with it. If you don’t get it, no way you’re gonna make a sixty-year-old white man from Live Oak understand. I’ll do it myself. Like everything else around here.”

  Highsmith checked his reflection in the garage window and exited through the side door. Just the sight of him sent reporters running for their microphones, cameras rolling.

  “Mr. Highsmith!”

  He crossed the lawn at a deliberate pace and stopped just before the pavement. Questions came from too many directions, so he quickly found a camera from a national news organization and spoke directly to it, ignoring any single reporter.

  “I have a quick statement on behalf of the Cousin family,” he said, and the crowd hushed to listen.

  “Jamal’s parents wish to thank everyone across the country for their prayers and love. They are appreciated. Jamal was their only child, their pride and joy, and this is unimaginably painful for them. But it’s important for you—I mean the media—to understand how this loose talk about a gruesome murder involving frat boys is adding to their pain. Let me speak clearly about this.

  “First, whoever committed this despicable act is not a frat boy, a school boy, a homeboy, or any other kind of boy. They are men who enjoy their position of privilege because men and women even younger than they are—many of them of color—fight and die for this country.

  “Second—and I am speaking to you, Mr. State Attorney—lynching has never been about the murder of one man or one woman. The crime here is terrorism—racial terrorism. The victim is the entire African American community. And the motive is hate. Jamal Cousin was president of the preeminent black Greek-letter organization at Florida’s flagship university. Lynching him on the banks of the Suwannee River where he would be found by African American students is an act of terrorism. And no matter how privileged, these terrorists deserve your sympathy no more than the Boston Marathon bombers or the Orlando nightclub shooter.

  “That is all,” he said, ignoring the cacophony of follow-up questions as he turned and walked back to the house. Quinton met him at the porch steps.

  “You get it now, Quinton?”

  They continued up the steps and crossed the porch. “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  He opened the front door, allowing his boss to enter first. “I do,” he said, following Highsmith inside. “I definitely do.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Jack ignored the speed limit all the way back to Gainesville and headed straight to the Theta house. The latest buzz on social media was that police were headed to the fraternity with a search warrant. The state attorney had yet to return Jack’s call to confirm or deny the rumor, which only made Jack believe it was true. It was important that he be there, but he hadn’t planned on a street clogged with demonstrators. A traffic cop stopped him eight blocks from Fraternity Row. Jack rolled down his window to plead for passage.

  “Campus is closed to vehicles,” said the officer.

  “I have to get to the Theta house.”

  “Yeah, you and everyone else.”

  “I’m the attorney for Mark Towson, Theta president.”

  “And I’m the Easter
Bunny. Move along.”

  Jack didn’t have time to argue. He parked off campus and started down the sidewalk, dialing his client for an update. Mark was still with his parents at home, without a cell phone but available on the landline, and his friends at the fraternity house were keeping him posted.

  “Cops just got there and are moving everyone to the dining room,” said Mark. “Looks like they want to search upstairs.”

  Jack broke into a run, speaking urgently into his phone. “Who’s your contact in the frat?”

  “Cooper Bartlett. Baine’s with him. Should I be there, too?”

  “No,” Jack said, huffing with each footfall. “And tell your friends to say nothing to the police.”

  Jack tucked away his cell and continued at full speed for another two blocks, flying past groups of students who were on their way to the protest on Fraternity Row. The crowd swelled as he got closer to the Theta house, forcing him to slow down and weave his way through demonstrators. It was a mix of students, half blacks and half other races—which, by Jack’s quick estimate, meant that most of UF’s fifty thousand students had stayed home but its three thousand African American students had come out in force. The collective mood was somewhere between anger and dissatisfaction with the university’s decision to expel just one fraternity member, even if he was the president. Banners and posters made the point, and the message was clearest as Jack pushed his way closer to the house, where hundreds of students, black and white, wore white T-shirts in solidarity, each with the Greek letters of Jamal’s fraternity emblazoned on the front and a handwritten message on the back. BLACK LIVES MATTER was a common refrain, along with THETA PI OMEGA HATES ME.

  A black student with a handheld loudspeaker was standing atop a redbrick wall that ran adjacent to the crowded sidewalk. Jack recognized him from the news as the fraternity brother on the Ichetucknee tubing trip who had found Jamal’s body, Percy Donovan.

  “We have a message for you, President Waterston,” Percy shouted, the loudspeaker carrying his voice above the crowd. “We will not sit quietly for another investigation into systemic racism that goes nowhere! We will not accept the same old excuse that this is another isolated incident. Racist cowards never act alone. TPO must go! TPO must go!”

  With fist pumping, he spurred on the crowd, the rhythmic chant beating like the new pulse of Fraternity Row: “TPO must go!”

  Jack pushed forward, where a line of uniformed police officers kept the crowd from hopping the wall and setting foot on the Theta front lawn. Jack approached the cop with the grayest hair—someone old enough to recognize the unusual name “Swyteck” as that of the former governor. It worked. The officer escorted him around the house to the rear entrance.

  Six cars were parked directly behind the house, and a posted sign gave notice that each space was reserved for an elected officer, from president to sergeant at arms. A team of forensic agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had descended on Mark’s car—doors, trunk, and hood wide open as the active search of the vehicle was under way.

  Jack identified himself and asked to see the warrant, which one of the officers produced. The state attorney had yet to identify Mark Towson as a target of the investigation, but the warrant left little doubt as to the focus. The search was for an “eight-cord nylon rope of any length.”

  “I assume that’s the type of rope used in the murder of Jamal Cousin,” said Jack.

  The officer was under no obligation to reply, and he didn’t. Jack moved to the second item listed in the warrant—fibers from a cotton shirt and denim jeans.

  “And I presume the fibers are consistent with the clothing that Jamal was wearing?”

  No reply.

  “How did you get into the vehicle?” asked Jack. “Break the locks?”

  “No. The Theta house mother turned over a set of keys at our request. They are kept inside the house.”

  “For the record, my client does not consent to a search for any item not listed in the warrant, and he does not consent to the search of any place not described in the warrant.”

  “Understood. But you should check the other warrants.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “Yep,” the officer said, signaling with a jerk of his head. “Inside.”

  Jack started toward the house, and as he opened the door, a reporter called out his name. Jack stopped and looked. She was on the other side of the wall with her cameraman.

  “Is Mark Towson a suspect?” she shouted.

  The media had been piecing things together all day, quick to label just about anything “breaking news.” A police search of the Theta president’s car was the Holy Grail.

  Jack stepped inside, closed the door, and called the Towsons’ landline. His client answered.

  “Just stay where you are until I get back, Mark. This ride is about to get bumpier.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Leroy Highsmith left for the Suwannee County Airport, two miles outside of Live Oak, late Sunday afternoon. Quinton Press drove, and the parents of Jamal Cousin rode with them. The pilot greeted them on the tarmac.

  “We’re good to go, Mr. Highsmith. I should have you in Miami within the hour.”

  “Thank you, Jordan.”

  The Legal Eagle, a twin-engine private jet, was the largest aircraft the Suwannee airport could accommodate, and it was perhaps the most obvious symbol of Highsmith’s rags-to-riches success. Over his four-decade career, Highsmith had been featured in countless platforms, from the Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair to 60 Minutes and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. His parents were sharecroppers on white-owned land near Lake Okeechobee, and their nine children grew up in a shantytown of whitewashed shacks with tarpaper roofs. Somehow, their youngest son went on to become the first lawyer ever from Bel Glade, a town so “third world” that the Peace Corps used to train its volunteers there. It was the riches, however, that drew the media’s attention. More than a hundred verdicts and settlements in excess of a million dollars paid for a fifty-room mansion in the mostly white enclave of Palm Beach and filled his eight-car garage with a fleet of European-made automobiles, including four Bentleys and two Aston Martins. In addition to the forty-one talented lawyers who worked for him, he had his own manager, publicist, social media consultant, chef and sous chef, relaxation therapist, financial advisers, private investigators, pilots, and aviation mechanics. Some said he traveled to court in a limousine so long that the back end arrived five minutes after the front end; while others wrote more accurately about his $15,000 suits, custom-made crocodile shoes, and a bejeweled Rolex wristwatch.

  And there was one nugget that made it into every story: the 18-karat-gold fixtures in his Gulfstream G550.

  “Is that real gold?” asked Mrs. Cousin.

  She hadn’t asked on the trip up from Miami, but Highsmith knew that she would, eventually. Black folks always asked. White folks never did—they just sat quietly and assumed it was the typical black man’s expression of in-your-face arrogance, harking back to the days of the great Jack Johnson, who capped his front teeth in gold as he knocked out one white fighter after another on his way to becoming the first black heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Highsmith could only imagine what his white guests said about him in the privacy of their automobile on the way home from the airport. And then he just loved their reaction when, days later, he would tell them that he’d purchased his Gulfstream pre-owned from a white businessman, gold fixtures included.

  “You’ll want to take this call,” said Quinton, as he handed Highsmith his cell phone. “It’s Oliver Boalt.”

  Highsmith excused himself from the Cousins, then moved from the main seating area of the cabin to the forward compartment, on the other side of the galley, where he could speak in private. “Hello, Oliver,” he said in a pleasant tone.

  “I saw your speech on television,” said the state attorney. “Those were some very hurtful words.”

  “You deserved a good kick in the ass. If you�
��re looking for ‘motive,’ you’re dragging your feet.”

  “Dragging—come on, Leroy. It’s been two days.”

  “Which will turn into two weeks, then two months, and then nothing. I can smell it.”

  “You’re not being fair. And I don’t just mean the speech. The fact that Jamal’s parents came to Live Oak and never met with the state attorney is terrible optics.”

  “They met with the medical examiner, the lead homicide detective, and the prosecutor you’ve assigned to the case. That’s enough.”

  “It makes me look like an insensitive jackass—or, worse, a racist. I want to meet them.”

  “Not this trip. They’re exhausted.”

  “That’s because you marched them all the way from Mission Baptist to the courthouse. They’ve met everyone but me.”

  “Let me spell it out for you, Oliver. I will not put these grieving parents through another meeting and more agony just so you can have a photo op to boost your campaign for reelection.”

  “This has nothing to do with politics,” Boalt said, his voice rising. “I’ve never lost an election in my life, and I’m not worried about this one.”

  Highsmith paused—not because he was without words, but because he wanted them to have the intended effect. “Maybe you should be worried, Oliver.”

  There was silence on the line, and then the state attorney spoke, incredulous. “Did I just hear you correctly?”

  “It’s an observation, not a threat. I have no mind to work against you. You’re a decent man, but you are more detached from the black voters of Suwannee County than you know. Maybe that’s because in past elections black folk didn’t vote. They will this time. If there’s no indictment before the first Tuesday in November, you could find yourself out of work on Wednesday.”

  “This investigation has my full attention. There are things in the works that I can’t share with you. I called you for one reason—to meet with Jamal’s parents.”

  “And you will meet them. As soon as there’s an indictment. Good night, Oliver.”