A Death in Live Oak

by James Grippando

  “You think Mark sent the text?”

  “I don’t give a shit. Where the fuck are we supposed to live?”

  Jack continued through the house to the big room in front, Theta party central. He spotted Mark standing by the faux fireplace, talking with a group of friends. Through the pair of large windows in front, Jack could see Fraternity Row packed with demonstrators. He heard that chant again, led by the man on the loudspeaker—TPO must go! Jack went to his client, but the security guard caught up and grabbed him.

  “Gotcha!” he said, huffing and puffing.

  “He’s my lawyer,” Mark told him. “It’s okay.”

  The security guard released Jack, seemingly dismayed to have run all that way for nothing. He was still trying to catch his breath as he walked away.

  “I need to talk to you,” Jack said. He pulled Mark into the TV room adjacent to the party room, far enough from Mark’s friends to talk privately. “Didn’t I tell you not to come here?”

  “Didn’t you know I would?”

  Jack had known, on some level. “You don’t owe the fraternity an explanation.”

  “Yeah, I do. Our chapter just got the death penalty. I’m the last president this house will ever have. I fucked it up for everybody.”

  A loud crash startled both of them. They hurried back into the living room. One of the front windows was shattered, the draperies moving in the light breeze. A rock the size of a baseball was on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.

  “Everybody out of here!” said Jack. “Get to the back of the house.”

  The security guard returned, ready for action.

  “Don’t draw your weapon!” Jack shouted.

  The guard took his hand from his holster and led Mark’s friends away. But Mark stayed put, staring through the broken window toward the crowd.

  “Let’s go, Mark,” said Jack.

  Mark still didn’t move. “This is out of control,” he said in a distant voice.

  “Which is why I told you to stay away,” said Jack. “If this crowd gets word that you’re actually here, it’s only going to get worse. Now let’s go.”

  “No,” Mark said firmly. “I need to fix this.”

  “Fix it? How?”

  “Talk to him.”

  “Talk to who?”

  “The guy with the loudspeaker.”

  TPO must go! TPO must go! The crowd’s chant only grew louder.

  “Mark, listen—”

  “No, you listen. Right now every student out there thinks I’m a monster. Maybe if I just go out and talk with this guy, I can stop some of this craziness.”

  “Mark, that sounds really noble, but it’s not at all safe.”

  “Yeah, well, look at what playing it safe has gotten me. I’m expelled. By tomorrow this house will be empty. The state attorney up in Live Oak thinks I lynched a black student, and one of my best friends is lining up to testify against me.”

  “The game is still in the first quarter,” said Jack. “It’s way too soon to throw the Hail Mary pass. If we make a mistake tonight, it won’t matter if you’re innocent. It will all be about the mistake.”

  “Fuck that, Jack!”

  He started away. Jack grabbed him, but Mark broke free, hurried to the door, and yanked it open. Jack followed him into the night.

  “Mark, don’t do this.”

  His client continued up the front walkway, and Jack didn’t know whether to make one last appeal to reason or simply tackle him. It was dark in the front lawn beneath the oak limbs, but Mark was just steps away from the intense glow of the television media lighting all along Fraternity Row, where throngs of demonstrators stood shoulder to shoulder in tightly packed unity.

  TPO must go!

  A police officer stepped toward Jack and his client, the beam of his flashlight blinding them. “Hey, you two! Back in the frat house!”

  Jack and his client froze. The bright flashlight had plucked them from the shadows, and getting called out by law enforcement had put them in the public’s crosshairs.

  “That’s him!” someone shouted, and it was quickly repeated over and over again as the news traveled like an electric current.

  Another police officer stepped toward Jack with authority. “Sir, back in the house, now!”

  Jack sensed that his client was ready to retreat, but just as they turned, a ball of flame streaked so closely overhead that they instinctively ducked. Launched from somewhere in the crowd, soaring above them like a tiny meteor, it went straight at the Theta house and right through the gaping hole that the rock had left in the front window just minutes earlier. A burst of flames erupted inside. Isolated cheers emerged from the crowd, but the pockets of celebration were soon overrun by widespread shrieks of panic and the urgent crackle of police radios.

  “Holy shit,” said Jack, as the flames quickly roared out of control.

  CHAPTER 25

  Percy Donovan watched in stunned silence. He was standing atop the brick wall directly across the street from the Theta house, where he’d been working the crowd and leading the “TPO must go” chant.

  “What the fuck was that, Kelso?” he shouted down to his friend.

  The front of the Theta house was an orange wall of flames. Sirens blared in the distance. Fleeing demonstrators screamed as they scattered in every direction, running into each other, pushing their way to safety, and trampling the fallen. Police scrambled to restore order, and within sixty seconds, a line of sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear—helmets, vests, shields—reinforced the uniformed peacekeepers of the university police department. One officer took to the public-address system on his squad car.

  “Remain calm! Everyone, please remain calm!”

  Percy was close enough to feel the heat from the flames that had overtaken the front of the house. He jumped down from the wall and landed on the sidewalk beside his friend.

  “Kelso! What the shit?”

  “Molotov cocktail, I think.”

  “Who’s the fucking idiot?”

  “I dunno. Wasn’t us.”

  The crowd surged past them, a mix of black and white students, all of them terrified. Percy spotted one of his fraternity brothers amid the confusion. He staggered into another demonstrator, who pushed him away.

  “Roland!” shouted Percy.

  He looked in Percy’s direction but seemed to be in a daze. Percy grabbed him and pulled him toward the wall, out of the flow. His shirt sleeve was sliced open and his arm was covered in blood.

  “Fuck! What happened?” asked Percy.

  “There’s a knife fight over there. ’Cept we didn’t bring any knives.”

  “Who stabbed you?”

  “Some alt-right motherfucker.”

  Percy felt a surge of anger. This wasn’t his first march for Black Lives Matter. He was familiar with the tactics of the Traditionalist Worker Party and other white supremacists, and it was a page straight out of their playbook to throw a Molotov cocktail, blame it on the black demonstrators, and then wield their knives in “self-defense” against the perpetrators of “white genocide.”

  Percy removed his shirt and tied it around the gash in Roland’s arm. “Gotta stop this bleeding.”

  “This is bullshit,” said Kelso. “They want a fight, they got one. I’ll take it to ’em.”

  “Don’t,” said Percy. “We gotta get him out of here. Can you walk, Roland?”

  Roland nodded weakly. He was still conscious, but the loss of blood seemed to be draining his awareness.

  “Help me lift him,” said Percy.

  Percy took one arm and Kelso took the other. Just as they got Roland to his feet, something smashed into the brick wall behind them with the force of mortar fire.

  “Shit!”

  The metal canister ricocheted to the sidewalk and rolled into the street, releasing tear gas and unleashing even greater panic. More canisters were launched in volleys from somewhere behind police lines and landed in the crowd. One hit a demonstrator in the shoulder and kn
ocked her to the pavement. All along Fraternity Row, people were stepping over other people, coughing and wheezing as they ran. Some pulled off their shirts to cover their faces and stop the irritation, but Percy’s shirt was the tourniquet on Roland’s arm, leaving him without protection. Kelso pulled his jersey up over his mouth and nose, grabbed a smoking canister, and hurled it toward the Theta house. Percy continued forward, but all the pushing and shoving in the crowd made it almost impossible to keep Roland on his feet, let alone make progress.

  “Stay with me, Roland,” he said, but with his very next step, someone launched from the crowd and broadsided Percy like a runaway truck. The man was huge, and it wasn’t the usual bump and jostle of a panicked crowd. He kept coming at Percy, the way a lineman might run all the way through a defenseless quarterback, driving Percy into the brick wall. Percy had barely seen him coming, and his eyes were too irritated to focus on the white face that was suddenly right in front of him. The man’s voice, however, was unforgettable.

  “Strange fruit, motherfucker. You’re next.”

  The man delivered one last shove, slamming Percy’s head against the wall. Percy’s eyes rolled up into their sockets. His knees buckled. The crowd noises faded. And then his night went totally black.

  CHAPTER 26

  Jack caught the Saturday-morning flight to Miami. He couldn’t count the number of posters and banners he’d seen over the past few days, so it seemed a tad ironic to be greeted by yet another one as he stepped out of the terminal.

  Lov Dada Homm, it read. Righley and Andie were standing behind it.

  “Did Mommy make this?” Jack asked playfully.

  “No, me!”

  “Starting at four a.m.,” said Andie, bleary-eyed.

  A family lunch in the Brickell restaurant district was a nice escape. They talked about everything but Jack’s case. The respite ended when Righley put her head down on the table, closed her eyes, and found the sleep she’d lost while making Daddy’s welcome banner.

  “I saw the news last night,” said Andie. “Three demonstrators stabbed outside Mark Towson’s frat house.”

  Jack didn’t mention how close he’d been to it. “Lucky nobody got killed.”

  “Do they know who burned down the house?”

  “Some people say skinheads; others say New Black Panthers. Police are reviewing video from all the media and about five hundred cell phones to sort it out.”

  Andie checked on Righley before saying more. Still asleep. “How long do you think this will go on?”

  “You mean the protests?”

  “I mean you, in the middle of it all.”

  Jack remembered the advice his father had given him a week earlier—the tension between being Mark Towson’s lawyer and being married to an FBI agent. “I wish I could say it won’t get any worse before it gets better.”

  The bill came, Righley bounced back, and the direction of the conversation changed by 180 degrees. The rest of Andie’s afternoon was planned out. Jack dropped her and Righley at a birthday party for a preschool classmate who, for the next four hours, would be known only as “Ariel.” Jack didn’t stay. He felt drawn to Coconut Grove, south of downtown Miami, where the funeral procession for Jamal Cousin was under way.

  Around 2:00 p.m., police halted all six lanes on busy U.S. 1, South Florida’s main north-south artery, as a mile-long trail of sadness flowed westward from the South Grove Baptist Church to Jamal’s final resting place. There was blue sky and sunshine for the solemn event. Thousands turned out to line the streets in tribute. Sunglasses were essential, and even though it was a perfect day for shorts and flip-flops, many onlookers wore black, even if they hadn’t attended the actual church service. Jack stood among them. He brought his best friend, Theo Knight, who had been planning to pay his respects with or without Jack.

  “Not sure how I feel about you bein’ Mark Towson’s lawyer,” said Theo.

  Theo was Jack’s best friend, bartender, therapist, confidant, and sometime investigator. He was also African American, a onetime gangbanger who easily could have ended up dead on the streets. And he was a former client. After four years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit, Theo had Jack and a ragtag team of lawyers at the Freedom Institute—and DNA evidence—to thank for his release. Freedom came with a monetary award from the state, which Theo parlayed into two successful bars: Sparky’s, named for the electric chair he’d avoided, and Cy’s Place, a jazz bar in the Grove named after his uncle Cy, a sax player who’d been blowing an old Buescher 400 since Miami’s Overtown was known as Little Harlem. Theo promised Jack free tequila shots for life. Before Andie came along, on plenty a morning after, Jack had prayed to God that Theo would just stop thanking him.

  “Honestly,” said Jack, “I’m not sure how I feel about being Mark’s lawyer either.”

  Jack and Theo watched from the intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road, Theo’s old neighborhood, where the Knight brothers and their vicious gang, the Grove Lords, had once ruled. It was in the heart of the old Grove ghetto, outside the run-down bars and package stores, that a fifteen-year-old Theo had come upon a crowd gathering around the body of a woman who’d been tossed into the street like worthless trash. His uncle Cy had struggled to keep him away, but Theo was drawn in, as if he needed to see with his own eyes what drug addiction and a string of violent “relationships” had finally done to his mother.

  “Justice for Jamal!” a man shouted.

  It had been a common refrain all week, but it was jarring in this setting, where virtually everyone in the crowd stood in silent anticipation of the procession. Two escorts on rumbling motorcycles were the first to pass, their blue funeral beacons flashing. The shiny black hearse followed, moving slowly enough for Jamal’s fraternity brothers to walk alongside it, about twenty on one side of the street and a roughly equal number on the other. Jack recognized Brandon Wall from the disciplinary hearing. He was in neither line, instead walking alone and directly behind the hearse, closest to Jamal.

  An older woman beside Jack dabbed away tears. In complete spontaneity, not choreographed at all, the black men around Jack, including Theo, thrust a black power fist into the air. Jack stood in racial no-man’s-land, a white guy who felt like he should be doing something to show his support, but he knew he’d look ridiculous if he raised a white fist and pretended to know anything about black power. An awkward gesture like that—doing anything to draw attention and potentially out himself as Mark Towson’s lawyer—would have been foolish, though he felt more than safe in the company of Theo, who was often mistaken for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

  A black limousine carrying Jamal’s parents passed. Jack could barely watch. “I shouldn’t be here,” he whispered.

  Theo seemed to know what he meant. “It’s what you people do.”

  “You people?”

  “White people. You need to make yourself feel better.”

  “You really think that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t get it.”

  “Why don’t I get it?”

  “Because you’re white.”

  “Then why are we friends?”

  “Because I decided I can live with it.”

  “That’s fucking depressing.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  Jack’s focus returned to the procession. More freshly waxed cars with headlights glowing in the sunshine. More sad faces. The vast majority were black. Jack wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was subconscious, but he found himself noticing the white faces. Really noticing them. He wondered what their story was, what had drawn them to the funeral procession of a young black man from Miami who’d been lynched on a river system that was immortalized in Florida’s official state song. Way down upon the Suwannee . . . Jack wondered if being here made them “feel better.”

  Jack froze. His gaze fixed on a young woman who was standing across the street from him on the other side of the procession. She was tall, whit
e, and blond, though most of her hair was beneath a broad-brimmed sun hat and her eyes and a good portion of her face were hidden behind dark sunglasses. He tried not to stare, but he couldn’t help it, and she didn’t seem to notice—until she did.

  She quickly looked away. Jack didn’t.

  Two more cars passed. She glanced back in Jack’s direction, as if to see if he was still looking. He was. Even behind sunglasses, Jack could almost feel their eyes meet.

  Slowly, she stepped back from the curb, and then suddenly disappeared into the crowd.

  Jack was standing elbow to elbow with other onlookers, with virtually no room to maneuver. He tried moving a half step forward, then sideways, to catch another glimpse of the woman. She was gone.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Theo.

  Jack settled back into his unassigned place on the crowded sidewalk. “Thought for sure I saw someone I knew over on the other side.”

  “Who?”

  Jack paused, trying to make sense of it. “Mark Towson’s sister.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The funeral procession ended at the City of Miami Cemetery. Leroy Highsmith told his limo driver to keep the air-conditioning running while Edith and Lamar Cousin readied themselves to step out into the hot afternoon sun. Highsmith sat facing Jamal’s parents in the rear bench seat.

  “Take all the time you need,” said Highsmith. “No hurry.”

  The drive had been straight up Biscayne Boulevard, but the behind-the-scenes route to Jamal’s burial in Miami’s oldest and most historic cemetery had been more circuitous. City Cemetery sat on ten acres north of downtown near historic Overtown Village, which by law was the only place the black laborers who built and worked the cemetery with shovels and pickaxes were allowed to live in Miami. As the tropical beauty of the site emerged, City Cemetery became the final resting place for pioneers like Julia Tuttle, the “Mother of Miami,” and James Jackson, the city’s first physician. Deeds to the few remaining plots had long since been issued, and burial was restricted to the deed owner or a family member. It took the active persuasion of a congresswoman, not to mention a generous cash offer from Leroy Highsmith to a ninety-seven-year-old deed holder, to secure an open plot for Jamal.