Death Among the Mangroves

by Stephen Morrill

  “Or they deep-sixed it in some canal off U.S. 41,” MacIntosh said.

  “Possible. But that scenario doesn’t give us anything to work with. I don’t have the manpower to send someone over there and you’re probably better at it anyway. If you can track it down that would be useful.”

  “You want me to find a sports car somewhere in Dade and Broward counties?” MacIntosh said. He folded the paper and put it into a shirt pocket. “How hard could that possibly be?”

  “Didn’t say it would be easy. Said it might help me. Think of it as a challenge.”

  “I certainly will. And if I deliver on this?”

  “I’ll tell Mr. Gillispie privately that I could not have closed the case without your help. No promises that what I tell him will do anything for you.”

  “Humm. I’ll think on it. No promises this side, either.”

  “Otherwise,” Troy said. “So long as you stay out of my way and my officers’ way, no problemo. Oversee away. You find anything useful, give me a ringy-dingy.” Troy looked at the card. “Nice print job. Doesn’t actually say on it what you do. Just your name and phone.”

  “I wanted the ones with the Sherlock Holmes hunting cap and the magnifying glass. But they were too expensive.”

  “Ah. But with this anonymous card you can tell people you’re with an insurance company, or a doctor’s office or pretty much anything you want to make up. Generic.”

  “Heaven forfend! Hadn’t thought of that. Great idea.”

  Troy grinned. “I find anything I want you to know, I’ll call you.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “No. I might. It would depend. I’m not a hard-case about private investigators, as I know some cops are. You’re more eyeballs on the problem and you’re free, at least to me. I’m curious: if you find the body while in the employ of the Gillispies, do you get the reward?”

  “Don’t see why not. How about you and your cops?”

  “No. We’re sort of exempt from such bonuses.”

  “Too bad. A little incentive wouldn’t hurt. Think I’ll take a stroll around town, since I’m here and if you don’t mind. Maybe do lunch at the yacht club. I have reciprocal privileges. Is it possible to book a motel room in this town?”

  Troy laughed. “It’s the season. On top of that there are about a half-hundred reporters infesting us and chasing after any scrap about Barbara Gillispie. Stop by the Sea Grape Inn and ask Mrs. Mackenzie if she has anything for a friend of Troy’s. Maybe she has a soft place for Scots names. That fails, go find Loren Fitch at the Gulf View Motel and tell him I said for him to give you the spare room he always holds back. If all that fails I promise not to arrest you for sleeping in your car.”

  “Thanks.” MacIntosh pointed at Troy’s desk. “What’s with the dollar bill?”

  “We have a Bad Words Jar.”

  “Ah. Thus the badinage with the woman out front.”

  “You own a boat?”

  “Ah, because I mentioned the yacht club. Yes. Live on one. Sailboat in Tampa.”

  Troy nodded. “Enjoy our town. Avoid the press. And check in with me often.”

  Chapter 28

  Thursday, December 26

  At six p.m. councilman and principal Doctor Howard Parkland Duell came in through the connecting door to the town hall offices. Troy waved Duell to a chair. “Doctor Duell, what can I do for you this fine evening?” he asked. I will be polite, I will be polite.

  Duell waved that aside. “We have a problem, a situation I’m surprised you haven’t noticed yourself as yet.”

  Troy sat up and faced forward and folded his hands on his desk and looked attentive. However much he despised Duell, the man was one of his bosses, Troy told himself. “Really? What have we overlooked?”

  “Theft. Blatant theft. Of electricity. The town’s electricity.”

  “Electricity,” Troy said.

  “At the park.”

  Troy nodded. Helpful. “One thing Mangrove Bayou has is a lot of parks.”

  “The one at 17th and 18th streets and Indiana Avenue, over by the Collier River,” Duell said. “The park picnic pavilion there.”

  “Yes. Seen it.” Actually, Troy thought, he had seen it from Lee Bell’s bedroom, across the river. He decided not to go into detail. “Park faces the Collier River. I’ve seen the pavilion. Does it have an electric line to it? I didn’t know.”

  “It does. For the use of citizens with, say, electric picnic implements. I’m not surprised at your ignorance, given the sloppy nature of your work for us to date.”

  “Aha. Is this electricity somehow leaking out and splashing on the ground? James Thurber once had an aunt or some such relative who thought that could happen. He wrote about it.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you think it was Thurber’s mother?” Troy said. “Could have been his mother. I can’t remember.”

  “Who cares about James Thurber? No that’s not the prob…”

  “I care about James Thurber. Deeply. Big on P.G. Wodehouse too. Don’t think Wodehouse ever mentioned electricity but he once visited Florida and wrote about Jupiter Island.”

  “What the hell are you babbling on about?”

  “It’s my sloppy mind. Sorry. Tell me about this electricity theft. Are they plugging in electric rotisseries now? I thought they just used those charcoal grill things.”

  “There’s some woman using the electric outlet without authorization.”

  “Who authorizes use of the electric outlet?”

  “Well, no one. But she’s not having a picnic. She’s some vagrant. She comes by and hooks up her cell phone and her chair.”

  “Her chair.”

  “Wheelchair. She has one of those battery-powered wheelchairs.”

  “Battery-powered wheelchair?”

  “Are you some sort of parrot?” Duell said. “I thought you had a high I.Q.”

  “I used to. This conversation is lowering it.”

  “Well, try to keep up.”

  ““I’ll try. When does she do all this electricity stealing?”

  “At night when nobody’s watching, as you would know if you paid any attention.”

  “Apparently you do. I would have deputized you had I known that you spent nights patrolling. So what would you have me do about this?”

  “Arrest her. She’s stealing town property in the form of electricity. We’re not the charging station for vagrants. That outlet is for the use of citizens having picnics and not for vagrants with electric wheelchairs.”

  “Not to mention the cell phone,” Troy said. “Bet that sucker soaks up a lot of juice too.”

  “This is not amusing, Chief Adam.”

  “Sure it is. Does anyone have picnics in the middle of the night? I’m not up to speed on picnics. Sounds as if the woman is using the outlet during a slack time. Why, if she didn’t have plugs in it, the electricity would just be oozing out onto the ground.” Troy was trying not to laugh.

  “Electricity doesn’t ooze, you idiot. And that’s not the point.”

  “If I’m not mistaken,” Troy said, “we have a charging station right on the other side of this building, in front of the town hall, for electric cars. It’s free.”

  “Sure we do. That’s because we wish to encourage use of electric cars here. So what?”

  “So we offer free town electricity to anyone who can afford a thirty-thousand-dollar electric car that needs Lord knows how many amps and volts or whatever goes to make those run, but I am to arrest a crippled woman for wanting to charge up her wheelchair and her cell phone?”

  “You put it as badly as possible. But yes. That’s what you are to do.”

  “Can you cite a law this woman has broken?”

  “That’s your job. Trespassing? Vagrancy? What’s wrong with stealing electricity?”

  “Stealing electricity is hooking up to your neighbor’s house, or fiddling with the meter so as to not have to pay the bill. It’s not charging your
cell phone or using a plug for your laptop. People do that all the time, at airports, shopping malls, wherever. And she’s not trespassing, just using the park at odd times.

  “And I’m not big on vagrancy,” Troy continued. “What makes a vagrant, exactly? Poor? Homeless? How poor can she be if she has an electric wheelchair and a cell phone? And I’ve always thought that it’s better to solve the base problem than toss people into jail because they can’t find anyplace better to sleep. What am I supposed to do with them in the morning? This is a police station, not a hotel.”

  “So what are you planning to do?”

  “I was thinking, nothing.” Troy said. “But I’ll swing by and talk to the woman. Maybe we can help her.”

  “As I expected. Inaction. Indolence.” Duell stood and headed for the door. “And fix your damn office door. The lettering has been misspelled for the entire time you’ve been here.” He walked on down the hallway.

  “Longer, actually,” Troy said. “It was like that when I came.” But he was talking to an empty stationhouse. Duell had slammed the front door on the way out.

  That night Troy went back to his own condo at the Sea Grape Inn. Lee Bell let herself in as he was taking a long shower. He walked out of the bathroom naked and found some briefs in his bedroom and went into the kitchenette.

  “I’m not much use tonight,” he said. “Long day and I was up all last night.”

  Lee was looking in his refrigerator. “I know that. And don’t you have any real food?”

  “That is food. It’s just frozen food in little boxes.”

  “Well, I came over to cook for my main man. Looks like all I need is the microwave.”

  “Works for me.”

  They both ate. It didn’t take long. “I’m worried about you,” Lee said.

  “¿Por qué?”

  “Because Judge Stider is a powerful man in Collier County and his son, from what you’ve told me, is a violent sociopath. It’s not just lawsuits I worry about. You need to watch your back.”

  “I know that.”

  She looked at Troy. “When I see you get up in the morning, wherever you are, here or at my house, and put on a gun and a flak jacket in order to go to work, it scares me a little.”

  “It’s a bulletproof vest, not a flak jacket.”

  “Whatever. People shouldn’t have to live like that.”

  “People shouldn’t,” Troy said. “They hire me, they hire my entire department, to live like that for them. We agree to stand the wall.”

  “Stand the wall? What’s that?”

  “We stand on the wall and say, ‘Nothing bad will happen to the people behind us while we’re on watch.’ Did you know that, technically, police officers are never off duty?”

  “Well, you certainly aren’t.”

  “None of us are. We may only get paid for part of each day but we’re always on call. I can pick up that cell phone and have more officers here within ten minutes, some in their pajamas, probably. I can get help faster than I can order a pizza delivery. Now, if I may, I’m off to bed.”

  “It’s only nine p.m.,” Lee said. “If you go to bed now you’ll be wide awake at three a.m.”

  “That’s okay. I often do that anyway. I’ll get up and walk the streets. I like to do that when it’s dark and quiet. Does that seem weird to you?”

  “No,” Lee said. “It’s like flying at night. Very peaceful. Can’t see anything but stars and clouds. No sense of movement, really. Even the radio is quiet. It’s kind of like Zen or something. You go to bed and then enjoy your walk later. I think I’ll go sit in the hot tub down by the pool for a while. Maybe meet some man who’s not such a workaholic.”

  Chapter 29

  Friday, December 27

  By Friday afternoon the town of Mangrove Bayou looked like a fire ant nest someone had kicked over. Every citizen who didn’t have something better to do—and most didn’t—was out looking for Barbara Gillispie. “It’s like an Easter egg hunt,” June Dundee said to Troy at one point. “With one egg.” Her phones had not stopped ringing all day.

  Troy had Tom VanDyke and Angel Watson on the day shift. They were busy sorting out trespassing complaints and occasional fistfights. Troy’s officers had long since searched all vacant properties on the islands but now they were having to arrest people for breaking and entering those same houses. Troy called in Juan Valdez on overtime to process paperwork and supervise the jail cells.

  Troy had received phone calls from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Highway Patrol, the chairman of the Collier County Commission, someone from the governor’s office, and a lawyer in town who said he now represented the Gillispie family. He had just hung up on the latter call when Collier County sheriff’s deputy Kyle Rivers darkened his office door.

  “Oh, thank God,” Troy said. “Now I can hand this entire case off to you.” He took out a dollar bill and laid it on his desk.

  “Shit, I don’t want it,” Rivers said. “Damn tar-baby.” Rivers knew the system and took out two dollar bills and laid those on top of Troy’s.

  “I don’t believe you are supposed to refer to Uncle Remus stories when speaking to a person of color,” Troy said.

  “I didn’t know that. So what color are you?”

  “Les Groud, our mayor, says I’m beige.”

  “What is he, some kind of nance interior decorator?”

  “Perfect. First you use a pejorative on me, now you insinuate that Les is homosexual, and in the process, damn all gay people, not to mention all interior decorators. You’re on a roll today.” Troy added another dollar to the small stack.

  Rivers took the dollar off the stack and handed it back to Troy. “Use of ‘damn’ in that context—or this—is not a curse,” he said.

  ““Come to think,” Troy said, “you’re right.”

  “This is all very amusing,” Rivers said. “But I don’t feel like trying to outspend you.”

  “Probably could,” Troy said, “given my salary here.”

  “You wanted the job. But I’ll dial it back,” Rivers said. “So what are you doing with this tar-baby? My lieutenant sent me over in person to ask.”

  Troy saw no reason not to tell Kyle Rivers everything he knew. So he did.

  “Sounds to me like you are doing everything you can and you have some leads worth working,” Rivers said. “You need anything from me?”

  “The weekend is going to be bad, with too many of our citizens off work and at loose ends,” Troy said. “Petty crime is busting out all over. Thinking of putting revolving doors in the cells. I could use a couple of your deputies to beef up the police presence. Take a load off the town’s overtime budget.”

  “By putting the overtime on the sheriff’s department budget instead?”

  “That would be my goal, yes.”

  “See what I can do.”

  Rivers had left when Troy heard voices from outside his window. He had the blinds closed but he got up and peeked through. He could see reporters on the street outside clustering around someone who was out of Troy’s sight. “Now what?” he said aloud and got up to walk to the lobby and open the front door.

  Councilman and principal Doctor Howard Parkland Duell was lecturing the crowd. Oh boy, this should be good, Troy thought. He stepped outside to hear better.

  “…this opportunity to explain why I think we need change here in Mangrove Bayou,” Duell said. “Clearly the police department here is not up to doing the job we ask of them.”

  “You mean the missing girl,” one of the reporters shouted.

  “I mean that and a lot of things. Most recently, the outrageous theft of electricity.”

  The reporters looked puzzled and more so as Duell went on and on about how a vagrant in a wheelchair was stealing the town blind on its electric bill. Troy stifled a laugh. A reporter saw him standing in front of the door and shouted across the street. “What do you have to say, Chief?” The reporter was grinning too. “Have you suspended the search for the missing girl wh
ile you go after the electricity thief?”

  “I would not dream of interrupting,” Troy shouted back. He went back inside the station, laughing.

  Chapter 30

  Friday, December 27

  Troy was looking at paperwork, trying to find excuses for kicking most of the arrestees in the back cells loose. He pushed aside his notes and sighed. Most of those people were voting and tax-paying citizens of the town who had acted stupidly in the heat of the moment. Troy thought that maybe, instead of officially arresting them, he could assign them to work parties. They could go around and repair the broken windows and doors they’d created in breaking into vacant buildings. Paying for everything themselves, of course.

  It was afternoon shift change and Milo Binder and Jeremiah Brown were doing their workouts at the station. Troy had insisted that all officers exercise for an hour before going on duty and they had barbells and a treadmill. The schedules were staggered to take that into account. Jeremiah Brown was just done with his workout and he drove Troy to the God’s Lightning Church on Snake Key.

  “All pumped up?” Troy asked. He exercised too, and ran every morning because he found the treadmill boring. In fact most of the equipment was his, donated to the station and kept in a back storeroom they now called the “gym.”

  “We need bigger weights,” Jeremiah said in his deep rumble. “Those toys, I just gotta do a lot of reps to make up the difference.” Jeremiah was six-two and nearly three hundred pounds of hard muscle, and when he climbed out of the patrol truck the big Suburban lifted an inch or two on the driver’s side. He always reminded Troy of a large black rhinoceros.

  “Jeremiah, we have weights up to two hundred and fifty pounds. I can barely bench-press half that.”

  “You is pitiable.”