Death Among the Mangroves

by Stephen Morrill

“Be proud of me when I, or somebody around here, gets convictions. Which may not be so easy with whifty evidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That cute trick with the private investigator. The defense will try to get that gun tossed out. When the gun goes, so goes the bullet match too.”

  “But he was hired by the victim’s father. He was working privately, not for me. And P.I.s do have wide latitude to investigate,” Troy said.

  “Not that wide. Unlocked storage unit, my ass. I’ll do what I can. At least we have the blood and other evidence. But right now I feel like I just stuck my arm into a hornet’s nest. You better come through for me on this.”

  “I will. I would think your boss would be handling a case like this, not leaving it to some assistant state attorney.”

  “You mean leaving it to someone who actually knows how to try cases? No, Jack DeGrasse will hand this one to me or one of my cohorts. If we win he gets the news conference. If we lose we get fired and he gets the news conference.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “It’s as fair as it gets around here. Could be even worse, though.”

  “How?”

  “I could be a public defender.”

  Chapter 46

  Friday, January 10

  Troy was an hour into his paperwork the next morning when Rita Shaner called. “Hold onto your chair,” she told him, “The Stiders were ROR’d this morning.”

  “Released on their own recognizance? No bail even? You’re kidding me.”

  “Wish I was. With what you gave me they should have been remanded to the county jail. They’re loose and probably rampaging around your jurisdiction. I hear that Judge Stider, in particular, was rampageous.”

  “Rampageous? Are you sure that’s a word?” Troy said.

  “I’m a lawyer. I only know meaningless Latin words,” Shaner said. “But if it’s not a word, it needs to be.”

  “How did you let this happen? You’re the assistant state’s attorney for as far as the eye can see.”

  “Apparently, your eye can’t see up to Fort Myers. Jack DeGrasse sent word down. Influence is like piss, it runs downhill. And I caught it. There was simply no way a circuit court judge was going to sit in jail awaiting trial.”

  “Couldn’t you even get a bail set?”

  “Nope. Not even on the kid, who is not a circuit court judge. The judge handling arraignments this morning wet his pants and almost apologized to them. What’s the diff? They would have made any bail the court set.”

  “One difference is that they might be easier to track. Did the judge even order surrender of passports?”

  “Nope. Nor did he tell them to stay in the jurisdiction.”

  “He may as well have set a time bomb to go off in this town.”

  “Oh come on, Troy. Judge Stider might sue you, but that’s all.”

  “It’s not him. It’s the kid. Mark Stider. When he gets angry he is unencumbered by the thought process.”

  “Oh. Well. My advice? Watch your back.”

  “Always do. Thanks for the call. And for trying.”

  Chapter 47

  Friday, January 10

  Randy “Panda” Groves brought out two ice teas for himself and for Troy. He sat across from Troy at the big cast-iron table on his deck overlooking the Collier River where that met the Gulf of Mexico.

  “Don’t know if I ever told you,” Troy said, “but this is the best view I’ve seen in Mangrove Bayou. And to think it’s on Snake Key too.”

  Groves almost never smiled, but this time he did manage a thin grin. “Thinking outside the box. Moved to town and saw that all the middle-class people lived on Barron Key, the wealthy on Airport Key and the original poor inhabitants here on Snake Key.”

  “You could afford Airfield Key, if there were a place available. Not so many lots there.”

  Groves shook his head. “Cheaper to buy four lots on this corner, with the great view, than one lot there. Had some single-wides hauled off for scrap and built a nice house.”

  “With a great view and an outdoor office,” Troy said. Unless it was raining too much, they always met out on this deck, elevated like the rest of the house a dozen feet off the ground, and with a blue Sunbrella sunshade overhead. “But what happens when our next influx of yuppies buys up all the lots on Snake Key and jacks up the real estate prices? Where do the old-Florida ‘Snakers’ go then?”

  “You skipped last Friday,” Panda said, ignoring the question as he opened his laptop. Troy usually had an appointment with the psychologist for every Friday afternoon.

  “Town meeting,” Troy said. “Last Friday of each month.”

  “Town meeting is at seven p.m. Your usual time here is five.”

  “I had some paperwork to finish up. For the town meeting.”

  Groves stared at Troy. He had the most deadpan stare Troy could recall seeing. “Sure,” Groves said. “We could schedule you for another day.”

  “No. This is good. I just need to plan for it a little better. Get my work done early.”

  Groves nodded. “You work from seven to seven. And most weekends you are in the office part time too?”

  “I like my job.”

  Groves stared at Troy.

  “And,” Troy said, “we’re always a little short-handed. Especially if there’s anyone in the cells. Got to keep a person in the station when that happens.”

  “Who made that rule?”

  “I did.”

  Groves stared at Troy some more.

  “I know. I created my own problem,” Troy said.

  “Why did your dreams switch?” Groves said.

  “I told you why.”

  “Tell me why again.”

  “I used to dream about the man who was about to decapitate his wife. I shot him before he could. I was reprimanded but not fired. The other officers present didn’t exactly come to my defense.”

  “And so you dreamed, often, that the man had, in fact, surrendered and you had shot him anyway,” Groves said. “What did you come to think about all that?”

  “At first I came to think I had killed a man for no good reason,” Troy said. “Then, later, I came to suspect, at least, that I was bending the dream to suit the report from the Internal Affairs investigation.”

  Groves put his fingertips together and touched those to his chin. He looked out to the mangrove islands offshore. “The brain is a marvelous instrument,” he said. “But as a recorder of history it’s not always accurate.”

  “I know that. Policemen all know that. We have a saying, ‘The worst sort of witness is an eyewitness.’ Five citizens seeing a mugging on the street will give five different descriptions of the shirt the mugger was wearing. And that’s simple.”

  Groves smiled. “And yet you want to talk to those witnesses as soon as possible, and before the news reports start. Why is that?”

  “That’s because once one guy gets on the news and says the shirt was blue, the woman who originally saw a red shirt starts to think it was blue too. Pretty soon you have, not five versions, but one communal version of what happened. And it’s not necessarily the right story.”

  “Do you think those other witnesses are now lying? Or were lying at first?”

  “Of course not. At first they tell us what they think they saw. Later they tell us what they think they remember that they saw. But there’s a vast difference sometimes.”

  “When you killed that man here in Mangrove Bayou…”

  “Just up the street, almost,” Troy said.

  “…here in town, in almost the identical situation, did you feel justified?”

  “Oh. Sure. Billy Poteet was about to shoot Wanda Frister.”

  “And since that night, six months ago now, no change in those dreams?”

  “Not much. The faces alternate. The original man and knife, then Billy Poteet’s face and gun. The endings vary. The man puts down his knife and says he’s surrendering and then I shoot him. Billy Poteet pulls the trigger and kill
s Wanda Frister and then I shoot him.”

  “And yet neither ending is what actually happened.”

  “No.”

  “Any pattern to the variation?”

  “Yeah. The pattern is I dream, I wake up nauseated, I run to the toilet and barf up my guts. Then I can’t sleep the rest of the night. That’s the damn pattern.”

  “But you have told me that you were fired from the Tampa police for killing a teenager. Why don’t you dream about that?”

  “Don’t know. He had a water pistol that looked real. But if you point a real-looking water pistol at a policeman, in dim light, you are just committing suicide.”

  “Think he was wanting to commit suicide-by-cop?”

  “No. He was just being stupid. A lot of criminals are criminals just because they’re too dumb, too uneducated, too lacking in any job skills to be anything else. I’ve read studies that show that the average I.Q. of prison inmates is around eighty. Only a fifth of them have finished high school.

  “You’re intelligent. You’re in Mensa,” Groves said. “Do you think low-I.Q. people are more likely to commit crimes?”

  “No. But they are more likely to get into trouble with the law. There’s a small distinction there. Intent and all that.”

  Groves nodded. Serious, he looked out at the water a moment.

  “So we lock them up in stone prisons,” Troy went on. “Any ‘rehabilitation’ measures are a joke and poorly funded and ineptly carried out. Then we let them out and expect them to suddenly be models of good citizen behavior. If there’s anything dumber than the criminals, it’s all the rest of us.”

  Groves looked back at Troy. “So you shot to death a teenager of possibly too low an I.Q.—perhaps half of yours—to be able to sort out what he was doing.”

  Troy frowned at the tabletop in front of him. “Seems odd that I never dream about that.”

  Groves nodded. “I want you to keep a notepad by your bed. Make a note of which version of the dream you had and the day and time. Bring the notepad next time.”

  “Probably need to keep the notepad in the bathroom. Is that an important clue? Which dream, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps you can tell me. But it’s information easily obtained. May as well obtain it.”

  “Typical cop-think,” Troy said. “Why don’t you come to work for me? I’d have one extra officer and could stop having to sleep so much on the sofa in my office. That solves my workaholic problem and I don’t need to see you any more. Neat solution.”

  Groves gave a thin smile. “Working long hours isn’t your problem. Why you want to work long hours may be. And you are resisting me, not yet willing to come to the truth.”

  “Don’t your patients always resist coming to the truth?” Troy said. “After all, if you cured them on the first visit, you would be flat broke.”

  “See what I mean,” Groves said. “Deflecting. And I don’t cure my clients. They cure themselves. Or not. I’m only the tour guide.” He looked at his laptop on the table in front of him. “I’ll see you next Friday. Same time, same channel.”

  Chapter 48

  Saturday, January 11

  Oddly, it seemed to Troy, the weekend was quiet. He and Lee went sailing on his Sea Pearl on Saturday, spent the night at her house, and drove her red Corvette up to Sanibel on Sunday.

  “Tell me why we’re doing this,” Troy said as they sat in traffic on Periwinkle Way. Lee was happily drumming on the steering wheel in time to the radio. Troy was feeling grumpy. In-season, the Sanibel main road was a slow-moving parking lot.

  “It’s fun,” Lee said. “We’ll do some shopping. I have reservations at the Old Captiva House for six.”

  Troy looked out the passenger-side window. “Could have sailed my boat up here faster. Isn’t there an airfield you could have flown to?”

  “No. Now try to enjoy yourself. People pay thousands to come to this island. Maybe we can run by Butts-Up-Beach and get some seashells.”

  “There’s a place in North Fort Myers where you can get all the shells you want, already cleaned and lacquered.”

  “Troy Adam, you don’t have a romantic bone in your body.”

  “I might have one.”

  “That’s not, technically, a bone.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.

  “How can you not know? You’re the Mangrove Bayou Director of Pubic Safety. Says so on your office door.”

  “It’s a heavy, heavy burden.”

  “It’s not all that heavy.”

  “I meant the reputation. This is making me horny. Did you happen to also reserve a room at the inn?”

  “You’re joking, right? Those were probably booked for this month at least three years back.”

  “Maybe not. The Sea Grape Inn won’t take reservations more than six months out.” Mrs. Mackenzie at the Sea Grape Inn gave Troy the cop-discount on one of their smaller rental condos. “I could flash my badge. That would impress them.”

  “I think my charge card would impress them more,” Lee said. “But no. We’ll drive home after dinner. I’ll make it up to you then.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”

  She glanced sideways at him, with that grin he so loved. “There’s a small box of tissues in the console. Try not to make a mess on the upholstery.”

  The Old Captiva House restaurant was everything Lee had promised. Troy had never been to it before.

  “Do they keep the Santa Claus and candy canes up on the roof all year, or is that just a Christmas thing?” he asked as they drove away after dinner.

  “I never noticed them before,” Lee said. “They weren’t there last April. Let’s go home.” The traffic had thinned a little but it was not until they got onto I-75 that Lee was able to stretch the car’s legs.

  “Ease it off,” Troy warned at one point. “Don’t need to get stopped with a chief of police in the car.”

  “Oh. Poo.”

  Chapter 49

  Wednesday, January 15

  Five days after her husband and son had been released on their own recognizance, Martha Stider came to see Troy. June brought her back to his office and seated Martha in a visitor chair. June stared down at Troy and Troy stared at Martha. Martha’s face was a mass of bruises and she had a cut over one eye. Troy almost blurted out that she looked as if she had gone fifteen rounds with a prizefighter, but stifled himself.

  “Martha, would you like for June, here, to sit in on our conversation?” Troy asked.

  Martha Stider glanced at June and then nodded. “That might be nice.” She fluttered her hands a little, like a wounded bird hopping. Troy motioned for June to sit in the other visitor chair beside Martha.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  Martha started to talk but broke down within the first few words. As she wept, Troy opened his top right-hand drawer, pushed aside the .40-caliber Glock pistol the department had issued him and which he never carried because he preferred his old-fashioned .45-caliber Colt, and got out a box of tissues. He handed those to June, who pulled several out and passed those to Martha. He sat quietly, looking out the rear window to his right at Sunset Bay and the town boat ramp where a man, woman and two boys had launched a small motorboat and tied it off to one of the docks.

  Martha Stider wept copiously. June offered several more tissues. The man now had the cover off the outboard and was poking around in it. Outboards worked best when worked hard and often, but too many boaters never learned that lesson, or learned to run an engine dry of fuel before putting it away for a long time.

  Martha finally stopped sobbing. Troy looked back at her. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “I’m so ashamed,” Martha said. Troy knew that telling her she had nothing to be ashamed of wasn’t likely to make any impression on her at this time. She needed to hear that, but not now. “What kind of mother lets her own son beat on her?” Martha sobbed.

  “The mother of a son who is twenty-four years old and six-feet-two,” Troy said.
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  Martha nodded. “I don’t know why he hates me so. I have never laid a hand on him. Growing up, The Judge wouldn’t let me even restrict him or anything else when he misbehaved.”

  “Did the judge ever spank Mark or reprimand him when he misbehaved?”

  Martha was wiping one eye and looking at Troy with the other. “No,” she said in a small voice. “Mark just grew up wild, with no restrictions, ever.”

  Troy called up the computer file June had created. “I have hospital records here,” he told Martha. “Who hit you on these dates?” Troy said. He read off the several dates.

  Martha stared at Troy. “You have my medical records? How on earth did you do that? Why?”

  “We’re here to serve and protect you, Martha. You can thank June for collecting that information.”

  “Oh.” Martha looked at June and blew her nose into a tissue. She looked back up at Troy. “Mostly it’s Mark. He hits me in the face. The Judge likes to hit me lower down so the marks won’t show in public. He’s who broke my rib and my arm.”

  “So both of the men in your house hit you?”

  She nodded. “Mark usually wins any argument with The Judge. Then The Judge will come and beat me to make himself feel better. Pretty much, whoever loses any argument between them will beat me.”

  Now that she was talking Martha seemed to be past the weeping stage. She even held her hands still. “The Judge makes me wear long sleeves and ankle-length dresses when I go out. They don’t let me go out very often.”

  “How did you get out today?”

  “The Judge doesn’t go to work these days. He’s been suspended or something. But they went to Fort Myers to buy Mark a new car. I sat and sat, and thought and thought, and then I ran here. I mean I ran all the way here.”

  “Do you plan to go home?”

  She burst into tears again. June started passing tissues. Troy checked on the family with the boat. They were hauling it back out again, the man gesticulating at the woman as she drove the car pulling the trailer up the boat ramp. Not a great showing for the man of the house in front of his two sons. Troy was glad he couldn’t hear what the man was saying.