The Wind Is Rising 1

by Daniel Steele

  “Well, we could always catch a movie or see if anything good is on television.”

  “Sex is out of the question. I bleed a lot. It’s a mess. But….”

  “Oh.”

  And I did see. Well, if it was good enough for Bill Clinton…

  “But that doesn’t seem fair. I get that, and what do you get?”

  She squeezed hard and I had to stifle both a moan and the desire to grab her back.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll…have fun.”

  I made myself take her hand and remove it and stepped away.

  “I’ve got a few things to wrap, plus talking with Dallas, but I’ll try to be there by 6:30 or 7 p.m. We can go see a movie…before…or have dinner somewhere if you want.”

  ”Just bring yourself – primed.”

  Dallas was leaning back in his chair looking toward the windows that overlooked the river I’d just been seeing close-up.

  “Dallas.”

  Without looking back at me he said, “”I know that you’re wondering about what happened back there. In the office with Herring.”

  “No. Well, maybe a little. I know you were right. Getting into a pissing contest with another agency is never good. But – that whole thing just amazed me. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced this whole damned thing is a frame.

  “ Bell didn’t do what they’re saying. I talked to him afterward and he knew the shooter. But it had been years since they’d had close contact. And he just happened to run into him over in Satsuma coming back from one of his jaunts. He said Samms was a good man, never had an arrest, never in trouble with the law until his tramp daughter in law and her boyfriend killed his son, drove his wife to suicide, and began abusing his grandson. He knew that Samms was going crazy worried about the boy and what he could do to rescue him from that situation. He said that might have driven Samms to snap. But he wasn’t into drugs and no way was he a dealer.

  “So first off, I don’t believe the warrant is legit. Secondly, no way would any agency do what they did just to bring in a suspect. Anybody that checked would have known how precarious Bell’s health was. They would have known that just showing up and grabbing him like that was almost certain to kill him.”

  I sat down in the chair facing Dallas. He had turned to face me,

  “Which brought up the big question,” he said. “If they knew the warrant was a piece of shit, and they had a pretty good guess that grabbing would kill him, why would they want to kill a witness to a crime that has absolutely nothing to do with Satsuma?”

  “Your thoughts?” he asked.

  “There’s only one person that would benefit by Bell’s death, and that’s William Sutton. He has five million reasons to want Bell dead and his momma is loaded in her own right and she wants Sutton free, I think, more than Sutton wants to walk free. So unless Mama Sutton is some long lost relative of Bludwurth, or Sutton is a half-brother, it has to be over money.

  “My thoughts are that Sutton or his mother approached somebody with the Satsuma Sheriff’s Office and offered them money – a lot of money – to do whatever they could to ensure that Bell didn’t live to testify. And assuming the Sheriff can be bought, they looked around for a legal way to get rid of Bell.

  “Then somehow they learn or somebody remembers this guy Samms who snapped and killed three people, including a Satsuma deputy, was a friend of Bell, or at least knew him. So they convince a low life junkie to make up a charge, and they’ve got a reason to come up and scare Bell to death.”

  “They would need the cooperation of the judge, and the State’s Attorney maybe,” Austin said in a questioning tone. “You think the place is that corrupt?”

  “You tell me.”

  Dallas leaned forward, clasping his hands on the table in front of him.

  “I think that’s exactly what happened. And I think – yes – that they are just that corrupt.”

  “Then we ought to do something. Call in the FDLE, file a formal complaint with the judicial commission on Love and the State Bar with Gregory. Ask the Governor to take a look. Hell, I’m up to my eyeballs, but I’d make the time to do a little digging or send some of our people down. They’re endangering our prosecution of Sutton, which makes it our fight.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, you don’t go poking around in the case, Forget it. You don’t send any of our people anywhere close to Satsuma. Forget this ever happened.”

  We just stared at each other for a while.

  “Dallas, what am I not seeing here? This isn’t like you. Besides the fact that you haven’t – with the one exception of the Sean Smith case – stepped into the way I do things here in a long time. Now you’re laying down rules and orders. Have you really lost confidence in my abilities?

  I thought you said we’d gotten past Sean.”

  “This has nothing to do with Sean Smith. Look, I’m not questioning your ability to run things or your instincts in cases. But this case is different.”

  “How?”

  He leaned back in his chair and glanced at me under those silver eyebrows, matching the silver hair. If he didn’t make it to the Governor’s Chair next year, it would be a crime against Central Casting. He was born to play a Governor – or President.

  “There are things you don’t know about. Things you’d have no reason to know about. But now you do. What do you know about Sheriff David Bludwurth?”

  “Not much. I’ve heard the name before. I don’t think he’s been in the news recently or it would stick in my mind. But – there’s a bad taste there. I think he’s done things in the past, but I don’t understand why he’d still be there if he’s been going around breaking laws left and right.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s more complicated than that. Some of this I know from personal experience. Some from stuff told me by the feds. Some just stuff that…floats around. People know about it, but you can’t get anyone to confirm it.

  “David Bludwurth is 58 years old. He’s been Undersheriff since he was 18, Sheriff since his daddy died when he was 24. His father was Sheriff before him for 38 years. And his grandfather was Sheriff for 44 years before that. The Bludwurths have run Satsuma County for 106 years. There’s never been anybody but a Bludwurth in that office, except for a year in the 1980s. And that was a special case.”

  “One hundred and six years? That’s hard to believe.”

  “Isn’t it? But it’s a fact.

  “Now some other facts. Florida has some big counties. Satsuma is the second smallest in the state. But that still makes it pretty good sized. Despite the fact that it’s small, it has the largest amount of land area by percentage covered in water –lakes, rivers, swamps- of any county in Florida. It’s also one of the smallest by population. There are only 28,000, give or take a few head, of people living in the county. It has the smallest percentage of population change – people moving out or coming in – of any county in Florida. Most of the people who live there have lived there for generations, and a lot of them are related one way or another.

  “There are only two towns of any appreciable population, Tangerine which is the county capital, and Orangedale. And only two major industries. They have a heavy metals mine – believe it or not – and one of the largest guano mines in the country. Other than that, all you’ve got is agriculture. It used to be the center for the orange growing belt and some are still grown there, but they’ve had problems with fungus and 20 years or so ago, with frosts killing the crops.”

  “That’s fascinating, Dallas, but what does it have to do with why you’re treading so lightly?”

  “Just listen and it will all become clear. So you have a small, isolated, ingrown, clannish county which has been run by one family since the beginning of time. There are only three major sources of income, and they’re all under the thumb of the Bludwurths. The mine owners found out a long time ago that if they wanted things to go smoothly, they had to keep the Bludwurths happy.<
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  “And, it’s been common knowledge since the late 19th century, that if you wanted to find a whorehouse that would NEVER be raided, or find a game of chance where you could gamble without any fears of the law breaking up the game, Satsuma was the place to go. There were gambling jaunts from Miami and Jacksonville and Atlanta, even, in the day. In the last 50 years drugs have become one of the main cash crops. We know marijuana is grown all over the place and there have even been rumors recently that the South Americans are using it as a way station to bring in everything, because shipments are NEVER intercepted coming in there.”

  ‘Okay, it’s a bad place, Dallas. I get it.”

  “You don’t. There’s never been a large black population in Satsuma, for a southern county, but there were blacks. And they weren’t treated any better there than in most southern counties. When the Freedom Riders were rolling in the 1960s, they were late coming to Satsuma because, honestly, the feds couldn’t get blacks there to file complaints or ask for help.

  “Finally, one 73-year-old black woman called the feds to complain that her 16-year-old grandson had vanished after getting into an argument with a local white farmer about not being paid what he’d been promised. After she’d made the complaint, a few FBI agents showed up to check on her when they hadn’t heard from her in a few days. They found her in shock in her bed. Her grandson’s feet – still in his shoes – were found on the front porch. It looked like a gator attack, but no one could figure out how a Gator could have eaten the boy from the head down and left his feet. And even if, WHO had left the feet and shoes on her porch.

  “When they got her out to an Atlanta hospital and she recovered, she filed formal charges of whites abusing and killing blacks for years, of castrations and lynchings, property being stolen without a pretense of it being anything but theft. And any blacks that complained just – vanished.

  “The feds were licking their chops, preparing a task force to come in, planning how they’d remove Bludwurth – the Senior – and clean up the county. And then, no one ever figured out how, she vanished from the home where the feds had her staying. The next thing they knew, they found her – hanging from a roof beam in her own house. Somehow she’d also managed to slit her wrists and her throat and gouge out both her eyes. And she left a note in her own handwriting – but very good English – about how she’d lied about everything and couldn’t stand the guilt.

  “The feds went crazy, tried to break anyone with the Sheriff’s Office or his friends and supporters, any remaining black residents, but they came up empty.”

  “Well, the feds were blocked, but the NAACP was enraged and tried to set up a protest march. It had worked everywhere else. But before they could set it up, four carloads of men arrived from Chicago. Fifteen of them were members of the original Black Panthers. They were all hardened ex-cons, most of them with rap sheets for assault and brushes with white cops.

  “Five were white college students who had worked the South in some of the most hostile places there were. None of them were afraid. They met with representatives of the NACCP just outside the Satsuma County line, and with feds. The feds offered to accompany them, even to call in the National Guard. The Panthers and the students said no. That would be admitting that racist crackers could scare them off. The Panthers were armed for a war and said they’d be alright.”

  Dallas looked back outside at the river. I wondered what could be so bad about the story. Civil rights marchers had died at other places.

  “They have pictures of the men in the cars waving as they rolled across the county line. They had CB radios. They kept in communication with the feds and NAACP every few hours. Everything was alright when they arrived at a campground about 10 miles outside of Tangerine that night.”

  “That was the last anyone ever saw, or heard, of the twenty men.”

  I just stared at him. There had to be more to the story.

  “And?”

  “Nothing. The next morning when the feds didn’t hear anything they called a few agents they’d left in place and they went and checked out the camp site. No cars. No men. No signs of a struggle. No blood. The feds started searching for them. They went out to the Old Sheriff’s home, hauled him out in handcuff. Took all his deputies into custody. Held them for a week. Tore the county apart. Brought in divers to search some of the lakes and rivers and bogs. Nothing.

  “By the time the week was over, there was enough pressure from friendly politicians – who’d gotten LOTS of contributions from the Bludwurths over the years – that the feds had to back off. By that time the NAACP had announced they would stage a protest march through Satsuma to call for justice for the Missing Twenty. And they were there bright and early on a Saturday morning with the cameras primed and about 100 NAACP members ready to go. Bludwurth, the Older and Younger, were standing in the shade of some oaks across the line. Smiling.

  “And nobody would cross the line. After a while the NAACP marchers just drifted away - in the other direction. The feds hung around, while the Bludwurths smiled at them and offered them Sweet Tea in the heat. Finally the feds pulled out.

  “The Missing Twenty were never heard from again. They vanished as if they’d fallen into a hole in the ground, and that’s probably what happed to them. The NAACP never marched into Satsuma and it was never mentioned again. You can find it in the history books if you look hard enough, but it’s not a part of the official Civil Rights History of the 60s. It’s not something they were proud of. But honestly, nothing like that ever happened anywhere else in this country. They were intelligent to be scared.”

  I began to understand why Dallas and Herring had treated Bludwurth and his men so carefully.

  “But that was a long time ago.”

  “Yeah, but the story doesn’t end there. A few years later the Old Bludwurth was dead. There were always rumors that the younger killed him. The most interesting rumor I ever heard was that the old man had killed his wife – the son’s mother – in front of the son. And that the younger had just been waiting for the right time to knock off his old man. That’s just a rumor, however.

  “What is a fact is that the feds had had a hard-on toward the Bludwurths since the Missing Twenty. And in the late 1970s they put on another full-court press, using undercover agents and trying to break anybody away from the Bludwurth organization. They finally were able to break two men and got sworn testimony that implicated Bludworth in everything from running drugs to prostitution to contract murder to money laundering.

  “Before they could get that one out of Satsuma, he vanished. Was never found. There were always rumors and I talked to a FBI agent who told me he personally had heard portions of an audio tape. In the tape, you could hear someone holding the poor bastard up out in the water so that a gator got one leg and was dragging him under. They managed to keep him from going under, but the gator went under with the leg. They must have had medical care because they were able to stop the bleeding. You could hear the poor bastard screaming for them to take him back to shore.

  “They held him out over the water like bait, and he was hit again. Lost that leg. You couldn’t hear him very well by that point, but he was begging them to kill him. And then they put him out over the water again and a gator hit him again. Almost got him, but they managed to yank him back. He lost an arm. My guy said the poor bastard must have been unconscious at that point, but you could hear the gators fighting for what was left when they put the rest of his carcass out.”

  Dallas rubbed his chin as his mind seemed to be somewhere in the past.

  “Naturally the feds never could find that tape, although there seemed to have been people that heard it. Over the years, I hear it’s been played for a lot of people. It always gets the point across. People don’t cooperate with the feds. Even visitors, newcomers to the county, lose their will be good citizens after they hear that tape.

  “Oh, and they got the second witness out to a protected location. Where he proceeded to slash his wrists and bleed to death when
he got away from his handlers for a few minutes. No one ever knew, but obviously Bludworth had convinced him it was better to be dead than a witness for the government.

  “But the feds had it all on tape, the details, the confession, and they dragged Bludwurth out of Satsuma all the way up to New York City where they tried him. And tried him. And tried him. And they could never get better than a hung jury.

  “Finally, a coalition of unlikely allies including civil liberties groups, Florida political forces, Southern politicians, raised enough hell about unending Fascist prosecution of a scapegoat for federal failures, that they let him go and he ran right back to Satsuma.”

  I considered the story I’d heard.

  “The original Teflon Don.”

  “Then in 1988, Governor Bob Graham decided the Bludwurths had been an embarrassment to the state for too long. He blanketed the county with state investigators, took people out of the country to encourage them to talk about Bludwurth and despite the fact that he didn’t come up with anything that could send Bludwurth to jail, he managed to remove him from office anyway. I was part of the group of attorneys that tore up the county looking for dirt.

  “While Bludwurth was out, Graham appointed an experienced FDLE officer to take over Bludwurth’s office and appointed an entire staff of deputies to replace Bludwurth’s men. I was one of the two attorneys Graham picked to head the project.”

  Dallas tapped his phone and said, “Myra, bring in two glasses. And something in them.

  He leaned back in his chair.

  A couple of minutes later Myra swayed into the office, carrying two crystal decanters with a dark red liquid. I figured it was Bourbon. At least that’s what Dallas favored at parties. She handed me one and bent over the desk to give Dallas his.

  While she was leaving, he took a healthy slug of his.

  “Go ahead, Bill. It’s Friday, the day’s almost over. This is a good pressure reliever.”

  I sipped mine.

  “There were times, Bill, when it almost felt like we were in Vietnam. Like I was back in Nam. I served one tour from 66 to 68. I was young and idealistic and smart enough to know that a career in politics would be helped by a service record. And I still remember what it felt like, being there. What I remember most was that you couldn’t trust anybody that didn’t look like you. The only people you could trust were white – and black – Americans. No Asians. No Vietnamese. No Gooks as we called them.