Shadow Men Part 11

"Fair enough," I said, and squeezed her fingers.

We packed away our beach things and walked up to the tiki bar and climbed the sandy ramp to the open-air restaurant. We ordered margaritas and conch fritters and watched the light of the day leak out behind us and turn the water a deep indigo and then a slate gray. My phone had not rung. I knew I would have to make the trip to Placid City to get answers, but tonight we were going to do nothing. No cop talk. No a.n.a.lyzing cases. We were going to be like normal people, without any worries.

CHAPTER 15.

Early on a Sunday morning I packed up an overnight bag, folded a Florida map and started driving to church. Our list of clergy possibilities had been whittled by callbacks. I'd left two more messages for the pastor at the Church of G.o.d in Placid City that went unanswered. Billy and I had discussed the possibility that we might be on a fishing trip in a much larger sea. It had only been a rumor that the male descendent of our gunman Jefferson had become a preacher, and even then we were only guessing that he had stayed in the state. Billy expanded the search parameters into northern Florida and was talking about pushing it up into other Southern states. He'd even forwarded the idea that the grandson could have changed his name after leaving Everglades City in the 1970s and disappeared anywhere.

But Mrs. William Jefferson's accent and her affirmation that her husband had roots in southeast Florida made a visit imperative. Her single comment kept rolling in my head, the jagged edges refusing to nub down. "That part of the family has been been pa.s.sed on." The reticence in the voice of the wife of a country preacher pushed me on. pa.s.sed on." The reticence in the voice of the wife of a country preacher pushed me on.

Southern Boulevard carried me through the urban sprawl of West Palm Beach, and twenty miles out, the land turned open and flat, with sugar-cane stalks, freshly tilled vegetable fields, and sod farms that lay as green and uniform as felt on a forty-acre billiard table. Route 441 took me nearly to Belle Glade, a farming town that has supported a migrant community of field-workers and seasonal pickers for more than half a century. The town sits at the southern curve of ma.s.sive Lake Okeechobee, but I couldn't see the water. A huge earthen d.y.k.e had been constructed here by the U.S. government in 1930. It was their response to the hurricane of 1926, which brought more rain in its march from the tropics than anyone had seen or imagined in their worst nightmares. The storm twisted up waves on the lake that surpa.s.sed ocean swells and sent the power of tons of water surging over the southern banks and sweeping over the town of Moore Haven. Many of the 2,500 residents killed were never found, their bodies buried in churned black muck-all that was left of the rich soil that had made the region the world's green emerald of winter vegetable growing. In the wake of nature's disaster, man became determined to tame her. The d.y.k.e was built and the natural flow of fresh water to the Everglades, which runs from this point for more than a hundred miles to the end of the Florida peninsula, was forever changed-many say for the worse. The same charge was raised when the Tamiami Trail builders constructed their road, when Cyrus Mayes and his sons helped put down the first unnatural barrier to the flow of shallow water to Florida Bay. If one considers such evolution to be evil, then there was enough complicity to go around.

I cruised slowly through the sugar cane capital city of Clewiston and then northwest past a sign that read OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE. Then the highway opened back up. With every mile the elevation subtly changed. Pine lands, with individual, polelike tree trunks and green, ta.s.seled tops, lined the road. The landscape was occasionally interrupted by carefully laid out orange groves, the rows running to the horizon and the close trees already showing gobs of the ripening fruit. I timed myself by the mileage signs along the way and made it into Placid City just after eight. There was little movement on the Sunday morning streets. I made two loops into commercial and residential areas that went no more than two blocks off the main highway. It was a narrow place of clapboard and red brick, pickup trucks and broom-swept sidewalks.

When I pulled into Mel's Placid Cafe, I turned off the engine and let the constant road noise of the trip leach away. There was a gray dust on the step up to the low porch of the restaurant and curtains on the windows. It was not until I reached for the door handle of the truck that I noticed a car parked across my back b.u.mper. It took up the entire pane of my rearview mirror. "Jesus, Max," I whispered to myself. "You do attract them."

When I stepped out of the truck, there was a little man leaning up against the front b.u.mper of a Crown Victoria. It was the kind of car a big man might drive, and he looked out of place next to it. I pretended I was counting out my change from my pocket while I measured him. He was dressed in khaki, but it looked more like a style than a uniform. There was no adornment on the shirt, no epaulets or insignia, only the one single gold star pinned over the left breast. I cut my eyes through the parking lot and saw no patrol cars or backup vehicles.

"Mornin'," he finally said, knowing that I was stalling. "One beautiful Sunday morning." He emphasized the observation by looking up at the treetops and sky. The man's head was bald and tan, and if he was more than five feet seven, I was being generous.

"You do have a gorgeous piece of country here, Sheriff," I said, guessing.

"And mighty quiet too, Mr...." He b.u.mped himself off my fender and reached out his hand.

"Freeman," I said, stepping forward to accept the small but firm handshake and thinking that little men in positions of power always had a habit of squeezing one's hand a bit more strongly than needed. "Max Freeman."

"Mr. Freeman," he said with a politician's smile. "I welcome you to Placid City. You came just for the delights of Mel's home cooking?"

"Not solely," I said. "Though I'm sure it will certainly be worth the trip, Sheriff, uh..."

"Wilson," he said. "O. J. Wilson."

It was difficult to judge his age. There were prominent crow's- feet at the corners of his eyes eyes and three rows of worry lines across his forehead. But he was fit and there was an energy coming off him that belied an older man. He was looking up into my and three rows of worry lines across his forehead. But he was fit and there was an energy coming off him that belied an older man. He was looking up into my eyes, eyes, trying to hold them, and it did not please me. I'd done the same in street interrogations and didn't like being on the other side of the stare. trying to hold them, and it did not please me. I'd done the same in street interrogations and didn't like being on the other side of the stare.

"You former law enforcement or military, Mr. Freeman?" he asked.

"You have a preference, Sheriff?"

"Sorry, just the way you carry yourself," he said. "No offense meant."

"None taken," I replied. I was actually intrigued by his slightly bulldog bearing. "I was a cop, up north. I'm working as a P.I. now, mostly out of West Palm and Lauderdale."

"You're on business then, up this way?"

"Just checking on an estate matter, for an attorney," I said.

He nodded as if he understood and reached out to touch the side of my truck.

"Nice truck," he said. "You a hunter, Mr. Freeman?"

"No, sir. Never have been."

"Then there wouldn't be any firearms back behind the seats there, correct?"

"I do have a permit for a concealed handgun, Sheriff. And that's in a bag behind the seat." I wasn't sure where this was going, but I did believe O. J. Wilson had his reasons and I really was in no mood to rile him.

"Would you like to take a look, Sheriff?" I said, and reopened the driver's-side door and folded up the seat.

"I would, thank you," he said, and bent in. He was short enough so that the floorboards were above his knees, and he reached in and gave my backpack and the sleeping bag I kept there a thorough going over. While he was bent inside, a couple parked their car and walked past us into the cafe. They did not so much as look back, as though the sight of the local constable going through a stranger's vehicle was as routine as the Sunday paper. When he was done he arranged the bags back the way they'd been.

"Thank you, Mr. Freeman. I appreciate your cooperation," he said, stepping back like some baggage security guard at the airport.

"Mind letting me in on what this is all about, Sheriff?" I said.

"Well, sir. I can't really," he said, dismissing me. "Let's just say it's a precaution and leave it at that if you don't mind, Mr. Freeman. Like you said, it's a beautiful and peaceful Sunday morning."

"No, sir. That was your description, Sheriff," I said, but the little man had already turned and headed into Mel's, leaving me to stand and simply wonder a bit before I finally climbed the stairs and went in to have my breakfast.

I was still frowning when a bell hanging on a curled piece of soft iron rang as I opened the door. The waitress actually said, "Howdy." A middle-aged man with a rough and mottled complexion tipped the bill of his John Deere cap as we pa.s.sed and I nodded back. I sat at an empty table in the corner that was covered in a red and white checked cloth and decorated with a single plastic geranium. The waitress was dressed in jeans, with a string ap.r.o.n and a flowered western blouse. She smiled as if I were a friend.

"How you doin' today, sir? Can I get you some coffee to start?"

"You read my mind, ma'am," I said, and then asked about the special. When she came back I hooked my thumb at the front of the room and said, "Your sheriff always so attentive on Sunday mornings?

She put a wrinkle in the side of her mouth and shook her head like a mother who was just told her son was teasing the girls again.

"Don't y'all worry about O. J.-he don't mean nothin' by it," she said. Then she lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Truth is, he's like a protective daddy. The man got the worst luck with them gunshot killin's, and he thinks it's his fault they can't solve 'em.

"Killings?"

She smiled again and said, "You're not from around here, are you?

"No ma'am."

"Well, sir," she began, her voice dropping even further, "we might be the smallest place in the state with a real-life serial killer out there." I could see John Deere pulling the brim of his hat farther down, and I guessed he'd heard the town gossip doing her thing before. "He's been knockin' off the bad boys of Highland County for more than fifteen years now. Every couple of years or so, another one drops, an' everyone gets themselves all in a fuss about how we ain't so far from the big city after all. Poor ol' Sheriff Wilson just took on the ch.o.r.e of finding him. Likes to frisk every stranger that comes through here."

"Annette?" John Deere had held off as long as he could. "Can we order over here, please?"

The waitress rolled her eyes and winked at me. I grinned back, friendly-like, and ordered the breakfast special-eggs over easy and biscuits with brown gravy.

I ate without interruption and gave the waitress's gossip little thought. Every little place has something, and violence doesn't have boundaries. Who isn't capable of it? You don't have to be a cop for long to find that answer: everybody. When Annette brought my check I asked if she could give me directions to Pastor Jefferson's Church of G.o.d.

"You really ain't from around here," she said. She told me the way in lefts and rights. I tipped her like a city boy at 20 percent and got a big thank-you in return.

The white frame building was set well back off the road in a slight gully. There was no sign at the road entrance, but several cars and trucks were already parked on the brown gra.s.s to one side. I turned down the worn dirt drive and like the other early arrivals, parked in the shade of a stand of century-old oaks. The Reverend Jefferson's church reminded me of the plain, clapboard Quaker buildings in central Pennsylvania. The steeple was canopied and slatted at the top to vent hot air. The windows were tall and narrow, and none held the adornment of stained gla.s.s or anything more fanciful than simple double molding. I sat in the truck and watched folks arrive for the 10:00 A.M. A.M. service. They were a democratic group. A middle-aged white couple, he in a western string tie and tan sport coat, she in a patterned dress and a white embroidered sweater. A black family, the parents in clean, pressed white shirts and dark trousers and skirt, their three matching sons trailing behind, the top b.u.t.tons at their necks done tight. A group of what I guessed were Seminole Indians climbing out of a big, club-cab pickup, the men in polished cowboy boots and the women in large, brightly colored skirts. Their hair was pulled back, black and glossy, and their stoic faces carried the cla.s.sic flat and sharply angled forehead and nose. service. They were a democratic group. A middle-aged white couple, he in a western string tie and tan sport coat, she in a patterned dress and a white embroidered sweater. A black family, the parents in clean, pressed white shirts and dark trousers and skirt, their three matching sons trailing behind, the top b.u.t.tons at their necks done tight. A group of what I guessed were Seminole Indians climbing out of a big, club-cab pickup, the men in polished cowboy boots and the women in large, brightly colored skirts. Their hair was pulled back, black and glossy, and their stoic faces carried the cla.s.sic flat and sharply angled forehead and nose.

I waited until near the hour and then got out and slipped on my navy sport coat and went in. I nodded and politely smiled as I found a seat in the back. The interior was as understated as the outside. The plain wooden pews were worn, the lacquer rubbed dull in some spots by years of wool and canvas, cotton and polyester. The ceiling was beamed and the highest windows let the morning sun streak through, illuminating lazy drifts of dust in the air. The altar was small and white and the expected dominant feature was a floor-to- ceiling cross behind it. The place looked like it could hold fifty congregants at most. There were some thirty-five this morning, and they all rose at some signal that I didn't see.

Pastor Jefferson looked young for fifty. His hair was dark, full and conservatively cut. He was slightly built and it was difficult to judge his height, but his face and shoulders were all angles and sharp corners.

"Good morning."

"Good morning, Reverend," the congregation returned.

"G.o.d be with you."

"And with you."

Let us pray.

I was the only one who did not lower my head as Jefferson recited. As he scanned the room, he picked me up in a second, a tall stranger in the back pew of his church. His voice was clear but not strong. He depended on the words themselves and not his performance of them. He was as plain as the physical structure. I was too far away to discern the color of his eyes.

"Please, be seated."

The service was informal and simple. The pastor's sermon was personal and gra.s.sroots. He came across as patrician and neighborly at the same time. He kept the Southern drawl out of his diction during his readings, but let it slip through when he turned a phrase out of the Bible. I saw him stop his eyes on several of the congregants during the sermon, though he seemed to avoid mine. When the offering plate got to me I noted that it was filled with envelopes, all of which, I a.s.sumed, contained member t.i.thes. I slipped a twenty under them.

When the service ended I stood watching until the last folks had filed out. Jefferson was outside at the bottom of the steps, clasping each hand and giving them a personal word. There was no one behind me when he looked up into my face and took my hand. His grip was soft and I could feel delicate bones through tight skin. He waited an extra few beats as the last true parishioner stepped out of earshot. His eyes were a dark blue that I had never encountered before.

"Mr. Freeman, the investigator, I presume," he said, a professional smile on his face.

"Yes, Reverend," I said. He'd caught me off guard. "A fine cleric and a clairvoyant too?"

His laugh was less formal. "Yes, well, I knew you would be coming sometime. I suspect I've always known someone would."

An hour later we were alone at a picnic table under the oaks. Jefferson had made the rounds with his people, consoling, blessing, promising visits and agreeing to commitments later in the week. When it became awkward for him to simply keep introducing me as Mr. Freeman without elaboration, I wandered over to the open table and sat inspecting the spa.r.s.e moss hanging in the oak limbs and trying to identify the birdsong coming out of a nearby field. With only a few cleanup volunteers on the grounds, the reverend had finally walked back to join me.

"You are originally from the Everglades City area. I don't have that wrong, do I, Reverend?" I said, cutting straight to it.

"That's correct."

"And your father and grandfather before him?"

"We left in 1962, Mr. Freeman. My parents moved to Naples the year my grandfather pa.s.sed."

His face was calm and emotionless. I'd seen the look before, years ago, when I'd come to the home of a Germantown woman in North Philly who'd aborted her child. It had taken the squad and the M.E. several days to track her down and she'd been waiting for us when we arrived. Jefferson had the same resigned and haunted look, as though he were waiting for me to announce his arrest and cuff him.

"Reverend, I'm looking into the disappearance of three men. A father and his two sons. We have reason to believe that they may have been killed when they were at work on the Tamiami Trail in 1924."

Jefferson's eyes had closed when I mentioned the two sons, and he kept them closed.

"We came across some letters written by the missing father and he specifically mentions a marksman named Jefferson who, the letter indicates, watched over the laborers. Could that Jefferson have been your grandfather, Reverend?"

He opened his eyes and at first seemed to be focused on something far behind my left ear. I might have turned to look if I hadn't known that there was only a wide and knurled trunk of oak behind me. Then his eyes shifted back onto mine.

"If it had to do with killing and evil, Mr. Freeman, then it most likely did have my grandfather Jefferson's hand in it," he said in a flat and somewhat defeated tone.

"Sir?" I said. The bluntness of the statement had jarred me.

"You see, Mr. Freeman, John William Jefferson was an evil man. Some in that place and time may have thought of him as the devil himself."

With that the pastor crossed his arms over his chest, took a deep and brave breath and told me all he knew about his infamous relative.

John William had come to the Ten Thousand Islands sometime around 1920. He brought his wife and a sum of money that was unusual for the time. He bought a prime piece of land along the Turner River that was among the most elevated of the sh.e.l.l mounds in the area. It was consequently valuable since it had the potential to be farmed. But John William was not a farmer. He was a slight man, with delicate hands that his grandson would inherit, and he always wore a wide-brimmed hat that put his eyes in constant shade. The first rumor about him was that he was dumb and could not speak a word because it was so rare than anyone other than his wife ever heard his voice. Ted Smallwood down at his post office and store at Chokoloskee would eventually dispel that rumor. In his few dealings with John William, Smallwood knew that not only could the man speak, but he could also read and write and was highly proficient and meticulous in doc.u.menting his finances.

The second rumor was that the new arrival was, in fact, a criminal, a killer who had fled the law in Missouri and come to the virgin outpost of southwest Florida to hide. Unlike the other rumor, this one never died, and was in fact built upon throughout John William's life. Stories of his exploits held few if any provable facts. The only truly witnessed detail of the man was his prowess with a rifle. That ability was known by his family and those in the spa.r.s.e and isolated community. But the speculation about that ability colored everything else he was.

He was not a lazy man, though his industry was the focus of many wagging tongues. On his river land he built one of the finest houses in the area, along with a stone cistern to gather fresh water and a solid barn that was considered ostentatious by his neighbors. But though his land was envied for its precious inches of rich topsoil, and his location next to the river for its easy access to the bay, John William did not farm or fish for profit. He was a hunter, and as the Reverend Jefferson's mother often said in her late night stories to him, he answered to no G.o.d or man other than himself.

John William made his living killing things. In the early years, when the fashion for ladies' hats in New York and the rest of the Northeast turned to outrageous displays of bird-feather designs, men with John William's talent were in demand. He knew the region, the nesting patterns of southeast Florida's pure white egrets and stunning pink flamingos, and being the finest marksman in the region, he became a hired "guide" for the acquisition arm of the distant hatmakers. Other locals in the same business would tell of coming upon hidden rookeries of the snowy egrets far from the more easily accessed nests around the islands. As the birds became spa.r.s.e, they themselves spent days getting there by skiff, but if the wind was right, they could smell that they were too late. When they finally cleared the last curve of water they would spot the carnage-an acre of trees and the wet undergrowth covered with the mutilated and rotting carca.s.ses of egrets. The larger ones had been killed with a single shot, the few valuable feathers plucked and the rest of the animal tossed away. Nearby a pod of fat gators would be rolling in the shallows or sunning themselves on mats of gra.s.s, lazy with the easy meals so plentiful that they could not begin to clear the area.

"It appears Mr. Jefferson gone an' beat us to it again, boys," would be the refrain, and another rumor would be piled onto the marksman's name. Later, with the rookeries all along Lake Okeechobee already wiped out by the plume hunters and southwest Florida facing the same eventual slaughter, the state banned the practice. But as long as there was a market, even an illegal one, the poaching continued. John William had long determined that it was his birthright to kill things for money. No government edict pa.s.sed down from a capital city eight hundred miles away was going to stop him. It was less than two years later that the first Audubon officer sent to the Ten Thousand Islands area to enforce the law was found dead on a mangrove outcropping along the western edge of Chevalier Bay. The warden had been missing for a week when a group of fishermen found his body. From a distance they thought he was still alive. At first glance in the early morning light, he appeared to be standing on a solid clump of land, waving. It was only when they got closer that they realized the warden was sunk to his knees in the gelatinous muck at the base of the mangrove, his arm caught high in a limb, the wrist wedged in a V-notch. When they got closer they could see that he had been killed. A single gunshot had entered at the back of his neck and then exploded outward from his throat. The body had been left with no effort on the part of his a.s.sa.s.sin to hide it. Speculation in the community as to the ident.i.ty of the killer settled in its usual place.

The sound of a screen door slapping shut stopped the reverend's recounting and we both looked up toward the church.

A woman carrying a tray with a pitcher and two gla.s.ses was walking toward us. She was dressed in a long printed dress and was tall even in the flat shoes that resembled black dancing slippers. Her honey-colored hair was up, and I could see touches of gray at the roots above her ears. Her eyes were red-rimmed and anxious, as though she had been both crying and angry at the same time.

"Ahh, thank you, Margery," Jefferson said. "Mr. Freeman, this is my wife, Margery. I believe you have spoken on the phone."

I stood up to greet her, but when she set the tray of lemonade on the table she did not offer her hand or look me in the eyes.

"Yes," she said, and then to her husband, "Are you all right, William?" The look in her eyes had changed to one of legitimate concern.

"Yes, Margery," he answered. "We'll be fine."

I could tell that "we'll" meant the both of them. She nodded and walked back to the church. When she had gone Jefferson poured the gla.s.ses. The coolness of the drink on my throat made me suddenly aware of the moist heat that was rising all around us in the canopy of shade. It was past noon and out in the sunlit meadow, gra.s.shoppers were flying. I was about to ask Jefferson if he wanted to take a break, but held back. I had been in police interview rooms where you learned that once a guy started talking, you let him. The reverend was in his confessional; I bowed my head and listened.

"It was not an easy situation for my father and mother. The constant rumors. The fear," he said, looking out and seeming to find the gra.s.shoppers himself.

His mother was a local girl from Everglades City, extremely religious. She knew the stories, the devil warnings about the Jeffersons who lived by the river. But Clinton Jefferson was her own age and they went to the only country school within fifty miles and the boy was polite and shy and nearly friendless. When she began coming by his house, she did not recall ever having heard Mr. Jefferson say a word. When she convinced Clinton to join her at Bible study, the father did not oppose it. When they were married at the age of eighteen, he did not attend the wedding. His wife excused him as being off on business. But Clinton Jefferson would not leave his parents despite being tainted by his father's reputation. He could not leave his mother to bear it on her own and he moved his new wife into the river house. The two women grew close-the reverend's mother was the first to hear about the pent-up pain of the wife who'd shared her husband's strange isolation and odd justifications for so many years.

"My mother was the one who then shared the stories with me, doling them out little by little as I grew," Jefferson said. "She wove them in with lessons of G.o.d's plan and his forgiveness. It was the beginning of my religious education."

"And you moved away after your grandfather died?" I said. It was the first question that I had asked.

"Killed himself," Jefferson corrected me sharply, and the retort brought my head up. "My father found the body in the barn on a winter day in 1962. He had shot himself with his own rifle.