The Mangrove Coast df-6 Read online

  The Mangrove Coast

  ( Doc Ford - 6 )

  Randy Wayne White

  Randy Wayne White

  The Mangrove Coast

  Prologue

  It was Tomlinson who suggested that I write about Panama; that I review on paper what happened and how it happened. He told me, “It might be good for your soul, man. Kind of a purge deal. Your tummy’s upset, you pop a couple of Alka-Seltzers, right? Maybe eat some stewed prunes, get rid of the bad stuff. Same thing. Put it down on paper and it’s gone.”

  I was on the deck of my stilthouse at the time, Dinkin’s Bay Marina, Sanibel Island, southwest coast of Florida.

  I’d been doing pull-ups.

  Lately, I’d been doing lots and lots of pull-ups.

  Thinking about Panama brought back specific unrelated images: black rain, banana leaves fauceting water, lunar halos, small precise breasts, a woman’s eyes diminished by uncertainty, wood fires, a mangrove shore…

  I told Tomlinson that my soul was doing just fine, thank you very much.

  It was a lie.

  Three days later, I said to Tomlinson: “Write it all down, huh?”

  He was momentarily confused, but then he was right there with me. It is, perhaps, because Tomlinson is always lost that he is also endlessly empathetic. He said, “Just a suggestion. I got to tell you, Doc, you haven’t exactly been yourself. When you look inward, man, your eyes actually change color. What used to be your Gulf Stream stare? Kicked back, friendly, drifting? It is now gray, dude, seriously gray. I mean like boiled beef. Not a pretty sight. Or maybe get some counseling. We catch a virus, we go to the doctor, no big deal. So we get an emotional virus, what’s wrong with getting a little psychiatric help? Christ, I spent a year making wallets and signing my letters, ‘Sincerely as a fucking loon.’ And look how together I am now.”

  I said, “Right. Your stability is… well… right out there for anyone to see.” Then I said, “Like a kind of intellectual exercise.” I was still discussing the prospect of writing.

  “An exercise, sure. That’s one way of approaching it.”

  The difference between patronization and kindness is intent. I was being treated kindly. Still… it struck me as having interesting potential.

  The human animal is accurately named. And I am, after all, a biologist.

  Here’s what I’d been wrestling with ever since returning from Central America: What quirk of experience or genetic coding compelled certain men to isolate vulnerable women and then to prey upon them?

  That kind of behavior certainly did not benefit the species, so why were their devices so commonplace… and so successful?

  The problem had bothered me since Panama. How can one protect all good and delicate people, all the children and wounded ladies, who are potential targets?

  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the problem haunted me.

  For Tomlinson, I condensed the dilemma: “Not all sexual predators are killers or serial rapists. The most successful of them live well within the boundaries of the law and they’re probably more common than we’d like to believe. See… the problem is identifying the bastards. They are not social anomalies; they are social deviants.”

  He said, “I’m with you, man. The difference is subtle but specific.”

  I said, “Exactly. So what’s that mean? What it means is, to succeed they must give the appearance of living socially acceptable lives. They must construct a believable facade so that their secret motives go unsuspected. Like camouflage, understand? They live a lie their entire lives… which means they become superb liars and actors.”

  Tomlinson was nodding, following along, indulging me. “You’re talking about that guy. Merlot? Jackie Merlot.”

  Just hearing the name keyed the gag reflex in me… and something else, too: dread.

  I said, “Yeah. Pedophiles, voyeurs, wife beaters, the back-alley freaks. Ted Bundy-he’s another textbook example. But that’s an extreme case. More commonly, only their victims know who these people are and what they really are. No, I’ll amend that. The truly successful predators are probably so adept at manipulation that their victims never realize they’ve been used.”

  Tomlinson was listening sympathetically, not analytically. I found that irritating. Did he really believe that I was so adolescent that I needed that kind of friend?

  He said, “You’ve got a lot of anger built up. The subject makes you furious. I can see it.”

  I winced. “You’re missing the entire damn point. I’m talking about difficulties of assessment. Pathology, not emotion.”

  “Sure. I relate entirely! It’s exactly the kind of stuff you need to be writing. Get it out of your system. You know another reason it might be good to get it down on paper? If the feds decide to take up the case again, call you in to testify, you can always refer to your notes. Tell them, hey, this is the way it all went down. I mean, if they decide the guy didn’t exactly disappear on purpose, they might come around again and ask more questions.”

  I was nodding; smiling just a little. I said, “Yeah, a written record. I see what you mean. Accurate notes of what went on, plus it might help me deal with losing what I lost.”

  But I was thinking: No matter how many questions they ask, they’ll never find out what happened to Jackie Merlot…

  Certain odors key the synapse electrodes, and there is no alternative but to return to the precise time and place in memory with which those odors are associated.

  Why is the linear memory so much easier to discipline than memories that are sensory?

  It’s like one of Tomlinson’s favorite little paradoxes: I have no choice but to believe in free will.

  If there is such a thing as free will, how is it that one can have no choice?

  What I am avoiding discussing, I guess, is how I happened to return to Panama. What I’m avoiding discussing is how it all began and what happened afterward.

  It would make an interesting research paper: “The Olfactory Senses as Conduit to Recall…”

  Yes. Odors…

  The barrier islands of Florida’s west coast have their own odor, their own feel. It’s a fabric of strata and weight: seawater, sulfur muck, white sand, Gulf Stream allusions and a wind that blows salt-heavy out of the Yucatan and Cuba.

  Think about hot coconut oil. Add a few drops of lime, then a drop or two of iodine. Dilute it with icebergs melted by ocean current: even if you’ve never been to Florida, reconstitute that mixture and you will know how the air feels and smells on the mangrove coast. You’ll also know something about a pretty little village there called Boca Grande.

  Boca Grande is on the barrier island of Gasparilla. It is one of the isolated, moneyed enclaves south of Tampa, north of Naples-way, way off Florida’s asphalt network of theme parks and tacky roadside attractions.

  It’s a place that I associate with quiet dinner parties, Sunday tennis, tarpon fishing and bird-watching… not with violent death.

  That’s one of Florida’s charms: Places like Boca Grande still exist. They are always full of surprises.

  1

  The first thing I noticed upon entering Frank J. Calloway’s secluded beach house was that there was something disturbing about the composition of the air. Less an odor, really, than an adverse density.

  It was as if oxygen molecules had been weighted with water plus unknown organic particles, then compressed and compressed again in the silence of a process so newly completed that something-illness? decay? — had only recently begun.

  It was a piscine acidity. It had an oily tinge…

  I noticed the odor as I passed through the living room-What’s unusual about the air in this place? — which was just before I stepped into the kitchen and found
the body of a man lying belly-down on glazed Mexican tiles.

  I stopped, took a step back and said, “Hey… are you okay?” Then I said, “Hello…?” and stood listening in the heavy air.

  I’m ashamed to admit how often I say idiotic things and ask dumb questions. This was one of my dumber questions. The guy definitely wasn’t okay.

  But it was a startling scene to discover: A stranger’s clay gray face wedged against custom cabinetry… copper pots and skillets suspended from hooks above rows of stainless burners… a mottled black swash of blood on the cupboard which marked where flesh and bone had impacted marble countertop, then wood.

  The man was wearing green swim shorts, no shirt or thongs.

  He had fallen heavily. Big men in their forties always do.

  Standing there looking at the body, I could hear Frank Calloway’s stepdaughter, Amanda, tell me, “Frank loves to cook. He studies it, like a gourmet. If he invited you over and he likes you, he’ll probably want to make dinner. If his ditzy new wife-he calls her ‘Skipper,’ for God’s sake. If Skipper will let him.”

  But there was nothing cooking on the stove. Nothing to account for the weightiness of atmosphere…

  I stood beneath the cathedral ceiling, aware of a silence amplified by the sound of skittish palm fronds outside and the slow collapse of waves on sand. A little-known fact: Waves do not move horizontally; only the disturbance that creates them does. Like fog in a breeze, water only illustrates energy.

  Even so, on this summer-bright afternoon in April, the Gulf of Mexico seemed a gelatinous membrane that was part of a greater respiratory system. I could look through the kitchen, through the shattered sliding glass door and beyond the pool and patio furniture to the beach: Wave after low jade wave sailed shoreward… one long exhalation followed by another… another… another.

  The waves made a hissing sound that gathered volume then deteriorated, gasped in the spring heat, gasped again and collapsed.

  Just one more dazzling beachfront day in the village of Boca Grande. Yet the sound of waves underlined something else that I had noticed: The man on the floor did not appear to be breathing…

  In movies, blood and a body cause the fainthearted to scream and the brave hearted to rush to the fallen’s assistance.

  That hasn’t been my experience.

  Nope. The more common reaction is a mixture of atavistic dread and a reluctance to get involved.

  Most people do exactly what I did: we look, take a step back, then look again. Basically, we act like dopes.

  Maybe there’s a reason. It is in the milliseconds of shock that the brain has time to charge the flight-or-fight instinct with adrenaline, preparing to take control. Are we in danger? Has the predator struck and run? Or has the predator lingered?

  Then we stare; a stare interrupted with quick animal-glances over our shoulders and to our unprotected flanks. We draw closer, still staring. Is this death? Is this the thing we fear above all else in life?

  For most, death is a spiritual concept, not a chemical process, and the flesh-and-fluid reality of it cleaves a hole, a momentary hole, in our illusions.

  Death must be approached cautiously like an abyss… or like disease.

  I am not fainthearted, but neither am I brave. I stood for a moment, alert to the possibility that I was not alone in this stranger’s house. My eyes reconfirmed that the sliding glass door which opened to the pool had been knocked off its tracks and shattered.

  It was a big door. Lots of wrought iron and storm glass. It had required some animal force to tear it free of its casing. Calloway was big enough to do it. But why would he have done it?

  I noted the beach towel dropped in a heap on the kitchen floor. It appeared to be dry; no blood. There was a deliquescent sheen of water on the copper-red Mexican tiles.

  I turned my head enough to see the high-beamed great room behind me and a winding staircase that spiraled to a beach loft. Stained-glass windows-bottle-nosed dolphins leaping-allowed tubular blue sunlight through the hipped roof.

  In the living room below were islands of white leather furniture on an acre of white carpet.

  About her stepfather, I remembered Amanda telling me, “When my mom married Frank, he was a clinical psychologist. Her psychologist after my real dad was killed; that’s how they got together. Financially, I guess he did okay, but then he began to invest in land. Money, money, money, if you’re smart enough. And Frank’s pretty damn smart when he’s not thinking with his testicles.

  “Finally, he gave up his practice completely to organize Florida land syndicates. He had a knack for knowing what people wanted before they actually wanted it. It must have been the shrink in him. He got really rich just in time to divorce my mom and marry his secretary. Jesus, Skipper. Can you believe he calls her that?”

  Sure, I could believe it.

  What was a little harder to accept was that I would be the one to find Frank Calloway, the former psychologist who’d made all the money even though he occasionally thought with his testicles, but who was now lying in the glaze of his own blood, dead on the floor of the kitchen where he might have cooked me a gourmet dinner had he decided he liked me.

  The type of house in which I stood is becoming a fixture on Florida’s west coast: a passive totem of wealth reconstituted as imitation Old Florida architecture. It had the obligatory tin roof, the Prohibition-era lines, the driftwood coloring.

  Inside, though, it was diorama-neat, a model of interior design, a place through which to tour admiring guests. Note the terra-cotta tiles, the polyester and acrylic fabrics, the recessed lighting and beveled glass, the breakfast room in red cedar, the Monticello tubs and gold faucets, the saxony cut carpet, the imitation pecky cypress made of some kind of Du Pont synthetic.

  It was not a home. It was an emblem in which to live.

  Not even that anymore for Frank Calloway.

  I crossed the kitchen and knelt, cupping my hand around the man’s wrist: skin cooler than the tile beneath me, no pulse.

  I changed my position, considered the dried blood on the man’s face and neck. Something else: Streaking along the jugular area were two parallel red lines.

  What could have caused something like that? Had he somehow scratched his own neck as he fell?

  I gave it a few seconds before I touched fingers to the carotid area: coated hair bristles, skin dry as a mushroom, still no pulse.

  What I felt was relief. He was dead. Yeah, he was dead.

  Not a very admirable reaction. But I am seldom as admirable as I would like to be. Still, personal ethics are the measure of one’s own self-image, one’s own self-respect. Had I noticed normal body warmth, a hint of heartbeat, I would have done what was required. I would have rolled him over, checked to make sure his airway was clear and then performed the required CPR. Two breaths to five chest compressions.

  So, yes, I felt relief. But some regret, too: Death may be solitary, but it reverberates. In a few hours, somewhere, someplace, unknown people-probably good people-would be in shock, crying, perhaps shattered with loss.

  As Tomlinson says, and quite accurately, all life forms are symbiotic. Each life is interlaced.

  I pictured Amanda: the skinny, mousy woman and her New Age tough-guy feminist attitude. Was she too aloof to shed tears for her stepfather?

  It was something I would have to find out…

  I’d never met Calloway, but I’d spoken with him a couple of times on the telephone and Amanda had sent me a photograph. Black curly hair, styled neat. Nose and narrow chin that suggested Italian antecedents. Jowly middle-aged face, bright, aggressive brown eyes behind oval-rimmed designer glasses that made a calculated statement: taste, intellect, money-powerful but in tune; youthful.

  He wasn’t wearing the glasses, but this was Calloway on the floor. And, yes, he was dead; had been dead for… how long? I’m a marine biologist not a medical examiner, but it wasn’t difficult to make an educated guess. How long would it take for a pool of water to evaporate of
f tile on a balmy, April afternoon? How long did it take for blood to coagulate and dry? An hour? Two hours?

  Not long. He hadn’t been here long.

  I placed my hand beneath Calloway’s shoulder, lifted and turned him slightly. No blood on chest or bloated stomach… perhaps a hint of priapism.

  Did that suggest death by head wound? Maybe. I wasn’t sure.

  I let the body settle on the tile; tried to ignore the rumble of internal gases. Crossed to the kitchen sink and washed my hands-a compulsion I would not have felt had a living Calloway and I shaken hands or whacked each other on the shoulders while trading jokes over beer.

  Stood there knowing that my next logical move was to pick up the telephone and dial the police. Maybe Calloway had come wet from his swimming pool, slipped and taken a bad fall.

  It happens.

  Or maybe, just maybe, I had stumbled onto a crime scene. Either way, dutiful private citizens turn such matters over to the authorities.

  But I did not behave as a dutiful citizen should.

  There were reasons. Maybe they weren’t great reasons but they were my reasons. One reason is that I had made a promise to a determined woman. Another reason was an implied promise to a long gone friend, a guy named Bobby Richardson. The fact that Bobby had been dead for nearly twenty years seemed to matter less and less.

  A promise is a promise. Right?

  The promises I’d made created a couple of problems. For one thing, I hadn’t exactly been invited into Calloway’s house. I’d been invited TO his house. We were supposed to meet for drinks promptly at six. On the phone, he’d said, “But if you’re like a lot of these islanders, always late, tell me now. I’ll just keep working till you surprise me.”

  Meaning I’d better be on time.

  My reply had been a bit more terse than he’d expected: “Geez, Frank, I’ve got nothing better to do than bounce around doing favors for your family. Your ex-family, I mean. So, yeah, make it six. I’ll try real hard.”