The Man Who Ivented Florida df-3 Read online

  A man's head poked up over the dock. "Yeah?" Man with wire glasses, hair salt-streaked, blond, his expression none too friendly. But she walked on out anyway, taking her ID from her purse as she went, ducked around some pilings, and stepped down onto the lowest dock, where she could see the man was standing in a funny-looking boat-wide wooden thing with poles and nets. Beside it was tied a sleek fiberglass boat, turquoise green, with a big black engine. Fast, probably cost a lot. She wondered what it would be like to try skiing.

  "Are you Marion Ford?"

  "That's right."

  Walker introduced herself. The man made no effort to shake hands, but he did take her ID wallet. He studied it, his eyes swinging from the laminated photograph to her face. "Florida Department of Criminal Law," he said. "You've had your hair cut shorter."

  She gave him her professional, congenial smile. Had to be friendly with them if you wanted them to talk. "Florida is a lot hotter than I thought it would be."

  "Not like New York, huh?"

  "Well, it can be hot there, too." She stopped talking, her expression puzzled.

  The man said, "Your accent."

  She replaced the smile. "I keep forgetting-I'm the one who talks funny down here."

  The man held the ID wallet for her to take, then turned his attention to the boat, messing with ropes and nets, not looking at her.

  "I was wondering if you might have time to answer a few questions."

  Instead of saying, "About what?"-that was almost always the first thing they asked-he said, "I'm just getting ready to go out. I have to catch the low tide."

  "It wouldn't take long. We're trying to get some background information on a relative of yours. Strictly routine. A man named Tucker Gatrell."

  Instead of asking, "Is he in some kind of trouble?"-they almost always asked that if the questions were about a friend or a relative-the man in the boat said, "Then why don't you talk with Tucker Gatrell?"

  "I've already spoken with him."

  "He suggested you talk with me?"

  "No. But for our background files-"

  "The tide's waiting, Ms. Walker. I've got to start the engine and get going."

  She tried a different approach. "Mr. Ford, I've driven all the way from St. Petersburg. I haven't been with the FDCL long, and they've given me this assignment, more than thirty people to interview, and if you could just give me a few minutes…" Playing on his sympathy, something she hated to do.

  The man stooped, pressed a button, and the boat's engine clattered- Pop-apop-POP-POP-POP. She had to talk over the noise. "Maybe I could go out in the boat with you?"

  For the first time, he smiled a little. "You'd get your clothes wet. Shoes all messy. I'll be dragging the nets." He had an irritating confidence, sure she would refuse.

  "That's all?" Agent Walker swung down onto the boat, not giving him a chance to reply. "It'll be a good place for us to talk, out on the water."

  Ford was thinking, Exactly what I deserve, giving her an opening like that. She set me up. He was standing at the wooden ship's wheel, one of the old ones made of fitted mahogany, steering across the shallows of Dinkin's Bay. The woman stood beside him, looking out the windshield, small black purse on the control console between the compass and the throttle lever, not saying much. Long-bodied woman, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five, had the practiced professional aloofness that more and more females were affecting when dealing with men-so determined to deflect any male assumptions about their competence that they also voided any chance of personal interaction, upon which acceptance and judgments of equality were based. Wore perfume. Nails glossed, but not long, and she had the gaunt facial bone structure and coloring Ford associated with people of the western Sahara.

  First the sandstorm, now her.

  "Is this what you do for a living, net fish?" In the little wheel-house, Walker didn't have to talk as loudly to make herself heard over the engine.

  "That isn't on the printout they gave you? My occupation?"

  "It said 'Sanibel Biological Supply.' That's all. Well, that you're a marine biologist."

  Ford said, "Uh-huh," steering the boat past the fish-house ruins off Green Point, then back into the main channel, past Jack Thomas's house and Esperanza Woodring's place, where chickens scratched beneath palm trees by the dock. He turned west into narrow Tarpon Bay cut, then angled north onto the grass flats before throttling down, stopping the boat. Pine Island Sound spread away northwest to southeast, a gray water field of flux and flow that showed the swirls of rising bars and the contours of grass bottom smooth as a golf course. Low tide, late afternoon, and not many boats were out. But having the woman along neutralized the delight Ford would have felt being alone on a spring low, watching water drain away until the sea bottom showed itself.

  He unlashed the net booms and cranked the outriggers down, listening as the woman said, "Maybe I should tell you why I've been assigned this interview." She was still standing by the wheel, trying to stay out of the way.

  "Why you're interested in Tuck Gatrell," Ford said.

  "He is your uncle."

  "He's my uncle."

  "But we're not interested just in him. We're interested in everyone who lives in that little village, Mango. And other places along the boundaries of Everglades National Park, too. We're trying to build our files."

  Ford eased the boat into gear and threw the nets out, watching to make sure they didn't swing out tangled. He said, "Oh?"

  Walker hoped he would say more; hoped his tone would suggest the approach she should take. So far, the man didn't fall into the textbook categories of friendly witness or hostile witness. It was as if he was standing back, watching from the gallery, not even there. She had a sheath of data sheets on all the work-ups-people she was supposed to interview-but Marion Ford's was only two paragraphs on a single page. The biology business, navy, and ten years with the NSA, National Security Agency, which implied all sorts of interesting possibilities, and why she'd jumped onto the boat instead of just setting up a phone interview. See what the guy was like for herself.

  She said, "Part of that area-around Mango, most of the village-is being annexed for a state park project. A sort of add-on to Everglades National Park, and we're doing backgrounds on landowners to see who might be hostile to the project. A kind of survey."

  She watched his face to see whether he believed that. He said, "That explains it," though she could tell he didn't buy it at all, something in his tone. Way too passive. So she added, "Of course, that's not the only reason."

  Ford was at the throttle, looking back at the nets, checking his watch. He wanted to do a short drag, seven minutes tops. Didn't want to crush any of the unwanted specimens in the accumulation of tidal grass and sea hydroid. Easing back on the throttle, he smiled at the woman and said, "You mean there's more?"

  "You've probably heard that three men disappeared in that area within the last few weeks."

  Ford said, "I don't think so. Where?"

  Walker studied him for a moment, thinking that he might be lying. "Three men in separate boats on separate days," she told him. "You haven't heard anything about it? It was just south of Mango, on the park boundary."

  Ford said, "And you suspect Tucker Gatrell?"

  "No, not at all. I'm-we are-just trying to assemble a picture of the people in the area, trying to get background. Two of the men had been hired by the state to complete an environmental survey project. A census, they call it. And we're trying to come up with a list of people who might have a reason to… ah, object to the survey." She smiled, watching him. "People think law enforcement is all guns and car chases, but it's not. Not at the FDCL. It's mostly research. Interviews, like I'm doing now."

  "Must be a long list."

  "Of people to interview? They gave me only thirty names,-maybe that's not all of them. The third man was a fishing celebrity. He had his own television show."

  Ford said, "Were they similar? The three boats. That could be a key."

  "No. I me
an, I'm not sure. Three boats couldn't all be alike. That would be too much of a coincidence." The question had thrown her. He'd been way back on the fringe of the conversation, then suddenly he was at the heart of it. "The key to what? You mean they could have been faulty boats and sunk?"

  He said, "But you're just doing the interviews. Someone else is doing the investigation."

  "Well… yes and no… but back to the three boats-"

  "What did Gatrell tell you?"

  "He didn't say anything about the boats."

  "About anything else, I mean."

  "I know, but-"

  "Did you go down there, talk to him in person?"

  "No. I talked to him on the phone, a preinterview, trying to set up an appointment. He didn't tell me much."

  Ford said, "I never found a way to make Tuck shut up." Already, he was dropping back from the topic. In and out, Walker thought, like a mongoose.

  Walker said, "Oh, he talked. But not about what I wanted. He just rambled. He's… kind of charming in an odd sort of way. He talked about himself, the way old people like to do. Perhaps exaggerating a little-not that I minded."

  Ford said, "Only a little?"

  "He told me he had invented some kind of fishing-stone crabbing?"

  Ford said, "That's true. Back in the fifties, he and his partner- an Indian named Joseph Egret-experimented until they found an effective trap. They supplied a Miami restaurant called Stone Crab Joe's."

  "He told me that he had discovered shrimp fishing, too."

  "At night, that's what he meant. He was one of the first to figure out that shrimp came out of their burrows at night. Shrimpers have fished at night ever since. He wasn't lying there."

  Agent Walker was beginning to sense a small rapport growing, built around questions about Tucker Gatrell. She said, "He told me he'd poached those pretty birds, egrets, and alligators. That one night he'd shot and skinned more than three hundred-"

  "Only Tuck would brag about that."

  "And that he was part of the reason so many Cubans had migrated to Miami. He'd supplied Castro with guns."

  Ford said, "He ran guns."

  "And rum."

  "From Cuba and Nassau. All true. During Prohibition back when he was in his teens."

  "And that he'd worked for the man who built the road across the Everglades, but it was a failure because the equipment kept sinking in the mud, and it was his idea to use a-what did he call it?"

  "I don't know what he called it, but it was a floating dredge. A dredge on a barge that dug its own canal and floated along behind. The fill created the roadbed. Tuck was a boy, a water boy for a man named Barron Collier, and supposedly he said-"

  Walker said, "Yeah, it was something funny-"

  "Tuck says a lot of funny things."

  The woman finished the story for him. "He said, 'Jesus Christ, Barron, man only makes two things that float, shit and boats. And you can hire yourself another boy if you think I'm walking through shit clear to Miami.' "

  Ford said nothing, listening to her. The woman had a nice low laugh; let a little bit of the girl show through, but Ford could see what she was doing, trying to build a working intimacy. Pretty good at it, too.

  Behind them, on the slick water, was a roiled trail, like a brown comet's tail, showing the path of the nets. He shut down the engine, cranked the outriggers up, swung the nets over the culling table, and spilled the contents. A whole world of sea life gushed out: filefish, pinfish, sea horses, parrot fish, tunicates, grasses, comb jellies, spider crabs, blue crabs, a calico crab, a couple of horseshoe crabs, and flopping rays. For a moment, sorting the specimens, he forgot that the woman was there, but then she said,

  "He told me this other story, too, about how Disney World got started up there in Orlando."

  "Tuck's not shy about taking credit-"

  "But it wasn't Walt Disney, or anybody like that, it was this other man-"

  Ford said, "Dick Pope. That's Tuck's Dick Pope story, about how he was the one who got theme parks started in Florida. Tuck used to take Mr. Pope fishing, the guy who started Cypress Gardens-it was always Beautiful Cypress Gardens in the newsreels, the ones with Esther Williams and the old movie stars-and Tuck says he's the one talked him into it. Then the Disney people came along and a lot of others. Reptile World. Sea World. A lot of them."

  Agent Walker said, "Truly an amazing man."

  "Tuck always kept moving," Ford said.

  "And that he was President Truman's favorite fishing guide, the one who decided they should make the Everglades a park."

  "No… well, yeah, but he's stretching it. It's not as big a deal as it sounds. The old-time Florida guides-there weren't many of them, only a handful-took out a lot of people like that, famous. Presidents and athletes and movie people. Forty, fifty years ago, west Florida was still wilderness. Sparsely settled. Tuck was one of only two or three guides in the whole region, so he got his share."

  "And Thomas Edison-"

  "It was a big wild area with just a few small-town access points-"

  "That Edison put him, Mr. Gatrell, in one of the first moving pictures, them fishing for some kind of fish."

  Ford said, "That's what he says. But I'm not sure I believe Tuck's Edison stories. Edison died in, what? The early thirties. Tuck was pretty busy running liquor then."

  "It sounds like he's done everything."

  "Seventy-some years in a young state, it adds up."

  "And that he's the last Florida cowboy… only he didn't call it that. It was something else-"

  Ford said, "See? The guy exaggerates. There're a lot of cattle people left in Florida. Florida's one of the biggest cattle producers in the country. He's always been like that."

  "Being his nephew, you've probably heard a lot of them."

  Ford turned from the culling table to look at her. "I've heard my share of Tuck's stories. But why don't we go straight to the questions you want to ask, save us both some time."

  Walker thought, Just when I thought he was softening up… She said, "There're no set questions, just background stuff. I'm trying to-"

  Ford cut her off. "You're trying to establish who in the area has a history of violence. You have a profile built, and you want me to supply a few pieces of Tuck, see if they fit. Who would kidnap or kill three men? Who knows those islands well enough to get away with it? I imagine the county law-enforcement people did air searches until they got frustrated, then called you in. Your department. And if you had suspects, you'd be talking to them, not doing deep background."

  Walker had been looking at all the flopping, crawling, oozing creatures on the table, watching the man sort it so quickly, putting most of the mess back in the water. She was thinking, I'll never go swimming in the ocean again. She said, "That's right." She looked at Ford, who was shaking the nets out, getting ready to head back. "You know him. Is he prone to violence?"

  "You've checked his priors. You know he is. But not in that way."

  "He knows the region. I mean, there are thousands of islands, like a jungle-"

  "He guided in the Everglades, I already confirmed that. Tuck grew up in the islands. He knows them."

  "Considering all he's done in his life, he's certainly shrewd enough. Maybe even brilliant."

  Ford said, "I wouldn't say that."

  Walker said, "Do you think he fits the profile? I'm only asking for his own good."

  "How would I know anything about the profile of a kidnapper or killer?" Ford started the boat, smiling at her. "I'm a biologist. Isn't that what it says on the data sheet they gave you?"

  "Yes… from what they gave me-"

  Ford kept talking. "Tucker Gatrell can be irritating as hell, and he has a temper, but he's not the guy you're after. He's an old man, for God's sake. He should probably be in a home or something."

  Agent Walker said, "I'd love to meet him. Maybe I'll drive down there tomorrow," using her tone to tell Ford she'd be the judge.

  Ford said, "You do that. See for yourself." />
  ***

  Ford sorted the specimens, putting sea horses and horseshoe crabs into the big saltwater tank on the deck, watching the sea horses right themselves in the aerator stream of raw water, finding tailholds on blades of turtle grass, while the horseshoe crabs plowed along the bottom. Ford's eyes lingered there, the cool haven of salt water, then looked to see whether Agent Walker's car was gone from the parking lot. It was. No strange cars, anyway. Jeth's four-by-four-he'd left it there while he was traveling-and MacKinley's Lincoln, Ford's own old blue Chevy pickup, then the cars that belonged to the live-aboards.

  He checked his lab to make sure everything was orderly, the stainless-steel dissecting table sponged clean, all the specimen and chemical jars in their places. Then he stripped naked and stood beneath the rainwater cistern, showering the sweat away before changing into fresh shorts and a blue stone-washed cham-bray shirt off the clothesline.

  It was sunset, the pearly after time, and the sky over Sanibel Island was wind-streaked with cantaloupe orange, purple swirls of cloud. Beyond the docks, mangroves settled charcoal black, blurring into smoky hedges as light drained from the bay. The lights of the marina bloomed on, and out of the closing darkness came the squawk of night herons hunting crabs on the mud flats and the mountain stream sound of tidal current dragging past the pilings of Ford's house.

  He stepped out onto the porch and looked at Tomlinson's sailboat. It was a dark buoy on the copper-glazed water, and he could see Tomlinson's silhouette, lean as a bird, straggly-haired, sitting on the bow of the boat. Meditation time. The man was out there every dawn, every dusk, even in storms, as if the sun might drift off station if not for his shepherding. Communing with nature, or maybe talking with God. No telling with Tomlinson. Or maybe thinking about his baby daughter, Nichola, with her mother up there in Boston, where Tomlinson had flown at least once every two weeks since the baby had been born-until recently, suggesting to Ford that things weren't going too well between Tomlinson and the child's mother.