The Whole Truth (2 page)

Oh, my god, a judge just shot a defendant!

I hear my own voice shouting, along with a dozen others, "Is he dead? Did she kill him?"

The Little Mermaid By Marie Lightfoot

CHAPTER ONE

South Florida is laced with saltwater canals, all leading inevitably to the great Intracoastal Canal, which runs from Texas to Boston and which connects with the Atlantic Ocean. In Bahia Beach, alone, there is enough access to water to make the parents of children feel nervous all of the time. It's so frighteningly easy for a baby to wander only a few yards out of sight, and in the space of a telephone call, to tumble into the water. In Bahia Beach, there are 327 canals, most of them lined on both sides with residences. Many, many of those homes have children living in them, children who are warned from the time they can crawl, "Don't go near the water!"

Driving in the city is a matter of crossing many bridges, some of them drawbridges that open to allow larger vessels to pass, holding up long lines of traffic as they go.

But the majority of Bahia's bridges are small, pretty ones spanning narrow canals and made of concrete. An interesting way to see those bridges is to float under them in a small boat. Kids especially love that, unless it spooks themtoo much. Underneath a bridge it's a different world—a dank, shadowy cave where you can see barnacles on the bottom, and you can smell fish and salt water. But you have to wait for the tide to be low enough to do that, or you won't get under at all because the water that flows in and out daily from the Atlantic will be licking the underside of the bridge. As the tide retreats, the boaters who use the canals for fun and transportation can slide under by laying themselves flat in their little boats as the undersides of the bridges pass inches from their nose. But eventually the water level decreases enough to allow even a man as tall as six-foot-seven-inch Bradley Williams to pass under without ducking his head.

On the morning of June sixteenth Brad, fifty-seven years old and still sporting a thick crop of sandy hair, sat at the stern of his beloved seventeen-foot solid teak motor-boat, Carousel. His wife, Jeannie, sixty-one and healthily attractive from all the tennis she plays, sat facing forward in front of him. She was knitting a vest for a grandchild as she and Brad leisurely puttered along on the reliable strength of Carousel's eleven horsepower diesel engine. The little boat is a family heirloom that Brad himself meticulously maintains and which everybody on both sides of the family loves like a pet. Like an untiring pony, it carries them nearly everywhere, to Bahia Beach's boat-accessible parks and picnic areas, to the homes of friends who live on the water, even out into the ocean where it bobs like a cheerful, unsinkable brown seal.

This particular Tuesday morning, Jeannie and Bradley were motoring over to Brad's aged parents' residence on a nearby canal. The elder Williamses prefer to live in their native Maine in summertime, leaving their son and daughter-in-law to look out for their property. Checking on it every day gives Brad and Jean a nice excuse to hop into Carousel and enjoy an early morning cruise.

Above them, the busy streets of Bahia Beach, a city of 100,000 people, hummed with rush hour traffic. But down on the water, all was serene. Their little motor is a thoughtfully quiet one, so they can putter past backyards and barely disturb the peace of the upper-middle-class neighborhood where they and Brad's parents live.

To reach Brad's parents' place, they have to go under three bridges. At the first one, connecting Sunrise and Fourteenth Streets above them, Jeannie was so busy knitting and purling (to rush the wee vest into service for a Sunday christening) that Brad had to remind her to duck her head.

The tide wasn't out very far yet. The Williams bent way over to get under, but they were used to this. After more than thirty years of living near the water, they duck under bridges as casually as other people duck under tree limbs. Besides, Brad is so tall he jokes that he's spent most of his life ducking one thing or another.

So they took the first bridge easily. Jeannie never dropped a stitch. The vest she was making was all white, in honor of the occasion. The yarn was so delicate she worried that her fingers—roughened from years of sanding the teak on their boats—would catch the fibers and pull them out of line.

Even with her rush-job knitting, Jeannie didn't ignore the beauty all around them. Perfect green lawns tilting down to boat docks and to well-maintained stone and cement seawalls. Lovely homes. Royal palm trees. The chattering of wild parakeets. Yards boasting their own orange, avocado, or grapefruit trees, most of them sagging with their heavy harvest at this time of year. Several great-beaked pelicans perching on dock posts. Gulls swooping over tall masts. And a clear, sunny Florida sky overhead. It seemed a perfect morning, like almost every one to which lucky south Floridians awoke each day. Granted, the temperature was already ninety degrees at seven o'clock in the morning, but down on the water, it was pleasant.

Jeannie never tired of such days.

Bradley never took their good fortune for granted.

Mornings like this, they felt especially blessed, and they told each other so. Married twenty-five years. Three wonderful daughters. And now a first grandchild, a chubby blond darling named Melanie. Brad was already making her a "big-girl bed" shaped like a boat. When finished, it would rock with a gentle motion, just as if she were sailing on the sea.

The second bridge on their route was easy to navigate, too.

Duck. Under. Through to the other side.

Visitors to the Williams love these excursions in Carousel, even though it scares landlubbers to pass into the shadows below the street. It's a thrill, especially when they have to duck down really low, so low they're afraid they'll scrape their backs or knock themselves out on the concrete trusses. The Williams haven't lost any tourists yet.

Now, Jeannie and Brad saw the third and last bridge coming up. Beyond it, they glimpsed his parents' house.

"Hasn't burned down," Brad joked to Jeannie, in his laconic Maine accent, still pronounced even though he hasn't lived there since he was twenty.

"Somebody left their fishing pole," Jeannie remarked, traces of her Boston upbringing still as clear in her words as Maine is in his. "Looks like the cops caught him, too."

Sure enough, as they neared the third bridge, they saw a fishing pole lodged firmly between two of the concrete posts on the upper side of the little bridge. Fishing there was illegal, the Williams knew, but people did it anyway. There is amazing affluence in Bahia, as there is in Pom-pano to the north and Fort Lauderdale to the south, but the homeless flock there, too, and people have to eat. Personally, Jeannie wouldn't want to eat anything a person could catch from these canals. Maybe she's being persnickety, she says, but she never can help thinking of all those big boats on the Intracoastal and all of the pollution they surely must leave behind them, regulations or no. Not to mention industrial effluents. No, what is in these canals can stay there, in Jeannie's view. If she ever goes hungry, God forbid, she'd rather line up for soup at a shelter than to fish off these bridges.

As they slowly floated closer, they saw that the fiberglass pole was rigidly bowed and the line was very taut.

"Caught themselves an old inner tube," was Jeannie's guess.

"That dates you," Brad teased her. "Don't you know that tires don't even have inner tubes anymore?"

"I said it was an old one, didn't I?"

Bradley observed to himself that it looked like a substantial rig, like something his own fishing nut son-in-law might use to land a big, heavy swordfish, and not like a cheap old pole a tramp might use to snare a passing crab, or little sole. You wouldn't think anybody would want to go off and leave it there. Even if it was snagged on something under the bridge, they could have cut the line and saved the pole.

He throttled back to slow down the boat even more.

Now they could see that an officer in the brown and tan uniform of the Bahia Beach Police Department was peering over the side of the bridge. He had on a short-sleeved shirt, and they could see the sun glint off the badge above his heart. Sunglasses dangled from his left hand. He looked at where the taut line disappeared into the dark water beneath the bridge, and then he looked at them in their boat. He yelled out to them, "Can you see what's caught on the line down there?"

As Bradley eased Carousel as close as he could without running into the line, Jeannie slid over to starboard to try to get a look. At first, she couldn't detect anything, because he water was so shadowed beneath the overpass. But then she caught a glimpse of something darker . . .

A fish?

No! She recoiled instinctively, because her second glimpse showed her something that looked like hair, and she immediately thought: canal rat. Getting herself in hand, she looked again. No, the hair was too light, too long for—

Jeannie brought her hands to her mouth in dismay.

She cried out, and Brad knew instantly that something was really wrong. It shook him up terribly when his wife screamed, "It's a body! Oh, my God! It's a child!"

Jeannie doesn't remember saying that, or even screaming. What she remembers, what she can't forget, is that she saw a clump of sodden hair floating in the water, and at the end of it, barely still hanging on, there was a pink plastic barrette, the kind that a little girl might wear.

As the tide inexorably lowered that morning, it revealed to the horrified observers a small human body, a girlchild, hung from the bridge by the fishing line wrapped around her broken neck.

The uniformed officer ran down the bank of the canal and plunged into the water without even stopping to remove his shoes. If there was any chance of reviving her, he wanted to get her out of there immediately. But even as he felt salt water fill his leather shoes, his common sense and experience told him she'd been dead for a while: Her neck looked broken, her skin was shriveled, and her little body hung limp and heavy in the water.

He determined that she was, in fact, irretrievably dead. Since that was the case, it became important for him to leave her exactly as they'd found her, in order to begin in an orderly way the investigation into her death.

Now sloshing wet, he clambered back out of the canal.

A small crowd of pedestrians began to gather.

It was awful, watching her body gradually appear above the water, as the level dropped, first her head, tilted heart-breakingly and unnaturally to one side, then her small shoulders clothed in a white T-shirt so wet that her skin showed through. In a terrible irony, the T-shirt bore a picture of the Little Mermaid, a favorite movie character of little girls a few years back. The people watching also saw pink shorts, bare legs and feet, but only when the little girl's body was finally, gently, cautiously lowered into a police boat. Until then, it had to wait, hanging there for a much longer time than most of the spectators could bear, while police photographs were snapped, diagrams were drawn, notes were jotted down.

The child's hair hung in stringy clumps almost to her shoulders. Because the hair was soaked, you couldn't tell it was blond. Her hair looked the dark, nondescript color that blond hair looks when it gets very wet. The pink barrette still clung to its bit of hair at the end of one of the clumps.

Nobody wanted to leave her hanging there a second longer than necessary. But nobody wanted to make a mistake, either, which might prevent the person responsible for this crime from being apprehended and convicted. A certain deliberate speed was imperative, even if it did offend the civilians in the neighborhood. More than one person yelled at the officers down in the police boat on the water: "For God's sake, cut her down! Can't you at least cut her down?"

Down in the boat, there were two officers from the Bahia Beach Police Department marine unit, an invaluable branch of local law enforcement which was not "launched" until 1965. Back then, one sergeant and two patrol officers made do with a single thirteen-foot dinghy to patrol 135 miles of interior coastline and five miles of beaches. An impossible task, of course. Now, decades later, the department boasts a dozen specially trained marine officers assigned to several different types of boats. The one down on the water on this day was a twenty-five-foot Boston Whaler. The officers in the marine unit are basically water traffic cops—handing out speeding tickets, arresting drunk boaters—but the unit is also called out when divers or water access to the scene of a crime are needed, like this one.

The officers in the boat cut her down as soon as they could, but that had to wait until the crime scene unit gave permission for it. The alternative to lowering her into the boat was to haul her up by the fishing line. It wasn't that the officers on land were too squeamish or sensitive to do that, but if they did that, they ran the risk of mangling the neck wound, and causing posthumous injuries that might compromise the autopsy.

Everyone felt the relief of seeing the little body released from its noose, and the mercy of placing her into a black body bag. The marine unit removed her by water. In Bahia Beach, even the police department has boat docks—at Northeast Twelfth Street. It was faster and less public to take her that way.

Meanwhile, the bridge remained partially closed for a time, seriously annoying those motorists and boaters who didn't know why. But this was Bahia Beach, and they should have been used to waiting for bridges to open.

The Williamses, Brad and Jeannie, gave their names and address to the police, and then they followed orders to get Carousel out of the way. They continued on, terribly shaken, to Brad's parents' place. They didn't see the dead girl's body removed from the canal. Jeannie was thankful for that, because just seeing what she did see was more than she wanted to have to remember for the rest of her life.

That next Sunday morning at St. Pious Cathedral, Jeannie and Brad held hands tightly, and they both shed quiet tears at Melanie's christening. They thought of the other child and of the grandparents who grieved for her. By then they knew, as all of south Florida did, who she was, and who had loved her. "Life is very special," Jeannie told her daughters that day. "I'm grateful for every day of it that you girls are allowed to share with us on this earth." She thinks that for the rest of her life, she will mean that more than she ever did before, and she knows she will find it difficult to let her grandchildren out of her sight when she baby-sits.