Everglades (16 page)

“Then call someone in management. It’s about one of your deceased members, Geoff Minster. I’m here representing his wife. I can have her call if you want.”

The guard thought for a moment, then said, “Back up and pull over. I don’t want you blocking the gate if a member needs to drive through.”

The gatehouse was sided by high stone walls and an acre or so of landscaped garden, hibiscus, travelers palms, and a life-sized Indian elephant carved of tropical wood next to a fountain. The elephant stood frozen, trunk down as if watering. In front of the elephant, a carved sign read:

There was a much smaller sign on the gatehouse wall: OUR SECURITY STAFF IS AUTHORIZED TO CARRY FIREARMS AND AIR TASERS, AND MAY USE LAWFUL FORCE TO INTERCEPT OR DETAIN TRESPASSERS.

As we waited, a new Mercedes convertible pulled up, two middle-aged men in the front. The guard took the phone from his ear long enough to salute, smile and say, “’Morn ing, Mr. Terwilliger!” then touched a button to open the gate.

“Friendly little place,” DeAntoni said, watching. “The guy in the white jungle beanie—I wouldn’t mind slapping him around some. Him and his asshole attitude. What you think, Ford? He looks like a bleeder to me. The kind who stands in front of the mirror with his weight-lifter muscles, but starts to bawl if he gets smacked a couple of times.”

I said, “You’re not smacking anybody and neither am I. That’s not going to get us inside those gates, and it’s not going to help Sally.”

Tomlinson told him, “Doc’s embraced a policy of total nonviolence, which is a major spiritual breakthrough. We’ve discussed it. He’s trying to grow as a human being.”

Watching the guard walk toward us, DeAntoni said, “Oh yeah? Then explain why my beezer’s the size of a turnip,” touching his swollen nose gingerly.

The guard came out, leaned toward the window and handed DeAntoni a card. “Send a fax to this number, stating exactly who you want to interview—we need specific names to make a request—and your reasons for visiting Sawgrass. The office will get back with you within a week to ten days. You know, on whether we can provide assistance.”

In a flat voice, DeAntoni said, “‘A week to ten days.’”

“That’s right, sir.”

“Look, Mac, all I want to do is go to the restaurant, talk to a few people, maybe find someone who knew the late Geoff Minster. It’s not like we’re gonna filch the fucking silver-ware—”

I put my hand on DeAntoni’s arm, leaning across, and said to the guard, “Thanks. We’re leaving now.”

The guard said, “That’s right, sir. You
are.
”

 

 

Tomlinson said, “Very, very cool. I don’t just like the idea, I love it.”

He said it in reply to DeAntoni’s suggestion that we park the Lincoln down one of the old logging roads, and sneak onto the property on foot.

DeAntoni said, “Except for Mister Tight-Ass, nobody in there’s gonna know we’re not friends of members, or maybe just scoping out real estate. Rent-a-cops, Mac. They really bust my balls.”

He sounded insulted.

I wasn’t as enthusiastic. I’ve spent a significant portion of my life working in places I was not supposed to be; places where I would have been shot—or worse—if discovered. Breaching security, compromising security systems, is demanding work.

I was once competent. No longer. Techniques change along with technology. You don’t probe a guarded position on impulse. It’s something to be researched and planned.
Trespassing,
like
pyromania,
is a word I associate with amateurs.

On the other hand, there wasn’t much risk. If we got caught poking around, asking questions about a dead member—and we almost certainly
would
get caught if we starting asking questions—what’s the worst they could do? Call the police?

More likely, they’d just tell us to get the hell off the grounds, and that’d be that. In the meantime, we might find a friend or two of the missing man. Having a member agree to talk to us would certainly mitigate matters with local security.

So I told DeAntoni, okay, pull up the road, and we’d work our way back on foot.

It was an instructive decision.

Sawgrass, the exclusive community, was a shaded garden of cypress, bromeliads and swamp maple. The wall that cosseted it was almost always hidden by trees. It followed the roadway for another mile or so before angling back into the shadows of its western boundary.

That’s where the wall ended. It is also where the tree line ended, and a new development project began.

Sally’d told us about it. Bhagwan Shiva’s theme community for gamblers: a self-contained city that adjoined Indian reservation land where he wanted to build casinos. Several thousand housing units plus a city center, restaurants, recreation centers, all designed to attract people from middle-income brackets; people with enough money to gamble, but not wealthy enough to buy property in Sawgrass.

He was having a lot of permitting problems, Sally’d told us.

From the road, though, construction seemed to be well underway, permits or no permits—although
destruction
seemed a more accurate term. There were several gated, dirt access roads, with modular offices, plastic Porta-Johns, temporary power poles. At each, were signs that read: FUTURE HOME OF CASINO LAKES, AN EXCLUSIVE PLANNED COMMUNITY. PRECONSTRUCTION PRICES AVAILABLE.

The crews weren’t working on this Saturday morning. Hadn’t been working for several weeks, by the looks of things. The first stage of the operation, however, seemed complete. They’d brought in a fleet of bulldozers and scraped the earth bare. Several hundred acres of black earth were turning gray in the morning sun. Only a few bald cypresses out there were left standing, isolated, sculptured like bonsai trees on a massive desert plain.

The cypress is an interesting, exotic-looking tree, with its connected, tubular base, bulbous knees and leaves as delicate as oriental lace. They grow in distinctive settings: on islands of elevated terrain in sawgrass marshes where, as a community of many hundreds of trees—even thousands of trees—they form a characteristic dome. Green rotundas of shadow out on the sawgrass horizon.

Cypress also grows along floodplains on long, silver strands that can be miles long. South Florida’s interior was once an uninterrupted canopy of cypress domes and strands. Up until the late 1940s, they comprised America’s last virgin stand of bald cypress and pond cypress: trees well over a hundred feet tall and several centuries old.

At the end of World War II, though, the big lumber companies arrived in Florida, motivated by a postwar construction frenzy that was hungry for building material. Dried and milled, cypress is a handsome conifer wood that is insect-and rot-resistant—perfect for houses. Rail lines were built, spur lines added; labor was imported. It took the companies nine years to girdle, bleed and cut an epochal forest that had been the centerpiece of an ecosystem that dated back to the Pleistocene. Many thousands of loaded freight cars; many millions of board feet.

There’re still lots of small cypress trees in the ’Glades. But big cypresses, the old giants are rare. In this area, though, the loggers had missed a few. Now those few trees stood alone on the bulldozed plain, solitary dinosaurs revealed, naked in this new century.

The three of us sat in the car, staring, until Tomlinson finally spoke. “There’s a kind of silence that’s really more like a scream.
Listen.
” He’d lowered his window. “Hear it?”

DeAntoni turned to me. “What’s he mean, because they flattened it like a parking lot? There’s gotta be at least two square miles of land out there.”

I said, “Yeah. Maybe more.”

“Permitting problems, my ass, man.”

I told Tomlinson, “What could be happening here—one of the managers at South Seas was telling me about it—is what’s becoming a sophisticated developer’s device. It’s so tough to get permits to build anything, developers know it’s going to take them months, even years before they’ll get the okay on a project. So they’ve figured out they’ll actually save money by going ahead, building anyway, then paying fines later with inflated dollars. There’s a whole generation of bureaucrats out there who behave as if people in the private sector are enemies of the state. Which is just idiotic. So it’s become like a war—and everyone’s losing.”

Tomlinson said to me, “Understand now why I call him a power-zapper? He’s a black hole, man, out there trying to absorb all the light he can. He’s
feeding.
He’s been feeding right here.”

Bhagwan Shiva.

A little farther down the road was a crossroads general store, Big Cypress Grab Bag. Shell parking, a pair of gas pumps, rusted tin roof, wire mesh over the windows, peeling yellow paint.
Coke. Bud Light.
Lottery tickets and food stamps accepted. On the other side of the road were two businesses in a single, elongated building built of cement block: Devil’s Garden Feed & Supply and Gator Bill’s Bar.

Driving by slow, hitting his turn signal, DeAntoni said, “Pickup trucks and Confederate flags. Now you understand why I tried that chewing tobacco shit?”

“Makes perfect sense now,” I said as I opened the door, then stepped out into the heat and a sawgrass humidity so dense it was like weight.

It was almost noon. Gator Bill’s was a popular lunch place. There were a dozen or so cars and trucks, country music loud from inside, a jukebox, maybe, singing “. . . blow, blow Seminole wind!”

Through the screen door, in the shadows, I could see men at the bar hunched over drinks, a woman with black hair braided long, muling trays.

DeAntoni said, “We’ll hit this place on the way back. If they won’t let us eat at Sawgrass—one of the hot-shit restaurants they got in there—we’ll come back, grab a stool at the bar. That waitress, she doesn’t look half bad.”

We walked along the road in the heat. There wasn’t much traffic: semis loaded with oranges tunneling the heat at seventy miles per hour; dump trucks and tractors with air-conditioned cabs. Their wind wakes created mini-tornadoes in the grass, whipped at our clothes.

Florida is more than beaches and theme parks. It’s a major agricultural state and, consistently, the second or third leading producer of cattle in the nation. We were at the southernmost boundary, where pasture meets swamp prairie, the first and final edge of tropical wilderness.

At the beginning of Casino Lakes development, we cut down one of the access roads, then across to Sawgrass. DeAntoni and Tomlinson both wanted to climb the wall, take our chances. But I told them why be obvious and give them an excuse to call the police if someone spotted us?

I said, “Let’s try the easy way, first.”

Most gated communities have service entrances—they don’t want the landscape soiled by all those dirty delivery trucks, or to require members to exchange pleasantries with the hired help. Sawgrass’s service entrance was off an asphalt spur at the western boundary: a chain-link fence, double-gated. There was a little guardhouse where an old man sat, feet up on his desk, reading the paper. He looked up from the newspaper as we approached.

To DeAntoni and Tomlinson, I whispered, “Walk like you own the place.” A few paces later, I stopped and called to the old man, “Whoops, sorry. I didn’t realize this was the service entrance. We’ll hike around to the front.”

He’d slid the front window open. “Who you fellas with?”

“The Terwilligers, down here for first time. So we don’t know the area. No big deal, we’ll walk back to the front gate.”

Maybe he knew the middle-aged man in the Mercedes convertible, maybe he didn’t.

As I turned, the old man called, “Oh heck, go right ahead on in. They got too many rules at this place as it is. Hot as it is, you want me to have staff bring you a golf cart?”

I said, “Nope, walking’s a good way to go.”

Waving us along, smiling, the man said, “Ain’t that the truth? These days, ever’body’s in a hurry. You tell Mr. Terwilliger, Freddy says hey.”

A nice old guy.

When we were well away, walking on a brick sidewalk among manicured gardens, through tupelo trees and cypress, DeAntoni said to me, “You’re smooth, Mac. Very smooth.”

I told him, “We’ll see.”

chapter fourteen

The
bartender said, “Mr. Minster? Of course, I knew Mr. Minster. An interesting man. Such a tragedy. We miss him here at Sawgrass.”

We were in the Panther Bar, which was part of the Big Cypress Restaurant, a place modeled after the old Rod & Gun Club in Everglades City. It was white clapboard, three stories high, pecky cypress inside with a wide veranda, ceiling fans, pictures by Audubon, Currier & Ives, framed and lighted. There was a formal restaurant—chandeliers and starched tablecloths—a light-fare eatery built on a deck over a cypress hammock, gators basking below in tannin-stained water, plus this ornate bar.

The bar had a granite fireplace, tables of dense wood, walls that were a museum of taxidermy: old skin-mounted tarpon, snook, bass and sailfish. There were alligators twelve to fourteen feet long, green turtles, turkeys, coveys of quail, a bear snarling on hind legs and one spectacularly large feral hog with razor tusks.

“Holy shitski,” Tomlinson said, eyes swiveling as we walked in. “They ought to have a couple of Michiganers tacked up there; human heads just to be fair. Give wildlife equal time. Or a Buckeye or two in travel garb, cameras around their necks. Mount them over there”—he pointed to the largest of the gators—“maybe partially ingested. A leg or two missing, but they’ve still got that Disney World smile on their faces. Tough-ass Ohioans not about to let
anything
ruin their vacation. A real Florida tableau. Don’t you think that’d up burger sales?”

Shaking his head, DeAntoni said, “Jesus, burgers. That’s exactly what I was going to order, too. Why you got to be so fucking vulgar?” and left us standing as he walked toward the bar.