Quint Mitchell 01 - Matanzas Bay (12 page)

“I don’t remember seeing her car until she turned in front of me.”

“Oh, my God,” Serena said.

“I was only doing fifty, but it seemed like … like the world had shifted into hyper-drive. No time to do anything.” I reached for the glass of water and swallowed a gulp.

“She was only nineteen years old, I found out later. Coming home from a date and talking to her boy friend on her cell phone.”

“Quint, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s funny what tricks your mind plays, but suddenly we went from moving at warp speed to slow motion. The world froze for a moment in the instant before she saw me. The light from the street lamp caught her face and framed it like a tinted photograph, her head tilted to one side. She was laughing.” I had lived through this scene so many times it felt like I was reading from a script.

“The phone was in her right hand, and she turned the steering wheel with the other. Then she saw me closing on her, probably heard my brakes screeching. By then we were only a few yards apart.”

Serena had a hand over her mouth, her eyes slightly glazed as though she could see the car bearing down on her.

“I’ll never forget her face. The terror. The realization she was going to …”

“Die?”

I nodded. “It was over quickly, for what it’s worth. I couldn’t do anything for her.”

“Were you charged for her death?”

I shook my head. “I’d only had one drink at the party, and passed a field sobriety test. It turned out the traffic signal wasn’t working properly, and we both had green lights. They considered the mechanical failure of the lights, the fact she was distracted by the cell phone and declared it an accident.”

“And that phone call?” she pointed at my phone still sitting on the table.

“Her father. The poor guy had a nervous breakdown. He and his wife divorced and he went to pieces. He calls me to … I don’t know, because he doesn’t know what else to do.”

“He’s been calling you since the accident?”

“Only for the past year or so. Sometimes a month will go by between his calls. But now he’s calling more frequently.”

“What does he say?”

I hesitated, not wanting to repeat the vicious names and gut-wrenching language he used. “You have to remember he believes I killed his only child and got away with murder. “He blames me and wants me dead, let’s leave it at that.”

“But it was an accident. A horrible accident, true, but he can’t hold on to those hateful feelings for the rest of his life.” She searched my face wanting, I thought, some reassurance that she was right.

“Maybe, but I’ve ruined his life, so I figure the least I can do is put up with his phone calls.”

Serena shook her head. I realized she was processing what I’d told her and hadn’t come to the same conclusion. “It’s tragic, Quint, but the man needs professional help. You can’t allow him to keep persecuting you for something that wasn’t your fault.”

Her honey brown eyes glinted like they were imbedded with granite chips. What she said next took me completely by surprise.

“This was a white girl wasn’t it?” Her jaw tight, voice low. “You wouldn’t put up with this kind of harassment from a black man.”

“Serena, this has nothing to do with the girl’s race.” I reached for her hand. She snatched it away and I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me, surprised at the ferocity of her feelings. My mind went blank for a moment. It felt like an eternity before I could answer.

“If you must know, the girl was black, and …” I paused and fumbled for something to say that would erase the anger in her eyes. “And she looked a lot like you.”

She appraised me for a long moment before speaking. “This was never about me, was it? It was all about her.” The look on her face made my stomach roll over.

Her voice took on a far-away tone, and I strained to hear her. “You’re only using me as some sick compensation to assuage your guilt.”

“No, you don’t understand.”

“I understand perfectly. You’re reaching out to a local girl of color to make yourself feel better.” Serena stood so abruptly her chair tumbled to the floor. “Well, I don’t want any part in your therapy sessions.”

Heads turned as she bolted from the restaurant.

FIFTEEN

The scene at Stuff of Dreams still haunted me. We’re all products of our culture and environment. Although Serena obviously had a different frame of reference, I never knew her to be conflicted when it came to race. Despite our three-month relationship, huge chunks of her past were unknown to me mostly because I hadn’t bothered to probe too deeply.

We’d been seeing each other for nearly a month before our relationship advanced into a more intimate phase. After that first time, lying naked in her bed, I gently rubbed the light sheen of sweat glazing her abs. Serena’s eyes were closed, and I let my fingers crawl up toward the swell of her breasts, exploring an erect nipple and tracing the dark tattooed areole surrounding it. She smiled and I heard a low hum, like the purr of a cat, from deep in her throat.

Up to that point, she’d shared only random bits of her life, mostly in answer to my innocuous questions. She told me her father had been born in St. Johns County, moved to Chicago in the sixties, and later married. I learned she had no brothers or sisters, and her parents had divorced when she was three years old. Her mother died of breast cancer several years after the divorce.

Lying in bed together that night, I told her I wished her mother were still alive so I could thank her for having the foresight to give birth to such a beautiful baby. Instead of responding to my offbeat compliment with a smile, a kiss, or, as I hoped, another round of lovemaking, she simply nodded. Without a word, she pulled a framed photograph from the drawer on the nightstand and handed it to me.

I stared at the photo of a couple who were obviously very much in love. A young black man in an army uniform had an arm wrapped around a willowy young woman with long blonde hair. She was nearly as tall as the soldier, smiling into the camera as if posing for the cover of a magazine. The soldier stared at the woman with a look reflecting a fierce and unrestrained love.

“This is your mother and father?”

Serena nodded and took the photo back, gazing at it for a moment before setting it on the night stand.

Obviously, I knew Serena was of mixed parentage, but it wasn’t until I saw the photograph of her mother and father that she became defined in my mind as a product of black and white. And as I hit the replay button on our lunch scene, my words came back to me wrapped in layers of guilt and confusion …
If you must know, the girl was black … And she looked a lot like you
.

Could Serena be right? Was I somehow drawn to her because of my feelings of guilt?

***

At my office the next morning, I brought up the home site for the St. Augustine newspaper on my computer. I typed
Matanzas Bay Project
into the box to search the story archives and up popped page after page of articles dating back nearly three years. Scanning through them quickly, I verified that the St. Johns Group received the green light to begin construction several months back.

From the beginning, William Marrano was clearly the prime mover behind the project, pushing the mayor and the rest of the commission to sell the city property to the St. Johns Group. One of the articles, dating back six months, reported on a bitter clash between Poe and Marrano at a city commission meeting. Poe addressed the commission, accusing them of
selling St. Augustine’s legacy to the developers for 30 pieces of gold
.

Returning to the first page of articles, I pulled up today’s story of Poe’s arrest. The headline blared,
St. Augustine Archaeologist arrested
. The sub-head told the rest of the story:
Dr. Jeffrey Poe indicted for murder of Vice Mayor Marrano
.

There must be a course in journalism school teaching budding reporters how to dredge up and list every embarrassing incident in a subject’s past no matter how long ago it may have happened. In that fine tradition, the story related Poe’s earlier run-ins with Marrano and noted it wasn’t the first time his temper had landed him in trouble. According to the article, as a sophomore in college, Poe had been arrested and charged with aggravated assault for attacking a classmate.

I knew Poe had a temper, but aggravated assault was a serious charge involving use of a weapon. My mind rebelled at the thought of Poe as a homicidal maniac, but I knew the prosecutor would jump all over the old aggravated assault charge. Anyone who didn’t know the man as I did might conclude from this article that Poe was capable of murder.

I tried to reconcile what I knew about Jeffrey Poe—the man who lovingly nursed his wife during those emotionally draining months of her illness—with the brutal killer who stabbed and mutilated William Marrano. They were not the same man.

I wondered how a reporter for a St. Augustine newspaper gained access to a thirty-year-old police report? If I had to put money on it, I’d bet Kurtis Laurance or someone else in the St. Johns Group leaked it to the reporter. Laurance had the resources to investigate Poe’s background, and the motivation to discredit him.

I printed the newspaper article before shutting down my computer. Sitting at my desk, a picture came to mind of the St. Johns Group in the form of an octopus, slick tentacles worming out in all directions, encircling and suffocating the life out of Jeffrey Poe. Kurtis Laurance’s sticky fingers appeared to be all over this case, and I hoped when it was finally over I didn’t find myself ensnared in their grip.

SIXTEEN

At twenty minutes past three, I turned onto International Golf Parkway. I followed the shadowed stretch of country road for five miles until I came to a contemporary three-story building of white concrete. A sign across the top of the building informed me I’d arrived at the offices of the St. Johns Group.

Landing an appointment with Kurtis Laurance hadn’t been easy. My calls had been passed to a succession of aides whose main job seemed to be to protect the people’s candidate from the people. Frustrated, I asked Erin Marrano to call on my behalf and Laurance finally deigned to speak to me.

“I’m a very busy man,” Laurance told me during that phone call. “How about next week, say Thursday?”

I patiently explained that I needed to see him today. “This might have an impact on the Matanzas Bay project,” I added. His tone immediately changed, and he told me to be at his office at three-thirty.

A half-hour later, I sat in the lobby squirming uncomfortably on a teardrop-shaped chair probably used in medieval torture chambers. Unable to sit any longer, I rose from my seat and pretended to study the framed photographs along the wall. Each one represented a project the St. Johns Group had built throughout the Southeast. I was looking at a photograph of a shopping mall in West Palm Beach when the door next to the receptionist opened and a tall blonde on stiletto heels surveyed the room. Her face, pinched and aloof as if expecting to find a reeking derelict, transformed itself when I turned toward her. She gave me a surprised smile.

“Mr. Mitchell?”

I flashed her the equivalent of an
Elevated
on my smile-alert system. She returned the smile before extending her hand and saying, “I’m Pamela, Mr. Laurence’s executive assistant. I’m sorry for the wait, but he can see you now.”

We walked to an elevator whose door glided open at her touch. On the third floor, we stepped through the double doors leading into Laurance’s office, a space about the size of a department store in one of his shopping malls. Pamela left me there, closing the doors as she exited.

Laurance sat behind a large executive desk talking on the phone. My attention was immediately drawn to another man in a rumpled dark suit who stood half-turned between me and Laurance, beefy shoulders and thick legs braced to tackle me if I tried anything funny.

With the phone still pressed to his ear, Laurance waved me toward the two chairs at a meeting table across the room. Mr. Rumpled Suit followed as I walked to the chair, positioning his stocky body between us like one of those concrete barriers protecting highway workers from on-coming traffic. He turned his head to stare at me with tiny, hooded eyes the color of watery iced tea bringing to mind an image of a moray eel. Face forward, I now saw a thin scar bisecting his right eyebrow and traversing the corner of his eye. Noting the bulge under his suit coat, I turned back to Laurance who was still talking on the phone.

“Gordon doesn’t bother me. Even if he is the Attorney General, how’s he going to explain his involvement in that casino gambling business?” He cut his eyes at me and abruptly said, “I have someone waiting for me. We’ll talk later.”

Laurance approached me with a fluid, athletic stride. In his late fifties or early sixties, he was tan and lean with close-cropped gray hair. He pulled back his cuff-linked sleeve to reveal a yellow gold Patek Philippe watch. Glancing at it before giving me a smile of perfectly even white teeth and offering his hand, he said, “I don’t mean to rush you, Mr. Mitchell, but I’m behind schedule as it is.”

Before he sat he gestured toward the other man. “Meet Lemuel Tallabois, my security chief. Lem is retired from the New Orleans Police and handles all my security needs.”

I nodded to Tallabois who raised a corner of his mouth in a snarky smile. His sideburns were trimmed eye-level in a stark, military cut. Aside from Bourbon Street and beignets, New Orleans was renowned for its corrupt politicians and even more corrupt police. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, national headlines blazed the news that fifty or sixty police officers were fired for abandoning their posts and stealing, along with a few more serious offenses like beatings and shootings. Lemuel Tallabois may have retired from the New Orleans Police Department, I thought, but probably not of his own accord.

“You may have heard I’m running for governor,” Laurance said, sitting down opposite me. “One of my advisers suggested it would be wise to have someone like Lem to watch over me since there are a lot of crazies out there.” He smiled again and shrugged, as if he didn’t quite buy the sentiment but didn’t have a choice.