Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (27 page)

“Sounds like a good lawyer might beat that ’32 treaty if all the parties didn’t sign it.”

“Some good lawyers tried. The Seminoles filed a claims suit in 1950 seeking compensation for the whole state. The case took twenty-six years to conclude. The Indian Claims Commission found that the Seminoles owned almost all of Florida at the time of the 1823 treaty and weren’t fairly compensated. The Commission assessed the 1823 value of the almost twenty-four million acres at $12,500,000. The Indians finally settled in 1976 for $16,000,000 to be split between the Oklahoma and Florida tribes. That settled for all time any claims the Seminoles had.”

“But, if that document is any good, if it is a protocol to the original 1832 treaty, the blacks would have an interest separate from the Indians. One that wasn’t extinguished by the lawsuit.”

“Maybe,” Newman said. “But remember, the blacks claimed to be part of the tribe.”

“The government didn’t recognize them as such. I think it’d be hard-pressed now to claim in a court of law that they were Seminoles and their claims were extinguished by the lawsuit that they weren’t a party to.”

“You’re the lawyer, but I can’t see the government trying to sort this out after all these years. The property titles alone would be almost impossible to unravel.”

“Not really. All the land today would have deeds in the county courthouses showing who owned it.”

“Yeah, but there’re towns and subdivisions built on a lot of that land.”

“The protocol only reserves the mineral rights. All that phosphate out in the center of the state would go to the Black Seminoles. They wouldn’t have a right to the property on which this college sits, for instance. Only the minerals under it. There’d be no economically feasible way to mine this land. They’d have to tear down the buildings and pay compensation to the owners. The mineral rights would be minuscule compared to the value of the land and buildings.”

“There’d be hell to pay from the phosphate interests. They’ve paid for those rights.”

“Yes, but the law contemplates what it calls a ‘bona fide purchaser.’ Since the owner could not have known of any claims on the mineral rights, he would have to be fairly compensated for what he bought.”

“That could amount to a lot of money.”

“Not nearly as much as those rights are worth today. And the new owners could make a claim for all the profits made off their minerals during all the years of mining out there.”

“Christ. This could open up a Pandora’s box.”

I shook my head. “A huge one. Can we prove that the protocol is legitimate?”

Newman studied the document for a long time. “The names of the signatories are right, I think. I can get a copy of the original treaty from the national archives and compare them.”

“How long will that take?”

“I can probably get one e-mailed to me by this evening. I’m a registered researcher and most of those old records have been digitized. Do you really think you could make a case out of this?”

“I don’t know. It looks as if this protocol was entered into at about the same time as the treaty. If the people who signed it for the government had the right to do that, and the Senate ratified it, I would think it’s good.”

“That seems a little iffy. Why would the government give away something so valuable?”

“Mineral rights in Florida at the time of the treaty were essentially worthless,” I said. “There was no gold, no silver, no fountain of youth. Phosphate wasn’t discovered until many years later. This was probably an
afterthought. Maybe it was a sop to the Indians who were worried about their black friends. The government gave the blacks the mineral rights to all of the reservation lands contained in the 1823 treaty, and the Indians, ignorant as they were of white man’s law, probably didn’t know that the mineral rights were absolutely worthless.”

“And the government couldn’t foresee the uses for phosphate. Or even know that millions of tons of the stuff lay just under the surface.”

“Exactly,” I said.

I drove back to Longboat, musing on the vagaries of life. If the protocol was valid, then there was going to be a lot of money moved from big corporations to a small group of Andros Island Bahamians who had very little institutional memory of their Seminole ties. It was going to be one hell of a lawsuit.

Part of me wanted to suit up and do battle against the titans, go into the pit that was the courtroom and slay them with my rapier-like mind, my wit, and superior intellect. I laughed at myself. I was well out of it. I’d done my time in the courtroom and I thought I’d acquitted myself well. I’d lost some cases, but I knew that the lawyer who’d never lost a case, hadn’t tried very many. I wanted no part of that circus again.

I’d been checking on Abraham regularly. The desk clerk on his floor would only tell me that there had been no change. He was hanging in, but who knew if he’d make it. He was in great shape, but he was still an eighty-year-old man. He might not survive this.

For that matter, I might not either. We were going to Gibsonton to invade the Snake Dance Inn, to try and jerk the West Coast Marauder leader Baggett out of there and get some answers. If we managed it, it’d be a close thing, and the odds weren’t exactly in our favor. Jock had called in some firepower from his agency, people in debt to him, who admired him and would come without asking why. His long career had given him many friends, men who owed him their lives. These guys lived by the soldier creed of taking care of your buddy. It was one reason I admired Jock so much. He had never been in the military, but he’d been a soldier in service to his country since he joined the agency right out of Clemson University.

My service was receding into the misty distance. I’d been a soldier, and I think some of that stays with you. There’s an old saying about veterans, “All gave some, and some gave all.” I think the corollary to that would go something like, “When you’ve been part of the military, the military is forever part of you.”

I was getting a little maudlin, but cheered up as I drove across the John Ringling Bridge. Longboat Key shimmered at the edge of the bay and the boats moored at the Sarasota Yacht Club gleamed in the late afternoon sun. A schooner, its sails furled, puttered under the bridge, a middle-aged couple lounging in the cockpit.

I had been having dreams of late, bad dreams, not of soldiers dead in the jungle, but of my childhood, a time cloaked in a darkness of the soul that I’d rather forget. I hadn’t dreamed of that time in years, gave no thought to it, banished it from my mind. Perhaps the war memories, so vivid and bloody, had supplanted those baleful reflections of a time a child could not quite comprehend. But the incident in the Swamp Rat Bar, when I’d been thrust backward in time for a second or two, was troubling. There was a dissonance in my universe, a warping of time and space that propelled me into the past, into a time I thought I’d forgotten and didn’t want to remember. A certain smell or a piece of a song would trigger the mechanism, roiling the amygdala, wrenching long-repressed memories over dormant synapses, and bringing them bounding into the present. I knew it was nothing to worry about, but there it was. I didn’t want to relive my childhood, not even in snatches of memory.

My journey had been long and sometime harder than I would have liked, but in the end I had arrived at a sort of peace, living on an island among people of warmth and substance. Yet, the old demons haunted me, and on rare occasions would rise up like bile and flood my system with despair. Dark images invaded my sleep and roused memories of the depredations of my youth and of a time when circumstances beyond my control plundered my innocence and robbed me of the equanimity that every child deserves. It was those nightmares that drove me into a blackness that I feared I’d never escape. Sometimes the dreams were of war and death and soldiers gone to Valhalla, and sometimes the dreams came when I was fully awake, in the form of flashbacks to times best forgotten.

Stressful events brought the demons rollicking to the fore, but I had learned to ignore them, or to at least not allow them to take control. I brushed them aside like so much fluff and went on about my life. I took a certain amount of pride in my ability to move past these chimerical fantasies and hold the blackness at bay, fighting a deadly duel that I could not lose and continue to live. My own death lurked in the deep shadows of depression, beckoning me with its promise of relief, of peace at last. But I always won, stuffing the incubi back into the pit from which they sprang and wrenching my own happiness from their grasping fingers.

Perhaps the stress of the past few days had unleashed the long-buried demons. I’d gone from a boat-loving beach bum to a hunted man in the space of a few hours. People were trying to kill me and I still wasn’t clear as to why, although now I could see the outlines of the answer forming. I hoped that the coming evening would clear away the mist, turn the shadows into substance, and give me the answers I needed to bring this mess to an end.

Jock and Logan were going to meet me at the Hilton for a burger. We were staying away from the booze until this night was finished. We needed sustenance, and on a pleasant spring evening, the outside bar would be hard to beat. I drove down the key and pulled into the hotel parking lot, parked, and walked in the back way, past the great white egret that hangs around waiting for a treat. He shuffled over a little at my approach and looked at me, waiting for me to feed him something. I shrugged at him and took a seat at the bar.

“Miller Lite?” asked Billy from behind the bar.

“Not tonight, buddy. Got some work to do.”

“I heard Jock was in town.”

“He is. He’ll be here shortly.”

“Good. I always enjoy seeing him. Logan coming too?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Billy laughed. He had known Logan for many years. When they were younger and Logan was just back from Vietnam, they had worked together in a bar at the Tampa airport.

Logan and Jock arrived and we took a table on the deck overlooking the Gulf. We talked as we ate our burgers. Jock had called Bubba at the DEA to ask about Morton.

“What did you find out?” I asked.

“Morton is on their radar, but he’s a shadow. They haven’t been able to identify him and nobody has a picture or prints or anything else. Morton may not even be his name. He’s tied in some way with one of the Mexican drug cartels. They think he’s the southwest Florida distributor. He owns several businesses around Sarasota and uses them to launder his drug money. On paper, he’s a forty-nine percent owner of Baggett’s place, the Snake Dance Inn. DEA is pretty sure there’s a lot of drug money being washed through that bar.”

“He might be the connection between the bikers and the other shooters,” Logan said.

Jock nodded. “Probably.”

“Is Morton his first name or last name?” I asked.

“According to the paperwork on the Snake Dance Inn, it’s both. He goes by Morton Morton.”

“Like Major Major in
Catch 22
,” said Logan.

Jock laughed. “Right, Logan. I didn’t know you could read.”

“If we can get hold of Baggett, maybe he can enlighten us,” I said. “The island gossip mill has sure been full of Morton today. He must have had a couple of bald headed guys. The one Logan took out and another one still with him.”

“Let’s get through tonight,” Jock said. “Then we’ll worry about Morton.”

I nodded in agreement. “I’ll call Bill Lester and let him know that we’re going after Baggett.” I pulled out my phone. It was dark, the battery dead. Crap. “Logan, can I use your phone?”

“I never carry the damn thing. Those minutes cost too much.”

Jock handed me his phone and I called Bill, got his voice mail, and left a message that we were trying to run down a witness and would talk to him later. I tried J.D. again. Got the voice mail again and left another message, telling her about the document and what Newman had said. I told her I’d catch up with her the next morning and we could try to put everything together. I also asked if she had found anything on Morton.

The sun was starting its languid dive into the Gulf, slowly sinking, its orb flattening out as it disappeared over the horizon. No matter how many
times I’d seen that happen, it still caused a flutter of pleasure in my system. It was an affirmation that the world was going around, its daily progress uninterrupted, that no matter how bad things seemed, the earth kept a steady pace in its rotations. That was a soothing thought, but I reflected on the night ahead and began to wonder if I would be alive to see it happen again the next day.

The Snake Dance Inn was a gritty place, taking up the entire first floor of a used-up building. There was a stairway at the side leading up to a veranda that ran along the front of the structure. Four doors were placed along the front, opening onto the walkway. A couple were off their hinges and leaning against the side of the building. They were flanked by old-fashioned double-hung sash windows, some broken, the remaining glass shards standing like alligator teeth in their mullions.

The first floor had one entrance door. The rest of the façade was faded brick. Motorcycles were parked haphazardly along the street in front, interspersed among the few cars that shared the space. More bikes were in a dirt parking lot on the east side of the building. A sign identifying the place as the Snake Dance Inn hung over the door. Above the sign, a single lightbulb encased in an aluminum shade and affixed to the building by a short stanchion illuminated it. This was not a place that invited strangers. Its customers were the regulars, and in this place that meant bikers.

Gibsonton lies south of Tampa on Highway 41 just south of the Alafia River, about fifty miles from Longboat Key. It is an unincorporated hamlet that has long been the winter home of circus and carnival workers, many of whom are now retired and live there year round. It can be a rough place at times and this bar didn’t add much to the town’s ambience.

We’d driven north on Highway 41, turned right on Gibsonton Drive, and then left onto a side street leading to the river. The Snake Dance Inn sat in a block of decrepit buildings, long ago abandoned. It was the only place in the area with lights showing. I suspected this was on purpose, a way to keep the really bad guys separated from the elderly retirees who made their homes in the area. This part of town was simply squalid.