Shake the Trees (12 page)

PART 2

SPRING 2008

CHAPTER 15

Elmer Winfield Tillis, Jr., didn’t like his name.  Neither did his father, who had early on adopted the nickname “T-Bone” - his favorite food and what he had eaten nearly every day of his adult life.  T-Bone had grown up on the family ranch outside Orlando.  The bounty of the land supplied the table, but not to his satisfaction.  His parents were thrifty and sold all of the expensive beef cattle they raised for cash money.  T-Bone changed that when he took over.

Cattle ranching had always been a huge part of the economy in central and north Florida, especially before the advent of frozen orange juice in the 1940s.  Even after much of central Florida was planted in citrus, T-Bone stuck to what he knew.  And then something funny happened in the 1960s.  T-Bone’s neighbors began getting very good unsolicited offers for their groves and ranches. 

The offers were from different out-of-town parties, but the parcels were concentrated geographically near T-Bone’s place.  Most of his neighbors eventually sold, but T-Bone smelled a rat - or at least a mouse.  And he was stubborn.  Eventually the prospective purchaser gave up on T-Bone and announced its plans.  Suddenly the Tillis family was wealthy.  T-Bone had struck oil, but never drilled an inch.  He owned nearly 3,000 acres surrounded by Disney World.

T-Bone lived until the ripe old age of ninety-one, when he died an unnatural death in Key West.  The tour bus chartered by The Florida Cattlemen’s Association had turned on its side and slid down an embankment after attempting to avoid a chicken crazily running around in circles in the middle of Highway A1A.

T-Bone’s only son gave the eulogy at his funeral.  He told how T-Bone had once figured out how many cattle had given their lives to produce the steaks he had consumed during his lifetime.  It was a lot.  Everybody said all that beef would kill him.  That a heart attack was just around the corner.  Turns out it was a chicken.  A single chicken had accomplished what several hundred cattle could not.  The moral of the eulogy was to enjoy life, because we’re usually done in by something we never even see coming.

It was odd then, given his dislike of his given name, that T-Bone named his only son Elmer Winfield Tillis, Jr.  But he did.  And he called him Elmer.  Elmer was fascinated by airplanes and flight.  When he was fourteen, T-Bone traded a side of beef for three months of flying lessons. Elmer was a natural.  He received his single engine VFR ticket at the earliest permissible age of sixteen.  By the time he graduated high school, he’d already acquired multi-engine and instrument ratings.

  After high school, Elmer told his girlfriend, who called him Winfield, goodbye, and joined the Marines.  He became an aviator with the rank of Warrant Officer and went to Vietnam.  Lots of close calls, but he always returned with the proverbial shit-eating grin on his face.  There they just called him “Tillis”, and that’s what stuck.  No first name - just plain “Tillis”.  He had left home a fifth generation Florida cracker, but returned home an heir to a fortune.  That’s when Tillis realized he was just plain lucky.

Tillis had read that early in the twentieth century, Howard Hughes’ father had invented a new and vastly improved drill bit for oilrigs.  Because the bit was in such high demand, and because no one else could make one due to patent protection, he decided to lease the bits instead of sell them.  The customers had no choice, and a fortune was made.  

Tillis knew everybody wanted their land and they sure weren’t making any more of it, so it seemed the idea applied.  He talked T-Bone into long-term leases of fifty years with a provision to update lease payments to market every ten years, and a huge and growing income stream was established.  And they still owned the land.  Except for five hundred acres, which was swapped in a tax-free exchange for a 25,000-acre plantation near Thomasville, Georgia, about forty miles north of Tallahassee.

T-Bone decided that with the family finances assured, it was time for Tillis to get a college degree.  It would be a first in the family line.  He was sent off to The University of Florida at Gainesville with instructions to get a business degree.  While Tillis was most often in search of carnal knowledge, he did display a natural aptitude for the intricacies of finance.  But he was best known to professor and student alike as a generous and popular host.  Many alumni would harbor fond memories associated with a Tillis kegger. 

As his fun-filled years as an undergraduate came to an end, Tillis decided he might just stay a few more years and get a law degree.  But purely for defensive purposes.  This caused T-Bone a great deal of consternation because he truly despised lawyers.  Since it was understood that Tillis would never actually “be” a lawyer, a large contribution was made to the Agricultural College in T-Bone’s name.  Despite its initial period of ambivalence, UF reconsidered and invited Tillis to continue his leisurely stroll through the hallowed halls of academe.

In 1967 the Florida Legislature created The Bureau of Law Enforcement, which was renamed The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) a few years later.  It was essentially a combined FBI and Secret Service at the state level, and coordinated federal and local law enforcement.  A major part of its charter was to investigate serious fraud and economic crimes.

Tillis heard about the FDLE as he neared law school graduation, and knew it was for him.  He enjoyed his time as a student, but missed the excitement of his former military life.  This new organization seemed as if it might make use of all of his talents, and he wouldn’t have to leave his beloved home state. 

T-Bone especially liked the idea of his son chasing down white-collar criminals, which might well include some lawyers.  T-Bone had become a major statewide political contributor, and the Governor returned his call in prompt fashion.  The Governor was told about a perfect recruit for his relatively new organization, and Tillis was soon invited by the Commissioner of the FDLE to submit his application.  The Commissioner warned him that the salary probably wouldn’t touch what he could make in the private sector, but Tillis didn’t care.  Immediately upon graduation with no honors, he joined the FDLE as a Special Agent.

Several years later Tillis acquired the nickname “Could’ve-Been”, although it was never spoken within his earshot.  He had excelled as a Special Agent.  He knew the law and understood finance.  But most importantly, he had the knack. He had the instincts.  When offered a Special Agent in Charge position, Tillis turned it down.  After T-Bone backed a dark horse for governor who won, Tillis was offered the Commissioner’s position.  He passed.  T-Bone gave a boatload of money to the unsuccessful Reagan quest for the Republican nomination in 1976, and to his successful run for the presidency in 1980, and Tillis was offered an assistant directorship of the FBI.  Tillis politely demurred. 

Tillis liked what he did and derived a great deal of satisfaction from his work.  He had no interest in becoming an administrator, regardless of the rank.  He didn’t need the money and he didn’t have an ego that required stroking.  If power was about doing exactly what you want to do, then Tillis was a powerful man.  He just lacked a title that reflected it.

Tillis brought the King-Air in low over Longleaf Plantation and executed a shallow left hand banking turn to line up for a straight-in approach to the small private airport just outside the city limits of Thomasville, Georgia.  He was looking forward to a relaxing long weekend, a well-marbled steak, and a nice bottle of wine.  As the King-Air tires chirped, Tillis looked out upon several privately owned jets.  Heirs to the private rail cars that once brought wealthy industrialists from cold winter environs to their plantations in the South.

In the nineteenth century, Thomasville was literally the end of the line - the rail line.  That fact combined with the gorgeous terrain of rolling hills and heavily forested and well-watered valleys conspired to make a Thomasville plantation a necessary acquisition for any proper capitalist baron of the day.  The abundance of bobwhite quail gave rise to a gentlemen’s sport with all the rules of etiquette of a foxhunt in Old England.

Tillis did not look upon the jets with envy.  He was a traditionalist, and preferred propellers.  But nostalgia had its limits, even for Tillis.  The King-Air was a turbo prop - the propellers weren’t powered by finicky and unreliable piston powered engines, but by jet turbines.  This allowed for reverse thrust upon landing - the propellers could be brought to a prompt stop and their rotation quickly reversed as the wheels touched pavement, bringing the aircraft to an alarmingly sudden halt when necessary.  His King-Air was also the overpowered short version, enabling the plane to leave the runway after traveling only a few hundred feet.  All this meant that Tillis could land and take off from short Florida airstrips that the pilot of a jet could never dream of utilizing.

After taxing to his hangar and shutting down the aircraft, Tillis dialed in the numbers on the combination lock and shoved the heavy hanger door aside, revealing a showroom new 1968 convertible Camaro SS.  Although the vehicle appeared stock, it had been updated with all of the technological improvements of the past forty years.  The top had been left down, and he quickly filled the small backseat with five moving boxes containing subpoenaed records on a case he was working, and fired up the 396 cubic inch power plant.

Although Tillis owned a penthouse condo in centrally located Orlando, which had been stylishly decorated by a former girlfriend and well-known interior designer, he considered Longleaf Plantation home.  The property was named after the slow growing but rock hard longleaf pine that had once blanketed the region.  The majestic tree was nearly harvested out of existence during the 1800s, but the founder of Longleaf had replanted much of the acreage and the towering pines were now fully matured.  The same owner had built the one-hundred year old stone “cottage” that enclosed nearly six thousand square feet of living space, all of which had been renovated with careful attention to the original plans and period detail.

The tires of the Camaro rumbled over the cobblestones of the driveway as Tillis approached the seven-stall double deep stone carriage house that he had built to match the style and appearance of the cottage.  The structure housed the collection of 1960s and 1970s era muscle cars that he’d purchased and meticulously restored over the years.  Tillis left the Camaro parked outside and climbed out of the low-slung vehicle, inhaling a deep lungful of pine-scented air and pushing his fingers through a thick head of wavy black hair.  Only a few silver strands belied his fifty-nine years on earth.  While his green eyes, strong jaw and six foot two inch well-muscled frame matched T-Bone’s, his hair and darker than average complexion found their origin in his maternal line.

Tillis’ direct paternal ancestor had marched into Florida nearly two centuries earlier to fight in what would become known as the Seminole Indian Wars.  The native people were driven to the south.  Remnants of the tribe would eventually take refuge in an area called Ten Thousand Islands.  This seemed satisfactory, because it was clear to all that no white man would ever choose to live there.  Unfortunately, Congress occasionally forgot to appropriate funds to bring the troops home.  Some men found their own way back, while others, like Tillis’ ancestor, settled in the still sparsely inhabited northern part of the peninsula.  Those that stayed earned a living as crackers, a reference to the sound of their whips, herding cattle between grassy patches interspersed amongst the vast and dark flat woods.

Tillis’ mother was an Alvrez.  The middle “a” lost to history.  Or at least to a strong southern drawl.  Generations earlier, Spain had carved land grants out of the northern third of the Florida peninsula.  The Sanchez family received a huge tract on the western side of the peninsula, and the Alvarez family was allocated a similarly generous swath on the eastern side.  The fact that there were still a lot of redneck crackers running around North Florida with the last name of Sanchez or Alvrez seemed odd to many.  But to Tillis, it was his heritage.

As Tillis reached into the backseat of the Camaro to retrieve a box, one of the huge double front doors of the cottage swung open.  The one hundred year old doors had been carved out of four-inch thick slabs of longleaf pine and weighed a ton, but were perfectly balanced and posed no impediment to the small grey-haired black lady who now stood in the doorway with her hands on aproned hips.  Alma Clemons had been Tillis’ housekeeper at Longleaf for more than twenty years, and took her responsibilities there seriously.

“Tillis!”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Did you forget to turn your telephone on?”

Tillis pulled a BlackBerry out of the bagged-out pocket of his worn leather jacket.  He normally filed an IFR flight plan, which required him to turn his cell phone on and close out the plan after he had landed.  But today was beautiful with unlimited visibility and he was in no hurry.  He’d chosen to fly VFR and navigate the old fashioned way by dead reckoning and reference to landmarks on the ground.  By varying his normal routine, he had forgotten to turn his cell on.

“Yes, ma’am.  I guess I did.”

“Well don’t that beat all.  The Governor’s been lookin’ for you.”

“Aw, shit.”

“Tillis!  Watch your mouth.”

“Sorry, Alma.  But a call from Chuck usually means trouble.”