The Alligator Man (5 page)

C
arlisle finished his report in the late afternoon and headed back to Gladestown. He planned on having a nice quiet dinner at Rosie’s but the circus had already arrived in town.

He first spotted a few reporters camped outside his office as he turned down Gladestown Road. As he drove closer to the Johnson mansion, he saw the TV trucks and the kiosks with the bright lights and the talking heads set up almost at the front door. He thought of poor Sylvia Johnson holed up inside. Then he drove over to Rosie’s only to find that it was filled to capacity.
Reporters!
he said to himself and steered his beat-up old Honda in the direction of home.

Roy Johnson’s disappearance, and the finding of pieces of his clothing in the swamp, was all over the Friday morning news shows and was front-page fodder for the papers, as was the speculation that he had been snatched by an alligator on Gladestown Road. They even had pictures of the two items of evidence. Carlisle could smell Sheriff Cousins’s fingers on that one. Politicians never shied away from publicity, especially national publicity. If it was going to happen anyway, why not be the one to report it?

Vern Fleming was waiting for him at the office. He’d already let himself in.

“Mornin’, Carlisle,” he said way too cheerfully as he sat in Carlisle’s chair with his feet up on Carlisle’s desk. “The sheriff suggested I spend the next few days over here in Gladestown. Kind of manage things until the fire subsides.”

Carlisle didn’t know how to respond to Vern, who had his sunglasses on at eight o’clock in the morning.

“I guess you don’t need me here,” he finally said.

“Not right now. You can go back home and relax if you want. Later this afternoon I’d like to take a boat ride with you to see where you found the stuff.”

“Sure. I’ll come back around two and get you.”

“That’ll be fine.”

It was a cool day for April, one of the rare days in south Florida when the sun did not peek through the clouds. The locals were again praying for rain. Vern was in uniform—white shirt rolled at the sleeves and dark slacks. He’d left the tie in the office and brought a jacket along. Carlisle wore shorts, a T-shirt, and docksiders. After introducing Vern to Scotch, the great blue heron, and asking Scotch to allow them access to the canal, Carlisle fired up the boat. As Scotch flew off, Vern started to wonder about Carlisle’s sanity.

They headed for the swamp on the east side of Gladestown Road where Carlisle had made his initial discoveries. Vern Fleming had retired to Florida from Chicago for the sun and the beach before he decided to go back to work to get away from his wife. He wasn’t a golfer or a fisherman. As soon as the boat left the dock, Vern, the tough city cop, was out of his element. He was a little skittish at the outset when Carlisle handed him the headset with ear cups. He became more frazzled by the sound of the airboat engine, although nobody could notice since his eyes were hidden behind the flyboy shades. And he stiffened up like a board holding on to the sides of the boat for dear life when Carlisle started weaving in and out of the mangrove corridors.

The turtles sunning on pine tree roots did not impress him, nor did the hawks and osprey circling the tree line above his head, and he definitely had his fill when Carlisle stopped the engine for a minute to get his bearings and a gator popped its head up a few feet away to ogle him.

“Is that what I think it is?” he said to nobody in particular.

“Sure is,” Carlisle replied. “But don’t worry, it won’t hurt you.” Carlisle was enjoying Vern’s paranoia.
After all, look what happened to Roy Johnson.

He started the boat again and didn’t stop until he had arrived at the exact mangrove root where the black cloth was discovered. He again cut the motor.

“This is where I found the black cloth,” he told Vern. And then he did something that made Vern cringe from his fingers to his toes. He stepped out of the boat and started walking on the mangrove roots deep into the swamp.

Vern saw a snake dart under some mangrove roots as Carlisle tried to get his attention. He held the side of the boat even tighter.

“I found the shirt piece down here,” Carlisle yelled back to him, pointing farther into the swamp.

“I got it. Good,” Vern replied. He wanted to be on dry land in the worst way.

“I’m going to take a look around, see if I can find something else.”

Vern hung his head in utter despair.

It wasn’t two minutes later that Carlisle shouted, “Oh my God!” and immersed himself completely underwater. Vern was sure he’d been attacked by something and wanted to cry out for help. Before he could find his voice, however, Carlisle reappeared holding an object.

“What is it? Vern yelled.

“A wallet.”

After the discovery of Roy Johnson’s wallet with his license and credit cards intact, even such luminaries as the well-known editorial writer from the
New York Times
, William Frishe, weighed in on his disappearance. With his article in the Sunday
Times
, Frishe gave Roy Johnson a moniker that would last forever.

Roy Johnson was the poster child for the new religion of greed and excess. He was an alligator, swallowing companies up whole and spitting out their remains. His rationale was that the free market was perfect like nature itself. The strong preyed on the weak, but in the end, everything would adjust and come back into balance. Riches eventually would abound for all, trickling down from the highest mountaintop to the lowest valley.

Roy and his ilk convinced those in power of the righteousness of their ways. In the end, a few succeeded in acquiring great wealth, Roy among them, while the country and many of its citizens fell by the wayside. Some shareholders lost fortunes, some their nest eggs. Some employees lost their jobs and pensions, others literally their lives.

Last week, nature corrected the imbalance that the market could not. Roy Johnson walked down a deserted road and an alligator rose from the depths of an Everglades swamp to greet him.

The Alligator Man has gone home.

I
t was four o’clock in the afternoon when Kevin finally jumped into his Jeep Wrangler and headed for St. Albans. He was still reeling somewhat from the argument he had had with Susan. It started as soon as he returned from his run.

“You’re going, aren’t you?” she said to him as he was taking his clothes off to jump in the shower. He didn’t answer her directly.

“Did you ever feel that things were happening that were more than mere coincidence and you had no control over them?”

“That’s just like you, Kevin,” she yelled. “Trying to shift responsibility even when there is nobody else to shift it to.”

“I’m serious.” Kevin said the words slowly and calmly. “Is it just coincidence that on the day after I lose my job I get a call that my father is sick and I need to go to St. Albans?”

Susan wasn’t buying Kevin’s philosophical questions. “For twenty-eight years he hasn’t needed you. Twenty-eight years! He hasn’t called. He hasn’t inquired about your health. Even after your mother’s funeral he didn’t contact you. You don’t even know the man, Kevin. Your future is at stake here. You need to stay and take care of
your
business.”

“Susan, he’s my father. This
is
all about me and my future. What if he dies and I never get to ask him why he abandoned me? Why did he not want me? If I don’t get those questions answered, it may haunt me for the rest of my life. Do you understand that?”

“The only thing I understand is that you’re running away from your problems here. You may be more like your father than you know.”

“That’s unfair and uncalled for, Susan. I don’t know why you’re acting like this. I’m only going to be gone a few days.”

“I know, I know,” she said as she sat down on the bed and started crying. “I don’t know why I’m acting like this either. It’s just a feeling I have that makes me very, very afraid.”

“You have a feeling but you don’t know why?” Kevin asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s the same feeling I have, Susan. I have to go.”

He hugged her and she hugged him back, the tears still in her eyes.

He drove north on Route 120 from Homestead and turned west on Highway 41. Kevin was very familiar with the route, having tried several cases in the city of Verona over the last few years. It was a fun drive. There were canals on both sides of the road and in the winter the alligators would be sunning themselves at the water’s edge. This particular evening he had a panoramic view of the sunset and it was spectacular. The sky, in a matter of minutes, went from a brownish yellow to pink and then deep, deep purple before succumbing to the darkness. He could feel the pressure from his argument with Susan releasing itself like the steam from a boiling teakettle.

When he hit Interstate 75, he headed north to Ocala where he decided to pack it in for the night. St. Albans was located on the west coast of Florida southwest of Tallahassee and was still four hours away. He’d head out in the morning for the place of his birth—a city he had not been to in twenty-eight years.

He knew a little bit about St. Albans from the newspapers and from conversations over the years with people who had either lived or visited there. It was one of the oldest cities in America. The Old City, as it was called, had been pretty much preserved in its entirety and served as a tourist attraction. The modern part of the city, the business section, served as a corporate headquarters for small and midsized businesses.

It was also the home of his father, Tom Wylie.

Even though it had been twenty-eight years since they had seen each other, Tom Wylie was never far from his son’s thoughts. He was a big man with enormous hands, as Kevin recalled, who always seemed to have a smile on his face.
What happened? Why did that smiling man leave me?

Tom Wylie was a lawyer. Kevin had gleaned that much from listening to grown-up conversations that he was not supposed to hear. His mother never talked about him in her son’s presence, nor did Steve Linehart, her husband and Kevin’s stepfather. It was as if he had been erased from their memory in one swipe, like a name on a chalkboard.

Later, when he became a lawyer himself, Kevin learned that his father was very well thought of in the legal community. Just two years before, Tom Wylie had represented a prominent Miami lawyer in a very high-profile murder case, a case that Kevin had followed with great interest.

He also remembered his dog, a black-and-white English setter named Matty. Gone with his father in that same eraser swipe.

He had remained angry with his father over all the years. It was an anger that started as a small hurt in a little boy’s heart, a little pitch fire. He’d stoked that fire at every event where his father failed to show—birthdays, Little League games, high school football, graduation, law school—until it became a raging, out-of-control blaze that he carried hidden behind a closed door.

Kevin counseled himself on the drive north to meet the man in a cool, unemotional way, not only for his own well-being but also because of the circumstances. His father was dying. Eventually, hopefully, they could get around to discussing what happened so long ago.

He hadn’t pursued it with his mother, partly because he knew she didn’t want to talk about it and partly because he’d had no desire to find out. He had his mother and Steve and the fire to sustain him. All that had changed.

Seven years ago, his mother, Carol, and his stepfather, Steve, had purchased a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. Steve had been a pilot for years and owned a single-engine Cessna. The plan was for them to spend the weekends in the mountains during the summer months. One Friday night six years ago, they ran into a thunderstorm. Steve apparently lost control of the plane and it crashed, killing both of them on impact.

With his father’s impending crisis, there was now an urgency to discover the answer to this important piece of the puzzle that was his life. There was a little boy still inside of him demanding answers.

C
arlisle’s world had changed drastically in the days since Roy Johnson’s disappearance. Vern Fleming came to his office every day, sat at his desk, and acted like his boss. Carlisle wasn’t one to take orders. Most of the time he simply ignored Vern but the man was getting on his nerves.

Every morning, Carlisle made it a point to check on Sylvia Johnson. He’d go up to the back door of the mansion, the one that led out to the garden, and give a special knock and Aida would let him in. Sylvia always came down when he showed up, and they had a cup of coffee and Carlisle filled her in on the investigation even though nothing was happening.

She’d had a minor breakdown when Carlisle told her about the discovery of Roy’s wallet. He had stayed with her most of the day. He hadn’t planned to, but he just couldn’t bring himself to leave someone in that much distress alone. Ever since that day, there’d been something between them.

Things really started to heat up after the third week of the ordeal, when the search officially turned from rescue to recovery.

Sylvia began to cry upon hearing the news that the rescue effort was over and Carlisle comforted her, putting his arm around her as he usually did and stroking her head with his strong hands. On this day, however, she picked her head up off his shoulder, looked into his eyes, and kissed him. He kissed her back slowly, sweetly. After a few minutes, without saying a word, she took his hand and led him upstairs.

He stayed with her until almost two when he moseyed over to Rosie’s. He was avoiding the office and Vern.

Things were starting to get back to normal in town as the recovery phase of the search started. The tourist business had pretty much petered out and the place was once again empty.

“Two more minutes and you woulda been outta luck,” Rosie told him as she personally delivered a serving of gator fritters that he had never ordered. “I was about to empty the Frialator when you showed up.”

“Timing is everything,” Carlisle replied.

“Speaking of timing, a few of the high school kids were here for lunch. They do that sometimes—cut a class and sneak out. Anyway, I was cleaning up and kinda listening to their conversation. I do that so in case they’re up to no good I can tell their parents or something.”

Carlisle didn’t believe a word of it. Rosie was just nosy, that’s all. She listened in on everybody’s conversations. He nodded like he understood just so she would tell him what she’d overheard. He wasn’t averse to hearing gossip.

“Do you know Freddie Jenkins, Margie Jenkins’s boy?”

“Yeah, I know him. He and his dad are real good fishermen.”

“Well, he was telling his buddies that he was out neckin’ with Becky Yates in the parking lot of the Chamber of Commerce, right next to the sheriff’s office the night Roy Johnson went missin’. Said his truck was facing Gladestown Road with the lights out when he saw this car make the turn and head down the road. From the lights of the car, he saw a man on the road and he saw the car hit the man and the man went flyin’ into the swamp.”

“Are you sure you heard this right?” Carlisle asked.

“I’ve been listenin’ in on kids’ conversations for years, Carlisle. I know what I heard.”

Carlisle’s brain was churning. “That means old Roy Johnson didn’t get snatched by a gator or fall into the swamp.”

“Nope,” Rosie replied, a serious frown on her face. “It sounds like a hit-and-run.”

Just then Rosie witnessed an event she had never seen before. Carlisle Buchanan rose and walked out of the restaurant, leaving a half-dozen gator fritters still on his plate.