The Alligator Man (8 page)

L
uck was no lady to Vern Fleming.

He ran into a firestorm by the name of Harvey Shay at the high school. Harvey was incensed when Vern showed up and wanted to take Freddie out of school.

“Carlisle Buchanan was here yesterday. He disrupted the whole school. It’s not going to happen again.” Harvey’s face was fiery red and he whined and whined.

Vern gave him five minutes. Then he put on his shades and addressed Harvey like the little pissant that he was.

“If the kid isn’t here, ready to go, in the next five minutes, I’m arresting you for obstruction of justice.”

Harvey just stood there, looking at the flyboy shades in astonishment.

“Four minutes,” Vern said, putting a toothpick in his mouth.

Harvey relented once again. He hoped this investigation was over soon. His ego couldn’t take any more visits from the Forrest County Sheriff’s Department.

Five minutes after his ultimatum, Vern left with Freddie in tow.

It had just been a bump in the road for Vern so far but that was about to change. He and Freddie reached Verona an hour later, having not said a word to each other. To Freddie, Vern was an alien with his shades and his smokes and his skinny black tie. He was a little freaked like he had been that night out on Gladestown Road. Even after he’d met the sheriff himself, Freddie refused to talk to anybody but Carlisle.

Two hours later, Freddie and Carlisle met again—this time in a small white room bare of all furniture and accoutrements except for a metal table, two chairs, and a big mirror inset on the side of the wall facing Freddie. Freddie had seen enough cop shows to know that there were people watching on the other side of that mirror.

Carlisle calmed him down by telling him everything.

“Now Freddie, our conversation is being videotaped and there are people watching, as you know.” Those words pissed Vern off so bad he wanted to barge in the room right then and shoot Carlisle.

Carlisle proceeded to ask Freddie the exact questions he had asked the day before and Freddie, who had followed Carlisle’s instructions and written down his story, gave the same answers. The interview took less than half an hour.

The sheriff just looked at Vern after the interview was over.

“What?” Vern finally asked.

“Nothing,” the sheriff replied. “I’m just trying to calculate in my head the difference between your salary and Carlisle’s.”

V
ern’s “lucky” streak wasn’t over by a long shot. Five days later, a Monday, he took off simply because he was sick and tired of driving over to Gladestown and sitting in that little office, staring into space. The reporters were back because someone had leaked Freddie’s interview to the press and Vern was sick of them too.

“I’ve got nothing to tell you,” he told six different newsmen on six different occasions after they had peppered him with a barrage of questions. Until they got a lead on the automobile, the investigation was at a standstill. He had Carlisle knocking on every door in town, inquiring about friends or family members who owned an old gray car.

“You’re going to be doing real police work,” he had told Carlisle as he sat in Carlisle’s chair and put his feet up on Carlisle’s desk. Carlisle didn’t respond. His little talk with Vern hadn’t worked. He had already decided that his days as an auxiliary officer were coming to an end. He would have quit already except he was sleeping with Sylvia Johnson and keeping her abreast of the investigation on a daily basis. He didn’t want to screw that up.

When Vern took Monday off, Carlisle manned the office. He was sitting at his desk about to head to Rosie’s for breakfast when the door opened and a burly man in his midforties or thereabouts with a full beard walked in. He was dressed in black slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt. His outfit looked a little like something Vern would wear without the tie.

“Is this the Gladestown sheriff’s office?” he asked.

“It’s the Forrest County sheriff’s office,” Carlisle replied. “There is no Gladestown sheriff’s office.”

“Well, I’ve been reading about that Alligator Man murder and I’ve got some information that I thought might be useful to you.”

Carlisle shot up from his desk. “Why don’t you come around the counter and sit down here, Mr.—?”

“Russo, George Russo.”

“Good to meet you, Mr. Russo, I’m Auxiliary Officer Carlisle Buchanan. Now what’s this information that you’d like to share with us?”

“I don’t know if it’s important or not. I’m a bartender down in Verona at a place called the Last Stop. It’s kind of connected to the Verona Inn and most of our customers are guests at the inn. It’s not a very upscale place. The week before the Alligator Man disappeared, this guy was coming in every night. He was drinking real heavy. As a bartender you can kinda tell when somebody’s agitated about something, and this guy was real agitated.

“Anyway, he was in the night the Alligator Man supposedly went missing. He left sometime after eleven—I can’t be sure of the time—but he was real agitated and real drunk. He mumbled something like, ‘I’m gonna kill him tonight.’ I’m not sure those were the exact words but that was the gist of it. I didn’t pay him any mind. Drunks say a lot of stuff. Then I started reading the stories about the Alligator Man—and I thought maybe there’s a connection.”

“You obviously know that Verona is sixty miles from Gladestown because you drove here today, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why would you think a drunk saying he was gonna kill somebody late at night in Verona, when he was totally wasted, had anything to do with the Alligator Man’s disappearance?”

“That’s just it, I didn’t. Not until I read the kid’s story the other day in the paper. That’s when it hit me. This guy drove an old gray Toyota.”

A
s soon as George Russo left his office, Carlisle typed up his interview and faxed it to headquarters. He then called Sheriff Cousins to fill him in.

“I made an appointment for Mr. Russo to come into headquarters tomorrow and give a sworn statement,” Carlisle told the sheriff.

“Good work, Carlisle.”

Sheriff Cousins immediately called the “sick” Vern Fleming to find out how he was doing and to give him the news. Vern was with his wife at the supermarket when the cell phone rang.

“Vern Fleming.”

“How much a pound is the grouper?” Dottie Fleming asked the man at the fish counter at that exact moment. The sheriff couldn’t help but hear it.

“Well, it sounds like you’re feeling better.”

Vern was caught red-handed and he knew it. There was nothing to do but go with the sheriff’s suggestion. “Yes, I am. I decided to go to the store with the wife.”

“Good. I’m happy for you. Carlisle Buchanan has just interviewed a bartender who thinks he can identify the murderer.”

Shit!
Vern said to himself.
That yokel is going to cost me my job.

“I’m just going to drive the wife home. I’ll be in shortly,” he told the sheriff.

“That’s probably a good decision.”

Vern immediately read Carlisle’s interview with George Russo when he got to the office. He didn’t wait around for the sheriff to dress him down, however. He set out for the Verona Inn and sought out the manager.

“I want to see all your registrations for the first two weeks in April,” he told the man after identifying himself.

“And if I don’t want to show them to you?” the man asked. He was a slightly built Indian man and Vern wanted to just smack him across the face and say,
I’m the law, now get moving!
but you couldn’t operate like that anymore. He thought of the principal back at Gladestown High and his attitude.
What the hell is it with people these days?

“This is a murder investigation. Do you want to go to jail for obstruction of justice?”

It was the language of a new era but it worked even better than the slap to the head. Ten minutes later Vern was sitting in a room with a small stack of registration books in front of him. Initially, he was looking for people who paid with cash. If they weren’t using a credit card, they did not have to use their real name. Of course, a criminal could use a fake ID, which would make things a little more complicated, but Vern’s method was always to start with the simple scenario. He found what he was looking for in a little over an hour. A man named Tom Jones had stayed at the hotel from the third to the eleventh and paid in cash. Tom Jones was obviously a false name unless he was a Welshman who swiveled his hips and sang a mean ballad.

“I want to see this man’s registration information,” he told the manager, who pulled it up on the computer almost immediately. Unfortunately, Tom Jones had not put down an address or a license plate number for his vehicle.

“Why don’t your people make them fill out the entire card?” he asked.

“We’re just a small hotel. People can go anywhere they want to spend the night. If they come here, we don’t hassle them with little details like that.”

“But it’s a safety issue.” Vern didn’t know why the hell he was arguing with this man about hotel procedures. He was just frustrated. He had the murderer, he was sure of it, but then again he had nothing.

“We try to be safe,” the manager told him. “When it’s not busy, we usually have one of the desk people write down the license plate numbers in the parking lot. We do it twice a day. It gives us information on where our out-of-state customers are coming from, and we do match the information with what we have on file.”

“What do you do with the information?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me.”

“Well, if the license plate numbers don’t match up with your guests, and obviously they won’t if some of your guests don’t even write down their license plate number on the registration card—what do you do?”

“Nothing.”

Vern wanted to smack the man in the head again.
You make work for your desk people and then you don’t use the information. It’s idiocy.
But then he got an idea.

“Can you print out the license plate numbers collected by your desk people for the second week in April?”

“Sure.”

“And you can give me a computer printout of all the guest registrations during that period as well?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

It was a tedious task, but he could get the names of the vehicle owners from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles and match those names with the guest registrations to narrow down his search for the mysterious Tom Jones.

He was ready to go back to the office now and have his inevitable little chat with Sheriff Cousins.

T
om Wylie woke up at four thirty on the afternoon of his surgery. Unlike the previous day, he was in a lot of pain and unable to focus on his audience. He squeezed Kate’s hand and smiled at her and, eventually, at everybody else in the room. After a half hour or so, he drifted back off to sleep. One by one, his audience slipped away as well. Billy was the first to go, citing some odd jobs that needed to be completed. Ray Blackwell left for Tallahassee soon after that, leaving Kevin and Kate alone with the sleeping patient.

“Your father still has his house in town. Why don’t you stay there while you’re visiting?” Kate suggested. “There’s nobody there and you can spread yourself out and relax. No sense paying for a hotel room.”

Kevin was about to decline. He still didn’t want to accept anything from this woman. But his father’s home had once been his home. He could roam around exploring the nooks and crannies of his past. It was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said.

“Good. I’ll drive you over. Tom’s going to sleep for a while.”

Tom’s home in the Old City was a two-story Spanish Colonial set on one of the canals that led out to the Gulf of Mexico. Kate let Kevin in and gave him a brief tour of the place. It was a modest home with two bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs, including the master, and one bedroom downstairs. Kevin vaguely remembered the house, although in his mind it had been much bigger. The downstairs bedroom had been his room.

There was a breakfast nook in the kitchen with an oversized window that looked out on the water. Kevin sat and lingered there for a minute.

“I loved to sit here when I was a little boy,” he told Kate.

Kate smiled. “It’s your father’s favorite place too.”

The centerpiece of the home was the living room with its massive fireplace buttressed on both sides, floor to ceiling, by bookshelves filled with books on a wide range of topics. The floors were hardwood with antique rugs and runners throughout. The furniture was old but comfortable.

“I could sleep on this couch,” Kevin said as he plopped himself down.

“People have,” Kate assured him, which raised another subject in Kevin’s mind.

“You and my father don’t live together?”

“In a way, we do. I’ve got my ranch and that’s my space. This is your dad’s—this and the lake house. I spend a couple of days a week here. He spends a couple of days a week with me at the ranch, although that will change while he is recuperating.”

“I was wondering about the ranch when you invited me out yesterday. I thought maybe he had sold this place and moved.”

“Not a chance. He’ll never sell this place.”

Kevin wondered why. There had to be bad memories here. “How did you and he meet?”

“We met at a coffee shop, actually. About a year after your mother and father split up and she moved to Miami. Your father was not doing very well back then.” Kevin did not know what she meant by that remark but he did not interrupt her. “We frequented the same place most mornings. There was a common table where we used to sit with a group of people. One day we were the only ones at the table so we struck up a conversation. After that, we were friends and it went from there.”

“How is it that you knew my mother?”

Kevin was probing like a surgeon looking for a stray bullet. Kate did not seem the least bit uncomfortable, however.

“I didn’t. I mean we never met. In the early years, anytime there needed to be communication between them for any reason, I would be the one who talked to your mother. Your father either wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to her.”

“Do you know why?”

“I knew it had to do with you.”

“How did it have to do with me?”

“That I can’t tell you. That’s something you need to talk to your father about.”

Kate departed soon after Kevin’s interrogation, leaving him free to explore his childhood home. It only took him a few minutes to find what he was looking for. His father used the second bedroom upstairs as a den. He had a table set up in the middle of the room against the far wall containing small boxes of hooks and feathers and glue. This was obviously where he made his fishing lures. Next to the table was a small chest and on top of the chest were two eight-by-ten-inch pictures of a little boy. In one picture, the little boy was sitting on the grass, giggling, his face covered with chocolate. In the other, he was dressed in a light blue summer suit with short pants, sitting on a small bench, smiling. Behind the table on the wall was a bulletin board full of pictures of Kevin with his father. His mother was in a few; the rest were of just him and his dad. In all of them, they were smiling and laughing and appeared to be so happy.

There were a few of a black-and-white setter as well—Kevin’s dog Matty. He felt a hollow feeling in his stomach for a moment as he looked at them. When he and his mother moved to Miami, they’d left Matty behind. He didn’t have a say in the matter and he never saw his dog again.

Kevin sat in his father’s den for a long time, taking it all in. He was thirty-six years old, a seasoned criminal lawyer. He knew from experience that the world was gray. Yet in his own life, in his own play, everything was black and white. He loved his mother, Carol, and his stepfather, Stephen. They had always been the good guys. And Tom Wylie and Kate Parker had always been the bad guys. Now he found out that Kate had not even met his father until a year after his mother left. And this room told him that his father had never forgotten about him.
What the hell happened? Why did I never hear from him again?