The Alligator Man (9 page)

V
ern handled the sworn videotaped interview at headquarters of the bartender, George Russo, and to his credit he stuck pretty much to the script Carlisle had provided. He wanted a more in-depth description of the angry, agitated bar patron, however.

“Can you describe this man?”

“Sure. He was tall, probably six two or thereabouts. I would say he was in his midforties, dark hair but thinning on top. He didn’t have a beer gut or anything and he actually looked to be in pretty good shape. I know drinkers. I can spot them a mile away. This guy wasn’t a drunk in my opinion.”

“Any distinguishing characteristics, like a scar or something?”

“None that I noticed. You know the bar is kinda dark.”

After that interview, Vern had his nose to the ground like a bloodhound. He heard back from the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles that very afternoon, and it only took him a few hours to go through his two lists and find his man. William Fuller owned a 2000 gray Toyota Corolla. His car had been identified in the parking lot of the Verona Inn from April seventh to the eleventh, the same days Tom Jones had stayed at the hotel and paid cash. There was no doubt that William Fuller was Tom Jones.

Vern immediately called the department back and had them fax a copy of William Fuller’s driver’s license. He then created a photo pack with William Fuller’s picture in it and called George Russo back. At nine thirty the next morning, Russo identified Fuller. Vern had his man.

He took everything to Sheriff Cousins, who was both surprised and relieved that Vern had solved the case so quickly. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the feds were breathing down his neck.

“Great job, Vern. I think Carlisle lit a fire under your ass. This just shows what a good homicide detective can do when he puts his mind to it.”

Vern was sure there was a compliment in there somewhere.

“We need to get the state attorney up to speed right away. I want to get a search warrant issued for that car and I want to arrest that son of a bitch before he knows what hit him. Where does he live?”

“It says here, Twenty-nine Maple Court, St. Albans, Florida,” Vern replied.

“What’s that, eight hours from here? He didn’t come this far to kill somebody for no reason.”

“St. Albans was the corporate headquarters for Roy Johnson’s company, Dynatron,” Vern told him.

“He’s probably a disgruntled employee or something like that. That’s gotta be the connection.”

“That’s my guess. I’m gonna run that stuff down next.”

The next morning, however, Vern was in Gladestown sitting in Carlisle’s chair with his feet up on Carlisle’s desk, chastising and gloating.

“Law enforcement is a paramilitary operation. You’ve got to follow the rules and you’ve got to be thorough. You don’t follow the rules, Carlisle. You investigate what comes to you but you don’t take it to the next level.”

Vern’s words didn’t make Carlisle angry. On the contrary, they affirmed what he had been thinking since this investigation started. He didn’t like following rules. He was somewhat like his dad in that way, although he wasn’t a lawbreaker. And when he actually sat down and thought about it, he didn’t care about finding Roy Johnson’s killer. The man deserved to die. The only reason Carlisle had put up with Vern this long was Sylvia Johnson.

He was sure she would understand why he quit, although he wasn’t going to tell her how he really felt about her deceased husband.

“You know, Vern, you’re absolutely right,” Carlisle said as he turned and walked out of the office.

“Hey, come back here. Where are you going?”

Carlisle ignored him. He got in his little white Honda and drove directly to Verona. He felt he owed it to Sheriff Cousins to give him the news personally.

“I’m resigning, sir,” he told the sheriff when he was finally ushered into the man’s office.

“What’s the problem, Carlisle? Vern getting on your nerves? I know all about it. He gets on mine every day. Look, this investigation will be over soon and everything will be back to normal.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Sheriff, but I won’t be back to normal. Things have changed in the way I see myself. I’m not cut out for this type of work.”

“I could get you a raise if that would do it.”

“No, sir. To tell you the truth, I don’t want to find Roy Johnson’s killer.”

“I understand. What will you do?”

“I’ll go back to giving airboat tours. And I’m a fishing and hunting guide. I’ll make ends meet.”

“I can’t talk you out of this?”

“No, sir.”

A
fter he’d sat in his father’s den alone for an hour or so and sorted nothing out in his mind, Kevin called Susan.

“Hi, honey, I’ve missed you,” she said when she heard his voice.

“I’ve missed you too, honey.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Well, my father had his surgery and he survived, although he still has terminal cancer.”

“Did you and he have your talk?”

“No. He’s barely conscious. We haven’t said anything to each other.”

“Well, maybe tomorrow he’ll be more alert.”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. This whole situation is a little more complicated than I believed it to be. I’ll probably be here for a little while.”

“What’s ‘a little while’?”

“Two weeks or so.”

“Two weeks! Kevin, do you realize you don’t have an income anymore?”

“Stop it, Susan. Of course I do. It’s not like I’m destitute. I’ve got plenty of money in the bank.”

“That money is going to go quick with your mortgage and utilities and food…”

“I’m not worried about it, okay? I’m just not worried about it.”

“You don’t worry about anything, including me. I’m just supposed to sit here like the dutiful girlfriend and wait until you decide to come home. And I shouldn’t say anything about you running off to St. Albans and spending all your savings and destroying all of our plans for the immediate future. I’m just supposed to put up with it.”

Kevin had had enough. “It’s always about money with you, isn’t it? Well, I’ve got news for you. My life isn’t a balance sheet.” He hung up the phone.

She called back immediately but he didn’t answer. He was already on his way to Chico’s. He needed a drink.

Billy was at the bar in the same spot Kevin had seen him the night before. It was a little more crowded, but still very relaxed.

“Hey, Kev, right on time. Let me buy you a drink.”

“Sure. I’ll just have a light beer, any kind,” he told the bartender.

“Draft or bottle?”

“Draft.”

“You look a little down,” Billy observed.

“Yeah, I just had an argument with my live-in girlfriend.”

“She wants you home, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s reasonable. She misses you.”

“I’ve only been here a couple of days. And it’s not like I’ve been on a golfing trip or something. She just can’t let things be. She’s got to press and press.” He took a long sip of his draft, almost emptying it.

“Well, it’ll all work out.” It was the best Billy could come up with.

“Or it won’t,” Kevin replied, surprising himself with his words. “By the way, Billy, while we’re talking about relationships, how is it that you’re so close to my father?”

“We go back a long ways. Your dad and my dad were friends, and then my dad died when I was seventeen. I was a little out of control after that. I don’t know if my mother called your dad or not, but he just started showing up, taking me out to the lake with him and you—that kind of stuff. He never talked to me—you know, like play the substitute father with the sage advice and all that bullshit. I probably would have tuned him out completely if he did. Instead, he taught me how to fish and hang out and enjoy stuff just by doing it. Some days it was just you, me, and him, and we’d have a cookout at the lake and cook the fish we caught. I mean, it was great. We’ve been friends ever since.

“Getting through that time straightened me out. I finished school, got my two-year degree, and met Laurie, the love of my life. We had a great life. Of course, I’ve lost everything now.”

“Not everything. You’ve still got the kids.”

“Yeah, I probably wouldn’t be around if I didn’t have them. It’s still hard to cope some days. That’s why I find myself in here a lot more often than I should be. Listen, let’s get off this subject. If you decide to stay in town for a while, I need to take you to a ball game. We’ve got a great Double-A baseball team here. It’s a nice old ballpark, costs nothing to get in, and beers are a buck. My kids love to go too.”

“It sounds like a great night out and I want to meet your kids.” Kevin wasn’t ready to leave the discussion they were having just yet. He had one more question to ask Billy.

“Were my father and I close back then?”

“Oh, man, you guys were inseparable.”

J
eanette Truluc had been a prosecutor for almost ten years, eight of those years in Forrest County. She was the top prosecutor in the Forrest County state attorney’s office and she usually tried all the high-profile cases. Frank Cousins was not surprised that she would be handling the Alligator Man case. Vern Fleming, however, didn’t like her at all. The fact that Jeanette was a dark-skinned Jamaican woman who usually wore her hair in braids probably had something to do with his feelings.

“Can’t they assign somebody else to this case?” he asked the sheriff.

“Who else would they assign? She’s the most experienced.”

“Well, I don’t like her.”

Sheriff Cousins knew that Vern’s opinion of Jeanette had a lot to do with the color of her skin and her gender, although he also knew that Vern would never admit it.

“You don’t have to like her. This isn’t about you.”

Jeanette Truluc came to the sheriff’s department at Frank Cousins’s request and reviewed the entire investigative file—including Carlisle’s initial interview with Sylvia Johnson and the sworn testimony of George Russo and Freddie Jenkins. The DNA report regarding the pieces of clothing found in the swamp came back as well. No DNA samples were found. When she concluded her review of the file, Jeanette left without discussing her thoughts and opinions with anybody.

When Frank Cousins heard that she had not talked to Vern at all, he smiled to himself. It was the smart thing to do.

She called him the next morning at nine o’clock sharp.

“I think that there is enough evidence to establish probable cause for a search warrant to be issued. However, the arrest issue is tenuous in my mind. While there arguably is probable cause to arrest, I’m not convinced there is enough evidence for a conviction.”

Frank did not reply right away. He wanted to listen between the lines for a moment. “What’s the problem?” he finally asked.

“There’s no evidence of motive at this point. That has to be filled in. Without it, we have a guy from St. Albans, who has a gray Toyota, spending a week in Verona and a murder occurring in Gladestown at the end of that week, involving a gray car that might be a Honda or a Toyota, or a dozen other vehicle brands. Those two events are intriguing but they are not sufficiently tied together. The bartender’s testimony that this guy said he was going to kill somebody gets you into the probable cause arena for arrest, but it’s tentative.”

“I see your point, Jeanette. Let’s just get the search warrant for now, continue our investigation, and at least try and talk to the guy.”

T
here was a patio on the south side of Tom Wylie’s house bordered on the east side by a wall and on the west side by the Gulf. The wall was attached at the southern end to a two-story building, which served as a garage on the bottom floor. Kevin had no idea what the second floor was used for. He was having his coffee on the patio, looking out at the water, when he heard a car pull into the garage. When nobody emerged from the building, he decided to investigate and walked up the outside steps to the second floor. He startled a middle-aged woman who was scurrying around in what appeared to be an office.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” Kevin said when the woman grabbed her chest at the sight of him and let out a loud gasp.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting anybody.”

“I’m Tom’s son, Kevin. I’m staying at the house.” He extended his hand. The woman hesitated a moment before reciprocating.

“I’m Jan, Jan Meyers,” she said. “I’m your father’s secretary.”

Kevin looked around. Jan was standing at her desk, which was obviously a secretarial station. There was a large office to his right. To his left there was another vacant secretarial station and a smaller office. “So this is his office?” Kevin asked, pointing to the bigger office on the right.

“Yeah,” Jan replied. “This is it. It’s been the same for the thirty years I’ve been here, although there’s not a whole lot going on these days. Your dad’s been phasing himself out for a while. He’s only got a few appeals left. I just putter around mostly, answer the correspondence that I can, and put the rest aside for him when he gets back. There was a time, though. I can’t tell you the cases your father has handled out of this little office.”

“Who’s in the other office?”

“Nobody. We’ve had some people in there for short periods from time to time but mostly it’s been vacant. ”

Jan was an attractive woman, probably in her midfifties, Kevin surmised.

“Maybe I can help with the correspondence,” he heard himself say. “I’m a lawyer.”

“Just like your father. That’s nice.”

Kevin didn’t reply. He didn’t want to get into it with this woman.

“He’s got an appeal that just got set for oral argument. Somebody needs to request an extension of time,” she said.

“Sure. I’ll need to talk to him about that, but why don’t I take a look at the file?”

She hesitated for a minute. Kevin could see that she was going over things in her mind. Client files were confidential, but this was Tom’s son. And he was a lawyer.

“You go in and sit in his office, and I’ll bring the file to you,” she finally said.

Kevin spent the next hour reading about Aurelio Hernandez, a cab driver in the business district who had been shot and paralyzed from the neck down by a robber. Hernandez had no medical insurance and received no workers’ compensation or disability payments because he was classified as an independent contractor. Tom Wylie was arguing in the appeal that cab companies were abusing the system and denying cab drivers fundamental rights by calling them independent contractors rather than employees. The classification was an illusion. The company escaped the obligation to provide workers’ compensation and Social Security benefits, and the driver had no protection whatsoever, which in the end left him crippled and destitute.

This is the kind of work I should be doing,
Kevin thought to himself.

He didn’t get to the hospital until after ten that morning but it didn’t matter. His father was still pretty much out of it. He was in a great deal of pain and the hospital staff was keeping him medicated. Kate was there until Kevin convinced her to take the opportunity to run any errands that she had. It gave her a break and gave him an opportunity to be alone with his father, even though Tom Wylie was not in any shape to carry on a conversation. Tom smiled when he woke up and saw Kevin at his bedside. He held his son’s hand as he had done on that first day.

The next day was pretty much the same. Kevin was there when Alex came in to check Tom’s incision. He watched as the bandage was removed and Tom winced in pain. There was a long scar down the middle of his stomach, and Kevin could only imagine what had been cut and displaced to allow the doctors to get in there and remove 80 percent of his father’s liver.

“You’ve got to start walking today, Tom,” Alex told him. “Otherwise you’ll get pneumonia.” Tom just grunted. Kevin could not imagine his father getting up and walking in that condition.

That afternoon, two orderlies came in and assisted the poor man as he stood up and attempted to walk down the hall. The expression on Tom’s face as he tried to first sit up and then stand was so severe it made Kevin wince. Kate was next to him and she grabbed his arm to steady herself. His anger at his father seemed so small at that moment.

On the fourth day, Tom seemed even more alert. Ray Blackwell showed up that day, as did Billy, who had been sticking his head in for a few minutes every morning.

Billy and Kevin had been meeting almost every night at Chico’s for a couple of drinks.

“I’m just allowing myself a couple now,” Billy said. “Eventually, I have to get back to my old ways, exercising daily and having a few beers on the weekend. It’s just hard right now.”

“I hear you,” Kevin said. “I’m struggling myself.”

The two men were becoming fast friends. They had gone to the baseball game the night before and Kevin had met Billy’s kids, Thomas and Heather. They were nice kids and Kevin couldn’t help but notice how much they adored their father. It just didn’t seem to be enough for Billy. He had lost too much.

“They get it all from their mother,” Billy told him when Kevin complimented him on his children. “She loved them to death but she made them toe the line. They’d be fine even if I were gone tomorrow.”

“I don’t think so,” Kevin told him. “I see a lot of you in those kids.”

Alex came in when everybody was still there. As soon as he completed his examination and confirmed that Tom was coming along nicely, the ribbing started with Judge Blackwell leading the way.

“Kate, you’re going to have to watch him when he gets out of here. He’ll be pulling his shirt up and showing all the ladies his scar and telling them he’s a war hero.”

“He’s been doing that with his appendix scar for years,” Kate replied. “It’s never gotten him anywhere.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Tom told them, smiling from the bed. “We don’t want to ruin Alex’s masterpiece.”

Kevin enjoyed the moment with the rest of them, no longer feeling like an outsider.