January 25, 2012

 WINDOW ON THE POND

FIRST WEEK

Monday, July 12

 

 “Do you know what’s going on?” her son Robin asked a small group of gawkers in the nearly emptied parking lot at Bok Tower Gardens.

“We heard a body was found inside the wildlife lookout at the pond,” a middle-aged man wearing white jeans and a navy tee shirt told him. “And it wasn’t a crocodile that shot him.”

 ***

The Dorado Bay police are slogging through a humid mid-July, phones ringing ceaselessly at the central station. Captain Rueben Samuels, aka “Sam,” doesn’t hear them. He is isolated in the annex, insulated floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. These hold reports and unclaimed evidence from crimes committed along this section of West Coast Florida prior to 1951.

The history shelved here makes Sam think about quitting his job to be a true crime writer. His books would be in the hard-boiled genre, but not the fantasy stuff with rich debutantes in slinky skirts deceiving down-at-the-heel detectives. Realism is better. Not so much about sex as about power and desperate means to survival. Biographical stuff. He would write from the point of view of the perp – narrating from death row, a “Last Testament” series.

Sam often thinks about Florida in the good old days when you knew who the bad guys were because they advertised themselves. Established Mafiosi lived in the biggest houses and threw parties for one another, inviting local bigwigs. They never caused problems. It was the second-rate gangsters that chased around the sand roads shooting out each other’s tires. They gambled, swaggered, womanized. If cops occasionally brought one or two in through the tiled archway of the old police station, the wannabees would sneer, act invincible, boast of tentacles running all the way back to the sewers of New York City. And pay their fines.

There was a kind of mutual respect between crooks and cops back then. That changed in Sam’s era of policing, when Florida became easily accessible by train and plane up and down the East Coast. From the other direction, frost-fearing, Midwestern pilgrims came high tailing it down every winter on brand new roads. Population boom. Diversity. Commerce. Then, when illegal drugs arrived big time, anyone you looked at could be crooked or go bad in Florida.

Sam heaves out a sigh of resignation. He’s seen lawbreakers so doped up their heads bounce around on their skinny necks, their faces so slack they can’t even hold an “I dare you” expression. Nobody gawks at crooks anymore. They come in, pushed or dragged if need be, through the side door.

The daily intake at DBPD takes place in a 1980s, high-ceilinged, concrete addition, where gray steel desks are lined up in rows, separated like ice cubes in a tray of aluminum-framed, half-walls. When the facility recently was upgraded, the walls got five-foot extensions of smoke-gray, bullet-proof glass. Interrogations in each cubicle are “private,” though any can be watched in progress by those authorized to look down from the bullet-proofed mezzanine.

Yet it seldom happens that way. The department runs so lean and overburdened with paperwork that nobody has time. Those appointed to review the suspects’ lies and alibis listen to the tapes when they can, and fail to see the nuances in body language. They can’t read the faces. It’s rights, records and statistics that give the expanding justice system its weight.

And in this system, which accounts for a large slice of the local economy, there is neither time nor a decent place for a first-time offender to be alone long enough for remorse to overcome indignation, no opportunity for a lawbreaker to pledge that the behavior will not be repeated.

The old detective finds this depressing.

“Everybody’s doing it,” is the tacit excuse for a crime. “I gotta make a living.” “I’m hooked.” “I’m crazy, man. Lock me up.” Bail is paid, time served, they’re gone. If it’s white collar crime, then the trial drags on.

Some might surmise the Captain of Detectives is semi-retired. Accepting that his views are obsolete, Sam has left interrogations to his juniors, middle-rank officers who never heard of “rehabilitation,” whose goals are to get confessions, to expedite cases.

Now things seem to be changing again. The newest recruits have arrived schooled in cool reserve, and yet under their jackets they are morally outraged and viciously aggressive, ready to lay down their lives. You wonder what kind of war they come from. They worry Sam. Yet he knows the real rot in the profession is the next rank up from him, the pansy bureaucrats in the corner offices who so fear making a mistake that they won’t even snicker when some smug, middle-class, child molester blames it on his priest.

These bureaucrats are increasing in number. Sam, with the threatening advantage of seniority, not to mention his perfected grumpiness, and a recent triumph in removing a gang of quasi-military avengers, got the go-ahead to move his office as far as he could get from the toilet-bowl atmosphere of reception, to what respectful colleagues call “Captain Sam’s think tank.” His office in the annex, appropriately next to the archives, helps him stay off his ulcer medications.

Pale sunlight filters through pebble-textured, clerestory windows. Sam wonders once more if he’d feel better about his life and be in better health if he’d stayed in Paramus, New Jersey, grown into his parents’ shoes and run their ice cream parlor. But they’d saved for him to go to college and have a real career. Forty years later, his parents long gone, his ex-wife institutionalized, and his kid on the run, he has to ask: Was he so damned smart with his B.S. and two years of elite academy training? He stares in the mirror a lot these days. His double chin and wrinkles don’t bother him. It’s his badge. B.S. for sure.

He’s admitted his sense of failure to only one person: Sophie George. It was after the Urquardt case, as close as he’d come to gangland crime in recent years. The retired librarian had been the one to point him in the right direction. When it was over, and they were sharing his most expensive bottle of wine, he polished his badge with his napkin and pinned it on the shoulder of her sweater. Then they both forgot about it. She called him the next day to report she had worn it into her doctor’s office. She said it got her in and out in record time.

***

Harold Garber decides that a pause at the Reflection Pool at the foot of the Singing Tower will be a fitting prelude to his errand. Approaching his favorite bench in the herbaceous sanctuary, he is annoyed to find it occupied by a woman stretched out on her back, a Florida road map tented over her face. Harold settles on a matching bench across from her. Here he can glimpse the swans beneath the tower bridge. He can breathe the sweet nectar wafting from deep-throated, copper-hued lilies, tall stalks reaching above his left shoulder.

Across the path, the recumbent woman seems to be asleep, or nearly so. He watches the rhythm of her breathing. The map shields her from pinpoints of light beaming down through umbrella-like leaves on champion Acer barbatum. She twitches a shoulder, an elbow, and then a hand flies out to brush away an insect. Each time she moves the map slides a fraction of an inch toward the path.

She is smartly dressed in a white, short-sleeved blouse, and skirt of blue denim with strawberries embroidered all over the cloth. He remembers seeing skirts like this back in New England. Perhaps this is a Vermont housewife who stepped out of a village market one day and decided to drive to Florida instead of back to her house. He slaps his knee. What an imagination! He sometimes delights himself. But he is gratified, too, to see an outfit that isn’t downright embarrassing. The way people dress down here – ill-fitting shorts and message tee shirts swarm over Disney World, Sea World, and Busch Gardens. This woman confirms his belief that Bok Tower Gardens is a preserve for visitors of discriminating tastes. But she is barefoot. Her toenails are painted a subtle rose.

Staring at the skirt and a yellow cardigan bunched up behind the sleeping woman’s shoulders, Harold is transported back to the square, gray stucco house with the white Tuscan columns where, by this stage of summer, the lawn must be browning and the garden a tangle of vines. He should be back there. Yet it seems just last week that he found Dorothy folded over her knees as if she had collapsed praying to the border of zinnias. He considers all that has taken place since last September: the sober funeral, several weeks of sympathetic gestures of friends and neighbors, considerable paperwork, including writing thank you notes. And then the decision to retire early, and leave Boston temporarily to stay with their recently-divorced, only child. It was all so automatic. Where was his imagination then? He had made no plan for a life without Dorothy, or without an office to go to. He’s here now in the center of Florida by default. And caught in a web of deceit he cannot fathom.

Harold’s morose thoughts are distracted by the woman’s shoes, striped canvas sandals, tied together by long laces, hanging over the end of the bench. They seem a frivolous choice for a woman whose gray hair now shows above the sliding map. He thinks back to a long time ago. He’s sure he’d seen such things on leggy girls with suntans, the sort who wore off-the-shoulder blouses and full skirts that blew up in the wind – girls who now would be in their sixties and seventies. Could she be one of them?

Restless now, Harold stands and pulls out the printed guide to the park he had stuck into his shirt pocket. He reads again that Lake Pierce Vista, stretched out before him, once was at the bottom of the sea. He looks down at his damp shoes. His ribbed socks are soaked, and cut grass sticks to the ankles. He would like to take them off. Not a chance. A sleeping woman can be barefoot, but a man tickling his toes on the green slope of fine lawn would be silly, sure to draw attention, and that’s the last thing he wants to happen.

***

Lieutenant James Will has not set foot outside Buchanan County for more than one day since Christmas. He usually takes a mid-summer break to be with his boys. But last July there had been three incidents of violence, two resulting from domestic quarrels, the other from a drunken brawl, and Sheriff McMahon seemed to put the blame for all of them on his Blue Lake peace officer being away.

“Better stick around,” he said when James approached him this year about taking a week off to go camping. “Keep a lid on things.” He gave him a buddy-punch and winked insincerely. “Mebbe you’ll get an award or something.” Not a promotion.

Considering the overall record of Florida violence, James knows the citizens in his little inland burg behave pretty good, despite the domestic spats and occasional one-too-many. They live in relative calm, far from the web of interstate highways that feed the coastal cities. The only roads that come through Blue Lake are old ones intersecting fields and orchards every few miles, and they are not well marked. Not many chances for a stranger to hit and run.

James takes a bite out of his rubbery cheese sandwich, sets the rest on the plastic baggie on the window ledge, and opens a file folder on his desk. McMahon has given him some bedtime reading, crime data he wants summarized for the single-page report the Sheriff delivers monthly to the Chambers of Commerce.

Certain facts stick out like sores. The Sunshine State ranks among the top five in most categories of crime. There are almost as many homicides in Florida as there are in New York. The only state that had more violent deaths per 100,000 last quarter was Hawaii. James finds this at odds with his picture of the beautiful peaks of the undersea mountain range, where life should be bliss. He imagines taking his boys to ride the incredible surf, and lie on sandy beaches uncluttered by flabby, aging torsos. There would be beautiful girls with smooth brown skin for Teddy to ogle behind his shades. Nicky would be wearing goggles, ready to snorkel.

He recently sent Nicky a National Geographic with pictures of Hawaii’s fish. Long red skinny ones. Yellow flat ones. Blue and green striped fish with black lips. Fish you could see through like those “ghost shrimp.” You can dive in water full of color, like an aquarium.

Every single day, James Will thinks about his sons living across the state with their mother. Driving home after work, he’s especially lonely. He wishes he would find those little buggers waiting to jump on him when he pulls up in the driveway. Most nights he drags his butt into the empty house around eight, plops down on the sofa in front of the TV. He’s never hungry, having munched on crap all day, but two, three beers a night have put on a gut.

So, lately, he’s taken to hanging around the station until ten or eleven, and even sleeps there some nights, unrolling his camping bag onto the shabby sofa in the lounge. He has an aversion to jail cell cots, though they are relatively clean, due to the fact that they are almost always empty.

TV makes cops’ jobs look exciting, but in the real world, tending to lowlifes is boring. Nothing heroic to do here. The only thing that makes routine police work in the deadest part of Florida tolerably worthwhile is having kids to support, their futures to dream about.

But there are kids and there are kids, he reminds himself. Junie’s kids’ whining and fighting has put a drag on that romance, especially since he came pretty close to whacking Joey once. Their acting up affects Junie differently. When they all went to Disney World last month, she must have said “shut up” ten thousand times. Mom and Pop never allowed him to use those words. Thank God he’d worked up the courage to tell Junie that much, and that he needs his own space for a while. She’d looked shocked. Like she couldn’t imagine why he was upset with her. It’s awkward at the station. Every day he has to walk past her desk, back-and-forth, back-and-forth. She usually keeps her face down when she hears his footsteps coming her way. He appreciates that.

James spends a few more minutes brooding about Junie, and how he probably owes her a chance to talk things over. He taps six digits of the familiar seven, and then puts the receiver back in the cradle. He can’t do it. Not yet. Maybe never.

“I should be looking for another job. It would make things a heck of a lot easier,” he mumbles to no one.

***

“Look, Mommy! That lady’s asleep in the woods!”

She no longer is, of course. The shrill voices shatter Sophie George’s calm, send her mind groping for congruity. The floppy map slides away, a corner lifted by a gentle breeze, reminding her that she and Robin and Anita are on their way to Mable Beach to see her sister. But what is this place? It looks like the cemetery she picked out in Hillsdale before she ever thought of moving south. Now Sophie recognizes the faience grille of the Singing Tower and snaps to alertness, irritated by her fuzzy thinking. After all, it had been her own suggestion to stop at the historic landmark built in the 1920s by the distinguished New York publisher of the Ladies Home Journal. She studies the pinkish gray marble walls, rising 200 feet in a sort of Gothic Art Deco style. Her gaze moves up to the carillon tower and then down, noting the decorations. Flamingos and cranes, jellyfish and seahorses, pelicans, storks, and even baboons. Her nearsighted eyes then light on her colorful toes. She had let Anita treat her to a pedicure!

Where are those lovebirds? And what happened to her shoes?

She grasps the edge of the bench and hoists herself to a sitting position. The sun’s rays are spreading across the western horizon. She bends over to search the ground around her.

“They’re hanging on the other end.” The voice comes out of the miasma of light and fragrant flowers across the path. She squints and sees a slight man standing opposite her, crisply dressed in tan pants and plaid shirt, his hands on his hips.

“No,” she says. “Those aren’t mine. They belong to my son’s fiancée. I remember now. She borrowed my walking shoes and left those silly things here.”

“Well, it looks like you’re stuck then,” Harold Garber says, pleased with himself for having discerned that the footwear had not seemed right for her. He is a pretty good judge of character. And a gentleman. He steps forward to pick up the fallen map for her, and starts to fold it, unobtrusively glancing at his watch.

“Yes, I guess I am. But they should be back soon,” Sophie replies, concerned that he might feel responsible for her. She reaches out for the map. He nods, gives it up, and steps back.

“Well, I’ll leave you on your own, then.” Harold makes a slight gesture like a “so-long” wave and turns away from her. Suddenly aware that she may have offended him, Sophie calls after him.

“Oh – sorry –I wasn’t telling you to leave. I just didn’t want you to think I was helpless.”

“Don’t worry. I had already decided about that. In fact…” Inexplicably, Harold feels compelled to make a confession. “As you were resting, I imagined you were a New England housewife tired of cooking pot roast, who decided on the spur of the moment to take a drive.”

“To Florida?”

“Well, you know how Yankees are. Hardly ever leave the township. But once they make up their minds . . .” He chuckles, twitches a tidy moustache, and she allows herself to laugh, too, her right hand placed over her heart, her left hand holding down the flap of her wrap skirt.

“I did live in Connecticut once,” Sophie offers, “when I was a young girl, on a farm near New London. We were really from New York, though.”

Harold’s chest lifts with a certain justified smugness. He could always recognize a kindred spirit. “I just came down here from Boston,” he says with a broad smile.

“Apparently, you’re glad you did.”

He sits down again and for ten minutes they chat. He tells her about his wife’s death and his daughter’s insistence that he join her in Florida for the winter. Lacking any ideas for filling his retirement years, he had agreed. Winter passed, and spring, too. He’s been in Florida now ten months.

“Are you going back?”

“I don’t know. I think I want to, but – my daughter needs me.”

END OF EXCERPT