Authors: H. Terrell Griffin
I paid the bill, left the hard joking waitress a three dollar tip, and went outside, again getting a blast of air from above the door. The streets were heating up, with the sun moving almost directly overhead. I took my jacket off and held it over my shoulder. Sweat was beginning to dampen my white dress shirt. I was irritable and the harsh coffee was settling uncomfortably in my stomach. I reached the rental, got in and cranked the engine, turning the AC to high. I sat there for a minute with the door open, letting the car cool down. My phone rang. I reached over to the passenger seat and wrestled the phone out of my inside coat pocket. It was Bill Lester.
“Shit, Matt. That wasn’t Connie Sanborne we buried.”
“What did you get, Bill?”
“Her name was Vivian Pickens. She was busted in Chicago nine years ago and charged with prostitution and possession of cocaine with intent to sell. She was tried, found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison. There is a warrant out on her for violation of probation. What the hell is going on?”
I told him what I had found out. “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why she ran. According to the people at the half-way house, she was doing fine. Her probation period was about up, and with her skills she could have gotten a good job. She probably could have stayed right there at the Grant.”
“Who knows,” he said. “Still, Matt, this doesn’t change anything as far as Logan is concerned. It’s no big deal to change the name of the victim on the indictment.”
“I know, Bill, but this sure makes me curious about Vivian. Do you have anything else on her?”
“No, that’s it. Name, place of arrest, charges and warrants. That’s about all you get out of the feds. I remember when you couldn’t get that much without weeks of waiting and begging. Ain’t computers grand?”
“Yeah. Thanks Chief. I’ll be in touch.”
“Wait a minute. When’re you coming home, and what about Logan?”
“I’ll be there in a couple of days. We’ll see about Logan.”
“Take it easy, Matt.” The line went dead.
The Illinois Probation and Parole office was housed in a nondescript mid-rise building, called the State Office Center, on Michigan Avenue. I found a parking place and walked the two blocks back to the building in a glaring noon day sun. By the time I entered the musty smelling building, I had saturated my shirt with sweat, and my mood was darker than my navy blue suit. I climbed two flights of stairs and entered a large room full of disreputable looking people lounging in the molded plastic chairs. Some were sprawled across several chairs, sound asleep. There was a counter at one end of the room behind which perched several clerks on high stools staring at computer terminals. I approached one, and said politely, “I wonder if you could help me.”
“Take a number and be seated,” she said, without looking up from her monitor.
“I need to speak with Will Ledbetter, please. Is he still in this office?”
“You’ll have to take a number and wait your turn,” she said, still staring at the monitor.
“What is your name, please?” I inquired, smiling.
“What do you need to know that for?” she asked, finally looking at me.
“Because,” I said, “When the director of this department asks me who was rude to the gentleman who chairs the Senate Committee responsible for this office’s budget, I want to be able to give him a name.”
Her eyebrows went up. Her mouth opened and then closed, then opened again. “Just a moment, Sir. I’ll tell Mr. Ledbetter you’re here. Your name?”
“Royal,” I said. “Matthew Royal.”
She picked up the phone, punched in three numbers, and said, “Senator Royal is here to see you, Mr. Ledbetter.” She paused a moment, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up the phone. “He’ll be right with you Senator,” she said, a pained smile briefly crossing her face.
A moment later a large black man, wearing a short sleeve white shirt, a paisley tie and a plastic pocket guard in his shirt pocket came lumbering through a side door. He looked at me and asked, “Senator Royal?”
“I’m Matt Royal,” I said, sticking out my hand. We shook and he asked me to come back to his office. We walked through a maze of cubicles partitioned off by those cloth covered screens that you see in offices everywhere. His office was small and cramped, with a beat up wooden desk covered in papers. There was a vinyl and metal desk chair situated under a grime caked window, and two fold up metal chairs for visitors.
He motioned me to a seat, and said, “What can I do for you, Senator?”
“I’m not a senator,” I said. “I’m a lawyer from Florida, and I think I have some information about one of your probationers.”
“I thought Carol said you were a senator,” he mumbled.
“I might have led her to believe that in order to get her attention.”
“Oh, well, what the hell. Carol is probably having one of her bad days. Come to think of it, I don’t remember her ever having a good day. Who do you have information on?”
“Does the name Vivian Pickens ring a bell?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. I remember Vivian. She was one of the smart ones. I thought she’d make it, but one day she disappeared. I never could figure out if she’s hiding or if she’s dead. What do you know about her?”
“She’s dead,” I said. “You should be getting notification through your normal channels in a few days.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I always liked Vivian, and thought she would make it through the program and turn her life around. What happened?”
“She was murdered about six weeks ago in Longboat Key, Florida. She had been living there for about four years under an assumed name. You were right about her. She did make it. She was the sales manager for one of the beach hotels.”
“What is your interest in this?” he asked.
“I’m representing the man accused of murdering her.”
“Golden Joe?”
“The pimp? No. Why would you think that?”
“Joe’s the only one who would have any reason to kill her,” he said.
“Why would Joe want to kill her?”
“She testified against him in a murder case. That’s the reason her sentence was reduced and she got the halfway house. Joe was sentenced to life for the murder, but I heard that he got out of prison about four months ago when the Supreme Court said that the prisoners were entitled to early release if they had a clean prison record. Joe only served about nine years.”
“What can you tell me about Vivian’s involvement in a murder case?”
“This goes back to about ten years,” Ledbetter said. “Vivian and a woman named Paulette Massilon were working the convention circuit for Golden Joe. He had bellmen and other hotel people on his payroll, and they would steer out of town johns to him. One night Vivian and Paulette worked a deal together. Apparently some high roller liked two girls at a time, and Joe sent Vivian and Paulette to the Lakeview Hotel to meet him. When they got to the room Joe was there with a shitpot load of cocaine he was selling to the john. Apparently everybody snorted a line and Joe left. There was plenty of booze and coke and everybody used some of it all. At some point Vivian passed out, and when she came to, the john was standing over Paulette beating her with the base of a lamp. Vivian passed out again, and when she woke up Paulette was on the floor with her head bashed in. Vivian had been badly beaten as well and was lying on the floor trying to get to the phone when hotel security came busting through the door. Someone had called to complain about the noise.
“Luckily, when Vivian got to the hospital that night there was a young plastic surgeon on duty who took over her care. Her face was all busted up on one side, and she had some other broken bones. He did a good job on her at the county’s expense.
“No one ever figured out who the john was, but with Vivian’s testimony Joe was convicted of felony murder because he was involved in the felony of drug sale that resulted in a murder. Vivian pled guilty to prostitution and drug sale and got an eight year sentence reduced to four years incarceration and four of probation.”
“So,” I said, “You think Joe may have killed Vivian for revenge.”
“I really don’t know. But, he got out of prison shortly before you say Vivian was murdered. I guess he wasn’t real happy about her testimony at the trial.”
“Do you know where Joe is now?” I asked.
“No. I wasn’t his probation officer, but I heard through the grapevine that he never showed up for his first probation conference. I don’t think anybody knows where he is, but I heard he’s back in the drug trade.”
“Do you know where Vivian was originally from? Did she have any family left?”
“Let me get her file. I keep the skips right here.”
He crossed to room to an old brown metal filing cabinet setting in the corner. He pulled out the bottom draw and retrieved a file. Sitting back at the desk, he opened the file and started pawing through all the loose pages. He pulled a piece of note paper from his middle drawer and wrote on it. He stopped and pulled one page from the file, leaned back in his chair and read the paper.
“This is interesting,” he said. “I had forgotten about this. My notes say that the last time she came in she was concerned that somebody was following her. She had seen the same car parked in front of her apartment house two days in a row, and the morning she came in she saw the same car parked in front of her office. She could never get a good look at the driver, but she could tell he was a white man. That’s all the note says, and that’s the last time I saw her.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A little over four years ago.”
Interesting. She had first shown up on Longboat during the Spring months four years before, shortly after the tourist season had ended. “What about her family?” I asked.
He pushed the paper he had written on across the desk. “As far as we know, she only had a father left. Here’s his address.”
I thanked the man, shook his hand, and left the office, finding my own way out. As I passed the front counter I smiled at the clerk and said, “Hope to see you again soon, Carol.” What the hell, let her have something to worry about for pissing off a senator.
Pahokee, Florida sits on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, and if I had not known better, I would have thought I was in a third world village. Highway 441, coming up from LaBelle, is a narrow two lane road of crumbling macadam bordered on each side by deep ditches that keep the flow of water from the Everglades from submerging the road. The town perches hard by the levee protecting it from the lake that sits like a large hole in the south central peninsula of Florida. It is a hardscrabble town, peopled by migrant farm workers from Mexico and the Carribean and a few Americans, black and white. The store fronts were unpainted, and many were boarded up. A crowd of sullen young men had gathered in front of the only thriving business, a liquor store. A high hard sun beat down on them as they stood around in the still air. The humidity was already high at mid morning, and the smell of body odor permeated the air. It was the kind of town that you drive through fast, with your windows up and your doors locked. I had come to visit Howard Pickens.
The address written on the piece of paper handed me by Vivian’s probation officer listed an address in Pahokee. I had flown out of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport shortly after leaving Ledbetter’s office, and I landed at Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport reasonably on time. I found the Hertz counter and rented another Chevrolet. I never have to worry with the baggage area, for the simple reason that I never trust my bags to the airlines. If I can’t carry it on the plane with me I leave it at home. When I get where I’m going, I need clean underwear and my shaving kit. If I were to check it through, chances are that I would never see it again. I had recently read that the flight attendants were lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to require that most bags be checked. I thought they should have been lobbying their baggage handlers to take better care of people’s luggage. If you could trust the airlines to deliver your checked bags to the proper place at the proper time, there wouldn’t be any need to carry all that stuff on the plane.
The heat hangs heavy in South Florida in late May. It is filled with moisture, the humidity high. It permeates every cranny; even the shade is hot. Except on the water, there is no breeze to stir the heavy air. People begin to sweat moments after stepping from their air conditioned sanctuaries. The natives have always known this, and remembered the time before air conditioning came to Florida, followed soon after by hordes of Northerners seeking the sun. The natives will tell you that air conditioning ruined the state.
I boarded the bus that would take me to the rental car company’s off airport lot to pick up my Chevrolet. It was half filled with men in suits, wilting in the afternoon heat. As we left the terminal the sky darkened, and within seconds, we were driving through a hard rain punctuated by lightning flashes and thunder. The regularly scheduled afternoon thunderstorm had arrived. It would only last a few minutes, and it would cool the air for a little while. Before dark came, though, the sun would again heat up the peninsula.
The jets sat on the runway, hunkered down against the storm, too cautious to take off into the windshears and lightning of the tropical storm. Their engines idled, the turbines turning slowly to keep the air conditioning churning through the cabin to cool the passengers, while the attendants served little bottles of booze to the businessmen headed out to their next meeting somewhere in the country. The young people hustling cars on the rental lot had donned yellow rain slickers, and they ran crab like, dodging puddles and oncoming cars.
The bus driver dropped me off right behind the car assigned me by the computer and told me to have a good day. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and steam was beginning to rise from the asphalt that surrounded us for miles. The jets began to roar their take-off ditty as they lumbered down the runway, reaching for their natural element, the sky.
I threw my overnight bag into the trunk and drove out the exit, stopping briefly to show the guard that my rental papers were in order. I eased out of the airport property onto US highway 1, known in Broward County as Dixie Highway. I found and old mom and pop style motel nearby, ate something unremarkable at the Denny’s next door, and went to bed.
I awoke early, checked out of the motel, ordered a cup of coffee and an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s down the street, and ate breakfast as I drove out toward the turnpike. I drove west on I 575, and then north on highway 441, up through the Everglades and into Pahokee.
The lushness of the landscape of the interior southern part of Florida never fails to move me. At first glance the River of Grass seems to be endless and barren, but it is teeming with birds and reptiles, mammals and fish. As I moved north I came into the rich bottom land that is so conducive to growing cane for the sugar industry. On the horizon I could see the smoke flowing upward from a sugar cane processing plant. The fields were full of cane, six or seven feet high, with white flowers topping each bunch. The road was built up, so that I could see over the cane, which gave the impression of a sea of white plumes, undulating quietly in the little breeze that blew across the landscape. The road was filled with large trucks going toward the plant full of cane, or returning empty to the fields.
The address I had been given for Howard Pickens was four or five years old, and I didn’t know if he still lived there, or was even alive. I tried to call him, but there was no listing in the phone directory. I decided to come anyway, on the chance of finding him.
I stopped at a convenience store and asked the clerk for directions. She told me that the address was in a worker’s camp out in the cane fields. I drove about five miles north of town on 441, and found the dirt road shooting off to the east through the cane fields, straight as a ruler, all the way to the horizon. After about three miles on the hard dirt road I came to a cluster of houses built into a clearing on the side of the road. There were about twenty houses sitting in a semi-circle, old and tired looking, squatting on their concrete block pilings. The paint was fading and a few had plywood nailed over windows. There was no grass, and about a dozen black and Hispanic children were playing in the dirt in front of the houses. I stopped and asked a girl of about ten if she knew Mr. Howard Pickens. She didn’t answer, but pointed to a house about mid-way in the semi-circle. I parked my car in front of the house and walked up the wooden steps to the little porch. A screen door separated me from the inside, but there did not seem to be a wooden door at all. A sour smell emanated from the house, and I could hear a radio in the background tuned to a talk show. I knocked on the door and waited. In a moment, a white man appeared in the front room. He was wearing a pair of tattered shorts and a tee shirt that didn’t quite cover his large protruding belly. He hadn’t shaved in several days, and the gray hair surrounding his bald cranium hadn’t been combed in a year. He had a can of Budweiser in his hand. As he got closer to the door, I realized where the sour smell came from. He hadn’t been near a shower in a week.
“Yeah?” he snarled.
“Mr. Pickens?” I asked.
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
“My name is Royal. I’m a friend of Vivian’s.”
“Big fuckin’ deal,” he said. “Whadda you want?”
“Can I come in? I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”
“What the hell. Come on in.”
The house was small. I was in a living room, and a hall ran back toward what appeared to be the kitchen. There was a door on either side of the hall, and I guessed one went to the bedroom and the other to the bathroom. The living room furniture consisted of an old recliner chair and a brown sofa with the cotton stuffing coming out at odd places. On one wall was a table with old magazines stacked on it. There were no pictures or any other evidence of life in the room. “Sit down,” he said, motioning to the sofa. He took the recliner.
“What kinda trouble is the girl in now?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Pickens, but Vivian is dead.”
A look of momentary pain crossed his face, but was gone so quickly I couldn’t be sure if what I said had registered with him. “Shit! I mighta knowed,” he said. “When the money stopped coming I figured she either died or got arrested again. What happened to her?”
“She was murdered,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Who killed her?”
“We don’t know. I’m trying to find out. A friend of mine has been charged with her murder, but I don’t think he did it. We don’t have much to go on. You said she was sending you money?”
“Yeah, she sent me a money order every other week. Wasn’t much, but it helped me pay the rent and buy a little beer and food.”
“Did you ever see her or talk to her?” I asked.
“Nah. She came around here about four years ago and said she was moving back to Florida and had a good job. I had just been shown the door by the sugar company. They said I was too old. I’d been cooking for these migrant workers for thirty years, but suddenly I’m too old. The pension they give me wasn’t enough to live on, and I wasn’t old enough for Social Security yet. They let me live in this house though, even if I do have to pay rent.”
“You haven’t seen her in four years?” I asked.
“No, but a few weeks after she left she started sending me the money orders.”
“Did you ever talk to her after she left?”
“Nah. She sent me the name of some woman in Sarasota with an address and told me if I really needed her to get in touch that way.”
“Who was the woman in Sarasota?”
“Hold on a minute,” he said, and lumbered up from the chair. He went down the hall and through the door on the left. He came back a moment later with a typed letter, dated in the spring, four years before. The letter read,
“Dad,
I’m enclosing a money order for $50. I will send you one every two weeks. If you need anything else you can contact me through Ms. Connie Sanborne, P. O. Box 2871, Sarasota, Florida.
Vivian”
“Did you ever try to contact her?” I asked.
“Nah. We weren’t ever close. After her ma took off she pretty much lived with a colored family in town. I didn’t see much of her. Then I heard she went to Chicago and got sent to prison. When she showed up here fours year ago, she was just passing through. She didn’t stay more’n an hour. Other than that letter, and the money orders, I never heard from her again.”
“Didn’t you want to know why the money orders stopped coming?”
“No. I figured if she wanted to stop sending them that was her business. I kinda thought she was in trouble again, on account of the time the police came by asking about her.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “When did the money orders stop coming?”
“I guess I got the last one back in April or so.”
“When did the police come by asking about her?”
“That would have been in early March. I remember because it was the same week of my birthday. I turned 62, and could start getting my social security. Since I had that, I didn’t really miss the money orders much.”
“Were these local police?” I asked.
“Nope. They was some kinda feds. There was two of them. Came in a big black car, a new one.”
“What federal agency were they with?” I asked.
“I don’t know that they said. Just said they was federal agents. I asked what it was about, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
“Did you tell them where to find Vivian?” I asked.
“Sure, they was federal agents. I did send Vivian a letter telling her that they was looking for her. I figured she’d know what was going on and could do what she liked about it. I wonder if they ever found her?”
I thought they probably had, and I didn’t think they were federal agents.