A Family Man at Last
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Cynthia Thomason
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15,5K
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CHAPTER ONE
YESTERDAY HAD BEEN the longest day of the thirty-five years Edward Smith had been on this earth. And that included the months he’d spent in juvenile detention for assorted crimes and misdemeanors. And the times he’d gone thirty-six hours without sleep while studying for college exams. The longest day and the worst day.
Edward had driven down to Sweet Pine Key two nights ago to see his father. He came from Miami as often as he could, usually at least once a month. His weekends in Sweet Pine were a chance to unwind from his high-pressure job. No one could maintain an uncomfortable stress level in the Florida Keys. Here, life was laid-back, easygoing, warm and sunny.
And, of course, these weekends gave him a chance to visit with the man he most admired in his life—William Smith, a former judge and the man who’d changed Edward’s life by adopting him, a foster kid who’d been kicked around the system until he faced a future as bleak as his past had been.
Edward had arrived at his father’s large pine home in Monroe County around nine o’clock on July 3, a steamy Friday night. He’d found the judge sitting in his library sipping on a whiskey while he awaited the arrival of his only son. They’d talked for a couple of hours before Edward excused himself and went up to bed. They still had two days to catch up before Edward had to return to Miami and the patients that waited for him there.
A bit after dawn on Saturday, Edward had walked out to the dock of Smitty’s In and Out Marina, the name his father had given the enterprise he’d purchased when he retired from the bench in South Carolina. Edward had been certain he’d gotten out of bed ahead of his father. He’d planned to have the rental boats gassed and ready for customers before William wandered out with his cup of coffee in his hand. Though Edward had never quite fit in with the Keys lifestyle, while he was here he liked to help.
It had been a beautiful morning. The sun slanted rays of promise over the Gulf of Mexico, and Edward looked forward to a day of calm water and warm breezes. What Edward hadn’t planned to see was his father’s body floating facedown in the Gulf of Mexico, his shirt torn and a fragment of it wrapped around a bolt supporting a piling under the dock. If not for that bit of cloth, William Smith might have floated off with the tide and been halfway to Texas by now.
And so, on that beautiful July morning in the Florida Keys, Edward had felt himself gut-punched and gasping for breath. He lifted his father’s face from the murky depths and saw the lifeless eyes open and staring, the weathered skin of his cheeks suddenly colorless from overexposure to saltwater. He leaned over the dock and retched before taking his cell phone from his pocket and dialing 911.
Confusion and shock muddled Edward’s brain. Clear thinking evaded him despite his being so closely connected to the Miami-Dade County Police Department. Something instinctive told him to avoid more contact with the body. “Don’t disturb evidence,” he said to himself. But why did it take so bloody long for the police to arrive?
The Monroe County Sheriff’s Department sent a squad car and two cops to investigate. They were local guys who dealt mostly with neighborhood crime on Sweet Pine Key. Finding a body was a big deal to them, since murders were few on the quiet island.
They’d questioned Edward for a short while, then declared the death an open-and-shut case.
“No evidence of foul play,” Officer Roland Patterson had said. “Of course, the coroner will have to validate that.”
“I’d say the judge just slipped and fell off,” his partner, Bobby Cashiers, said.
Edward wanted to shout at them, but common sense dictated that yelling at the lead investigators would be a mistake. But they’d come to this conclusion based on what? “That’s it?” he said. “You’re declaring this an accident?”
“That’s the way it appears to me,” Roland said. “No doubt this is a shame, but it’s no secret that your father was known to tip a few. Yesterday being a Friday night and all, he might have been staring at the bottom of a bottle by the time the sun went down.”
Sure his father drank a few on the weekends. He no longer worked on the bench, and he was exactly where he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Besides, who didn’t drink in the Keys? But that didn’t mean he was a sloppy drunk who would fall off his own dock.
“I didn’t get here until almost nine,” Edward said. “Dad was fine then. Yeah, he’d had a couple, but no one has ever even hinted that William Smith couldn’t hold his liquor.” Edward held his temper as best he could, but he desperately needed to find an explanation for the inexplicable.
“What time was it when you last saw your father after you arrived?” one of the officers asked.
“I went to bed around eleven.”
“Is that the usual routine for you and the judge? Have a drink or two and then you leave him and go up to bed?”
“I guess so,” Edward said. “Sometimes Dad went to bed before I did, but I wanted to be up early to get the rental boats ready.”
“You never heard the judge go to bed?” Roland asked.
Most everyone on the key called William Smith “the judge.” That was what he’d been for over thirty years, before he’d followed his dream to own a marina in paradise. And folks who didn’t call him “the judge” called him “Smitty,” after the name he’d given his beloved marina.
“I didn’t hear him come up the stairs,” Edward said. “Maybe he stayed up a while to read.”
“Or other things,” Bobby Cashiers said. His implication was clear.
“He wasn’t drunk!” Edward proclaimed. “We had a perfectly normal, sober conversation for two hours. After our talk, he returned the whiskey bottle to the liquor cabinet. He wouldn’t have had another drink.”
“Then why did he come out on the dock?” Cashiers asked.
“I don’t know why he would come out here after dark. Maybe to see the stars. Maybe to check on something. But I can guarantee you he didn’t walk out here so inebriated he fell off a dock he’d been walking on for fifteen years!”
The discussion between the officers and Edward continued for over an hour. The officers kept insisting that the evidence, or what they referred to as “lack of evidence,” pointed to an accidental death, possibly related to alcohol consumption. Edward insisted that his father was an excellent swimmer with much to live for. “Even if he’d had a fifth of whiskey, he wouldn’t have been so drunk he couldn’t have swum a hundred feet to shore.”
“Maybe he passed out, hit his head,” Roland pointed out.
“Not likely,” Edward said. “But if such a ridiculous thing happened, the coroner will find a wound on his head.”
“Look, you’re not here for most of every month,” Roland added. “I’m not sure how much you know about the judge’s behavior the last few years, but if he wasn’t at Tarpon Joe’s in the evening drinking with his buddies, he was dang sure in his house drinking alone.”
“I know enough about his behavior to say he didn’t fall off this dock!”
Eventually the coroner arrived and the body was removed to the shore. An initial examination did not show any injury to the judge’s head. Edward knew there wouldn’t be a self-inflicted injury, just as he knew his father hadn’t stumbled from the dock. An ambulance took William Smith’s body to the small morgue at the sheriff’s department. Later, the judge would be transported to Fisherman’s Chapel and Funeral Home a few miles away. The coroner promised to look the body over carefully, and if he saw any reason to contradict the officers’ conclusions, he would let Edward know.
But Edward wasn’t satisfied. He sensed the coroner would be as quick to declare the death an accident. “Don’t you have a homicide investigator in this department?” he asked the coroner.
“We do.”
“Then let’s get an expert here,” Edward insisted. “I would think it’s customary procedure in a case like this.”
The coroner didn’t look convinced that such action was necessary, but he nodded. “Don’t guess it can hurt.”
And so here it was a Sunday morning, more than twenty-four hours after Edward had found his father’s body. Word had spread among the residents of the small island, and a few neighbors had stopped to offer condolences. Edward dealt with such comments as “Sure is a shame.”
“A good man, the judge.” He sat on the porch of his father’s decades-old house and waited for the homicide detective to show up.
And as he waited his mind filled with memories. The first time he’d set eyes on the judge, Edward had been sixteen years old, a veteran of the foster-care system since he was three and a kid who always seemed to get into trouble. The court appearance he’d been at was worse than most. Edward had been picked up for stealing a car—again.
Judge Smith had given him a stern talking-to, but not before he’d heard Edward’s story. One foster home after another. Unknown parents, no family, a high-school dropout. He’d asked Edward a number of questions, even smiled a time or two at the answers.
Ultimately, he’d sentenced Edward to six months in a juvenile-detention center, with release dependent upon Edward’s earning a GED so he’d have a high-school diploma. And then the strangest thing happened. The judge visited Edward at the detention center. Not once, but several times. The visits became weekly occurrences. And despite a chip on Edward’s shoulder the size of an oak tree, a bond between the two formed and grew.
The day Judge Smith offered Edward a room in his home in South Carolina had been the day Edward’s life had experienced a rebirth. And the day the judge adopted the seventeen-year-old, Edward’s future began.
Edward sighed and tried to swallow the huge lump in his throat. The homicide investigator wouldn’t care about any of that. Judge Smith, the man who’d taken Edward from the gutter and given him hope, was now just a body, after all.
A bit of that oak-tree chip came back to settle on Edward’s shoulder as he waited for the investigator to arrive. And when she did, Edward couldn’t believe his eyes.
There must be some mistake, he thought. The officer who got out of a plain, dark gray midsize sedan was hardly what anyone would consider homicide-detective material—certainly not the Law & Order type. No more than five feet four inches tall, slender, with dark hair pulled back into a tight bun from a round olive-skinned face, the female coming toward him didn’t look old enough or seasoned enough to deal with crimes of the worst sort.
Maybe the true homicide detective was busy and had sent someone from his office. But it wasn’t so. The woman dressed in black slacks, a short-sleeved blue shirt and sensible walking shoes showed him her badge and said, “Good morning. I’m Monica Cortez, detective for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, Middle Keys division.”
Edward could hardly find the words. “You’re the homicide investigator assigned to this case?”
Her dark eyes widened. She started to say something, but obviously thought better of it and extended her hand. “I’m the only homicide detective in this part of the Keys,” she said. “I assure you I’m qualified to do my job.”
Oh, jeez. She must have interpreted Edward’s comment as a negative take on her stature, gender and appearance—just exactly what his first impression had been. He wasn’t one to judge anyone based on appearance or any other feature. He’d learned that lesson the hard way, and yet he’d just made a judgment of this lady.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I suppose I’m just surprised to see a...” He stopped. He was only digging his gender-inequality hole deeper.
“A woman in this position?” she said for him.
“Something like that. But I meant no disrespect.”
“Sure you didn’t.” She took a notebook from her shirt pocket and snapped her ballpoint pen into writing mode. “You’re Edward Smith, I presume?”
“I am.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” It was a clichéd statement, but she actually seemed to mean it.
“How much do you know about this case?” he asked.
“I’ve read the reports. Officers Cashiers and Patterson filled me in with the details.” She looked away from the house and toward the dock. “Are you ready to answer some questions?”
From her tone, he almost got the impression she was going to interview him as a suspect. “Anything you want to ask,” he said.
“I think we should start by going to the scene.”
“Yes, of course. That would be fine.” He led the way over lush Bahia grass to where water lapped against a pristine shoreline. Edward’s father had made many improvements to the property in the years he’d owned it. The dock stretched one hundred feet into the blue Gulf of Mexico. At intervals, berths were occupied with the small fleet of boats owned by Smitty’s In and Out. The gas pumps and a bait house sat a few yards down the shore. It was a typical marina setup, yet with a kind of tropical charm. Edward and his father had worked hard to make the property into what the judge had wanted—an oasis filled with flowers and palm trees.
Edward had almost forgotten the purpose for the walk to the dock, he was so caught up with memories of years past. He and his dad had attached mooring lines here, bumpers there. They’d worked together whenever Edward could get away from school and, later, his job. They’d laughed often, shared a few beers.
“Where exactly did you find the body?” Detective Cortez asked.
He stopped near the end of the dock and pointed down. “Right about here.”
“The last time you saw your father alive was the night before?”
“That’s right. Friday. We had about a two-hour conversation when I got in from Miami, and I went to bed.”
“And when you found him the next morning in the bay, was he wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before?”
Edward thought a moment. The other officers hadn’t asked him that question, but it seemed an important one. “Yes, actually, he was. Which means this happened late Friday night and not Saturday morning.”
“Possibly. The coroner will be able to give us an exact time of death.”
She asked him other questions, some of them repeats of what the officers had asked the day before. What was your father’s state of mind? Did you notice any unusual behavior, nervousness, anxiety? Are you aware of anyone who might hold a grudge against your father?
“There might be someone from his past,” Edward admitted. “My father put a lot of people behind bars when he was a judge in South Carolina. But I doubt many of those people even knew he lived here on Sweet Pine. He hasn’t practiced law in over a decade. When he bought this marina he was happy to leave that other life behind and run this operation.”
“I’m familiar with this marina,” Monica said. “My father used to work here. Perhaps you know the name. Juan Cortez?”
“Oh, sure, Juan. I remember him,” Edward said. “Nice guy, hard worker. My dad depended on him. Where is Juan now?”
Monica looked away and tapped her pen on her notebook. “He passed away five years ago. A heart attack. I’m surprised your father didn’t mention it.”
Jeez, maybe he had forgotten. He wasn’t involved in the day-to-day operation of the marina. “I don’t mean to minimize Juan’s value to my father,” Edward said. “Five years ago I was still establishing my career. I wasn’t here too often.”
“Yeah. I’ve only seen you a time or two.” She looked into the murky water. “Just a few more questions. Did you know many of your father’s friends and acquaintances from around here?”
“Not many of them. I spend more time in Miami than I do in the Keys. My main employment is with Miami-Dade County. I do try to come down here whenever I can, though.” He paused, thought about what he’d just said. “Though that will no doubt change now.”
“So you had a good relationship with your father?”
“The best. I owe him...” This police detective wasn’t interested in the sad tale of Edward Smith, so he cut short his explanation. “Anyway, yes, we did.”
“And can you think of anyone here who might have reason to want your father dead?”
The question brought fresh anguish to Edward’s chest. He took a deep breath. “No, no one,” he answered. “If my father had any enemies here, he never discussed them with me, and I never observed any hostility between him and any other person. Look, my dad was happy here, happier than he’d been in years. He was always positive, cheerful, looking forward to living his golden years right in this house.”
“And you never heard a local person speak ill of your dad?”
“No. I can only assume that the locals were glad to have him as part of the community. He was an honest, hardworking contributor to the economy. This business brought tourists to Sweet Pine from all over.”
Monica Cortez stopped taking notes and gave Edward an intense stare. “I hate to bring this up, but I’m told you know the conclusion Cashiers and Patterson came up with, and you’re not satisfied with it.”
“I do. That’s why I asked for a homicide investigator. My father drank, but so does most everyone in the Keys. I’ve never seen him drunk or unable to handle himself. The thought of him walking out on this dock and just suddenly tipping over is ludicrous.” To further emphasize his case, Edward added, “And even if he had fallen in, which he didn’t, he could have swum a few feet to reach shallow water, where he could have walked to shore with no problem.”
“I know this is difficult,” Cortez said. “It’s human nature to want to find a reasonable explanation for something we don’t understand.”
“Do you, Miss Cortez? Do you really know how difficult this is for me?”
She didn’t answer.
“Because I came here on Friday night to spend a weekend with my father, and Saturday morning I find him floating in the bay. This weekend started out no differently than any other in the last fifteen years. And yet, the man I owe my life to is gone. So, yeah, this is difficult for me.”
“I understand that,” she said. “My questions and comments are merely an effort to get to the bottom of this.”
He hadn’t meant to sound so harsh. He needed this woman’s help. He needed someone to believe that his father hadn’t just tripped on a board and fallen into the water. “I’m sorry. I’m just going through...”
“I get it,” she said. “You need a minute?”
“No. Go on.”
“How was your father’s health the last few years?”
“Excellent. He was seventy-six years old and didn’t even take a blood-pressure pill. And he was still strong. Patched the roof on this house last year with just a ladder and some tar paper. And if you’re wondering about his mental state, he was sharp as a tack.”
Cortez put her notebook on a bench at the end of the dock and bent over. She examined the dock and the piling where the judge had been found. She unwound the fabric piece from the bolt, set it on the dock and ran her hand through the water to feel the wood around the piling. After a moment, she uttered a small sound. “Hmm.”
“What?” Edward asked. “Did you find anything?”
Cortez stood. “Maybe. It’s probably nothing, but I’m going to call for a diver. He should be here within the hour. I need to check a few things, like when high and low tides were last night and this morning.”
Edward suddenly experienced a burst of relief. This detective, as inexperienced as he suspected she was, was taking him seriously. “Are you going to wait for the diver to get here?” he asked.
“Most definitely. If you have something to do...”
“No. Let’s go up to the house. We might as well have a seat and get out of the sun.”
They walked back to the house together. Cortez made her phone call. It was as short and efficient as everything else about her. But Edward was becoming more confident about her efficiency by the minute.
SHE’D SEEN HIM AROUND. Most everyone on Sweet Pine Key had seen him, talked about him, speculated about his supposedly mysterious past. But Monica had never met anyone besides the judge and the one guy who worked at the marina who actually knew him on a personal level. Of course, her father had known Edward, too, but since he’d been gone five years, she rarely heard Edward’s name mentioned around the small settlement of Sweet Pine. Sometimes a neighbor might mention that Smitty’s son was on the island. Most times not.
Maybe that was because Edward spent so much time in Miami. Maybe it was because he chose to stay separate from the Keys’ lifestyle. He didn’t hang out at the local watering holes when he was here. He didn’t brag at the bait shops about his big fishing conquests. Whatever the reason, Monica was fascinated today by the slim, good-looking, six-foot-tall man with the sandy blond hair who looked nothing like Smitty, the judge.
She’d heard rumors that Edward was adopted. Seeing him close up today, she could believe it. The judge was a stocky five foot, seven inches with a thin ring of white hair around a bald pate, and had a thick, muscular torso and short legs. Edward was muscular, from tip to toe. Before the end of the day, Monica was determined to find out if Edward was biologically related to Smitty. If Edward wanted a homicide investigation, then she had to have all the facts.
They sat on the porch of the iconic Florida Keys home that the judge had purchased when he’d made a deal to buy the marina. Folks on Sweet Pine had admired the house for decades. Only a short walk from the dock, it seemed a perfect fit for a man who wanted to leave civilization behind and watch the sun set over the Gulf. As far as Monica knew, since the judge had moved onto Sweet Pine, he rarely took his old Pontiac out of the garage. He was content to ramble around in his two-thousand-square-foot home, play with his boats and walk to the convenience store and liquor seller. Folks said he had his necessities delivered from the nearest supermarket.
Sometimes he wandered down to Tarpon Joe’s Bar and Grill if he felt uncommonly sociable. Monica had even run into him there and had a few brief conversations with him and the small crowd of senior citizens he attracted. A nice old guy, she’d thought. Friendly and pleasant. And he’d spoken fondly of his son, Edward, who lived and worked in Miami.
While they waited for the diver to arrive, Monica continued to question Edward. She asked about people the judge talked about, whether he had close friends on the island, whether he ever mentioned having a run-in with one of his neighbors. Yeah, Smitty talked about regular customers who came for bait, oddball tourists who rented boats. But, according to Edward, he’d never argued with anyone about more than the size of the shrimp he was charging ten bucks a dozen for.
She saw an opportunity to get to the bottom of Edward’s story. “So what about the early years, when you were a boy and the judge was still on the bench in South Carolina? Do you recall anyone threatening him?”
Edward answered quickly and concisely. “I only met my father when I was sixteen,” he said. “The judge adopted me.”
So the rumors were true. “Oh, really? Do you mind telling me how that came about?”
“I suppose not. I was a troubled kid, growing up in the foster system. I got in some scrapes, broke the law a few times. My big break came when I was sent before Judge Smith in juvenile court.”
“The judge pardoned your crimes?” Monica asked.
“Heck, no. He sent me to juvie for six months. But he didn’t forget me. For some reason he took an interest. He visited me in detention, made sure I was getting an education, even gave me extra homework that he looked over himself.”
“And you and he grew close?” Monica said. “I mean, he did adopt you. That must have been a big step.”
“It was for me,” Edward said. “The judge was waiting when I was released and he took me back to his home, where he lived alone with only a housekeeper. I stayed with him a couple of months, and then he made it official. I became his son.”
“Just like that?” Monica said, not wanting to sound suspicious, but jeez, a successful judge taking a problem kid home to his house was not an ordinary occurrence. In fact, some people might say that Edward fell into a pot of gold.
“No, not ‘just like that,’” Edward said. “I proved myself every day to my dad. I worked my butt off to show him I was worthy of his trust. I studied, didn’t run around, broke off with all my old friends. I knew what a lucky break he was offering me.”
“You even got an education, right?”
“Went to the University of Miami because they had an excellent program in psychology. It was tough at first. I missed my talks with my dad, but we communicated often, and I went home to South Carolina when I could. I worked on campus, and what I couldn’t earn, the judge provided. Finally got my master’s degree and a doctorate. During that time the judge moved down here, so we were close again.”
On the surface, Monica couldn’t find any reason to believe that Edward didn’t have fond and grateful feelings of this man who had given him his big break. Edward appeared successful in his own right, so he would have no motive to want to see his father dead for monetary reasons. And it appeared the judge was a thoughtful and caring provider.
“Did William have any other family?” Monica asked.
“No. His wife died before I met him. They’d had no children, and he never remarried.”
Didn’t leave many relatives to question, Monica thought. If she was going to investigate this case, she would have to find motives among the people the judge knew or had known.
The diver arrived, and Monica put away her writing tools. She and Edward walked with the diver to the end of the dock. He donned a wet suit and went into the water, concentrating especially on a particular piling where she had looked earlier.
After a few minutes, his head broke the surface. “Yeah, I see what you’re talking about, Monica. There appears to be fresh gouge marks in the wood.”
“Can you tell if the marks mean anything? Any pattern?”
“Not really. Looks like about a two-inch vertical line. I can’t tell what it was meant to be. I’ll come back after the tide goes out and get a better look.”
“Thanks, Carl,” Monica said. “Tide goes out at four fifty this afternoon. I’ll meet you back here,” she added. “But I guess that’s it for now.”
“I’m going to stay for a while,” he said. “Might have a look around the bottom to see if I find anything.”
“Okay.”
Monica and Edward went back to the house to wait. Edward turned on the ceiling fans. The day was becoming typically hot and humid. Monica’s clothes were beginning to itch. She took off her ball cap and brushed strands of damp hair from her forehead, but didn’t loosen the sensible bun at the back of her head.
“Look, Edward,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll find anything to corroborate your theory that your father was murdered. But I am truly sorry it happened. I’ll do all I can to ease your mind about this loss.”
He nodded. “Thanks.”
“I really do understand what you’re feeling. Like I said earlier, my father died five years ago.”
“That’s tough. Do you have other family?”
She stopped short of mentioning every one of her relatives—aunts and uncles and numerous cousins. And her brother. But she did tell Edward about her mother and her nephew, Emilio, both of whom lived with her in her small cinder-block house just up the road.
“My father thought a lot of the judge,” she said. But then she stopped.
Carl was coming toward them. He reached the porch and handed her an object in a plastic bag. “Found this at the bottom sticking out of the sand.”
Monica stared at the five-inch pocketknife with a carved marlin in the wood handle. She handed the bag to Edward. “Do you recognize this?”
His voice hitched. “I gave it to my father for Christmas last year.”
“It doesn’t show any effects of being in the water long,” she said. “He could have dropped it Friday night.”
“And he could have used it to carve whatever you and Carl found in the piling,” Edward said.
Had the judge carved something of significance in the moments before he died? Monica couldn’t wait to return after the tide went out so she could see for herself.
