of the four men at the table, knowing he could not resist his natural inquisitiveness.
Driving east into Miami, headlights and overhead streetlights flashed and splintered through my broken windshield and hampered my view of the skyline after dark. When I got up onto the interstate, I could see a curving neon light that snaked through the city, an artistic addition to the Metrorail line. The Centrust Building stood bathed in teal spotlights, a tribute to the Florida Marlins baseball team. Against the blackness of Biscayne Bay, the lights in the high-rise towers took on the look of manmade constellations. The contrast to the weathered pine of the Loop Road Hotel was not lost on me.
When I got back to Billy’s apartment he was waiting for me with a fresh pot of coffee, a take-out order of jerk chicken and black beans and rice, and a sheaf of computer printouts, dossiers he called them, on Brown, Sims, Blackman and Ashley. He also had company.
He was on the patio with a woman he introduced as Dianne McIntyre, “a lawyer w-with an office in the s-same b-building as mine.”
She was as tall as Billy and had a swimmer’s figure, broad shoulders and narrow hips, and was dressed expensively in a pure silk blouse and a charcoal skirt. She was comfortable enough to have taken off her heels and was padding about in stockings.
As I ate at the counter they stood in the kitchen area, sharing a bottle of wine. When I looked up Billy was staring at me.
“W-What happened to your face?”
I self-consciously touched the swollen cheekbone.
“Door,” I said.
The woman raised one of her fine dark eyebrows and indelicately probed at a molar with her tongue. Billy accepted my reticence and picked up the first page of the stack of papers.
“Dianne actually kn-knows this f-fellow Sims. S-She worked w-with him on an environmental case.”
I could tell how hard Billy was trying to control his stutter and it made me anxious for him. But the woman seemed completely inured.
“It was several years ago in a dispute between a very influential developer who wanted to build some kind of mega sports complex in an area of the Everglades that had never been touched,” she said, turning the wineglass in her hands. “Sims had been working with the naturalists and environmental groups for years and had marshaled some fairly strong support against the project. One of the shrewdest things he’d done was elicit the favor of the old Gladesmen by convincing them that their way of life would be threatened as much as the flora and wildlife of the area.”
“N-No doubt men l-like your Mr. Brown,” Billy said, leafing through the stack of papers.
“Apparently things got ugly and some of the developer’s backroom people allegedly threatened Sims,” McIntyre continued. “Shortly after, handmade posters started showing up at the public fishing ramps and even in some outlying suburban stores that if anyone harmed Sims, those responsible would be gutted and fed to the gators.”
The attorney again seemed unruffled by the circumstances. Neither shocked nor amused. Just the facts, ma’am. I watched her closely.
“The project finally died and Sims seemed to move away from the mainstream. I haven’t heard much about him for the last few years.” When she finished, she sipped again at her wine.
Nate Brown’s was a story in itself, much of it untold.
Billy had found some archived newspaper clippings and legal transcripts online that shed a little light on the wizened old man who could back down three pumped-up thugs with only the slightest flick of his Loop Road respect.
Nathaniel Brown had been born in the Glades and learned the skills of the back country with one motivation: survival. There was no record of his parentage and no official documentation of his life until a war record placed him in an infantry division in the army in WWII. There were notations of his award of two silver stars, for bravery beyond the call when he had taken out a group of specialized German mountain troops during an ambush, “single-handedly causing a number of casualties upon the enemy.” He had then doctored a group of his own squad members wounded in the fight and kept them alive in the woods for nearly two weeks until they were found.
After his discharge, his name didn’t surface again for more than a decade until he was arrested and charged in the death of a game warden. By then Brown had built a small reputation as an alligator poacher whose