The Insider staff would not be in the office until after ten. We had worked late into the night to get the issue finished. I had taken them out for beer and pizza afterwards and told them the staff meeting would be at 11:00 a.m.
I went online to read the Herald’s article on Sue’s death, which had already been updated twice while I was at Breaktime. The Hines residence showed no sign of forced entry. Bo had come home from the television station and found Sue unresponsive in their master bathroom. Her stepbrother, Wittman, and his daughter lived with the Hineses. They were asleep in their rooms and had heard nothing. The police said they did not suspect foul play.
Sue’s death was either health-related or a suicide. Neither possibility fit the Sue Hines I knew.
Sue Eaton Hines had stood a full six feet tall—or “five foot twelve,” as she liked to say. She possessed such a radiant presence that when she walked into a room, conversation left it. You couldn’t take your eyes off her. Men, even the most confident players, forgot their names when she smiled at them.
If she shook your hand, your knuckles popped. If she knew you well enough, she called you “sweetie” and might haul you off kayaking or sailing. Sue exuded health and vitality, looking thirty-five instead of fifty. When she laughed, it came out with a roar, filled with delightful, childlike innocence.
Her curly red hair, green eyes, and light array of freckles on her nose and cheeks gave away her Irish heritage. But instead of a fiery temper, Sue had a warm way of scolding you that made you so ashamed you would instantly vow never to repeat the offense. She had scolded me often.
Beautiful enough to live a step beyond convention, other women might comment about Sue that she spent too much time talking with their husbands and boyfriends at dinner parties, but they could do nothing about it. Men loved her because she liked to talk football, hunting and politics, but she wasn’t a flirt. You savored a conversation with her like a fine whiskey.
Sue worshiped Bo. She had fallen in love with him when she was a sophomore at Pensacola Junior College and working in Dr. Lou Bowman’s office during summer break. Bo had been accepted into Florida State’s masters program and spent time that summer in Pensacola helping his grandparents. He also spent a lot of time with Sue. When she graduated from PJC, Sue enrolled in Florida State. Bo hung around Tallahassee an additional year and delayed his MBA so that he and Sue could both graduate in the spring of 1981.
Up until my article about Bo appeared, she had called me “sweetie.” When the cops came to their North Hill home to arrest her husband in early April, she called my cell phone crying, “All Bo ever did was stand up for you when the rest of this town wanted you drummed out of Pensacola, and this is how you reward his friendship?”
Before she hung up, Sue screamed, “He was your friend! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
I didn’t say a word, and the phone went dead. That was the last time I heard her voice. And for weeks her words lingered, like cigarette smoke in my blazer after I had spent the night closing Intermission.
The Pensacola Herald gave few other details of how Sue died. While the police told the reporter they didn’t suspect foul play, the officers also didn’t say natural causes. In other words, the wife of my one-time friend may have committed suicide. The article stated that friends said she had been distraught over her husband’s arrest, which the reporter added was caused by an audit prompted by allegations made by Insider publisher Walker Holmes. It also mentioned the trial was set to begin that morning and that I had refused to comment on her death.
In other words, I pushed Pensacola’s most unlikely candidate for suicide to take her life.
I knew all the public information officers at the Pensacola Police Department and the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office and they hated commenting on possible suicides. If a victim took his or her own life, the PIOs would file it away as such and tell the press off the record, “We don’t comment on suicides but, of course, that is up to the medical examiner to decide.”
The official statement would be that law enforcement did not suspect any foul play and would wait for the medical examiner to perform the autopsy. The ME usually took four to five weeks before she issued a report, long enough for the suicide to be a nonstory.
The Herald allowed readers to comment on articles. The first few posted below the article on Sue’s death offered condolences to Bo, his grandparents, and Sue’s stepbrother, Jace Wittman. The next thirty-five anonymous comments attacked me:
WallyTaxesRanger: “Does Walker Holmes have an alibi?”
JollyRoy: “Holmes is the one who needs to be arrested. He killed her, even if he didn’t pull a trigger.”
SallyBeach: “The so-called reporter is a backstabbing jerk. Hines should sue him for everything he has. Hines will own his tabloid.”
And those were the kindest comments about me. The Herald didn’t moderate its website. More comments meant more hits and more ad revenue. They could have at least given me a commission.
I put on a new button-down shirt and headed to Dare’s offices at Jackson Tower. The one block walk was one of the most difficult I had traveled in quite some time. She was expecting me to tell her more about Sue’s death. I wouldn’t do it in an email or over the phone.
Evans Timber & Land Company owned Jackson Tower, which loomed at the end of Palafox Street and overlooked Pensacola Bay. In 1903 it was the tallest building in Florida, the state’s first twelve-story skyscraper. Only two taller buildings had been built in Pensacola since then.
When I got off the elevator, I nodded at the young receptionist and walked through a maze of cubicles filled with real estate agents and back to the corner office.
Dare’s office had a spectacular view of Pensacola Bay. One could see Pensacola Beach, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Naval Air Station in the distance. An enormous Oriental rug covered the floor. One wall had mahogany bookcases filled with books, many of them first editions signed by Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, and other Southern writers. Dare liked to tease me that she had a spot for my first novel.
Behind her massive desk hung a portrait of Rory, smiling like he owned the Gulf Coast—which he did. Under the portrait was a silver tray with bottles of Jack Daniels and Cutty Sark and a set of crystal glasses. Next to the tray was Rory’s most prized possession, the football from Ole Miss’s 1969 Sugar Bowl victory over Arkansas, autographed by Coach Johnny Vaught and Archie Manning.
The three of us had met for the first time at the University of Mississippi. Rory had been a first-year law student. Dare and I were freshmen.
I was the first in my family to attended college, hailing from the Mississippi Delta town of Belzoni, the “Catfish Capital of the World.” I would have gone to Mississippi Delta Junior College in nearby Moorhead or Delta State University like my classmates who didn’t immediately enlist in the military or work on their parents’ farm out of high school, but Ole Miss had offered me an academic scholarship. My parents drove me to Oxford in the family station wagon and told me they would return to pick me up at Thanksgiving break.
Dare had graduated from St. Agnes Academy, a private Roman Catholic, all-girls high school in Memphis, the same school that Priscilla Presley attended while Elvis Presley courted her. Dare’s father was a corporate attorney for Holiday Inn and a running back on Johnny Vaught’s undefeated 1962 football team, and her mother was a former Ole Miss homecoming queen.
We met at a Pi Kappa Alpha pledge swap. Somehow I had ended up the pledge class president of the fraternity. Dare held the same position with the Chi Omegas. We launched the pledge toga party and ducked out to drink beer at the Gin, one of the few bars in Oxford that kept its kitchen open past nine o’clock on Monday nights. Over burgers and fried mushrooms, we talked for hours about William Faulkner, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and how we were going to change the South.
We stayed until closing time, and Dare drove me back to the dorm in her convertible Spyder. We didn’t kiss. No, we hugged, knowing that we would always have each other’s backs.
Rory came on the scene later. For some odd reason, he was jealous of me, but Dare refused to end our friendship. I served as an usher in their wedding in Pensacola in 1991. I found that I liked the town and made a pledge to myself that I would find a way to relocate to a coastal town.
The opportunity came three years after I had written an exposé for the Commercial Appeal on how Ole Miss boosters were taking football recruits to strip clubs in Memphis. Head football coach Billy Brewer lost his job and athletic director Warner Alford resigned. The football program was put on probation for four years and lost twenty-five scholarships. Ole Miss fans called me a “traitor.” Advertisers pressured the paper’s publisher and editor to terminate my employment. I was reassigned to cover the court beat and promptly turned in my resignation.
I moved to Pensacola, rented a cinderblock house on Pensacola Beach, and wrote for several local papers along the Gulf Coast for the next seven years until I got fed up with the revolving door of editors, layoffs, and unpaid leaves. I cashed in my 401(k), convinced a couple of investors to take the chance on a 33-year-old, and started the Pensacola Insider in 2002.
Dare was the only one in Pensacola who had known Mari, my fiancée. She had helped me deal with Mari’s death and got me through graduation. These days, I didn’t mention Rory, and she never brought up Mari.
As I walked into her office, Dare looked up from her desk as if she had been waiting for me to appear. I leaned over to place a kiss on her cheek, but she pulled away. She wasn’t ready to completely forgive me for setting the Hines trial in motion. We had barely spoken since Bo’s arrest. I sat in a leather chair by the bookcase, thinking that maybe a swallow of the Cutty Sark would relieve my headache.
Dressed in a black Armani suit with a white blouse and pearls, Dare’s blonde hair, flawless, luminous skin, and brilliant blue eyes captivated me as they did everyone who met her. Her speech had only a hint of a Southern accent, which became more pronounced when she was tired. I had missed hearing that accent.
She sat quietly as I relayed what Harden had told me. When I finished, Dare turned her chair away from me and stared out the window at sailboats in the bay. I sat and waited.
When she turned back to face me, Dare wiped her cheeks with the back of her right hand, held back her head, and shook off the remaining tears. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, didn’t need it.
“Do you think it was an accidental overdose?” she asked, twisting her strand of pearls.
I shrugged. “It’s possible, and maybe the medical examiner will even say that happened. I don’t know.”
“She was the old Sue when we were at Jackson’s on Monday. We didn’t talk about you, but she believed Bo would be acquitted.”
The girls frequently met at Jackson’s, the town’s only five-star restaurant that had long windows opening out onto Ferdinand Plaza. Jackson’s was where you went if you could afford it and didn’t mind being seen.
“So do you and much of this town,” I said.
“No, no, no, that’s not my point,” said Dare. “I’m talking about someone who was like a big sister to me. Sue had no reason to kill herself.”
“Maybe something changed since Monday . . .”
“No, dammit, Walker! Sue wouldn’t kill herself!” Dare yelled.
She started to tear up again and turned her chair away from me. Dare was tough. Rory had two brothers, but they had both let her run the family empire.
I addressed the back of her leather chair. “How about her health? Was she having seizures?”
Dare stayed facing the window. One of the sailboats had tacked wrong, and its sail flapped, begging for the captain to recapture the breeze.
She said, “She hadn’t had a seizure in over a year. She may have had one martini too many at our lunch, but that wasn’t unusual for Sue, especially since your article.”
I said nothing, ordering myself not to get defensive.
She continued, “Sue and I were planning a long weekend to the Keys. We would stay at my house on Duck Key. She wanted to do some deep-sea fishing, and I wanted to catch up on my reading. Sue couldn’t wait to try the new tapas at Santiago’s Bodega.”
The sailboat caught a breeze and headed toward the Pensacola Naval Air Station.
I said, “People are going to blame me for her death.”
Dare swung her chair around to face me. “Dammit, Walker, everything isn’t about you and your goddamn newspaper. You always want to make it about you.”
I said, “Because this is about me and my paper. Bo Hines stole that money. If Sue killed herself because of the trial, her death is on him, not me.”
Dare clenched her fists. Her jaw tightened. She said, “I sure as hell hope you find out what happened.”
Then she turned her chair away from me again. I had been dismissed.