On the way to the meeting I thought about what Roger once told me, “Pensacola—old Pensacola—loves nothing more than stopping progress, especially when a wealthy Yankee is proposing it.”
The maritime park had begun as a public-private development to revitalize downtown Pensacola after Hurricane Ivan. Wealthy real estate developer A. J. Kettler, who had built several high-end condominium projects along the Gulf Coast and also owned the city’s minor league baseball team, the Pensacola Pilots, was looking to build a new stadium. And the University of West Florida had benefactors willing to build a maritime museum.
The city would issue bonds to provide $40 million to remediate the former industrial site on Pensacola Bay and build the stadium. Kettler would build a $16 million office building. The university would construct a $20 million maritime museum. The rest of the forty acres would be open for commercial, retail, and residential development.
It was a brilliant plan, with an excellent mix of public and private use. The build-out of the project would put over $300 million on the tax rolls and create about 1,000 jobs. Florida Trend hailed the maritime park concept as one of the brightest developments on the horizon.
The city council members loved the plan—with the exception of Jace Wittman. Wittman had taken a strong position against it for the single reason that his high school nemesis, Stan Daniels, was A. J. Kettler’s attorney. His grudge against Daniels trumped any argument about the benefits that might be derived from the proposed development.
Despite fifteen months of public hearings and city council debates on all aspects of the project, Wittman claimed the public had been left out of the decision. His first referendum to stop it for this reason had failed. But now that the building was about to begin, he had a new petition drive focused on rescinding the construction contract.
Wittman had a group of loyal followers that I had labeled “naysayers” during the 2006 referendum. They were suspicious of any changes proposed for their city, especially if it involved spending tax dollars, and they loved Jace Wittman. The naysayers saw him as their champion, the one who believed all their wild conspiracies and promised them the keys to power. He was their Moses, a voice in the wilderness telling the city leaders to repent and forget their wicked progressive ways.
As I pondered this unfortunate truth, I realized the rain had stopped. Steam rose off the hot pavement as the business day subsided. Workers piled out of the Escambia County Office Complex opposite the Insider offices. Secretaries and their supervisors wandered across the street to Blazzues and Intermission to commiserate over a few beers about how they only got four weeks of vacation and the stupidity of the county commissioners before they headed home.
A herd of runners thundered down Palafox Street. Downtown bars had running clubs that offered pasta and cheap beer. The afternoon runners, older than the morning crowd and about twenty pounds heavier, jogged or walked past me in their too-short shorts. Me? I’d rather pay the extra dollar for my PBR and skip the lasagna on a plastic plate.
When I walked into the meeting room at New World Landing, a boutique hotel on south Palafox, I expected to see a bunch of old farts wearing tinfoil hats, drinking warm punch, and eating soft sugar cookies. I wasn’t too far off. However, they had left their hats at home, probably because the tinfoil interfered with the sound system.
I had taken it on the chin earlier at Sue’s funeral, but not tonight. I got a sick pleasure from walking into rooms like this one. The crowd reacted to me the second I entered and signed the guestbook. A perceptible shudder could be felt, as if someone had found a fingernail in their punch, but was too polite to say anything.
I sat in the front row with my black notebook and recorder. Wittman and his brain trust huddled in the corner next to the punch bowl and cookies. I looked around and didn’t see a pile of stones in any of the corners, which only meant they hadn’t planned ahead.
Wittman’s Save Our Pensacola attracted two groups of people—military retirees who hated anything they believed might increase their taxes, and old Pensacola families that resented anyone changing their town. The military retirees always talked about their tours of duty and how Pensacola didn’t measure up to other cities. From their vantage point, community leaders were idiots and never did anything right.
The old Pensacola crowd began every conversation with a statement about how many generations their family had lived in the area. They tolerated the military retirees because they were worker bees that did the tasks they would never do like knock on doors, gather petition signatures, and put campaign signs in yards.
The Save Our Pensacola leaders wouldn’t ask me to leave. After all, they had complained about the city’s lack of open meetings. The daily newspaper and the television reporters stood in the back of the room. Two very slight men in cheap suits with their photographers and cameramen shook their heads and grinned at me. Apparently they expected fireworks.
A couple of retired military types sat on both sides of me, not saying a word, but they looked hard to see what I was writing in my notebook. Pensacola attracted such retirees from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois. They complained about everything while getting their health care for free at the Navy hospital and buying cheap goods and groceries at the Corry Station PX Mall.
They filled their days attending city council meetings, writing letters to the editor that quoted Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and trolling internet forums and blogs looking for chances to prove their brilliance.
I wrote in my notebook for my chaperones to see, “The crowd is warm and happy to see me. Their medications must be kicking in. There is a smell of Bengay, talcum powder, and Old Spice in the air. I hope the Depends hold out.”
The two men sitting next to me snorted. Having failed to intimidate me, they stood and moved to sit next to the refreshments to guard against reporters eating the cookies. They muttered “asshole” under their breaths as they left me.
A lady in red polyester pants with a head of orange-tinted hair opened the meeting with a prayer to “Our Lord and Savior.” I didn’t think she meant Wittman, but I bet he did. The room didn’t have a flag, so they said the Pledge of Allegiance to Wittman’s lapel pin.
The woman sat down at the head table with a gangly fellow who turned out to be her husband, and Wittman. Her chair creaked as she plopped down. My escorts stood and stared at me from their vantage point near the sugar cookies. I barely suppressed a laugh and kept my head down while I wrote.
“Ichabod” thanked his Technicolor wife before launching into a diatribe about all the sins of Kettler and the flaws of the maritime park. The retired UWF professor, who said he was a sixth-generation Pensacola native, droned on and on. A few of the faithful in the crowd appeared to be nodding off. The reporters were getting restless, and I noticed them checking their cell phones. Wittman nodded with a fixed phony smile and stroked his gray goatee. He kept looking at the door and checking his Rolex. After nearly thirty minutes, he stood and took over the meeting.
Wittman was a big man, a former athlete whose waistline had expanded as he had gotten older. His black hair with a few strands of gray was still full, and he wore a white polo under a Ralph Lauren blue blazer and loafers without socks. He didn’t have his brother-in-law’s natural charm and perfect manners, but he commanded attention when he spoke.
“Thank you, Professor Ellis,” he said. Looking at the other reporters, he continued, “I see the legitimate, nonbiased press is here for this very important meeting.”
Professor Ellis and his wife stared daggers at me.
“We, the people of Pensacola, don’t want this park.” Wittman’s words set off a round of applause and a chorus of “amen” from the crowd. “The downtown crowd is trying to force this on us. We shouldn’t be paying for a baseball park for a millionaire’s hobby team.”
Wittman towered over the podium. He reminded me of William Jennings Bryan when he gave his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic National Convention. Wittman had the same religious fervor that I imagined the upstart Bryan had when he delivered his closing line to his speech on using silver to value the US dollar: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Then the crowd went wild, rushed the stage, and swept him in as their presidential nominee. Bryan would later lose to William McKinley.
The Save Our Pensacola crowd edged towards the same level of hysteria. Wittman was charismatic and a master of twisting his opponents’ words and programs. He knew how to manipulate this audience and the media.
He shouted, “We CAN do better!”
“Yes, WE CAN,” I heard a familiar voice yell from the back. Bowman Hines walked into the room, welcomed by applause and a hug from his brother-in-law.
“Jace is so right,” said Hines, dressed in the same dark suit that he wore to his wife’s funeral, “which is why I’m handing Save Our Pensacola a check for $10,000.” Facing the audience with his arms spread, he continued, “This is our town, our land, and we are the only ones who should decide what we do with it.”
More applause. I noticed the reporters were lapping it all up. The park project was in trouble.
“This check is just a down payment on my commitment. My late wife would have never wanted to see such valuable property handed over to some outsider. Sue would want me to stand with her brother against this boondoggle.”
I couldn’t remember Sue ever taking a stance on the maritime park.
“Sue loved nature,” Bo continued. “I donate this money in her memory so that we can have an open waterfront park that the entire city can enjoy.”
Hines spied me in the audience. He pulled back his shoulders and stuck out his chest as if daring me to say or do anything. He said, “We will stand together as one community and take back our park for our families and future generations to enjoy. Let Kettler build his ballpark elsewhere.”
As the crowd cheered, Wittman’s daughter, Julie, slipped into the room. Thin, with the broad shoulders of a swimmer, she had the same athletic figure as her late aunt. She must have arrived with Hines.
Wittman said a few more words, thanked the crowd, and walked over to the “legitimate” reporters with Hines, who motioned for his niece to stand at his side. He wanted the entire family in the photo that would grace tomorrow’s front page.
Hines beamed confidence. He smiled and answered every question, all the while keeping his arm around his niece’s shoulder. He wanted to project that he was the hero who had suffered an unbearable loss, and with his family by his side, he would rescue the city in the name of his beloved wife.
I walked out and headed to the hotel’s bar, 600 South. Pensacola had only a few high-class bars. This was one of them. The waitresses had no visible tattoos, wore short black dresses, and noticed when your glass was three-quarters empty. Plus, 600 South didn’t have a running club.
I ordered a Jack and coke to celebrate my surviving three near stonings in one day, a new Walker Holmes’s record. As I sipped my drink, an African-American man sat down beside me. He was slim but well-built, possibly a triathlon athlete. He had too much muscle to be just a runner, and he carried himself like he was either a cop or Marine Corp officer. Being in no mood to do anything but drink alone, I ignored him.
“You Walker Holmes?” he asked after the bartender handed him his Crown Royal, no ice.
“Guilty,” I said, looking ahead as I watched through the mirror behind the bar the Save Our Pensacola supporters milling in the parking lot.
He extended his hand. “I’m Alphonse Tyndall, Mr. Holmes. Joyce Blake is my aunt.”
I shook his hand and turned toward him. “How’s your aunt?” I asked.
“She is living with my mom in Memphis,” he said. “Still hurting, but doing much better. I wanted to buy you a drink and thank you for helping her when no one else would.”
Three years ago, an Escambia County deputy ran over Joyce Blake’s son, Andre. The patrol car’s dashboard camera captured the teenager’s homicide. The video shows the vehicle chasing Andre, who is riding a bike, and the officer shouting at him to stop. We hear the enraged deputy muttering about him being a black kid as he catches up with Andre and tries to shoot him with a Taser from his window, and then we see the officer suddenly veering into him and pinning him under his car.
It was a senseless tragedy that never should have happened, but Sheriff Frost blamed bad parenting for the death. He claimed the boy was snooping around a construction site at three o’clock in the morning and his deputy was just doing his job.
A coroner’s inquest agreed with Frost. I did not. I lost sleep over the boy’s death. I saw it as my failure. His death was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Poverty, racial disparities, and a failing public education system were at the root of the problem.
In break rooms, at lunch and dinner tables, and on internet forums, people blamed Andre or his mother for his death. “Why wasn’t he at home at 3:00 a.m.?” “Why didn’t he stop?” “He’s a thug; he was packing a gun.” They wanted to blame his mom because they didn’t want to admit the same thing could happen to their children—that is if they lived in Brownsville where their teenagers rode bikes because they didn’t have cars, and if their children felt they needed a gun to protect themselves but knew if they were found carrying one, they could end up in prison forever, and if they lived in constant fear of being racially profiled and chased down by the police—or if their children lived in a world that had crushed their dreams long ago.
Joyce Blake’s pastor agreed to set up a meeting for me to interview her, and our paper told her son’s story. We also posted the patrol car’s video on the blog. After the backlash, Frost eventually had to fire the deputy, which didn’t make him happy. Our reporting won a victory for the Blake family and cleared Andre’s name. It added to the list of grievances Frost had concerning me.
I asked, “What brings you to 600 South? Don’t tell me it’s a coincidence that you’re having a drink here.”
Tyndall smiled. “My aunt told me how you never backed down in your reporting on Andre. You always would walk right into the middle of the fight. I’ve been following the Sue Hines story, saw the announcement of the Save Our Pensacola meeting, and took a chance you might be there. I lingered in the back of the meeting room and followed you into this bar.”
So much for my powers of observation.
“Alphonse is a pretty big name to carry around,” I said. “Do you have a nickname?”
Most white people in Pensacola didn’t know that many of the black men they knew had two names—the ones they gave their white coworkers, and the ones their friends called them.
Alphonse smiled. “Razor because I never could grow a beard. I’m pleased to finally meet you, Mr. Holmes. My aunt speaks highly of you.”
“Call me Walker or Holmes,” I said. “Please skip the mister.”
“Using ‘mister’ is part of my military background,” he explained. “I spent six years in the Air Force as a judge advocate officer.”
I asked, “Are you with a local law firm, Razor?”
He shook his head. “I’m on the Florida attorney general’s Child Predator CyberCrime Unit.”
According to the Federal Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, Florida ranked fourth in the nation in volume of child pornography. The CyberCrime Unit protected children from computer-facilitated sexual exploitation.
The Florida attorney general set up five regional offices to work cooperatively with local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to provide resources and expertise. Pensacola had one of the regional offices. The identity of the staff at those offices was confidential information, but we knew they were active. Last month, the task force, in conjunction with local, state, and federal law enforcement officials, arrested twenty-six individuals across the Panhandle for targeting children.
“You’ve been busy,” I said. “The work must wear on you.”
Razor said, “Getting the sick bastards off the streets makes it worth the effort. Unfortunately, new ones pop up every day.”
So we drank. Our second drink was to “Operation Yellowtail,” the name of the bust operation last month. The third was in memory of Sue Eaton Hines. The fourth was for the maritime park because Razor loved baseball. And the last was for short black dresses.
Razor and I exchanged business cards and agreed to drink again soon.
As I got ready to head back to the loft and Big Boy, the bartender handed me an envelope. “A woman told me to hand this to you before you left,” he said.
“What did she look like?”
He shrugged, “I don’t know . . . fat.”
I opened the white envelope when I got back to the loft. A single, off-white piece of stationery fell out.
It was Sue Eaton Hines’ suicide note.