I asked, “Was Lieutenant Amos Frost the problem?”
He nodded. “When I confronted him last week about it, he first denied knowing anything, but when I offered to show him the video, he confessed.”
“Where does the blackmail come in?” I asked.
“The producer—”
I interjected, “Cecil.”
Tyndall gave me a half smile. “Cecil Rantz had asked Amos Frost to notify him if any law enforcement began to investigate his operation. He promised Frost that he would never release the video and would give him the only copy when his crew left town.”
“Did Frost tell Rantz about your investigation?”
“No, he was too good a cop to do that, but he made sure the sheriff’s office didn’t provide us resources. Lieutenant Frost admitted to me that he was trying to get the filmmakers to finish up here and move to some other location.”
I said, “So you think he saw the roof caving in on him. That he was about to be exposed.”
“Not sure. Maybe. We were supposed to meet Friday morning at Waffle House in the north end of the county. If he helped us and shared everything he knew, I would have tried to keep his name out of it. But there weren’t any guarantees.”
The summer rainstorm stopped, and the smokers migrated back outside where a waitress was wiping down the tables and chairs on the sidewalk.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.
“The film scheme is part of a much bigger deal, an international deal,” he said. “This week, we are going to round up all the ringleaders. We still don’t know who is financing the operation. Amos Frost’s suicide has pushed my bosses to pull the trigger and shut it down. Somebody will cut a deal.” He took a big swig of his beer and smiled. “I thought you might be able to use what I gave you to get Sheriff Frost off your back.”
We ordered one last round. The Insider traded ads with Hopjacks for free pizza, fries, and beer, so I used our trade to pick up the tab. Tyndall handled the tip.
As we finished our beers, I made the decision to share Bree’s dilemma.
“Razor, you may want to check into Monte Tatum. My sources say he has been keeping company with Rantz, maybe invested in his operation.”
“Tatum? The Green Olive owner?”
I nodded.
He said, “Monte Tatum. That makes some sense, but he doesn’t have the kind of money it takes to run the operation we’re closing down.”
I said, “I can’t tell you my source, so don’t ask. He has invested at least twenty grand in Rantz’s company. You need warrants for his offices in the SunTrust building, the club, and his house. I hear he may have videos at all three places.”
“How reliable is your source?” he asked, looking me in the eye.
I stared back. “Very.”
“Well, let me talk it over with my team,” he said as he shook my hand and got up to leave. “Don’t write anything until the sweep, and I’ll keep you in the loop.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
23
Monday morning I decided to take Big Boy on a long walk. My ribs weren’t aching, and the rain had cooled the morning temperature down to the high sixties.
We hiked to Roger Fairley’s grave in St. John’s Cemetery. The Masons had established Pensacola’s second cemetery in 1876. I often teased Roger that his ancestors had helped to fund the purchase of the twenty-six acres only so the Fairleys could have the prime burial plot on the northern slope near a magnolia tree.
Pensacola was predominately a Roman Catholic town prior to the Civil War. As more Protestants began to migrate to the coastal town, tensions mounted between the Spaniards and their descendants and the new arrivals. The Masons, a secret society that the Catholic Church prohibited its faithful from joining, had gained a foothold in Pensacola when the British controlled the settlement in the late 1700s. Fearing the Catholics might refuse to let any more Protestants be buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery, the Masons created their own cemetery.
From the cemetery’s inception in 1876, the Masons were surprisingly more progressive than their Catholic counterparts and opened the cemetery to people of all religions and races, although the groups were separated and the areas for white people had much larger plots.
Roger was on the board of the St. John’s Cemetery Foundation, as each generation of his family had been. He loved to brag about the cemetery’s historical significance.
“St. John’s contains the largest and most diverse number of gravestones and monuments in Northwest Florida,” he would say over martinis, trying to persuade me to write a newspaper article on the cemetery. “It’s where the leaders of Pensacola are buried.”
He regaled me with the names of the more illustrious cemetery occupants. Dick Pace, born 1896, built Pensacola’s first paper mill, Florida Pulp and Paper Company, which later merged with St. Regis Paper Company. He enticed Monsanto and Escambia Bay Chemical to locate plants in the area. I often reminded Roger that the corporations were three of the biggest polluters in Northwest Florida. Pace also founded the Pensacola Country Club, Pensacola Yacht Club, and the Fiesta of Five Flags celebration—three of my least favorite Pensacola society fixtures.
Another historical figure buried there was O. J. Semmes, born in 1876, who was superintendent of the city’s streetcar system, later founded the Semmes Coal and Ice Company, and chaired the Escambia County School Board for thirty-six years from 1921–1957. The board named an elementary school in his honor.
“And he ran one of the most segregated school systems in the country, one that wasn’t integrated until a federal judge ordered it after Semmes’ death,” I would chime in.
Roger would get the point and drop the subject.
Big Boy and I walked into the cemetery through its G Street entrance, a gatehouse
