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
