With a pandemic keeping me at home, I was watching more movies than ever. And for Doc in prison, movies were played in the communal room almost nightly, and on weekends, it was usually a double feature.
Doc still had the heart of a doctor and made frequent references to the pandemic and the devastating effect it was having in some of the other countries. As the summer unfolded, the numbers would also shoot up in Florida.
I had kept writing to Tiger even after him ignoring all the times I had told him that I was too old and not interested in romance. He continued to insist that he would bring me down to Florida when he got out, but my answer to that was that I would be remaining in Canada, the land of my birth and the land of free healthcare. I wasn’t too concerned because Tiger was in so many ways similar to Juan. Juan had vowed to come up to Canada and be my eternal lover after getting out. Once he did get out, I never heard from him again. Tiger, with three life-sentences, wasn’t likely to be getting out, and even if he did, I knew he would return to the world he was familiar with and share his pent-up desires with someone closer to home. In fact, I knew he was still in contact with the woman who he had been involved with before being incarcerated. Also, he was the father of several children with different women, so his roots were there.
Doc was now in a different facility than Tiger. I learned over time how the relationship between the two men ended. Not amiably. Whether it was the tension created by being in a 10’ by 6’ cell 24/7 due to covid lockdown protocol, or whether it was caused by Tiger regretting that he shared his penpal with his cellmate, the whole thing came to a head when Doc was attacked while sleeping, a knife to his throat and a razor to his eye, and his watch stolen. After that, both men were put into solitary confinement. When they came out, they were put in different cells and later, both men were transferred to different facilities.
A year earlier, Tiger had been writing to me about his new cellmate. I now looked back on those letters to see if there was anything that would help me to tell the story of what really happened that day Samira died because what I was discovering online was that Assistant Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman wasn’t telling me what happened that day.
Although it wasn’t Tiger’s intention to exonerate his cellmate, he kind of did. When Doc first arrived in his cell, Tiger’s plan was to let his cellmate talk and talk and talk—and his new cellmate was definitely a talker—until he finally admitted he had killed his wife. Instead, his bunky talked from the moment he got up to the moment he fell asleep and it was always the same, he hadn’t killed his wife, it was most likely the handyman who supposedly found her who had done it. It wasn’t the sort of thing that would convince a court of law, but to me it was compelling that not once did his story change. At that time, Tiger wanted me to have a crack at it. Convince Doc that I was his friend, and then hopefully he’d confess to me that he had killed his wife. Well, Doc was already my friend and from everything I’d read and seen, I agreed with him. All the evidence should have caused the police to arrest Gardner the handyman, not Doc.
Cappleman had her opinions. Tiger had his opinions. Doc had his opinions. But none of them had actually been by the poolside that day when Samira had been put into the water.
In Wakulla, Doc befriended an African-American man who needed a walker to get around and help getting his tray at meals. Initially, Doc didn’t know why Jeremiah Fogle was in prison and his letters about his new friend made me picture someone like Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption. We found out later that month that Jeremiah Fogle had been the instigator of a high-profile church shooting in Lakeland Florida in 2011 that had resulted in the death of the pastor. Before that, he had shot his wife, thinking she was having an affair with the pastor. It was not the first time Jeremiah Fogle had shot and killed a wife. In 1986, he had killed another one and done time for manslaughter. In total, he had been married seven times. Now he was serving two consecutive life sentences in Wakulla. Doc told me how Mr. Fogle often told people he was a prophet, but lamented that people wouldn’t listen to him.
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