Evil Season

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Authors: Michael Benson
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to tell if there was an odor coming from the Provenance because he had a head cold and couldn’t smell anything.
    The only thing unusual about that stretch of time was that Garfield was training a new security guard, taking the rookie on his rounds with him, showing him what to do.
    He remembered that maybe eight months before there had been a false alarm at the Provenance, the alarm went off for no apparent reason, and he had talked to the responding officers. He had no recollection of ever being inside the gallery. (The false alarm actually happened two years earlier. Officer Cespedes subsequently found a report dating back to 2002 regarding the Provenance’s security system’s false alarm. The system had been inspected, and Wishart’s motion detector was replaced. Wishart was fined by the Sarasota Police Department for having a faulty motion detector. She was told she’d been in noncompliance with a city ordinance. This ticked Wishart off, and she officially requested that the fine be excused. Red tape was sticky and it wasn’t until the summer of 2003 that the SPD Support Services Division decided to excuse the malfunction for this incident only. However, the incident would still count toward possible future “multiple malfunctions” penalties.)
    Cespedes asked Garfield, “What’s your address?”
    Garfield gave the address of the Bay Plaza, where he worked.
    Cespedes said, “No, home address.”
    Garfield, at that point, became vague. Only after repeated probing and follow-up questions did the officer ascertain that Garfield lived with a friend on Garden Road in Venice. Garfield said he didn’t remember the street number.
    â€œYou don’t know your own address?”
    â€œI’m only going to be staying there for two more days and then I’m moving into a Howard Johnson’s.”
    Although it was like pulling teeth, the officer finally induced Garfield to spit out the whole story. Until recently he did have a permanent address in Venice, but he had been asked to leave because of marital woes. His wife of five years, in fact, had taken out a temporary restraining order against him.
    â€œWhy did she do that?”
    â€œShe’s afraid of me.”
    The restraining order, he admitted, dated back to a December 29, 2003, incident in which Garfield’s wife called the sheriff’s department on him, claiming he had barricaded himself in the bedroom with four firearms. Deputies had to come and remove him from the home.
    Garfield said that the women of the house had ganged up on him. His seventeen-year-old stepdaughter also claimed that he abused her physically. She, too, called the sheriff’s department on him, but none of it was true. He was afraid of losing his job if any of these domestic troubles became public knowledge.
    Cespedes looked into Garfield’s claims and discovered that he had largely told the truth, although he had not been completely forthcoming regarding the ongoing nature of the conflict between the Garfields. Cespedes learned that five times in December and five times again in January sheriff’s deputies had to come to the Garfield home because of family disturbances. Only recently, Mrs. Agnes Garfield (pseudonym) reported, her husband pounded nine beers before noon and then set his mind on getting his wife and her daughter arrested.
    Agnes Garfield, a nurse by profession, informed police that her husband, the bum, had made a living for several months making jewelry and then selling it at art shows and flea markets. Her father-in-law was an FBI agent or a Treasury Department officer or something like that. A Fed. Agnes called Detective Opitz many times during the investigation. Every time she recalled a bit more dirt on her husband, she phoned it in without hesitation.
    Garfield told Cespedes that years earlier he himself had been a cop, five years with a small-town police department in Ohio. Under persistent

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