by Diane Capri
“I didn’t expect to find so many people here. What’s going on?” George asked him.
“Most everyone likes Deborah. People are shocked. It’s hard to accept that the general killed himself.” Ben was trying to speak softly. The trouble was that everyone in the room was speaking quietly, which created a low rumble over which truly quiet voices could not be heard.
“I’m certain he didn’t.” George said, with the same vehemence he’d used with Frank Bennett outside.
Ben looked at him curiously. “Why?”
“I knew Andy for twenty years. Served under him in the army, did you know that?”
“No, I guess I didn’t.” Ben said, a little cautiously.
George’s army career isn’t something he usually talks about. I was surprised he’d bring it up here.
He said, “Well, Andy would never have killed himself. He thrived on adversity. He thought suicide was the coward’s way out. There’s no way he did this to himself. No way.”
I hadn’t noticed Frank Bennett enter the house, but now he stood nearby, listening intently. Frank was a friend and a local celebrity, as Andy had been. We all knew him. He was entitled to pay his respects just like the rest of us.
But Frank wouldn’t leave anything he overheard out of his professional life, either.
Ben’s attention focused on George. A small crowd gathered. Some had their backs turned, pretending they weren’t eavesdropping on our conversation.
“Did you ever talk to him about it?” Ben asked.
“Yes, years ago. One of our mutual friends committed suicide; Andy wrote him off as cowardly.”
“How’s that?”
“Andy thought the man should have shown more courage in the face of adversity; that the issue was a small one and he should have been above it.”
I glanced around uncomfortably. The crowd had grown larger and they’d become quiet, listening intently now, and not bothering with pretense.
“Anything else?” Ben asked George.
I didn’t like his tone or the question. Not at all.
“Andy never believed any of the suicides reported in the media actually happened. He thought that Vince Foster was murdered, for example.” There was a shocked murmur rippling through the surrounding crowd now.
I spied Deborah Andrews a few feet inside the house. I turned to George and took his arm.
“Will you excuse us, Ben? We need to pay our respects to Deborah.” I started walking away, pulling George with me and the crowd of frankly curious onlookers parted for us to walk through. Deborah’s back was turned to us; I leaned over to whisper to George. “You need to curb your views while we’re here. It’s not the time or the place.”
He squeezed my arm gently to emphasize his agreement while people we didn’t know continued to look at us, pretending not to stare.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 4:06 p.m.
January 23, 2000
DEBORAH ANDREWS HAD BEEN polite since birth.
I noticed, as I hadn’t on Friday night, that her brown hair was streaked with grey and her blue eyes were faded. She’d added a few pounds over the years and she looked every nano-second of her age, which I guessed to be about sixty-five.
Today, she wore a black silk dress with short sleeves and a jewel neck. The obligatory pearl choker adorned her neck and small pearl earrings were clipped on her lobes. Deborah’s only other jewelry was her wedding ring, the plain gold band Andy had put on her finger over thirty years before. The way arthritis had swollen her knuckles, she wouldn’t have been able to get the ring off if she’d wanted to. Which, we all knew, she didn’t.
Standing next to Deborah Andrews in the darkened living room of the large, unkempt, rambling house, was her daughter, Robbie. Nothing about Robbie resembled her mother, physically or temperamentally. Had that always been so?
Robbie glared at us with unconcealed malevolence that startled me into defensiveness. She was taller and about a hundred pounds heavier than Deborah, but nothing about Robbie was soft or compliant. Her hair was highlighted and cleverly styled. She wore chic glasses that made her round face appear even fuller than it was. She had three chins and each one of them seemed to be lifted in sharp defiance. Robbie held onto Deborah’s arm as if Deborah would fall without the support, as if Deborah needed to be shielded from us.
When I’d known Deborah Andrews, she would never have needed support from Robbie. If anything, it had been the other way around; Robbie had been the flighty one.
Today, Robbie had cried off all her makeup, if she’d had any on to begin with, which was unfortunate. The uncharitable thought that sprang, unbidden, to mind was that Robbie had the kind of face that needed every bit of a makeup artist’s skill. She stood there, as if she was lost and without any clue as to what had happened to her father, but she’d be damned if she’d let any of us get close to Deborah. Robbie seemed especially hostile to George and me, but I might have been projecting a little.
I remembered the chasm I’d fallen into when I lost my mother and, if Robbie had lowered her emotional armor just a tiny fraction, my empathy for her would have overwhelmed me. As it was, her attitude was jarring. I gripped George’s arm a little tighter, trying to hold onto my lifeline.
Deborah, gracious as always, held out a hand to George, who took it, kissed her cheek and murmured something privately into her ear. I bent over to give Deborah a small hug, myself. She seemed to need the contact. Or maybe I did. The house smelled strongly like cats, but I didn’t see one. Not that anything on the floor would have been visible in this crowd.
“Hello, George, Willa. It’s so good of you to come. I wasn’t sure you would.” Deborah said quietly.
“I didn’t think you’d have the nerve, after the way you behaved,” Robbie said with more honesty. “If it wasn’t for you, my father would still be alive.”
Well, obviously I hadn’t been projecting Robbie was openly hostile to us. All charitable thoughts I might have had for her situation immediately evaporated.
Deborah turned to her smoothly and patted Robbie’s hand. “Robbie, dear, George was justified in protecting Willa. Your father would have done the same for me.”
“That’s not what I meant, and he knows it.” She pointed her chin at George, defiantly. “He was the one who led the opposition to Daddy’s nomination. Without him, Daddy would be on the Court by now. He’d have had no reason to kill himself.”
Her spite was palpable. It oozed off her like lava flow, causing me to worry about a potential violent eruption.
“George did what he thought was right, Dear. We can’t hold it against him now.” Deborah, always generous of spirit and kind to others, was a woman who loved too much. Or maybe she displayed the kind of mannerly conduct that George’s Aunt Minnie would have called breeding.
Robbie glared at us both, but kept further opinions to herself. She didn’t allow us to talk with Deborah alone, though.
“We’re very sorry about Andy, Deborah. Neither one of us can believe it,” I said, in a serious bit of understatement.
Deborah’s eyes glassed up and tears welled in her lower lids, threatening to spill onto her face where earlier tears had left tracks in her makeup.
“I can’t believe it either, Willa. I’ve known Andy all my life. We lived next door to one another from the time I was born. I don’t know what my life will be without him.” Her voice broke and I was afraid she’d break down completely.
Robbie, took over, thanked us for coming and said her mother should go lie down for a while. They headed off to one of the other areas of the house.
Offering condolences to Deborah had been more difficult than I’d imagined. After that, I needed a little time to myself, too. I left George in search of the bathroom.
Unfamiliar with the layout of the house, I blundered into what must have been the general’s den. The room felt like an alien place to me, somewhere that I would never have been invited, where I didn’t belong. It
held the allure of the forbidden. Perhaps, I’d find a powder room here.
My nose wrinkled up almost involuntarily at the cat smell, which was close to overwhelming. Still, I didn’t see a cat.
The room was dominated by a large wood desk and the brown leather armchair behind it. It was filled with army paraphernalia: Flags, guns, plaques, framed certificates and photographs. Lots of photographs depicting Andrews with national and world leaders.
I wondered whether Andrews had written his memoirs here. The rooms where writers work had always fascinated me. I loved to read and I viewed the writing process as near magic. Someday, I planned to learn to write novels, but that day was far off in my future.
Andrews’s memoirs had caused quite a stir when he published them a year or so ago. He’d kept extensive notes of his army experiences and he used those notes to write his autobiography. He was sharply criticized for taking official army documents and using army personnel for the project.
He used the U.S. Army as if it was his personal corporation, they said, acting like he was the CEO. He denied any wrongdoing, offered to return the documents and pay for the personnel. But the damage to his reputation had already been done.
Recalling the scandal, I realized it hadn’t driven him to suicide, lending further support to George’s disbelief of the official explanation for Andrews’s death.
A dirty fireplace, a couch and two chairs fronted the massive desk. The weather would get quite cool out here in the country on winter nights. A fireplace would make the evenings cozy. There was a soft antique Iranian rug in front of the hearth and several other souvenirs of lifelong military travel.
A man’s man lived here, the decor seemed to say. Nothing soft or feminine about any of the furnishings. I wondered if Deborah had felt excluded from most of her husband’s life, and how she’d dealt with that.
To the left side of the desk, a door led to the outside of the house, which, when I thought about it, made sense. The general would have wanted to admit visitors for private meetings without disturbing his family.
Finally, I found what I’d been looking for. The head, for I’m sure General Andrews would never have called it the powder room, was just opposite the private entrance. It wasn’t the cleanest bathroom I’ve ever been in, clearly the province of a man. I ducked in and took care of things.
As I was leaving the bathroom, careful to return the seat to its original up position, I heard two guests talking in the general’s den. I waited a moment to avoid disturbing their privacy.
“Deborah said Andy was sitting up reading in here Friday night around eleven. They have separate bedrooms so she didn’t know what time he went to bed,” one of the men said.
The other guest, a woman, replied, “They’d been arguing and she went to bed angry. How would you like to have to live with that?”
I’ve never been a comfortable eavesdropper. Thankfully they moved on, and I let myself out to the hallway before someone else came into the room.
I wandered around the house for a while, looking for George, and eventually stumbled into the large country style kitchen that overlooked the small brown lake. Here, too, the house could have used a good cleaning and some maintenance. The cat smell was stronger because of the litter box in the corner. The lake and the dock in back of the house were visible out the French doors.
The fishing boat in which Andrews died was tied to the dock. Yellow crime scene tape and a uniformed officer I didn’t recognize posted there prevented curiosity seekers from walking out onto the dock or bothering the boat.
Not normally voyeuristic, for some reason I was drawn outside. I might not have another chance to see the crime scene and I was drawn to seize the opportunity presented.
I slipped out the back door and walked carefully across the yard, grateful for my flat shoes, scanning for snakes. I stopped in front of the officer, who had watched me make the journey from the house.
“This certainly is a beautiful lake, isn’t it?” I asked him. I still didn’t recognize the man at all, and he apparently didn’t know me, either.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You gotta admire a man who can afford a place like this.”
“Is that the boat where he died?”
“Yes, ma’am, it is.”
“It sure is a mess, isn’t it?” I tried to see out into the boat, which was about twenty feet from where we stood. It was full of blood and other things, hopefully remnants of successful fishing trips it is.”
Without glancing back at the boat, he replied, “Yes, ma’am.”
I was getting the picture that I wasn’t going to learn any pertinent information from this officer, whether he knew me or not. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I asked him, “Do you think the general committed suicide?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Ma’am.”
“Is there anything at all you can tell me?” I asked him. “Not if I want to keep my job, Ma’am.”
Because cases come to my courtroom long after the crime has been committed, there are very few crime scenes that I’ve actually witnessed first hand, but I’ve seen hundreds of crime scene photographs. Maybe a picture is worth a thousand words, but a personal view gave me visceral information.
The quiet, for example. I heard nothing out here, even sounds from inside the house. And the cloying odors. The entire area smelled like dead fish and dank, rotting vegetation. What a nasty place to die. Pictures would never convey the frightening aura of solitude and danger I felt simply standing here.
This lake was private. There was no public access and no other visible houses around it. Like most dark lakes in Florida, I was sure there were alligators floating beneath the surface and snakes just around the water’s edge.
The entire effect was eerie, like a horror movie, but more vivid. The short winter day was ending and I told myself that the cool breeze was responsible for the gooseflesh on my arms.
But if there were visible clues to a murder here, they weren’t obvious to me.
I said goodbye to the officer, went back inside, found George and insisted that we leave. He was more than ready, so we writhed back through the television cameras and ignored Frank Bennett when he asked whether George would like to comment on Robbie Andrews’s accusations against him.
I could have spent the evening discussing everything thoroughly with George, because for the first time in a long time, he seemed willing to talk about it. But I thought we’d had enough for one day, there would be many long, leisurely hours to hash it all out, and our relationship would get back to normal.
Spending time in a house of mourning gave us both a desire to be alive, I guess. We went to bed together and made long, slow, quiet love, tainted with the understanding that Deborah Andrews’s loss allowed me the opportunity to reclaim my beloved, although we were a long way from our previous relationship.
I hoped George and I had weathered a rough spot, and with Andrews’s nomination permanently defeated by his cruel death, we’d now pick up the pieces and somehow resume our lives. I craved peaceful days, shared evenings, and passionate nights. Maybe, after a few weeks, a romantic vacation in Bermuda.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tampa, Florida
Monday 7:00 a.m.
January 24, 2000
MONDAY MORNING, I IGNORED my continuing unease as I ran the dogs, showered, dressed, picked up the Newton file, made plans with George for dinner and scurried off down the back stairs to the garage. Greta’s top was still down from Saturday, and I didn’t bother to put it up. The wind can’t hurt my very short hair, and the morning was already turning into a fine Florida day.
Some federal judges use their law clerks as chauffeurs, but I really enjoy my time with Greta. Some say Greta’s too flashy for a judge to drive. But if you’re from Detroit like I am, cars are the essence of life itself. How could I give up Greta just for a job?
I drove carefully but quickly down our version of Palm Beach’s Avenue of Palms, over the bridge off Plant Key away from Minare
t and turned east onto Bayshore Boulevard toward downtown Tampa. The view was, as always, spectacular. Hillsborough Bay, particularly along the Bayshore, is truly beautiful.
Not many years ago, the Hillsborough River, Hillsborough Bay and Tampa Bay were completely dead. After a massive cleanup campaign, fish, dolphins, rays and manatee are regularly spot ted here. If a body of water can be reclaimed, a loving marriage can be reclaimed, too, I thought.
Greta and I passed the old mansions along the north side of the Bayshore, interspersed with the newer condominiums and a few commercial establishments, like the Colonnade Restaurant. It was closed this morning, but by lunchtime, it would be filled to capacity with the Old Tampa crowd, as well as the current crop of snowbirds that filled the place to capacity every day to enjoy the spectacular view.
I followed Bayshore over the Platt Street Bridge toward the Convention Center. As I approached Davis Islands, then Harbour Island, and turned north on Florida, I passed what used to be called Landmark Tower and is now the Sun Trust building.
A small cloud covered my emotions. One of my friends who’d worked in that building died this year. I hadn’t thought of him for several months. The recent death of my friend had popped into my mind several times since Saturday. I tried to shake it off and reclaim my earlier hopefulness as I quickly passed the building, then a series of storefronts and Sacred Heart Church along the four-block stretch to the courthouse.
My office is one of the last ones housed in the old Federal Building, circa 1920. It is a beautiful old building with wood details way too expensive to duplicate today. In 1920, the Middle District of Florida was a much smaller place than it is now. The building is old, decrepit and much too small.
Which is why we have a new federal courthouse just down the street. Maybe, when the Chief Judge, the man we call CJ (who I’m sure hates me), is promoted or retires, I’ll get to move to the new building with all the other judges. I took his parking spot the first day on the job and he’s never forgiven me for the small trespass. Since then, I’ve done quite a few things he doesn’t approve of. He has no real power over me, which irritates him even more.