Twisted Justice

by Diane Capri

  I saw no blood anywhere on the boat or the seat cushion. Except for the remains of fishing trips past, and the black fingerprint powder that would cover everything until the next hard rain, the boat was like a hundred others used by fishermen everywhere.

  What had I hoped to find here? I didn’t know. But whatever it was, the only thing I’d discovered was the eerie dark and the musty, dank smell of rotting vegetation and dead fish. That and the level of nerve or stupidity it took for the killer to follow Andrews out here after midnight.

  I dropped the camera back into my tote bag and turned to face the bull gator. With careful steps, I returned along the dock, toward the shore line and stared him in the eye.

  He didn’t move. I glanced up to see whether I thought I could jump far enough from the slimy dock without falling to be out of his running range. Fat bull gators can run faster on their squatty legs than tall federal court judges. But he might lay there for hours and I was not going to wait.

  I looked out onto the kudzu. The diamondback had moved on, but other snakes might be enjoying the welcoming environment. Indecision kept me in place another few moments until a rat ran right across my foot and caused me to scream.

  The bull gator opened his mouth and the rat ran right into his waiting jaws. I knew the old gator had planned for that rat to be me.

  Before I thought another second about it and lost my nerve, I stepped quickly off the dock, onto the kudzu and away from the gator.

  Then I ran.

  I didn’t stop until I made it back to the Andrews’s kitchen door and found myself pounding on it, shouting.

  “Deborah! Deborah! Let me in!” Adrenalin coursed through my body.

  She’d been standing there, watching me through the window, the whole time.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 1:30 p.m.

  January 29, 2000

  I DIDN’T WANT TO come back here, ever again.

  But I couldn’t leave. Not yet.

  After I’d calmed down, forgotten a little bit of exactly how scared I’d been, and wrestled with the cats for a comfortable chair, I dredged up what was left of my courage.

  “Did you see or hear anything at all the night Andy died that might help me? I love my husband.”

  Despite my best intentions, I heard my voice break a little. “And I don’t want to visit him in prison for the rest of his life.”

  She studied me closely for several minutes. Maybe she was weighing her thoughts, deciding what she would tell me and what she’d keep secret. Or maybe, she was floating in some kind of drug-induced haze. I couldn’t tell anymore. And worse, I wasn’t sure I cared.

  I thought about marital privilege again. For weeks now, I’d felt shut out of George’s life, cast aside while he focused his entire reputation on something he believed was essential to the country and the lives of everyone who lived here.

  As a result, I didn’t know things I should know.

  Basic things.

  Like where he’d been on the night Andrews was killed and how his gun had come to be a murder weapon.

  Was my husband innocent of murder? If George told me that he had killed Andrews, would I shield him? And if he was innocent of murder, but guilty of other crimes, then what? Would I invoke the privilege, if called to the stand to testify? Would George prevent me from doing that?

  I wanted to know the rules of this crazy game George seemed to be playing with our lives. To me, it felt like Russian Roulette.

  The privilege, in this instance, was meant to shield George, not me. He could prohibit me from testifying against him. But it would be easier for him if I just didn’t know the truth. Was that the real reason he wasn’t communicating with me?

  I shoved these unwelcome thoughts aside and refocused on Deborah.

  In a court of law, she couldn’t be forced to tell me many of the things she’d already divulged, and if Andy had been alive, he’d have tried to keep her quiet.

  But the goal of the privilege was to encourage communication between husband and wife. Even when Andy was alive, these two hadn’t communicated very well.

  Like my husband, at least recently, Andy had kept his wife uninformed about his activities. Whatever Deborah might know, surely there was no harm in her telling me now. Unless she’d killed her husband.

  Finally, Deborah’s internal battle (between discretion and dishonesty? I wondered) ended.

  “When Andy got the Supreme Court nomination, he thought he needed to pretend he still had a marriage a while. It’s a lifetime appointment, but he had to get confirmed first. He knew he might not get there.”

  She shook her head, whether at his foolishness or the country’s, I couldn’t tell. “So, he started staying home more. He moved into the guest room, which is attached to his den. He could come and go through the outside entrance there. I rarely saw him, but he did get mail here.”

  She stopped talking for a long time.

  Was I supposed to know something about the mail delivery? I couldn’t think what it might be.

  She began to clean up the kitchen, still struggling with herself. After a while, I realized she wouldn’t continue unless I prodded her, so I said, “What kind of mail did he get?”

  “Just the usual things at first. Magazines, bills, junk mail.”

  “And then, something else?” I prompted after another long pause.

  “Yes.” She picked up a hand towel and turned to face me, still standing in front of the sink where she’d been washing the cups and saucers. “Three or four plain business envelopes with no return address. At first I thought they were some type of advertising gimmick.”

  “But they weren’t?”

  “No.” Still she hesitated. And then, seemed to make up her mind. “One day I did something I’ve never done before in my life. I listened to the messages on Andy’s machine.”

  She lowered her face into the towel. Bright crimson flushed up her neck. I could barely understand her muffled words. “I was sure he had a lover and I’d find out why he never wanted me. Or maybe I just wanted my suspicions confirmed. I’m not even sure anymore.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “A woman said: Stay away or you’ll die.” The words seemed frightening, but her tone reflected relief. “I wanted to have my fears confirmed. It does a terrible thing to your self-esteem to be sexually ignored for thirty-five years.”

  Tears slowly made their way down her face, leaking from the outside corner of each eye. No tantrums or hysterics. Silent tracks flowed down and dropped off her cheeks onto her shirt, making dark blue circles in the cotton. She seemed not to notice them.

  I couldn’t imagine actually hoping my husband was having an affair. The irony of trying to apply the marital privilege to Deborah and Andy was that they had no marriage at all. I felt a voyeur to the pain that no one had previously witnessed.

  “Did you talk about the message with Andy?”

  She squared her shoulders; voice firm. “I erased the message, and I didn’t listen to any others. If more calls came, I’m sure they were all in the same vein.”

  “Did you tell the police about this, Deborah?”

  She shook her head. “I’m telling you only because of George. I can’t stand the humiliation of the world finding out about it.”

  She placed a soft hand on my arm. “Please use the information in your search for Andy’s killer if you must. But don’t tell anyone our true story. Please.”

  She pled with me, seeking something I couldn’t promise.

  On the way back to Tampa, I dictated today’s events into my digital recorder. I recorded her remarks about Andy receiving threatening phone calls, but my opinion was that either she’d fabricated the entire story or the calls had come from one of the many faceless protesters I’d seen on television during the confirmation hearings.

  People who sent anonymous notes and made threatening phone calls were usually cowards, not murderers.

  Deborah had given m
e quite a bit to think about.

  And I felt she knew more than she told me.

  So I dictated, “Did she kill Andy herself?”

  And my next thought, “Or does she suspect one of her children?”

  That could be the only thing that would make her refuse to divulge the rest of what she knew, given everything else she’d told me.

  Deborah wouldn’t accuse anyone of murder, mostly because she didn’t really care that her husband was dead. In some ways, she’d seemed relieved.

  But if she suspected one of her children of killing Andy, she’d never say so. In her mind, they’d done her a favor.

  I’d gone to Deborah’s house to find information that would help me persuade Michael Drake not to seek an indictment against George. The trip had been fruitless.

  But I was forced to think about all the violent women that surrounded the Andrews murder: Tory Warwick, Olivia Holmes, Robbie Andrews, and now maybe Deborah Andrews as well.

  I tried to reach Olivia several times. She didn’t answer any of the numbers she’d given me.

  As I turned off the exit and made my way to the courthouse, I gave up attempting to talk with her personally. I left a message, asking Olivia to meet me in my office this afternoon, and I went there to wait.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 3:30 p.m.

  January 29, 2000

  AGAIN, I LOGGED INTO the Internet. Robbie’s column was addictive. I’d been reading it every day since I’d first found it in the same way that I often turned to Dear Abby in the daily paper.

  Robbie’s opinions were harshly worded. Not much compassion there. Like father, like daughter on the compassion gene, anyway.

  One mystery was why people contacted her at all, but her supplicants seemed to have an insatiable desire for public humiliation.

  Today’s topics were consistent with the pattern I’d noticed: three or six letters on three basic topics, career advice (don’t sleep with your boss, no matter what), child rearing (kids need discipline and parents need a life) and advice to the lovelorn (forget happily ever after).

  Not long after I began reading Robbie’s column, the security guard buzzed me.

  “Olivia Holmes is here to see you, Judge.”

  I hadn’t told anyone that we’d hired Olivia. Judges meeting with lawyers was nothing unusual.

  “Send her up,” I said.

  My gaze fell upon a note from Margaret that I hadn’t seen before. It was not welcome news. Asbestos files transferred; scheduled for serial status conferences, ten a day for the next thirty days. M.

  The CJ could assign me these cases. Administrative matters were his bailiwick. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  “Swell,” I said, tossing the note into the trash on my way to greet Olivia at the door to my chambers.

  She carried a yellow leather briefcase that would have cost me a month’s salary. Federal judges made a decent living, but nothing like successful lawyers in private practice. We didn’t take the job for the money.

  Again, Olivia was dressed as the female version of the successful businessman. I wondered why that armor was so necessary to some women, particularly the diminutive ones.

  She struggled to be taken seriously. She was less than five feet tall and well under a hundred pounds, not to mention beautiful. She looked like a hand-painted china doll. Perhaps the accouterments of success added stature in a way that compensated for lack of physical size in a culture where size matters and bigger is better.

  I invited Olivia to sit down, my tone icy. Some ground rules had to be established. I was grateful for Olivia’s help, but we were paying more for her expertise than the price of a luxury car. Beyond that, this was our life, our case, and I was married to the client. As the minister said at our wedding, the two of us were one.

  Standing on the platform that my predecessor had installed to raise his desk up above those mere mortals on the floor, I towered over Olivia by almost two feet. She had to tilt her head up to look at me the same way one might look at the stars at night.

  “Olivia,” I said.

  If she felt intimidated, she didn’t act like it.

  “Willa,” she responded, just as professionally.

  “Please sit down,” I motioned her to one of the frightful green client chairs opposite my desk and returned to the over-sized black leather desk chair, another hold over from my predecessor. The chair and the platform had the effect of making me an imposing presence, a posture I’d exploited more than once.

  “I don’t want you calling me here and leaving messages with my secretary. My desk is not private. I have law clerks, the Court Security Officer, court reporters, my staff. Any of them can come in here and look at what’s in plain view. If you need to talk to me, leave your name and number only on my private line. I’ll call you back when I can.” I said this firmly, and watched her bristle.

  Clearly, she was used to much more deference than I was showing her. I thought she might actually resign, and it took a while for her to decide how she wanted to handle it.

  “Of course,” she finally said, defiantly. “I thought you wanted people to know I was representing your husband.”

  “The fact of your representation is something I don’t mind disclosing, but that’s all. What else gets disclosed, and when, is our decision, not yours,” I said.

  “All right, Willa.”

  Her tone said she wasn’t used to taking orders. Often, a criminal defense attorney is so much better informed than her client that she makes most of the decisions in a case. Olivia accepted my insistence that she wasn’t in charge here, but she didn’t like it.

  Surly now, she said, “But you should know that two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.”

  Something about the way she said it sent a chill up my spine, and I shivered involuntarily.

  “There’s something else,” I said.

  Her face scrunched up with annoyance. “What’s the problem? If you’ve got something to say, why don’t you just say it, so we can get to work?”

  “Alright, Olivia, I will,” I said, bluntly. “I did not give you permission to talk to George about his gun and I was amazed to learn from him that you had. I don’t want you to do it again.”

  Her eyes narrowed and a crease appeared between her brows.

  She said, “You’re suggesting that I’m supposed to defend George for capital murder and never talk with him except with your permission? That’s a little unconventional, isn’t it?”

  Her face lit up as if she’d just figured something out. Her tone softened. “There’s no need for you to be jealous. George may be the last faithful husband in North America.”

  How absurd.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 4:30 p.m.

  January 29, 2000

  I FELT MY ANGER flare and struggled to keep control in the face of such impertinence.

  “I am not jealous,” I told her. “And, no, it is not unconventional to insist that someone who works for me do what I want them to do.”

  I emphasized my next statement, “I’m not suggesting that you should never speak with George, only that you do it when I’m present or I’ve agreed to it.”

  Olivia didn’t respond right away. Instead, she went over to the water carafe on the small server in the corner and poured herself a glass of water. She returned to her chair.

  She said, “Willa, we need to get something clear here. I accepted this case because I wanted to. I don’t need the work. And you are not my client. George is. You know that.”

  She lightened her tone. “When you’re charged with murder, maybe you can call the shots. Now, if you and George want to fire me, then that’s your choice. But that won’t make me stop working on this case and it won’t keep George from talking to me if he wants to do so.” Paused to sip her water. “Why don’t you think about it a minute. I need to go down the hall.”

&nbs
p; Set down her glass and walked out. On me.

  No one had ever left my chambers without my consent.

  I was flabbergasted. Flummoxed. Outfoxed.

  And maybe some more “f” words, but I couldn’t think of any that were repeatable.

  Because, of course, she was right. George was the client, I was just the wife.

  Even if he wasn’t Olivia’s client, he could talk with whomever he pleased. Something he’d amply demonstrated over the past few weeks, which was the main reason we were in this mess to begin with.

  I had no leverage.

  I’d chosen Olivia because I’d thought we shared a common goal that would make her easy for me to control. I could replace her, but the next lawyer would likely be worse.

  When she returned sporting freshened lipstick, we were both calmer.

  A response was due from me, so I said, “You’re right, of course. I apologize. This is very, very upsetting to me and I was shocked when George told me last night that you had been there to interview him and asked him about his gun.”

  Graceful in victory, she said, “We have a lot of work ahead of us, Willa, and we’ll get farther if we work together. It’s pretty obvious that you and George are not communicating that well right now. He has taken care of you for seventeen years and he isn’t about to stop doing that because you’ve decided it’s time for you to take care of him,” she lectured me. “So why don’t you let me handle George professionally. Until we get this figured out?”

  If I wanted George to get out of this mess, I’d have to let Olivia do her job. I didn’t like it, but I really had no choice. “The least you can do is to keep me informed of what you’re doing and your progress. So we don’t duplicate effort.”

  “And you can do the same for me.” She gazed at me pointedly. Olivia might look like a diminutive doll, but she was one hard woman. If I hadn’t understood that before, I did now.