by Diane Capri
Mere suspicion was not evidence. I needed a solid plan.
And more information.
And some other suspects needed to be ruled out first, so that there was only one possible killer who wouldn’t be George.
Michael Drake would insist on a solid case he could prove before he’d let George go, because it looked like Drake already had a winner.
I moved to the computer. I waited for the site to load. I’d read the Ask Dr. Andrews column daily, so I’d gotten a feel for Robbie’s style. Her answers were pretty canned as well as increasingly harsh.
The usual questions on the usual topics comprised today’s column. There were three letters about workplace issues involving sexual misconduct of one kind or another. The child-rearing queries were about sexual abuse. And the lovelorn letters were about sexual dysfunction.
Mine was the only letter of the day that wasn’t about sex, but Robbie’s answer was:
Research is conclusive. While even a bad marriage is good for a man, a bad marriage causes negative health effects and can literally kill the wife. If you stay with this man, you can expect further heartache.
You can’t have a sexual relationship with a man who is in jail. If he’s convicted, divorce him or resign yourself to infidelity.
Interesting take on the whole thing, Robbie. Kate says that we all teach what we need to learn. Maybe Robbie should take her own advice.
Robbie had sex on her mind.
Nor did she consider that Faithful Wife’s fictitious husband really was innocent.
What was that about? Guilty conscience?
I hoped so.
I signed off and went back to my journal.
After a couple of hours of playing with one idea and then another, I thought I had it figured out. One step at a time, I’d get to the point where I could expose the killer.
But I needed to line up my evidence and nail it down.
Otherwise, Drake would never believe me.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Tampa, Florida
Monday 6:30 a.m.
January 31, 2000
I ONLY HAD TO park outside Sheldon Warwick’s house for about half an hour before he backed out of his driveway. I followed him to The Old Meeting house on Howard Avenue, in the district some clever marketer with a sense of humor had now dubbed “SoHo,” meaning “South Howard.”
I opened the door and walked through into history. On the left was the long counter. It was green Formica trimmed in chrome. Stools at the counter were round green vinyl, also trimmed in chrome. The waitress stood poised between the straw dispensers, taking orders for eggs over easy, country ham, and biscuits made with lard. Grits on the side. Sausage gravy smothered everything.
My mouth watered at the greasy smells as I took a seat at the counter and glanced above the open window to the kitchen for the blue plates that were displayed on the wall. Each plate reflected black handwriting that told diners what the supper special was for every day of the week. On Mondays, the special was bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches on white toast, cream of tomato soup, and a vanilla malt.
To say the Old Meeting House was reasonably priced was like saying it snows in North Dakota. People with old money in Tampa rarely spend it.
Warwick approached his buddies dressed for politickin’. He wore an old pair of khaki pants that looked like they’d need a patch any day now. The required beat-up deck shoes, sans socks, and a cloth belt with small fish on it that was ragged around the edges finished his bottom half. His golf shirt was a faded navy blue with a few speckles of paint on it. He’d probably snatched these clothes from his gardener.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Warwick was surrounded by several Tampa movers and shakers, all of whom were dressed exactly as unfashionably as he was, but they wore their own clothes. They dressed to be comfortable and because they weren’t trying to impress anyone.
The difference between Sheldon Warwick and his companions was that they were all genuine and he didn’t have a genuine bone in his body.
I skipped the lard, ordered scrambled eggs and coffee.
Warwick’s crowd all recognized me, but theirs was not a gathering where women would be welcome or accepted. They didn’t want to be rude, so they just acted like they hadn’t seen me. Once acknowledged, the southern gentlemen’s code of honor would have required them to include me. And be polite about it.
Seated alone at the counter, the waitress felt obligated to chat me up. We talked about the ice cream special of the day and the balmy weather. Warwick and his cronies laughed behind me while I savored the tastes of childhood.
After I’d finished my eggs, the tone of the conversation behind me sounded like Warwick was about to depart. I left a ten-dollar bill on the counter and followed him out to the parking lot where he tried to enter his fifteen-year-old Volvo. Another sign of old money around here was to buy cars as if they were priced per pound and never replace them while they still moved.
“Sheldon,” I called to him over the noise of the traffic on South Howard.
He turned around.
“Oh, Willa. How nice to see you.” He smiled for the crowds, or at least any crowds he thought might be looking at this hour. He held out his hand and took mine for the same reason. There was no warmth there.
“I didn’t have the impression you’d be glad to see me again so soon after our last chat,” I told him.
“You exaggerate, Willa. You always have.” He turned to unlock his car door. “I do need to be going, though. Have a good day.”
Before he could get seated inside the car, I moved closer to him and took off my sunglasses so that he could see the dark circles under my eyes as well as the seriousness of my intentions.
“Sheldon, I’m sure you know I’m not going to let this rest. Olivia Holmes told me that you have no alibi for the time of the Andrews murder.”
Sheldon removed his sunglasses, too, five hundred dollar ones. I guess when he got dressed for his biscuits with the boys he must have neglected to borrow his gardener’s old aviators.
“Look, Willa, I’ve indulged you because you’re Jason’s sister. But don’t push your luck. I had no reason to kill Andy. As for my alibi, I don’t need one. But I do have an appointment.”
He sat down heavily in the car’s worn leather seats. I grabbed the door handle, refusing to let him pull it closed.
His eyes were completely hidden by the sunglasses, but tone dripped condescension. “If you’re looking for a plausible alternative to George as murderer, you might consider your lawyer. Given her irrational hatred of Andrews, she had more motive to kill him than I did.”
“You’re too power-hungry,” I said, trying out one of my late night theories, while holding onto the door handle and my temper. “Andrews was making you look bad, ruining your hearings, disrespecting you before your constituents. He embarrassed you, exposed your lack of political clout for the whole world to see. Men have killed for less, Sheldon.”
He pulled the door out of my hand and slammed it, started the engine and backed out of the driveway, leaving me standing there holding nothing but the air and a fingernail broken down below the quick.
But I had him running, I consoled myself as I stuck my throbbing finger in my mouth.
I moved to the next step.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Tampa, Florida
Monday 7:30 a.m.
January 31, 2000
JASON ENTERED THE PRIVATE room I’d reserved at the Tampa Club high atop the Barnett Bank building downtown. The club was mostly deserted and I figured there would be few opportunities to be interrupted.
While we gazed out over the southeast Tampa skyline, the Florida Aquarium, St. Pete Times Forum hockey arena, and Ybor City in the background, Jason ordered an egg white omelet and wheat toast. We talked family matters for a while.
It was pleasant to sit and talk with Jason about ordinary things. We hadn’t had much contact in the past twelve years. He’d been living in Washington, D.
C., but he was often out of the country on business for Senator Warwick or helping him campaign in election years.
Jason wanted to be Secretary of State some day. He had high political aspirations and he planned to run for Senator Warwick’s seat when the senator retired.
I would have been proud to have Jason in the senate, but it was a waste of his considerable talent. I’ve made plain my view of the political process and everyone involved in it.
Time to get to the point. “I took your advice and investigated Thomas Holmes’ death.”
“I know. Sheldon told me.”
I smiled. “What did he say about our interviews?”
Jason grinned, too. “That you are an impossible woman and it’s too bad you already have a lifetime appointment. He said he can’t get rid of you, but he won’t support you for advancement to the Court of Appeals, either.” Jason took a sip of his bourbon and water. “Sorry.”
“Actually, unlike the rest of you, I don’t have any aspirations to higher office. So it’s not much of a hardship,” I told him, even though losing the chance did sting me, a little. “Besides, if what I think is true, Senator Warwick won’t be in a position to make a difference to my career if and when I change my mind about that.”
He looked troubled, now.
It was always whose ox was getting gored, wasn’t it?
Jason wanted Warwick to stay in the senate for another term and then retire, endorsing Jason to replace him.
Jason has had his life planned out in concrete progressive steps since he was eight years old. He wouldn’t let anything upset the applecart at this stage of his career. He’d worked too long and too hard and kissed too many asses to get where he was.
Wasn’t he just a little too satisfied to have George accused of murder?
Not that he wanted or expected George to be convicted.
But after George was arrested and the police stopped investigating, Jason as well as his boss gained a little more breathing space.
“So, what did you find out that upset Sheldon?” Jason still sounded like there wasn’t any possible way that I could be a problem for the powerful Senator Warwick.
Maybe that’s what prompted me to shake him up a little. My inner brat, as Kate calls it.
“I found out that President Benson asked General Andrews to get Thomas Holmes out of Charles Benson’s life and shut him up. Permanently. And Sheldon Warwick not only knew about that, he arranged it.” I said this as if it were a fact.
Judges don’t actually lie.
Maybe I stretched the evidence a little, but I might be able to prove it, if and when the time came.
Jason almost choked on the ice that he’d just started to chew. The Heimlich maneuver might have been required, but for the fortunate thing that ice melts. Jason choked and coughed and his eyes watered as I sat and watched, making no effort to assist him.
Eventually, once he could talk again, he said, “Willa, you are barking up the wrong tree there.”
“Maybe you better straighten me out, then, because unless I get some different information, this is the story I’m taking to Frank Bennett. I’ve only recently discovered what a powerful thing public opinion is,” I said sweetly.
Jason is a tough political operator and I counted on that to inspire him to help me. Especially now that his career plans were at stake, too. He shook his head, amazed at my foolish conclusions.
He said, “I didn’t mean to suggest that Thomas Holmes was murdered. His death really was an accident, just as the army said. Didn’t you read the file?”
“Then why steer me in his direction?”
“Don’t you believe his death was an accident?”
“No,” I said. “But answer my question.”
He gaped at me as if I was a few bricks short of a full load.
“You wanted to know why President Benson nominated Andrews to the Supreme Court. Andrews was no more qualified for that job than you are,” he said, as if everyone with an IQ above sixty would have figured that out by now.
“Thanks.”
He looked a little chagrinned. “You know what I mean. But Andrews hadn’t wanted to retire from the army. The army was all he knew and he loved it. He’d have stayed forever.”
Why Andrews retired? The public story was that he’d served his time and wanted to move on to other projects.
“Then why didn’t he? Stay forever?”
“Because they made him go.” Jason took a deep breath and got up and refilled his water from the serving cart. He stood with his back to me and drank a few sips of it before he walked back to the table.
He put the glass down and jammed his hands into the pockets of his khakis, leaned his butt on the edge of the chair and stuck his legs out straight in front of him. Stalling. I waited. It wasn’t my turn. He took another sip of his drink.
“You’ve already figured out that Andrews was at least bisexual?” he asked.
So he gave me some credit, at least. I nodded.
He took another drink. At this rate, he’d be pie-eyed before he finished. “Sexual orientation, as long as you keep it private, is irrelevant in most circles, but in the army? Well, you know what the status of the world was there.”
I sipped water. Slowly. Kept full attention on the facts. “Yes, Jason. Everybody knows. Andrews knew, too.”
“Sure he did. Look, Andrews was a sorry S.O.B. Just being bisexual wouldn’t have been a big problem if he’d kept it to himself. But he couldn’t keep it private. He was a general, nearly the top ranking army officer. Yet, he made sexual advances to junior army personnel.”
An involuntary whistle escaped my lips. The army was, in many ways, just like any big corporation where bad apples, including sexual miscreants, could rise to the top, no matter how conscientious the organization was to try to prevent that from happening. Bad apples advanced in the corporate ranks, especially if they had powerful friends, as Andrews had. The army would have had the same vulnerability as Andrews was coming up, even though things had changed somewhat in recent years.
Still, even if Andrews was guilty of sexual misconduct, that couldn’t be the whole reason he was forced to retire.
I said, “You’re not trying to tell me that in an organization as large as the U.S. military, there aren’t at least a few unauthorized sexual activities going on, are you?”
Jason wanted me to understand this now. “Even if his partners were willing, Andrews was so senior and had so much rank that you’d never know for sure.” He took a deep breath and revealed the rest. “Some of his partners weren’t consenting. At least, that’s what several men said when they filed sexual harassment complaints against him.”
“So the complaints were from men, not women?”
When I’d heard about the sexual harassment complaints the first time, I’d assumed Andrews’s subordinate females filed them. Based on my own experience, I knew Andrews was a misogynist. It seemed natural that he’d be looking for sex in all the wrong places. I’d simply assumed it was heterosexual contact he’d been seeking.
Jason nodded. “There were both kinds. One particularly nasty event involving a man came to Warwick’s attention. Sheldon went to President Benson and they told Andrews he had to retire. If complaints against him were revealed, they’d have ruined his career anyway. Andrews had no choice but to retire.”
“Except?”
He gave me a look that said he didn’t want to keep talking. But he did. “Except Andrews refused to go quietly.”
“And?” I prompted again.
Jason gave me a look of resignation. “Andrews told Sheldon and the President that he would only retire if President Benson agreed to nominate him to the Supreme Court when the next vacancy came up.”
“What?” I was, for the first time during this tale, actually shocked. “You have got to be kidding.”
Now, I paced around the room, the steam fairly rising from my pounding heart to my flushed face.
“The President sold the most important job i
n the country to a man he believed was guilty of reprehensible conduct?”
“Calm down,” Jason said, in the patronizing way that makes me want to throw a pie in his face. “President Benson said no and Sheldon said he wouldn’t support Andrews either.”
I felt a little better, but I remained standing and pacing and I could feel my blood boil.
For a couple of seconds.
Until he added: “And that’s when Andrews told them both that if they didn’t make sure he got on the Court, he would make sure the world knew about Charles Benson’s drug use and how they’d all handled Thomas Holmes. Because it touched Sheldon personally, too. His son, Shelley, had been a part of that crowd.”
Now, the lid blew off my composure completely.
“So we can add blackmail to Andrews’s list of accomplishments now?” I shouted. “Warwick and Benson agreed to put that despicable character on our highest court for the rest of his life?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. If I hadn’t had such a low opinion of politics and politicians in the first place, this piece of information alone would have been enough to push me over the edge. I paced back and forth, berating Jason and his boss and the president and the system and on and on and on.
Then we heard a knock at the door to the private room which preceded the entrance of an apologetic manager. “Is anything wrong, Judge Carson? Shall we call the police?”
The interruption threw cold water on my rage and embarrassed me into reassurance. He seemed mollified, but looked back to confirm no act of violence was imminent before he closed the door softly on his way out.
A few gulps of cold water and some time for thinking things through led me finally to ask Jason, “Would anyone care? Now? To find out that Charles Benson used drugs as a kid? I mean, really, lots of teenage kids experiment with drugs.”
Jason, who had simply been waiting for me to vent, his gaze turned toward the far distances he could see from forty-two stories up, looked me directly in the eye now. “It wasn’t just experimenting. Charles was a heavy user. He went into rehab after this. Besides that, Charles bought and furnished drugs to others. In the White House. That in itself is about ten federal crimes.”