Miz Scarlet and the Acrimonious Attorney

by Sara M. Barton

  “Kenny, the answers we need are back in Hartford. It’s not even eleven o’clock yet. If we leave now, we’ll have plenty of time to talk to Dubinsky, and we can catch a red eye back here later tonight. Come on, honey. You know it’s the right thing to do. Besides, the killer is here in Florida. If I’m in Connecticut, I’ll be safe for at least a couple of hours.”

  “This is not how I saw this trip unfolding, Scarlet. I expected a totally different outcome. It should have been wrapped up by now. You should have never been attacked....”

  I could see him wrestling with the idea. He was clearly torn over what to do. It was time to give him a little shove.

  “If anything happens to the victims, it will be on us. We need those answers, honey, and that means we have to fly back there. It’s really the only way we have to solve this case.”

  He couldn’t argue with that, could he? When he shrugged, I knew it was a done deal. One way or another, Paul Dubinsky was going to give up his secrets to us, even if I had to pile on the guilt until he begged for mercy. How else could we stop the maniac who wanted to kill me?

  “We’ll go on one condition,” he said firmly. “No calls to the Four Acorns Inn. No quick stops to pick up anything. We’re seeing Dubinsky and rushing right back here.”

  “No problem.”

  “Promise me.” Those big, brown eyes cut right through my heart with their laser sharp light. He clearly intended to hold me to this agreement.

  “I, Scarlet Wilson, promise we will not have any contact with the Four Acorns Inn.”

  “Or Larry.”

  “Oh, believe me, she’s not even on my radar,” I told him, wagging my head back and forth. “The last thing I want to do is have to listen to Larry crow about how her cop friends already solved the case. Look at me, Kenny. I’m black and blue from head to toe. How can she possibly think they solved this case?”

  The kiss I got in response was so laced with passion that I nearly lost my head and forgot we were out in public. Kenny’s deliciously amorous side was just beginning to show itself on a regular basis and I admit I liked it. The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to our old, staid routine.

  Make sure that you book that return flight for this evening, Miz Scarlet. If you leave this tropical paradise without a formal commitment from Captain Peacock, it will haunt you for the rest of your life. And if it doesn’t, the Googins girls will jump into the fray and make your life absolutely miserable. “Coulda, shoulda, woulda...” will follow you into old age like creaky bones and a weak heart.

  Even as I pumped myself up for all that travel, I recognized one teensy-weensy flaw in the plan. The killer was here in Florida and we didn’t still didn’t know who he was. Coming back was a real risk.

  That’s all the more reason to get those answers from Paul Dubinsky, lest your name be carved in on a granite headstone in White Oak Hill Cemetery. “Here lies the body of Scarlet Wilson. The amateur sleuth got a little cocky with a killer and ended up dead.” That wouldn’t be much of a legacy, would it?

  Our plane landed at Bradley International Airport just before four. With no luggage to collect, Kenny and I hopped on the shuttle to the long-term parking lot and retrieved his car for the twenty-minute drive into Hartford.

  Paul Dubinsky was waiting for us in his office when we arrived. His assistant led us down the hallway and ushered us in.

  “Mr. Tolliver, it’s nice to put a face to the voice.” The short, middle-aged man with black-rimmed glasses held out his hand to Kenny. “And you must be Ms. Wilson. I’m so sorry you had that trouble last night. You must have been frightened.”

  He waved us into the pair of chairs that faced his desk, and once we were seated, he sat himself down. I looked into those blue eyes of his and saw the truth. The news about the attack on me last night had sent him into a panic. There was no way he would willingly stick his neck out to help us. It only took five minutes of double talk and chit chat to drive that point home. He did everything he could to avoid our questions, short of simultaneously standing on his head, patting his belly, and singing the alphabet.

  “Mr. Dubinsky, we need to know what happened to you. There’s no way we can help you or any of the other people as long as your secrets stay buried,” the remarkably patient man from Mercer Security told him.

  “No.” That one word was said firmly, decisively. “No, I can’t go through that again.”

  “Again?” I leaned closer, determined to draw the answer out of him.

  “No.”

  It’s a good thing I’ve got thick skin. I’m not easily dissuaded.

  “When did you go through it the first time?”

  Kenny didn’t interrupt me as I pressed the older man. He was waiting for something. I wasn’t sure what it might be, but as long as I had questions, I was going to dig for the answers.

  “Here’s the problem in a nut shell, Mr. Dubinsky. I found Mr. Grimshaw’s body. I came face-to-face with the masked killer. And for some unknown reason, he now wants me dead. I don’t even know why.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s very unfortunate.”

  “It’s more than unfortunate,” I countered hotly, knowing he was resisting my efforts with little discomfort. How could this experienced attorney not help me? Didn’t justice matter? “He’s not going to stop until he succeeds. Why?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you,” he shrugged. “Who’s to say what goes on in the mind of a madman?”

  “Madman?” I studied him for a long minute. He knew more than he was saying. And then I realized why. “You know who the killer is, don’t you?”

  “No.” He looked away. “I am merely sympathizing with your plight, Ms. Wilson.”

  “Bulldocky!” I slapped my hand on his desk to get his attention. “You know who the killer is and you refuse to talk? That makes you an accessory to murder!”

  “No, Ms. Wilson, you are very much alive.” He picked up a pen from his desk and began to doodle on his legal pad.

  “I wasn’t referring to me, you sanctimonious twit! You know who murdered Philip Grimshaw!”

  “Is that an accusation?” he asked dully. “I’m afraid you will have a difficult time proving I was in any way involved.”

  “Care to bet on that?”

  “Scarlet, this is a waste of....” Kenny put his hand on my wrist. I twisted away.

  “No! No, I will not stand by and allow this silly man to commit such a travesty of justice! You know who murdered the man who saved your bacon and you’re willing to keep silent? What kind of lowlife jerk are you?”

  And then I saw the light. It hung on the wall of the senior partner’s office, a mere rectangle that was about five inches by seven inches, in full, glorious color, surrounded by mahogany. In that moment of clarity, I unraveled the secret to Paul Dubinsky’s shame.

  In the photograph, he stood on a tropical beach, palm trees in the background, with his arm around a young woman. He was dressed in striped trunks and a tee shirt. His companion wore an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny string bikini that left little to the imagination. Her blonde hair was drawn back in short, spiky pigtails and tucked under a bright red baseball.

  “Is this you down in Florida?” I asked Dubinsky as I pointed to the frame on the wall. He quickly looked away. Catching Kenny’s eye, I frowned and cocked my head in the reticent lawyer’s direction. Dubinsky had no intention of cooperating with us.

  “Yes,” he nodded, acknowledging my question. I noticed that he put all of his attention on a legal pad on his desk.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “Just a family friend.” He picked up a pile of papers and started to shuffle them like he was playing cards. I could see his eyes weren’t really focused. It was a ruse he used to distract us.

  “A family friend?” I let my skepticism come through loud and clear. “What kind of family friend?”

  He didn’t answer me. That told me that the girl in the photo was important. Now I needed to know who she was.
/>   When I was growing up, my brothers rarely showed me any mercy during playtime. They would drop out of the trees when I least expected it and gleefully pounce on me like cunning bobcats, hollering, “Tag! You’re it!” I learned that the only way I was ever going to survive a game of hide-and-seek was to surprise my opponent; I had to take him down hard and fast, before he had time to think. It was time to grab the attorney in a full nelson, pinning him until he cried “Uncle!” and begged me to stop.

  “Try again, Mr. Dubinsky.”

  “Excuse me?” Those eyes, almost obscured by the thick lenses of the glasses, registered his shock. He was clearly not used to women speaking to him that way. But he was also the victim of blackmail, and his blackmailer was now a murderer. I suddenly remembered the aggressive way Margie Grimshaw poked Kenny. She was an intimidating woman who didn’t play by the rules. I took a chance and tore a page out of her playbook.

  “I’d like an answer,” I told him, “and it had better be the truth.”

  For just a few seconds, I thought I had guessed wrong. But then Paul Dubinsky looked up at me.

  “That’s Grimshaw’s stepdaughter, Sybil.”

  Why would a man who was being blackmailed have a photo of himself with a teenage girl on his wall? That made no sense to me. Unless....

  “How long did your affair with Sybil last?”

  One minute, the attorney was staring at me across the desk. The next, his breathing became stilted. As the color faded from his face, he closed his eyes and his derriere landed in the desk chair like a fifty-pound sack of flour. Splayed across his legal pad, arms outstretched on the desk, he looked like a corpse at a crime scene.

  “Oh, crap!” I cried, springing forward to check for a pulse. I couldn’t get my fingers under his collar to feel his carotid artery. Desperate, I loosened his tie. My quivering fingers worked feverishly to unbutton his shirt.

  Kenny calmly reached past me and tapped the unconscious man’s face lightly. “Come on, Mr. Dubinsky! Wake up!”

  “Should we do CPR?”

  “No, he’s coming around. He just fainted.”

  “Thank God!”

  “Get him a glass of water, Scarlet.” Kenny pointed to the carafe and tumblers on the credenza behind the desk.

  Twenty minutes later, with the flood gates wide open, Paul Dubinsky made a clean breast of his affair with young Sybil. Worried that I would scare the bejesus out of the poor man and cause another fainting spell, I let Kenny ask the questions.

  “Why did you keep the picture?” he wanted to know.

  “I...I’m sure this sounds silly to someone like you, but...I...I wanted a reminder of my...stupidity.”

  “It was your way of doing penance?”

  “Yes,” he admitted, his face flushing as his shame caught up with him. “I had never done anything like that before. I was horrified by my bad behavior.”

  Restless and edgy after the unexpected scare, I wandered around the corner office. My curiosity about Sybil grew as I listened to Dubinsky’s tale of woe. Something just wasn’t right.

  “How old did you say Sybil is?”

  “That picture was taken the first time we met, a little over a year ago. She had just turned fifteen,” the devastated man announced.

  “I don’t think so.” I shook my head.

  “I know she looks older than that, but believe me, she’s in high school.”

  “No, she’s not. I’d bet the farm on it.”

  “What?” Dubinsky seemed stunned.

  “Scarlet?” Kenny glanced over at me, a quizzical expression on his face. “Do you know something specific or are you just guessing?”

  “She was no fifteen-year-old when this was taken. Trust me on this.”

  “But I’m paying her tuition at St. Mary’s!”

  “You may be paying, but Sybil isn’t in high school.”

  “How do you know that?” For the first time, Dubinsky made honest eye contact. He wanted to believe me. How could I prove my point?

  “I taught high school for several years, Mr. Dubinsky. I know teenagers. I’d say Sybil’s about nineteen or twenty by now.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “She’s wearing a Despicable Me baseball cap.”

  “So?”

  “It’s vintage. The new ones are very different.”

  “And?” Kenny looked at me expectantly.

  “It’s a cap for an adult, not a kid. Either she’s older than she looks or she shops on eBay for vintage clothing.”

  “You really think she might be that old?” Dubinsky’s face was pale once more.

  “I do. Are you going to faint again?”

  “No, no. I’m fine.” He pushed his desk chair back and swiveled around to his credenza. He opened a drawer and retrieved a file.

  “Can you tell us what happened to you? How did you get into this mess?”

  “Johnny Zee invited me to go out for a day of fishing with him and a group of his friends. I was out on Siren of the Seas. After lunch, I started to feel a little bit queasy, so I went below to lie down. I must have passed out.”

  “Do you do that a lot?” asked the man from Mercer Security.

  “It’s my blood pressure medication. Sometimes I get light-headed.” He grimaced. “When I came to, I was naked and Sybil was asleep beside me. She was naked too.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you fainted,” I remarked. “It sounds more like you were doped.”

  “Doped?”

  “She’s right, Mr. Dubinsky. Did you have anything to eat or drink before you felt queasy?”

  “Just a glass of orange juice.”

  “Someone probably served you a Mickey Finn.” Kenny wrote something down in his little notepad. “The usual drug of choice for one is chloral hydrate.”

  “I was drugged? No wonder I felt like hell!”

  “Did Johnny Zee know about what happened?” I inquired. He shook his head.

  “I don’t believe so. He was too busy chiding me for not pulling my weight as a fisherman. He expects his anglers to produce results.”

  The three of us sat in silence for the next thirty seconds or so. And then Kenny asked a pivotal question.

  “Did any of the other blackmail victims experience anything similar to what you went through while on Siren of the Seas?”

  “You think they might have been drugged too?” He looked from Kenny to me and then back to Kenny. The self-doubt was beginning to fade as he came to grips with the truth. “That...didn’t occur to me.”

  “Blackmailers are a vicious breed, Mr. Dubinsky. You might be amazed to learn that they have plenty of tricks to torment their victims.”

  “But we don’t know each other. Most of us have never even met.”

  “There must be a common denominator between you,” said Kenny, “a thread to tie the blackmailer to the blackmail. If you were set up, the others were too.”

  “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Dubinsky....”

  “Please call me Paul. If you know my darkest secret, there’s no reason to stand on formality.”

  “Very well, Paul.” I gave him a little smile. “How much money did you end of paying them?”

  “Two hundred and eleven thousand dollars, including school fees for Sybil.”

  Chapter Twenty Two

  “Wow, that’s a lot of cash.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t all cash. I gave Margarita the title to my boat.”

  Kenny sat up suddenly. “What kind of a boat was it? Where did you dock it?”

  “It was a twenty-six-foot Calcutta 263,” was his wistful answer. “I kept it in Islamorada, just outside my condo at a marina resort.”

  “Do you still have the condo?”

  “Alas, no,” said Paul, letting out a disappointed sigh. “It was one of the things I had to sell it to pay my blackmailers.”

  “How much was the boat worth?”

  “It was worth just under a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Did you get that money back when Philip g
ot into the safety deposit box in the Santa Domingo bank?”

  “Yes, all but about five thousand of it.”

  Kenny tilted his head. He was clearly intrigued. “So, they sold your catamaran and banked the profit.”

  “As far as I know, they did. But I have no idea where it went, or to whom.”

  “Is there any way to trace it?” I wondered.

  “It’s only traceable if it’s legitimately registered in the United States.” Kenny tapped his pen on the top page of his pocket notebook. “How seaworthy was your boat? Could it have sailed to the Bahamas?”

  “It might have been possible, but only with an experienced captain at the helm. It’s a very stable boat in rough waters, but I don’t know that I’d feel comfortable making a run like that. If you run into rolling waves, you could get swamped, and if you’re trying to get through choppy waters, you could consume all your fuel. I used the boat for bottom-fishing and trolling.”

  I glanced at the wall clock above Paul’s desk. Our plane was scheduled to take off in an hour and a half. It was time to go. I stood up and gently stretched, feeling every one of my bruises. Maybe I could nap once the 747 was up in the air.

  “I know that I told you I couldn’t talk about the other victims and what they went through. It’s true,” Paul said. “But I might be able to reach out to them and explain the situation. They may or may not be willing to talk to you. If any of them were set up the way I was, and if they’re not guilty of any crimes, you are far more likely to have some success in convincing them to cooperate.”

  “Give me a little time first to do some digging. Once I do, I’ll know better what questions I need answered. I want to solve this case, Paul.” Flipping his notebook closed, Kenny rose to his feet. “I guess we should get going. We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “Of course you must. I appreciate you coming to Connecticut to speak with me.”

  I was about to pick up my purse from the chair when a question occurred to me. “Paul, after you sold your condo in Islamorada, did you stop going down to the Keys?”

  “Well, yes. I was terrified, thinking that I would be....” He didn’t bother to finish his thought.

  “Arrested for raping an underage girl,” said Kenny matter-of-factly.