by Diane Capri
When I arrived home, I learned that Kate’s worry box had flown open and let my anxiety out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Tampa, Florida
Monday 7:00 p.m.
January 24, 2000
GEORGE WAS WATCHING THE evening news rehash the General Andrews mess. When I turned my gaze to the television screen, a little “oh” escaped my lips when I saw George’s image, his voice repeating what Frank Bennett described off camera as “Prominent Republican strategist George Carson’s murder theory.” Just the title set my teeth on edge, but I couldn’t drag my gaze away.
Next, Frank cornered Police Chief Ben Hathaway. “Have you found any evidence to support a cause of death other than suicide?” he asked.
And Ben’s reply: “I can’t comment about an ongoing investigation beyond the official statement I’ve already given.”
Frank returned to the camera, and concluded. “Chief Hathaway did not deny the possibility that General Andrews was murdered.”
I sat down heavily beside George on the couch. “Why would
Frank air such a thing?” I said, breathless.
George replied, too calmly, “Frank has a responsibility to tell the truth, Willa. Andy didn’t commit suicide and we all know it. If Frank puts the real story on the air, the truth will come out, the killer will be found. Otherwise, Andy’s suicide will just be another speculative story for years, like Marilyn Monroe.”
He turned off the television and asked me if I wanted a drink. I wanted a dozen. He poured me a full glass of Sapphire and tonic.
Before I sipped the gin, I voiced my sober conclusion.
“Frank asked you if he could run the story before he did it, didn’t he? That’s the reason the story didn’t play last night.”
George was unperturbed. “Of course, he asked me. But I’m sure he would have aired the truth even if I’d objected. Frank is our friend, but not at the expense of his journalistic ethics.”
I felt my alarm rise another notch. “You’ve always thought ‘journalistic ethics’ was an oxymoron. When did you get to be so supportive of the media?” Anxiety injected my tone with unwanted sarcasm, but George just turned and walked out into the night air. Whether he heard me or not, I didn’t know.
I followed him out to the veranda and the dogs lumbered after us. We sat in our usual white wicker rockers. I took a big gulp of my gin and tonic and changed my approach. “George, don’t you see? This story makes it look like you know something. Like you have some inside information.” I took another swig, seeking an instant tranquilizer, but the comforting numbness didn’t come.
“I do have inside information,” George said quietly.
Not only was the gin not tranquilizing me, every nerve ending now buzzed throughout my body. Maybe this was the intuition or spirit guide Kate was always telling me I had. And maybe it was just years of experience as a lawyer and judge, but I knew, even before George explained it to me, that this was not good news.
“What inside information is that?” I squeaked out, past the lump in my throat.
“You’d better have a bigger drink. This will take a while,” he said. I didn’t argue. I handed him my highball glass and waited until he returned with a tumbler. He’d refilled the ice, Sapphire and tonic. We were out of lemons at the small bar in the den, so he’d substituted a lime.
George sat in deep reverie for a while. Because I feared what he would tell me, I didn’t rush him. I sipped my drink, watched the gentle lapping of the bay against our beach and concentrated on my breathing until I felt myself finally begin to relax.
Really, what could be so alarming?
As Kate had said just hours ago, this was George, after all. The man I’d been married to for seventeen years. I knew him better than he knew himself. What could he possibly tell me that would be so bad?
Finally, he began, in a quiet, slow way, as if he was telling a story around a campfire. “You know that before we met, I was in the army and I served under Andy overseas.”
He seemed to need me to acknowledge this, so I said, “Hmmm.” George’s army career was exactly the kind of thing that made me love him as I did. He’d joined the army right after college, even though he didn’t have to, because he thought it was the right thing to do.
George was always doing the right thing and he never had any trouble figuring out what the right thing was. Maybe it was his Lutheran upbringing, or that WASP noblesse oblige. Whatever it was, George navigated by a strong moral compass that was sometimes bewildering to me.
When we were dating, I thought dependable George wasn’t likely to throw too many curve balls at his wife and that was just what I wanted. After a lifetime of insecurity, my mother’s death, Dad leaving me with Kate, feeling adrift and alone, George’s brand of support and security was just what I’d craved.
Seventeen years later, I was still satisfied with it. The problem was, the shifting sands of George’s life were changing both him and our relationship. The entire situation was baffling to me. I couldn’t understand it, and I didn’t want to.
George continued, “When I first met him, Andy was the best kind of officer the army could turn out. He was an honorable man who viewed his career as a calling. He insisted his men abide by the highest moral code he and the army could exact. There were so many examples of this during the time I served under him that I can’t name them all and I’m sure I’ve shared some of them with you before.”
Again, an affirmative response seemed to be called for. “Hmmm,” I said.
“Andy and I came to be friends. I didn’t make the army my career, but he didn’t hold my decision against me,” George smiled a little. “We had a connection regardless of how infrequently we saw each other. Whenever we could, we’d meet for dinner or drinks, but the years put distance between us.”
He paused again, sipped his Scotch this time, and added more firmly, “Until Andy was promoted to Colonel and stationed in Tampa not long after you and I moved here.”
I remembered the time well. We were new in Tampa then and the Andrews family was one of the few we’d known. We saw Andy and Deborah and their children as frequently as Andy’s busy travel schedule would allow.
That was when I’d come to like Deborah immensely, although she was drinking heavily, even then. She was a busy mother and I didn’t see her often, so we finally lost touch.
Even in those days, Andy was a bit too much of a man’s man for my taste and his views on women bordered on misogynistic. Mostly, in my presence, he simply behaved as if women didn’t exist.
I remembered several social occasions where Andy stood tall and straight, quiet and polite while women in our circle talked. He wasn’t listening and he rarely responded unless we asked him a direct question. It was more like he was waiting for the noise to stop.
When a quiet moment inevitably occurred, Andy would turn to one of the men and start a totally new conversation about something none of the women were the least bit interested in, such as the maintenance routine for the stealth bomber or something.
He wasn’t exactly disrespectful, but he treated women as if they were flies buzzing around a picnic: Something that couldn’t be helped and were best ignored.
Back then, both Andy and I had made allowances for each other because of my respect for Deborah and our mutual admiration for George, our common friend. But I never spent any time alone with him. The idea just wouldn’t have occurred to either of us. We’d have had absolutely nothing to talk about.
George’s voice brought me back to the present.
He continued, now, in that same far away, remembering kind of tone. “Derek Dickson was another officer, the third member of our triumvirate. Derek made his career with the army, but he served in a different unit from Andy and his career stalled out after he made Colonel.”
My head had started to spin a little because of the gin and not having eaten anything since my tuna sandwich at lunch. I squinted my eyes and tried to pay attention.
Georg
e cleared his throat. “One day, we heard that Derek’s boy, a young First Lieutenant, had committed suicide. Derek was crushed. The boy had gone to West Point. Derek had been so proud of his son.”
He left to refill his glass, and he took his time about it, gathering his composure.
When he returned, I felt the chill he exuded. He’d become more remote, his emotions in check, determined to finish the distasteful story.
“I wanted to send a gift of some kind to Derek and go to the funeral. I wanted Andy to go with me.”
“Did he?”
“He flatly refused. He said the boy was a coward who couldn’t face his responsibilities and the army didn’t need him.”
George stopped a second or two, then finished. “He said the army didn’t need Derek either because he obviously sired a deviant.”
My breath drew in quickly, in shock and disgust.
George refused to look at me. “Andy, unbelievably to me, tried to arrange a posthumous dishonorable discharge for cowardice, but it couldn’t be done. Andy and Derek quarreled about it.”
Then he raised his eyes to mine and I could see how much it cost him to tell me this now, years later. In an even softer voice, so that I had to strain forward to hear him, George said, “Derek killed himself the next day.”
Incredulity heightened my disgust. “That’s despicable! I had no idea. Why would Andy do such a thing?”
To deliberately hurt a man and his family when he’d suffered the death of his child was gratuitously cruel beyond measure. I’d known Andy to be a single-minded military man back then, not a harsh, heartless monster.
And I knew George. He felt guilty. I sensed it in everything he told me, in everything he’d done these past few weeks to keep Andrews off the court.
“I couldn’t fathom it, even then,” he said quietly. “But it was obvious to me that the Andy I had known years before was not the man who literally ruined Derek’s life.”
“What happened between the two of you?” For I knew there was still more to this story.
“Andy and I fought about it and some pretty harsh words were said. Words I never regretted, even once,” George’s defiance reminded me of the principled man I was used to, and I was glad to see that man was still there, somewhere. “After that, I distanced myself from Andy and I guess he distanced himself from me, too.” George stood up now, at the veranda’s rail, looking out over the bay.
There was more. I waited.
“Over the years, you know, you hear things. I heard a lot of similar stories about Andy’s lack of compassion. Even the way he treated his kids was overly rigid and controlling. He acted like they were his to command, too.”
I hadn’t said anything in quite a while. I didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” was the best I could manage.
George sipped his drink for a while, almost as if he was alone with his thoughts. But he wanted me to know now, to know what he’d kept to himself all these years.
He turned around to face me. “I finally came to believe that Andy was mentally unbalanced. As he rose further and further up the ladder, and eventually received his fourth star, I became truly alarmed.”
George walked back into the den and returned with a light throw I used on the sofa sometimes. I blamed the evening chill that had settled on my shoulders for causing gooseflesh to rise on my arms. He placed the throw around me, snugging it up close, and cupped my cheek in his hand before he knelt down to look me in the eye.
“That’s why I worked so hard to defeat his nomination. Why I couldn’t let such a man sit on the highest policy making court for the next generation.” George looked directly at me, trying to communicate the intensity of his feelings. “There were so many good men in the army. And many more good candidates for the Court. But Andy was unfit to serve. I knew it. President Benson and Sheldon Warwick knew it. I think even Andy knew it.”
George continued to look at me intently. I realized it was important to him that I understand now, although he hadn’t shared any of this with me before. I nodded. It was all the speech I could manage.
He took my silence for lack of comprehension. “But don’t you see? Andy would never have given up on any fight. Fighting was how he solved all his problems. He would have seen this battle for the Supreme Court seat to the bitter end and he was too damn close to winning.”
He stood up again and put both hands in his pockets. “A heart attack from the stress could have killed him or maybe some other lunatic with a better aim could have gotten him.” His voice filled with strength and conviction. “But he would never, never have taken himself out of the game early and definitely not by suicide. Someone killed him. No one will ever convince me otherwise.”
I drew the throw closer around my shoulders and tried to stop shaking.
The minutes passed as I struggled to get myself under control, to face one central question I couldn’t answer: Was I more upset by the story itself or by the fact that I’d never heard it before?
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tampa, Florida
Monday 7:30 p.m.
January 24, 2000
I THOUGHT I KNEW everything there was to know about my husband. I’d believed we were soul mates in the way few couples are. I knew his favorite meals, vacation spots, what he liked to read, even the underwear he preferred.
I knew all these trivial details of George’s life. How could I have had no clue about his failed relationship with Andrews, something so important? A serious personal friendship had exploded in a spectacular and awful way. Yet, George had kept it to himself.
What other things had he kept secret?
I shook that off. Or tried to.
Maybe our connection had just never been tested before, I hoped.
My most significant personal tragedy, the death of my mother, happened long before I met George.
Since we’d married, our lives had been pretty uneventful, upwardly mobile, middle class, white bread normal.
Like the lives of most of our friends.
George had been my lifeline to the world. He acted as my anchor, my sounding board. He was my protection and companionship. We lived in a special world. He cared for me and I cared for him. We shared everything.
Or so I’d thought.
If I found out he had other secrets, what would they do to our lives?
Could we live with such knowledge?
I really wasn’t sure. And it was that lack of certainty that unnerved me. I needed to be sure of George, I wanted to be sure of him. Dammit, I had been sure.
Until lately, I was dead certain I knew who and what my husband was.
My emotions careened uncontrollably from hysteria to catatonia. I felt alternately sad and angry, near tears and near rage.
Because I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, I said nothing. I was so lost in my bewilderment, so focused on my personal feelings, that I didn’t hear George leave the flat a while later. He must have gone downstairs to work, I thought, to the extent I noticed at all.
By the time I found my way back to reality, it was dark out and getting colder. There were no lights on in the flat and the dogs were outside, howling to get in. In fact, that was the noise that roused me and made me realize that George wasn’t there.
I stood on shaky legs and opened the door to let Harry and Bess run headlong into the room. After petting them for a while and giving them a few treats, I did what I always do when I need to control my emotions.
When I don’t know what else to do, I work. I know I use work as an escape from life, a substitute for life. It’s where I go to get away from everything that I can’t cope with. I know it’s not healthy, but it’s better than other self-destructive methods of escaping the world. And it works.
I got comfortable in sweats and began to work on the Newton file in preparation for tomorrow’s opening statements. In the den, I sat at the desk where Aunt Minnie had done her household accounts as a young bride. It was a partner’s desk; one person
could sit at either side and both could work in the middle.
At some point, hours later, noticing I was hungry, I called downstairs, asked George to send up whatever tonight’s special was and join me for dinner. When he said he had already eaten, I realized it was after ten o’clock. I’d been working for over three hours and didn’t remember a thing I’d read. I’d have to start over and try to concentrate this time. It would be a long night.
Making room on the desk for my dinner tray a while later, I noticed the black leather book Kate had given me last year for Christmas sitting on the small table beside my favorite reading chair. It was embossed in the center with the words she’d said to me when she gave me the journal, “When your heart speaks, take good notes.”
The pages of the book were blank. Kate insisted that keeping a journal would provide guidance and connection to my intuition. Every time I saw her, she asked me if I’d started to use it. She’d asked me today, in fact, but I had ignored the question.
Maybe now was a good time. If I wrote down some of these thoughts I was having about George, maybe I could at least leave them there on the page and pay attention to my work.
I wrote for over an hour, putting down all the things that had happened in the past three days and how I felt. I wrote long paragraphs describing how shaken I was over George’s secret. And I wrote one short sentence about how stupid it was for him to tell Frank Bennett about it.
Finally, I approached the questions I feared most: If Andy didn’t commit suicide, who killed him? And did George know the answer to that question?
My hand shook so badly that I couldn’t read what I wrote next: what would the State Attorney do to George?
I slammed the journal closed and threw it on the floor. It landed face down in the corner under one of Aunt Minnie’s twenty wing chairs that seemed to sprout full-blown in their ball-and-claw feet every time I had my head turned.
It would be a damn long time before I touched that thing again. Not only did writing in the journal not make me feel better, I’d come to a conclusion that everybody else must have reached yesterday. I’d never felt so stupid.