Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  “Yes, I was here. Sound asleep. I was in my room, with the windows closed, the curtains drawn. I’d taken a Valium before I went to bed.” She shuddered. “That dinner at George’s restaurant was so dreadful, I wanted to be swallowed up in sleep. I actually prayed to die in the night, just so I wouldn’t have to face you or anyone else ever again.” Now, a little anger crept into her tone. “Andy was always doing that to me.”

  “Doing what?”

  The anger grew stronger. “Embarrassing me in public. Not caring how I felt. He never cared how other people felt. He just did whatever he wanted.”

  “You didn’t kill him, did you Deborah?” I laughed a little, like

  I was making a joke. Some joke.

  She didn’t deny it right away. She took more tea, and another stale cracker onto her plate, not looking at me. I waited for her answer, sensing that something was going on here that I didn’t quite understand and wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  Finally, she said, “No. I didn’t kill him. Not that I hadn’t thought about it. But if George did kill Andy?” she put a little uplift at the end of the sentence. “Thank him for me, will you?”

  I felt disoriented, as if I’d been conversing with a multiple personality. I didn’t know what to say.

  She changed the subject back to her cats and I’d had enough of that. I stood up, as if to leave, but I asked her, “Do you mind if I take a look around outside? I’ll stop back to say good-bye.”

  “Be careful of the gators,” she said, as she carried the tea tray back into the house.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 12:30 p.m.

  January 29, 2000

  THE BACK YARD WAS as overgrown as the front. Kudzu vine covered everything, including the trunks of the trees. The foliage grew so thick overhead as to completely block out the sunlight. Somehow, the yard seemed more sinister today than it had when I was here the last time. Maybe because there was no cop with a gun standing at the entrance to the old dock now.

  I made my way carefully through the dank vegetation, each footfall meticulously planned. I wiggled my toes, thankful for my closed, flat shoes, and kept my gaze to the ground, watching for snakes.

  Poisonous cottonmouths were most likely around the water. Unlike rattlers, cottonmouths were quiet, they snuck up on you, and their venom could kill a grown adult. I’d been told that cottonmouths were often confused with harmless water snakes, but my goal had always been never to get close enough to tell them apart.

  Diamondback Rattle Snakes were plentiful around here, too. They can strike up to four feet. I saw one on the golf course not too long ago and refused to get out of the cart for the rest of the game.

  Torn between watching for alligators that might be hanging out in the brown tinted water and keeping my gaze fixed on the kudzu that covered what was once the lawn, I stepped slowly, conquering my fear, although I wanted to run straight to the dock and get off the damned kudzu. But one misstep could cause me to fall. And if there was anything I really didn’t want to do right at that moment, it was lie down on the tangled mess.

  I was almost to the water’s edge when a tree branch as thick as my forearm slithered across my path. I screamed out loud and jumped back ten feet. The snake coiled up then and I could see the large lump in the middle of its thick body, distorting the characteristic diamond patterns clearly visible on its sleek skin.

  He hissed at me and that was all I needed to run a wide circle around him and jump onto the dock, struggling not to fall into the brackish water. Maybe because he’d so recently fed on a field mouse or something (I prayed his meal hadn’t been one of Deborah’s cats), the diamondback let me go.

  I watched him uncoil and slither on, disappearing into the kudzu at the edge of the orange grove.

  When my pounding heart had settled down to twice its regular thumping rate, I found the courage to make my way along the rickety boards of the weathered, old fishing dock. But I swept my gaze from side to side, watching for alligators and cottonmouths.

  Unlike cats, which are somewhat territorial and may stay fairly close to their chosen home, snakes and alligators cohabited and moved about freely. Both liked to kill small animals, including small humans. And they could do serious bodily harm to large humans like me, too.

  Again, I realized that no one knew where I was. I hadn’t told George, or Olivia. And I doubted that Deborah even remembered I was out here. It wasn’t likely my cell phone would work here, either. Even if I could manage to haul it out of my tote bag in time to call anyone for help. What in the world had I been thinking?

  If a diamondback struck me, or an alligator attacked, I could die, and no one would know.

  That was when the uncontrollable shaking started.

  I also realized that Andy had to have been either the bravest man I’d ever known, or the dumbest. The story was that he came out here every morning, before daylight, to go bass fishing because the fish liked to feed then and might be lured onto his hook. Each day, he traversed that god-forsaken kudzu snake haven in the semi-darkness, made his way to where I was standing now, and then into that small boat, just to go fishing?

  Now that I’d reached the dock, I wanted to finish up the job I came for quickly and get the hell out of here.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 12:45 p.m.

  January 29, 2000

  THE OLD DOCK WAS in disrepair, too, just like the rest of the place. The boards were slimy with green fungi. I put each foot down purposefully, testing the strength of the rotted boards, one at a time. The length of the dock was about thirty feet, but it felt like walking a very long gangplank.

  I reached the spot where Andy’s fishing boat was tied up about a hundred years after I’d wanted to get there. When I turned to see how far I’d come, I noticed the big bull gator sunning himself on the shoreline, inches away from the dock’s entrance. He opened his mouth wide enough to let me see his powerful teeth and then closed it, smiling at me. As if to say, “Just wait. I’ll catch you on the return.”

  For some reason, that did it. I stood up straight and got a hold of myself. Whatever courage I possessed found its way back into my body. That old gator was more afraid of me than I was of him. So what if more than three hundred of the damn things had attacked humans in the last fifty years. No gator had killed a human in a long time. I wouldn’t be the first.

  With judicial detachment, I stood now and looked down at the fishing boat. I reached into my tote bag, grabbed the digital camera, and took some pictures. The first one was of the gator. If he killed me, I wanted to leave something so he could be identified.

  The second that thought arose, I started to laugh. And then I forced myself to stop. I told myself it wasn’t hysteria.

  The aluminum fishing boat was about twelve feet long. It had an old Johnson outboard motor on it, twenty-five horsepower, according to the writing on the side. The little boat would scoot along with the motor opened up. The motor had been white once, but now it was covered with the same green slime as the rest of the boat.

  Everything in the boat had an unused quality to it. There was an old, red tackle box, and a couple of fishing rods with open-faced reels attached. I saw a boat cushion that probably doubled as the required life preserver. A few coffee stained Styrofoam cups rolled around in the bottom along with several inches of dirty water.

  Based on the police photographs and the crime scene investigator’s reports, the killer had stood on the dock, about where I was standing now. I held the disposable camera up and took a couple of pictures. In the shady daylight, I doubted the pictures would develop into anything useable.

  At the time he died, Andrews was sitting in the only seat the boat possessed, the blue and white one from which he could steer by holding the protruding tiller of the small motor. My pictures of the empty seat weren’t as gruesome as the pictures of Andrews, slumped over, with the hole in his head, that I’d seen in the police fil
e.

  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
me 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).