by Diane Capri
He waited for Senator Warwick to finish talking, then said, “It’s not an army matter. The general was retired and the murder was not on army property. This is a civilian investigation.”
More silence on his end, as Jason shook his head and held up his hand, cupped so that the four fingers were on the top and his thumb on the bottom. He opened and closed his top and bottom phalanges, a gesture meant to explain that Warwick was simply yakking on and on. Instead, it reminded me of yesterday’s bull gator.
“You have a lot more influence in the civilian world than I do. Why don’t you use some of it if you want to know what’s going on?” Jason didn’t sound too deferential to his boss, now. Maybe their nerves were fraying just a little under pressure, too.
Jason signed off shortly after that by promising to meet with Warwick later today.
Then, he turned to me and said, in the same exasperated tone, “Now what can I do for you?”
Resisting the urge to snap back, I counted to twenty, while he continued to look at me and I studied him, trying to figure out a better conversation starter.
Jason had his shoes off. He’d donned well-worn jeans and a faded, once red T-shirt with I Survived The Honolulu Marathon emblazoned on the front in now-cracked purple letters.
“Did you?” I asked him.
“Did I what?”
“Survive the Honolulu marathon?”
He smiled and gave up his pout. “No. But I survived the girl I was dating at the time who did. She gave me the shirt and I refused to give it back when she left me.”
“Sort of like the one who gets dumped keeps the ring?”
He laughed. “Something like that.”
And the ice was broken. I, for one, was glad.
I hate personal conflict in my life. I deal with conflict in my professional capacity every day of the year. I didn’t want it anywhere near my personal life. To avoid conflict, I usually tried to stay above the fray, ignoring my base emotions.
But I’d been plunged directly into this cauldron of intrigue and when George left home, I felt adrift without my anchor. This was totally new territory for me.
I’d been floundering around, trying to figure out how to keep my marriage together and rescue my husband, too. All I’d accomplished so far was allowing the time for bold action to pass, as the clock marched inexorably toward Drake’s deadline.
I needed help, and I was finally ready to ask for it.
“Ok,” he said, “what is it?”
This question was one I’d carefully rehearsed. “I need to know why the President appointed Andrews to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t make any sense to me. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of qualified jurists he could have chosen. Andrews never even practiced law. He was a hothead who was used to giving orders that other people followed. I doubt he could even write a well-reasoned legal opinion. President Benson had to know that. So, what gives?”
“Everybody on the hill is asking the same question and has been ever since this all started,” he said, deflecting.
Sheldon Warwick had been Jason’s boss for ten years. They were friends. Warwick is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the reigning Democrat on the hill and a personal friend of both the president and the general. Common sense said Jason knew the answer to my question. I was sure of it.
“You’re more of a politician than I gave you credit for.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell me Warwick doesn’t know and don’t tell me he didn’t discuss it with you.”
“Assuming that’s true, I can’t breach Warwick’s confidence.” Taking a little pity on me, I guess, he said, “If you want to know, you’ll have to ask Warwick yourself.”
“So, he does know.”
Jason laughed ruefully, shaking his head in defeat. “Look, Willa, I love you. I love George. But I can’t tell you anything.”
“Come on, Jason. We’re talking about George’s life here.” I was pleading now, and he knew it.
He considered for a long time. How much loyalty did he have, and to whom? Hard facts make hard choices.
He said, “I can’t tell you what I know without permission from Warwick, which I’ll ask him for.” I’d already started to object, but he talked right over me. “In the meantime, I’ll give you a hint that will point you in the right direction if you won’t tell anyone where you got it.”
He was asking me now to trust him. Did I? What choice did I have? But, not knowing the full picture, I couldn’t put on such a tight straightjacket.
“If I have to disclose what you say, I’ll tell you first,” I counter-offered.
After thinking about it some more, he finally nodded. “Fair enough, I guess, if you don’t get me fired. If this thing blows up, I’ll be without a job anyway.”
He waited a couple of beats, as if he might change his mind, then he said, “So, here’s your hint. Ask George’s lawyer what happened to her brother.”
Now, I was totally confused. What could Olivia’s brother have to do with Andrews’s appointment? She’d told me she believed Andrews killed her brother. At the time, I thought she was being overly dramatic. She obviously had no proof of her claim. If she had, she’d have had Andrews prosecuted when her brother died. And anyway, all of that happened years ago.
I couldn’t see the connection. “Are you trying to jerk me around here? Because I really don’t have the time to go off chasing wild theories. George is less than two weeks away from being indicted for murder.”
My voice caught a little. “You haven’t forgotten that, have you?”
He seemed to step back in the face of my outrage. “Just ask Olivia,” he said.
“Olivia already told me. She took George’s case because she thinks Andrews killed her brother and she wants revenge. So what?”
“No, Willa,” Jason said softly, taking my hand and looking me squarely in the eye. “So why?”
He got up and walked into the bedroom. When he came out, he was holding a slim file folder. He handed it to me without another word.
Thomas Edward Holmes, deceased, it said on the label.
“What’s this?”
“The final report on his death.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 1:30 p.m.
January 30, 2000
GRETA AND I HEADED toward downtown where the Andrews twins, David and Donald, were staying at the Harbour Island Hotel. Greta’s top was down when we drove over the Harbour Island Bridge. The sweet perfume of jasmine filled the air. Paradise definitely smells better than the rust belt.
I parked Greta myself in the underground garage and walked up the stairs to the entrance to the hotel. Florida water front hotels locate the lobby and registration desk on the second floor. You had to go up an escalator to get your bags to the front desk.
The system was so inconvenient that it must have increased tips to porters by at least fifty percent. But that’s not the reason for it. The real reason is hurricanes.
If Tampa experienced a hurricane, something that hadn’t happened here since the 1920s, Harbour Island would be underwater. The Hotel’s second-floor reception desk, where all the computer equipment was located, was an attempt to prevent flood damage from the tidal surge that follows the big blow.
I’m not afraid of hurricanes. As natural disasters go, hurricanes are best because modern weather equipment detects them long before they hit land. Tornadoes and earthquakes are unexpected; floods last longer and do more damage; and snow storms are simply unacceptable. Hurricanes have killed fewer people than any other type of major weather disaster.
If a hurricane hit Tampa, we’d be in the first level of evacuation because, like Harbour Island, Plant Key lies below sea level.
But then, we might get a new house out of the insurance company.
At the front desk, I asked for David or Donald Andrews. David said he’d meet me in the lounge on the outside deck in ten minutes. Shortly after the waitress delivere
d my Perrier with lime, David had reached my table.
He sat down in the chair next to me, the one that faced the water. Somehow, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy I wanted to hug. In fact, I was so wary of the Andrews clan by now, I didn’t even want to shake hands with him.
David had always been the serious one. He was a shy and quiet teenager the last time I’d had a conversation with him. The intervening years didn’t seem to have changed his approach to conversation any. The only small talk was of the “nice to see you again” type that takes about thirty seconds. Then, he waited for me to say something.
I started in a direction that I was fairly sure he wouldn’t have anticipated. “Did you know Thomas Holmes?”
His eyebrows shot up. Good. I’d surprised him. “Sure. I knew Thomas. He was a couple of classes ahead of me at West Point. Why?”
“Do you know how he died?”
Seemingly without guile, he said “Killed in a training accident. On maneuvers, somebody had live ammunition in their gun. It was investigated. No one was ever charged. I don’t think they could find the gun that shot him.”
It interested me that David knew the contents of the slim file that Jason had given me. The folder contained Thomas’s death certificate. Killed by a single gunshot wound to the heart, it said. Age at death was twenty-eight. Manner of death was accidental.
Also in the folder was the final report of the investigation reflecting that Thomas had been shot during a training maneuver. Did David know that the murder weapon was conclusively identified as a handgun issued to Thomas himself, although the verdict on his death was not suicide? General Andrews’s name appeared nowhere on the paperwork. There was no mention in the report of who found Thomas’s body or where he’d been discovered. The documents looked official enough to be the official cover-up version Olivia had mentioned. I’d thought of about fifty questions to ask in the past thirty minutes.
Now David asked a question of his own. “Why? That was a long time ago.”
“Was your dad there at the time?” His eyes widened and he looked at me with an inquiry that hadn’t been there before.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “Andy was there. But he wasn’t in the field with Thomas. Why do you ask?”
I’d tried to figure out how Olivia’s version of Thomas’s death could be true, and the plausibility of her theory completely escaped me. I just couldn’t see how Andrews might have killed Thomas and gotten away with it. And the paperwork certainly didn’t support her idea. “But couldn’t he have put the live ammunition in one of the guns, maybe?”
David shook his head. “I don’t see how. How could the general know where Thomas would be, who would be in a position to kill him and what gun he would have? I don’t think that’s possible,” he concluded. Then he added, “I’m willing to believe a lot of bad things about my father, but I don’t see how he could have killed Thomas Holmes.”
I let him think about it for a while. Then I said, “Let me put it this way. If the general had wanted to have Thomas Holmes killed in that training exercise, could he have arranged it?”
He considered the question. “I suppose so,” he said, thoughtfully drawing out each word. “A four-star general can arrange just about anything.” He leaned back and folded his hands over his flat stomach. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he did do it. But why would he bother?”
That was another good question, the one Jason had posed and suggested I should answer. “David, you said Thomas was at West Point with you. How well did you know him?”
“Pretty well. I knew President Benson’s son, Charles, too. We hung out together. My brother, Donald, and Sheldon Warwick’s son,” he answered me frankly. “Those were the early days of the Benson Presidency. We’d get invited to the White House. It was all pretty cool, really, for army kids.”
This came out of left field for me. “Charles Benson and Shelley Warwick were in the army?” I had never heard this before. “Shelley was. Charles just hung out with us. It’s kind of hard for the President’s kid to find friends, you know.”
I thought about the presidential children I’d heard of over the years. All of them had seemed to experience a difficult adolescence. Living in the White House fishbowl was not easy, even for adults. For kids, it had to be equal parts excitement and prison.
I drew my attention back to David’s story. “Charles was kind of a behavior problem even before his dad got elected. After they got into the White House, the general told me Charles became quite a handful.” He took a break and looked across the water at the convention center, where the winter boat show was in full swing. “As a favor to the President, Senator Warwick and Dad arranged for Charles to hang out with us when we had the time. That’s all.”
Charles Benson, Shelley Warwick, Thomas Holmes and both of General Andrews’s sons were friends, hung out together at the White House. And Charles Benson was a juvenile delinquent. I was getting warmer. The little hairs on the back of my neck were tingling.
“Are you and Charles Benson still friends?” I asked him.
He gave a quick, negative shake of his head again. “Something happened with Thomas and Charles. The general said we couldn’t hang with either of them anymore.”
“What about Shelly Warwick?”
“Shelley was a little older than us. He’d left West Point already.” With a little grin, David added, “Charles was kind of a pain anyway, always getting into stuff and then we’d get into serious trouble for it. It wasn’t worth it.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t worth it?”
He grinned now, applying adult insight to adolescent behavior. “Our Dad was a general, but Charles’s Dad was the President. We had more clout with regular army guys, you know?”
I got it. The general’s sons, the Senator’s son, and Thomas Holmes, the son of generations of West Point graduates before him, had high status among their peers, but Charles Benson, the President’s kid, was a notch or two up the ladder. None of the other boys would have been friends with Charles in the normal course of Washington hierarchy. Which meant that being friends with Charles would diminish the status of the other boys in Charles’s presence, so they’d rather be the big fish in their own West Point pond than the minnows in the White House pool.
“How about Thomas?” I asked. “Did he mind being banished from Charles’ company?”
As if he’d never considered the question before, David said “Actually, he did, now that you mention it. Thomas really liked Charles, you know? Shelley, Donald and I were just being his friends because the general said we had to. But Thomas and Charles were really close.”
“How close were they?” The little hairs on the back of my neck were fairly vibrating now. Maybe it was the power of Jason’s suggestion, but I felt I was finally getting somewhere.
“Inseparable in some ways, I guess,” David told me. “Thomas was really pissed when the ‘hands off’ order came down from the general. Thomas said he wasn’t going to do it. He said the army couldn’t order him to abandon his friends; the general’s reach didn’t go that far.”
“What happened?”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 1:45 p.m.
January 30, 2000
“THE NEXT WEEK, THOMAS got orders to maneuvers in Korea. He was killed there a few months later. I never saw him again.” David said this as if he was putting the pieces together in his mind.
“Was your father in Korea at the same time?” I asked.
He answered me slowly, “I think so,” drawing the words out.
From the expressions that passed over his face, I could almost see the gears meshing, see him adding two plus two and coming up with what I had come to believe was the only possible four.
“Still think Andy didn’t kill Thomas?” I asked him.
This time, he didn’t bother to argue. He asked, “But why? It doesn’t make sense.”
He sat up a little straighter in the chair, mused aloud, “Andy was
capable of killing. He’d done it a lot in Vietnam and other places.” He stared out over the water again, thinking, trying to put it together.
When he spoke again, his tone was distracted, as if he was pondering the vagaries of human existence. “But why kill Thomas? He’d already sent Thomas half way around the world to separate him from Charles. That would have been enough, even for Andy. It was the army way.”
I now considered seriously, for the first time, that Olivia could have been right. General Andrews might actually have killed Thomas Holmes, directly or indirectly, and it was something Jason must have known.
I realized I might never figure out exactly how Andrews had killed Thomas, but Jason thought the real issue was why.
Did David Andrews know the answer?
People who claim that they just know what to say when the time comes to say it infuriate me. I’ve never been able to do that. I usually plan out most important conversations in my head well in advance. Some of the dialogue I actually get to use.
Right now, my logic and imagination had failed me. So I used the direct approach, my usual fallback.
I leaned in to David and looked directly at him, resisting the urge to delay so that something more appropriate might occur to me.
“I guess you’ve heard that George has been charged with murdering your dad.”
He actually smiled. Not a happy smile. Just one of those lines of the mouth that turn up on one side to let me know he found the statement mildly amusing. He nodded, but he didn’t say anything.
“George didn’t kill the general.” I said, with as much conviction as I felt in my heart, which was considerable.
He nodded.
“You knew that?”
“Sure.”
“How did you know?”
He studied me for a while, and I thought he was going to ignore my question.
But he answered. “George has too much to lose.”
Then, maybe feeling a little sorry for our situation, he broadened the grin on his face and offered something he must have viewed as close to a joke. “Besides, he would’ve had to take a number and stand in line for the privilege.”