Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  “What do you mean?”

  He straightened himself in the chair, put his forearms on the small round glass table between us and leaned toward me, like he didn’t want to be overheard, even though we were the only ones on the patio. As if he was about to tell me a secret, but his whispered tone was farcical and exaggerated.

  “Maybe you didn’t know this, but Andy wasn’t a very nice guy. He had a lot of enemies. It’s not really a surprise that someone killed him, is it? Isn’t it more of a surprise that someone didn’t do it years ago?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows as if trying to clue me in that I should find his statements hilariously funny.

  But I didn’t find him funny at all.

  The situation was tragic, for everyone. His behavior was odd, inappropriate.

  I remained sincere, ignoring his attempt at comedy, and responded to his words. “I know he had a lot of public enemies, but I don’t think any of them would have taken the trouble to try to make his murder look like a suicide. What I’m interested in are his private enemies.”

  His weird humor continued, as if he was sharing some blazing insight with a comic audience. “Most homicides are committed by family members or someone close to the victim, right?”

  “You think someone in your family killed Andy?”

  “I think all of us would have had good reason to. If incentive, motive, and opportunity count for anything, it makes sense, don’t you agree?”

  David’s continuing sarcasm began to grate on my last nerve.

  I said, “Yes. I do. But you know much more about the family than I do. Why don’t you fill me in?”

  His humor switched abruptly to anger.

  “Dad,” he emphasized the word with such vindictiveness that small droplets of spit hit me in the face. I struggled not to recoil from his fierceness. His hands gripped his highball glass so tightly I thought he might crush it. Now I realized that this wasn’t his first drink of the morning. Many drinkers get quieter when intoxicated, and David was speaking in unnaturally quiet but angry tones now. Just how much in control was he?

  “Dad loved all of us. Especially me and Donald.”

  He emphasized “especially” in a vicious way, like he was giving me a clue, trying to communicate something without saying anything specific.

  Now, his tone changed abruptly again, to mock innocence: “Why would we want to kill Dad?”

  He looked directly at me, almost challenging me to understand. Maybe he’d been thinking about this for some time. Perhaps he’d decided to tell someone and I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Or maybe he was out of control, drunk, or something else I hadn’t figured out yet.

  I leaned back and took a look at him again, resisting the urge to wipe his spittle off my face. David Andrews was tall, lean, strong and good looking. He’d been so since he was about nine or ten years old. He and his brother were as different from his sister in body type as they were in temperament, goals and life achievements. Neither of the brothers had ever married. Nor were they now in any kind of long-term relationships.

  Sometimes, I’m quicker to catch on than others. This one took me another few seconds. “Are you saying Andy abused you?”

  He raised his eyebrows again, in that mocking way, as if to say, so you finally get it.

  Then, he answered my question. “Not sexually. He did manage to draw the line there. But psychologically. Emotionally. Yes. Every day.” He drained his glass and gestured to the waitress for another. “Our lives were pure emotional torture. He was so happy that we were just like him. He just loved us so much, see? He’d punish us because he loved us, he said. He’d threaten us, freeze us out, keep his nose in every second of our personal lives because he loved us, you know?”

  The vulnerable boy David had been was nowhere to be found in the angry man sitting across the table from me. His face worked around his memories and took on a nasty frown. He stood up abruptly, knocking over his plastic chair, then strode over to the rail and leaned both forearms on it, as he faced the water.

  I followed him warily. I’d thought him one of his mother’s harmless cats, but now I realized I’d opened the cage door and let an unpredictable tiger out.

  David’s father had been an extremely violent man and probably a murderer, if Olivia Holmes was right about what happened to her brother. Usually, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  Not at all confident of what David might do next, I glanced around and saw no other people on the patio with us. If I needed help, I realized that a loud scream would reach the tourists across the harbor at the boat show.

  Boldly, I joined David at the rail, but I stood aside, keeping my gaze firmly on his body language, leaving enough room to get away fast, should it come to that.

  When the waitress brought him another drink, he took a big gulp, for fortification, maybe. Then he turned to face me. “I think now that he was trying to change us, to force us to be different. Straight. If such a thing was possible, he would have succeeded in changing us. I think he hated us and what we were. We definitely hated him. We would have done anything to get him off our backs.”

  When he saw that I finally understood, he seemed to calm down a little. He returned to his chair and relaxed into it, extending his legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles.

  David sunned himself. He closed his eyes and dropped his head back, slouching further in the chair.

  My mind twirled possibilities; each forced attention back to him. Eventually, he began to speak, without changing his position in any way. His voice was low and I had to strain to hear him.

  He said, “Andy figured out we needed changing when we were about ten. When we were just figuring ourselves out. When we needed him the most.”

  David didn’t say so, but that must have been about the time when he and Donald began to realize they were gay. It would have been a confusing time for them. An overbearing father, an alcoholic mother. The situation was no less difficult because it was a common one. What a horrible time the two young boys must have had trying to grow up.

  “Dad spent all his free time raising us up right. Sexual orientation is nature, not nurture. But Andy was on us all the time to be different. To change. Mom saw what we were and how he treated us. So did Robbie. They did nothing to help.” David didn’t seem to have any emotion left.

  He drank and recited the story as if it had all happened to someone else. “Guilt, I think. That was when Mom really started drinking heavy and Robbie just started getting heavy. She was a pretty girl before that, you know? But it was weird that she just got so jealous of us. We would have happily traded places with her.”

  The waitress came by with another highball for him. I wondered how he’d be able to walk to his room. He was already pie-eyed.

  He said, “The only break we got was when he was away. We prayed he would go. As soon as we could get away to military school, we left. No matter how hard it would be for us there, it was the only place he’d release us to attend. We were out of our home like a shot. And we rarely came back.”

  “Why’d you come back now? To celebrate his birthday?” Seemed far-fetched at this point.

  That’s what John Williamson, Robbie’s husband, had told Olivia. That Deborah had gathered the family together to celebrate the end of the confirmation hearings and her husband’s birthday. Given the level of hatred I’d witnessed in David just now, I didn’t think he was all that into making his father happy.

  He sighed. “You get older. You try to forgive and forget. You recognize that he has no power over you anymore. You know that you are what you were born to be. Your other family members have to be forgiven, too.”

  He looked at me again and drained his glass once more. “Anger eats you up, you know? It destroys your life. You try to get past it.”

  He set the glass down and looked around for the waitress to order another.

  “Did you? Get past it?”

  “Before he died,
you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I tried. I was in therapy for years. So was Donald. We finally figured out that Dad was more unhappy with himself in those days than unhappy with us. We were the scapegoats, not the cause of his problems. I think we’ve both managed to go on with our lives. But, as you no doubt noticed, the anger is still there.”

  David’s story was heartbreaking. I thought about the little boy he’d been and the bitter man he’d become. In some ways, it was a good thing the general was dead. Alive, he’d have a lot to answer for.

  “It was such a betrayal, you know?” he said now, still trying to figure things out. “We wanted to be like him. We were him. He was off protecting the country, for God’s sake, and he couldn’t take care of his own family.”

  For some reason, the venom was no longer apparent in his words. His sorrow was harder to witness.

  I turned my gaze away from the naked pain in his face. “Did you kill him, David?”

  I wanted him to say yes. I would have forgiven him if he’d killed Andy. Even Michael Drake, as ambitious as he was, would accept a plea to reduced charges, when he knew the whole story. David as his father’s killer would have tied everything up with a neat bow. And I was weary of the whole sad situation.

  But it was not to be.

  “I’m sorry to say I didn’t,” David told me. “I wanted to kill him, God knows. I tried to make myself do it.” He waited a beat or two. “The bond was still there, somehow. No matter how much I hated him for the way he’d treated me and Donald, our whole family, he was still my father.”

  David raised his now watery blue gaze to meet mine. “My biggest struggle has been not to become him. If I’d killed him, I’d be exactly what he was.”

  David waved to the waitress for another refill. His tolerance for alcohol showed me that he was following in his mother’s footsteps, another sad part of this family story playing out with predicable certainty.

  “Some days, I wish I’d killed him, Willa. But I didn’t. And Donald didn’t either. God forgive us.” Just like his mother, silent tears began to slowly slide out of his eyes and down his face.

  Anger had propelled me here, made me ask David these questions. I’d wanted to clear George’s name and now I felt that I’d destroyed David’s defenses to do so.

  I wasn’t very proud of myself right at the moment, but I didn’t know what else I could have done, either.

  What I’d learned were secrets I didn’t want to know. Everything David told me supplied each member of the Andrews family with motive for murder. I’d achieved my objective, but at what cost?

  I reached over and touched David’s arm, thanked him for helping me, and took my leave. I paid the bar bill on the way out and asked the waitress not to disturb him for a while.

  Then, I made my way back to Greta with a heavy heart.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 3:00 p.m.

  January 30, 2000

  IT WAS TIME TO compare notes and to find out whatever I could about Olivia’s brother. I now believed General Andrews killed Thomas Holmes, but I still didn’t know why. Jason said that Thomas Holmes was connected to Andrews’s Supreme Court nomination. I had to find out how.

  I dialed Olivia’s number on my cell phone before I started my car. She answered her private line on the third ring. First, I told her about my conversation with David Andrews. She asked a few questions, but not many. I started the car and continued talking to her.

  When I’d found my way back to the Bayshore, heading home, I asked her if Thomas was gay.

  A lawyer gets very close to her clients when they go through the crucible of trial together. Trial is an intense and unique experience. Maybe that’s why I’d begun to trust Olivia. Trusting doesn’t come easily to me. Trust means a loss of objectivity. I invest too much of myself when I trust and then it’s too hard to extricate myself from a relationship gone south.

  Now, I worried that I’d made a mistake in trusting Olivia. After my interviews with Jason and David Andrews, I realized that Olivia’s motives for murdering Andy were as strong, or stronger, than many others. What real evidence did I have that she hadn’t done it? Just her word. Was that enough?

  “Olivia? Did you hear me? I need to know whether Thomas was gay.” I thought the question impertinent, and I was sure she did, too.

  But a pattern had begun to emerge that disturbed me. General Andrews was a man of secrets and they seemed to be consuming him in the days before he died. His views against gays in the military had been extensively reported during his confirmation hearings. David said he was brutal to his own sons because they were gay.

  The general didn’t have his sons discharged from the army. He could have. Was he showing compassion? Or had he run into resistance for such a course before?

  If Thomas Holmes was gay, that might explain what Olivia had described as General Andrews’s enmity toward her brother. How would Andrews have treated gay soldiers in the days before military policy required acceptance of them? Based on what David said, I imagined the general must have made Thomas Holmes’s life a living hell.

  When Thomas Holmes served in the army, simply being homosexual would have been a dangerous matter. The widely debated but relatively recent policy, referred to as “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell”, provides that homosexuals can serve in the U.S. military, but requires that they keep their sexual orientation to themselves and do not engage in homosexual acts while in the service.

  Failing to observe either criterion can result in an immediate, albeit honorable, discharge.

  Like so many compromises, this one between gay-rights advocates and those flatly opposed to gays in the military, was unsatisfactory to both sides. The military and everyone around the issue was uncomfortable with the policy. It solved nothing and gave everyone something to complain about.

  Many people felt the “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy violated the First Amendment. At least one federal judge had held the policy unconstitutional. And the policy was particularly ironic because the U. S. Military’s job was to uphold the Constitution, which protected free speech.

  Opponents pointed out that the bigger problem was attempting to control behavior. Behavior problems between heterosexual males and females have caused a number of scandals in the modern military. Accepting homosexuals, opponents said, was akin to putting nude heterosexuals together in communal showers. In other words, the argument was that the soldiers wouldn’t be able to control themselves.

  There had been homosexuals in the military for generations, and often, others who served with them were aware of their sexual orientation, whether they were openly gay or not. But hate crimes ran rampant in the civilian world. No matter what the army’s policies were, hate crimes would still occur there, too.

  I now believed Thomas was murdered by General Andrews and Thomas being gay seemed the most likely reason.

  Olivia answered my question. “I don’t know if he was or not. Thomas was actually quite homophobic. Men hit on him all the time. It made him furious.” She sounded thoughtful, as if she was trying the idea on to see whether it fit. “I always wondered about how fiercely he reacted. When guys hit on me, a simple no is usually sufficient.”

  As she spoke, Olivia sounded as if the idea of Thomas being gay had never occurred to her before. Could she have been that out of touch with him? Or was my idea way off base?

  “What did Thomas do?”

  “He’d blow a gasket. I saw it happen several times.”

  My theory sounded more and more likely to me as she talked. She seemed to be describing classic gay panic, an argument sometimes used to defend crimes resulting from over reactive violence by the target of unwanted sexual advances. It was a self-defense excuse that relied on an irrational and unfounded assumption: that because one was gay, he or she would force sex on unwilling partners.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just one other thing,” Olivia said slowly. “After Thomas died
, several male friends came to the funeral that I thought were probably gay.” She waited a couple of beats. “At the time, I wondered if he’d lived a secret life all those years, but I dismissed it.”

  I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know exactly what to say. “You’ll probably never know, and I’m not sure it matters,” I told her.

  “My parents need to believe in Thomas as the all American hero, killed in the line of duty as an honorable soldier,” she said. “I guess after I couldn’t get President Benson to help me prosecute Andrews, I decided to just leave my parents with their illusions.”

  Now was the time to try out the rest of my theory, the one that made a little more sense than assuming General Andrews was a cold-blooded murderer.

  “But what if Thomas was gay, and having an affair? He could have been court-martialed, couldn’t he?” I pressed her, and her anger flared immediately.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 3:30 p.m.

  January 30, 2000

  “I DON’T SEE WHAT that could possibly have to do with anything. Why don’t you just leave it alone?” She snapped at me, and I was tempted to let it go. I guess the notion of Thomas leading a secret life was okay as a theory, but once I suggested an actual affair, that was too much for Olivia.

  Something so painful might mean nothing now.

  Or it might mean everything.

  Jason set me on this path for a reason, even if I didn’t yet understand what that reason was.

  “Don’t you see, Olivia?” I asked her, as gently as I could. “If Thomas was having a homosexual affair, it might explain his death.”

  “How so?”

  “Maybe Thomas approached someone else for sex and the general accidentally killed him. Maybe Thomas died because of General Andrews’s gay panic.”

  She already believed Andrews had killed her brother. I handed her a plausible motive. My theory made sense, even if it could never be proved.