by Diane Capri
Instead of focusing on my use of the word murder instead of death, Warwick took a different tack.
“Who is Thomas Holmes?” he asked me.
I shook my head. “Won’t work, Sheldon. You knew Thomas Holmes because he was at West Point with your son. You also know how and why he died and that President Benson wanted it all kept quiet.”
Much of this I was just guessing. But I had to push somebody’s hot buttons, and soon.
“My wife will be here any minute.” He looked toward the staircase and called up, “Victoria, Willa’s here and we’ve got to get going. Come on down, dear.”
“Nice try, Senator. Now you’ve got about three minutes to tell me what I want to know. Because otherwise, when I leave here, I’m going straight to Frank Bennett, tell him what I know so far, and let him run with it.”
He thought about it for a little while. We heard Tory yell down that she’d be with us shortly. He wanted to call my bluff, I knew. But what would he do?
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 7:10 p.m.
January 30, 2000
FINALLY, WARWICK SEEMED RESIGNED to my tenacity. He answered my question quickly without fanfare.
“Thomas Holmes was a cocaine addict. He supplied Charles Benson with drugs and tried to lead him into addiction, which Charles was resisting, but Thomas kept pushing.”
He drained the martini and plopped both onions into his mouth. “When the President told Thomas to leave Charles alone and never sell Charles drugs again, Thomas refused on both counts. President Benson discussed it with me and I suggested he ask General Andrews to arrange for Thomas’s transfer overseas. Thomas could have been court marshaled for drug use, but that would have been devastating for Thomas.”
“Not to mention the bad publicity for Charles and the President,” I said.
He shrugged in response.
I hadn’t known about the drugs. In fact, I’d thought Thomas was gay and he’d tried to seduce Charles. My theory was that Andrews had killed Thomas out of gay panic. So, I was wrong.
But the rest of the story was pretty much what I’d figured. “And how did Thomas Holmes get killed, Senator?”
“That really was just an accident. Olivia thinks Andrews killed her brother, but that is nonsense. Thomas was taking target practice in Korea, where he was posted, and he ended up fatally wounded. He was alone at the time, and no one found him until it was too late to save his life, unfortunately. There was a full inquiry into Thomas’s death at the time. A stupid accident. That’s all it was. I told Jason to give you the report. Didn’t you read it?”
I should have known. Jason wouldn’t have gone out on a limb to give me that file without his boss’s permission.
The realization pissed me off. So I pushed his buttons a little harder.
“I don’t believe you. I think Andrews killed Thomas or had him killed. And I think you and President Benson knew about it. Maybe you were both involved in it.”
His eyes narrowed as he returned my steady gaze.
“I don’t care what you think, actually,” he said, as calmly as if he was discussing the weather. “And before you go to Frank Bennett, you might keep in mind that there are laws against such outrageous defamation, even of public figures.”
Tory Warwick picked that moment to walk into the room.
“Hello, Willa dear,” she said as she gave me a small southern hug and kissed her husband on the cheek.
“Tory, you’ve taken so long to get ready that we’re going to have to go or they won’t seat us,” he said. “Willa, I’m sorry we have to rush. It’s been a pleasure.”
He called the maid to show me out and I was on the front porch with the door closed behind me before I knew what happened.
I’d just been non-ceremonially dumped like a stinking, over-ripe melon.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 7:30 p.m.
January 30, 2000
SENSORY OVERLOAD. I NEEDED space, to drive with the wind rushing at me, blow the cobwebs out of my thinking and to take a really long walk along the sand. I wanted to hear the Gulf pounding in big waves, noise to silence my confusion and help me find the missing pieces of the puzzle that was General Andrews’s murder.
My Detroit origins must have returned to me on a primordial level, because driving fast comforted me, always had. That didn’t explain the hypnotic pleasure I got from experiencing pounding waves on the sand, which I assumed was even more basic to human evolution.
I left Warwick’s house and sped over Gandy Boulevard and across the Gandy Bridge as quickly as I dared. This drive used to be fairly quick, but in the last few years Gandy has become almost as progress-choked as Dale Mabry. And progress means traffic.
It might have taken me less than fifteen minutes to make it onto I-275 south. I wasn’t really checking the time. I opened up Greta’s engine on the interstate and when I looked down at the speedometer again, it registered more than a hundred miles an hour. I backed off a little.
The freeway wasn’t crowded and I could weave in and out of legally poky vehicles.
In no time, I was driving toward St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island.
The speed and the wind didn’t blow away all the ugliness I’d heard today. It was dancing around in my head when I parked the car, put two quarters in the perpetually ravenous meter, picked up my journal and walked toward the water.
There were a lot of condos in this area, but I was mostly oblivious to the other people on the beach. It was a little cold for bathing suits, but there were a number of tourists lying on the sand, turning blue.
It amazed me when tourists simply did what they came here for, regardless of the weather. Vacations were like that, I guess. This was the time they intended to spend at the beach and, by God, they were going back with a tan, even if it meant enduring hypothermia to get it.
I don’t remember what I thought about while I walked, but when I became conscious again, I found myself near Sunset Beach. One of Kate’s bridge club friends has a condo here, and I was walking at the water’s edge in front of her condo complex when she spotted me.
I wasn’t surprised. It’s nearly impossible to go anywhere without running into someone I know. We say Tampa is the big city with a small town feel, and this was one of the reasons why. People from bigger, more impersonal places like Miami, Chicago, or Los Angeles didn’t understand this about Tampa, but it’s true. Everyone knows everyone here.
It’s foolhardy to assume one can behave badly without being noticed. The local joke was that if you wanted to have an affair, you had to go out of town.
Dottie was only about twenty feet ahead of me when I finally saw her. She came toward me, waving a handkerchief, calling my name. I couldn’t focus on her small talk, but my “ums” didn’t seem to deter her. Dottie could talk for thirty minutes to a wrong number. I’d seen her do it.
Finally, she took my monosyllabic responses for disinterest, but misinterpreted the cause. Dottie was what Kate called a little ditzy. It’s true she was not a genius, and she was more involved in her bridge club than world events, but Dottie was a sweet soul and I often thought the world could have used more like her. There was not a mean or ugly bone in her body. If she wasn’t so flighty, I’d have been able to tolerate her in larger doses, some other time.
“Are you and George getting along alright, Dear?” she asked, putting her arm around my waist and walking along with me.
“What?”
“I said are you having trouble with George?”
“Oh. No.” I must have sounded less than grateful for her sympathy.
She drew away from me slightly. “Aren’t you upset about his arrest?”
“Not really.”
And I wasn’t, not at that moment anyway. I wasn’t even thinking about George.
I was thinking about Andy, Deborah, Robbie, David and Donald, and how pathetic they were.
I was thinking about h
ow horrible growing up in that household must have been and whether that would’ve been enough to make one of them kill their patriarch. How difficult to be homosexual, trying to serve in the old army. Maybe the new army, too. And how much harder General Andrews had probably made it.
I thought, too, about Olivia and Thomas and his parents and the sad tale of their lives. Thomas’s premature death that had destroyed his parents’ world. Whether Thomas’s death had truly been accidental or not, he’d been shipped over to Korea because of his drug use and having crossed the son of the President, if Sheldon Warwick was telling me the truth. Would knowing any of that make their lives easier? I thought not.
I’d tried to fit the puzzle pieces of the Andrews murder together and figure out how and why he’d died. George, for the first time since the day Craig Hamilton was shot, was not uppermost in my mind. Before I caught myself, I almost asked Dottie: George who?
The shock made me realize that the whole sordid story needed a fresh eye. Maybe Dottie wasn’t the best sounding board, but she couldn’t have been any worse than the pounding surf.
I made up some hypothetical reason for bringing it up. And I didn’t tell her the real names of the players. I tried to sound like I needed help with one of my cases.
But I’d long ago lost my objectivity. I felt I was looking too hard, and in the wrong places.
Dottie listened politely to my rambling account as we strolled together along the beach, the breaking waves a gentle accompaniment to our words. She nodded and glanced my way occasionally, but it seemed as if most of what I told her sailed right over her head.
Then she said something that, maybe because I was so close to it, just had never occurred to me before.
“So you mean the father was gay?”
I stopped in my tracks, but Dottie kept walking. After a few steps, she must have realized I wasn’t next to her anymore. She turned around and looked at me. Clearly, she thought I’d lost my mind.
“What did you say?”
“I just asked if the father was gay. We get a lot of gays here on the beach you know. There’s a large gay community in Tampa. They’re all so nice to us. In fact, you know that general who was killed a few weeks ago? He was gay. He came here once with his boyfriend. He tried to disguise himself in some pretty crazy outfits,” she smiled at the memory. “Of course, we didn’t recognize him at the time. Not until later when we saw him on TV.”
I reached out and grabbed Dottie by the arm, turning her to face me. “General Andrews came here with men?”
It was hard to believe anyone who knew anything about Tampa would assume he could flaunt an affair so close to home going unrecognized.
Of course, out of uniform, before he was in the national spotlight as the Supreme Court nominee, maybe he could have gotten away with it. Once.
“Not men, sweetie. A boyfriend. Cute one, too. My neighbor across the hall, he’d sometimes let men use his place.”
“Dottie, what did the general’s boyfriend look like?”
“Tall, dark and handsome, of course. Rugged looking. But he had this cute little widow’s peak in the front,” she gestured with her thumb and forefinger near her hairline. “You just never know,” she said sweetly, patting my arm.
“How many times did they come here together?”
“Goodness, Willa, I don’t know. I don’t spy on my neighbors.” Spying on her neighbors was exactly what she did.
“Of course not. I thought you might have heard something, that’s all.”
“Why, Willa! I’m surprised at you. With all your troubles, I wouldn’t think you’d want to be gossiping about someone else.” She scolded me.
I remained silent and a few seconds later, she relented. “Well, maybe this will just take your mind off your troubles for today.”
She patted my arm again. “Now let’s see. I guess I saw them here together a couple of times or so since my neighbor went back to New York for the summer. He’s a snowbird, you know. A decorator. He decorated one of the Kennedy’s apartments. Actually, I think it was that sweet Caroline and her husband.”
I thought I might scream if she didn’t get to the point. At least, the point I was interested in. But I didn’t want to frighten her or underline the level of my interest, so I simply asked, “Is that right?”
“Um hm. Anyway, I think the general first came to stay when Jeffrey left. And it seems to me that he was here, on and off, for most of the summer. In and out, I mean. Actually, I was about to report him to the condo board because we’re not supposed to sublease. I wanted to sublease last year when I went on that Hong Kong cruise? The one I took Eunice on?” She was looking at me as if I was supposed to remember this.
“Sure,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you sublease.”
Dottie didn’t need much encouragement to rattle on forever about the vacation and never get back to the issue.
She cast a very annoyed glance at me for interrupting her again.
“Right. So, I was just a little peeved about the general being in Jeffrey’s place and bringing that young man with him. And I was discussing it with Eunice. We were both about to complain. But that young guy, Jack? He was such a charmer. He talked us out of it. He said they weren’t really subleasing from Jeffrey, they were just using his place occasionally. Of course, I didn’t know the other man was the general then. I didn’t recognize him. Eunice said she knew who he was all along, but I don’t think she did. She’s always claiming to know more than she does. You know people like that, don’t you?”
I tried counting to ten while smiling and nodding.
I was so preoccupied by Dottie’s message that General Andrews had at least one gay lover that I nearly missed Dottie’s final bombshell.
But she hadn’t recognized it as a bombshell. Dottie could have been hit on the head with an anvil without realizing what had happened.
I tuned in at the very end of the story.
“ . . . So Eunice said maybe they’d had a fight or something. But I just didn’t think that could be true because we would have known about it with them being right across the hall and all. There had to be some other reason they stopped coming here. Maybe just because Jeffrey got home.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you been listening?”
I rushed in so she wouldn’t repeat the whole thing again. “Sure, but what does Jeffrey being home have to do with it?”
“Well, Jeffrey’s place only has one bedroom. If he was back home for the winter, they wouldn’t have had anywhere to sleep. So they must have had to use some other place. It didn’t necessarily mean they broke up, does it?”
I missed the next few words because I was focused on General Andrews and his lover having terminated their relationship.
What caused that breakup?
Could the lover have killed him?
When I tuned back into Dottie’s rambling, she was saying, “Eunice always jumps to conclusions like that. Just because she’s divorced, she thinks everyone else has to be miserable. For instance, she can’t stand the fact that my Arthur and I were so happy until he died. She believes I’ve been making that up.”
Dottie was wounded by this idea, but I couldn’t deal with one more story from her.
Besides, she’d already given me so much to think about that I had to go.
I pried myself from her grasp as quickly as I could. Dottie hadn’t reported what she knew to the police or the media. I could only hope she’d remain in happy oblivion for a while longer.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
Tampa, Florida
Sunday 9:30 p.m.
January 30, 2000
ALL THE WAY HOME, I kept the facts in my head. I noticed nothing as I raced toward my study. General Andrews was bisexual and he’d had an affair that ended just before his appointment. These facts, innocently supplied by Dottie, thrust a hole big enough to drive a truck through my theory of Thomas Holmes’s death.
And supplied at least one other potential suspect.
So I got to work. I sat at my desk with my journal and wrote down everything I’d learned today.
I had given each of the local suspects a page in my journal and listed what I learned about them as I learned it. I reviewed my notes now with the benefit of a strong drink to lubricate and elucidate my thinking.
First, I listed everyone whom I knew had a motive and opportunity to commit the murder, including some nut from one of the fringe groups opposed to General Andrews’s nomination.
I still thought that would be the strongest and first choice simply because one of them had tried to kill Andrews on the final day of the confirmation hearings, but at the same time, I recognized that view as the wishful thinking it was.
My list included General Andrew’s three children: Robbie, David and Donald. For completeness, I added Robbie’s husband. In good conscience, I had to include the general’s wife, Deborah, although I didn’t really think she’d shot him. I also had to include Olivia because the same motives that made her want to defend Andrews’s killer gave her a strong reason to kill Andrews herself. And I’d never been able to rule her out.
Lovers Andrews had had over the years should have been at the top of the list, but I didn’t know who they were. Or at least, if I knew them personally, I couldn’t identify them. I wrote Lovers? And more specifically, I wrote jilted lovers?
President Benson, Senator Warwick, his wife Tory and, to show myself how scrupulously fair I was, Jason Austin, were all included. I wouldn’t explore whether I would let Jason be tried for murder if it meant I could have my husband back. The potential losses there were just more than I was willing to examine.