Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  They kept looking at me, neither one of them volunteering so much as a chagrinned expression. I ran my hand through my hair and felt it move into a style resembling an angry rooster.

  “So, you can tell me now, or you can all go home.”

  Tremain thought it over. Newton looked merely curious. I’d entered a gag order in the case, and besides, if Tremain had already spilled the beans to the press they wouldn’t be here en masse to find out what the story was.

  So I guessed Tremain had only announced that there’d be big news today. He’d have to send the reporters home, in which case they might not come back, or he’d have to tell me what he had planned and risk ruining his show.

  I began to flip through the tower of new files, throwing each one on the floor beside my predecessor’s throne as I saw what kind of case it was. Asbestos. Splat. Asbestos. Splat. Asbestos. Splat.

  As the files landed on top of one another, my annoyance at the CJ grew. If he’d walked in at that moment, I might actually have thrown one of the files at his toady little head.

  Meanwhile, the two lawyers played chicken with each other, neither one being willing to blink first. I’d made it all the way through the tower of files before Tremain said, “Mr. Newton plans to present the Court with a motion this afternoon for an injunction preventing us from publishing his tennis club membership list.”

  “Why do you want to use his tennis club list?” I asked, standing up to retrieve another stack of files on the left side of my desk and beginning to flip through those and drop them on the floor.

  “Because I have a witness, a member of the club, who will testify that the club is all-gay,” Tremain told me.

  I glanced at Newton, who seemed prepared to deny the claim, but he surprised me slightly when he took a different tact. “The names of the people on that list include men who are not publicly out, Judge. These matters are of the most sensitive nature. Only a first rate scandal rag like this defendant would ever consider publishing such a thing.”

  I rubbed the throbbing that had started between my eyes again, reminding me of the list of things I still had to do for George. I didn’t have the mental acuity to deal with this issue today. I doubted I ever would.

  I turned to Tremain, “Putting aside for the moment how you got the list if it’s so top secret, why is it relevant to this trial?”

  Tremain looked at me as if I was the last idiot on earth. “Because Mr. Newton’s name is on it, your honor. It’s an all-gay club and he’s a long-term member. The list establishes our truth defense.”

  I thought about it, and it seemed he was right. At least, the list was evidence of the truth of the matter, clearly relevant. The list would provide Tremain with the facts he needed to get the case to the jury.

  “What’s your response to that?” I asked Newton.

  Now he was the one who seemed uncomfortable. “Judge, the prejudice of this document is unfair. If you allow him to publish this list, even say that the tennis club is not just a men’s club, as everyone believes, but a gay men’s club, a number of innocent people will be irreparably harmed, including me.”

  I considered the matter for what I like to think was longer than it would have taken me if I’d been a little more with it. “What exactly are the issues here? In short sentences, please.”

  Newton started. “Judge, this list is information that is completely unrelated to any legitimate purpose. Its only value is to justify public curiosity about people who are not even parties to this case. If you disclose this list, everyone on it will be thrust unwillingly into the full glare of bigotry, with no corresponding benefit to the public.”

  Good point. I looked at Tremain for his response.

  “Mr. Newton has alleged two things in this case. The first is that whether or not he is gay is a private fact that The Review should not have printed in any event. The second is that he is not gay and the article is defamatory as untrue.”

  He seemed to be winding up, instead of down. “This list is evidence of the truth of the “Mr. Tampa” article. Beyond that, whether Mr. Newton is gay is newsworthy, and the list goes to our defense.”

  Tremain stopped to take a breath, and I hoped he was finished. No such luck. “This is a question of fact and it can only be determined by the jury’s informed weighing of the competing interests involved. Mr. Tampa had the tennis club list at the time she wrote the article Newton has sued us over. If we are precluded from using the list, the policy you’ll be espousing is that the media should always skirt trouble by completely avoiding any possibly sensitive area. Surely, that is a chilling effect on the First Amendment.”

  I hated to admit it, but he made a good point, too. Perhaps he really was worth the $850 an hour he was getting paid, even though the possibility gave me a stomach ache.

  “Look, the only way I’m going to be able to resolve this is to look at the list. I presume you both have law on this subject?”

  “Yes, Judge,” they said in chorus.

  Of course, they did. They knew there would be a fight over this point. Nice of them to give me notice. Lawyers.

  I tossed the last file on the floor and buzzed one of my clerks to come and take them all somewhere else, where I wouldn’t have to look at them.

  “Ok.” I stood up and gestured that they both should rise as well. “What we’re going to do is to go back out there. I’m going to put an innocuous statement on the record and call the jury in and dismiss them for the day. You’re going to submit your briefs and the list, and I’ll consider the issues.”

  Ignoring everything else on my desk, I promised, “You’ll get my ruling tomorrow morning.”

  They glanced at each other, probably realizing that they each had an equal chance of victory and defeat.

  Wanting no misunderstandings, I admonished them both, “Between now and then, if one word of this appears anywhere outside these four walls, you two will be spending some quality time together in close quarters, do you understand?”

  So that’s what we did.

  When I got the paperwork from them, I recessed the trial for the day.

  After that, I served the lawyers in the asbestos cases like a butcher at a meat counter, handling each case in line and giving them scheduling orders, until all of them were gone.

  I was mindlessly marking time, trying not to worry about what Olivia might have to say.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY

  Tampa, Florida

  Monday 4:30 p.m.

  January 31, 2000

  BY THE TIME I’D driven over to meet Olivia, I had worked myself up into a bundle of anxiety that I hoped had to do with excess caffeine consumption and not news that Drake had obtained his indictment.

  Ybor City is a unique enclave in Tampa and a good example of the fickle nature of popularity. The area began as a cigar manufacturing community populated with Cuban expatriates. Cigars eventually went out of vogue and the community declined. In the late 1980s, the area was rediscovered and became a thriving nighttime destination. Teens cruised Seventh Avenue under the canopies of twinkle lights until the residents finally insisted on a curfew and an anti-cruising ordinance.

  Nightlife doesn’t start in Ybor until ten o’clock and it carries on until the wee hours, getting progressively more wild and loud. I had signed an order dismissing a case last week brought by a tourist against a fictitious “John Doe.” The Tourist actually got shot while cruising the bars and didn’t even know it happened. There was so much noise in the bar, no one heard the gunshot. She was so drunk, she didn’t feel her missing tiny phalange until two bars later.

  The case had to be dismissed because the tourist couldn’t identify which bar she’d been shot in, let alone who shot her. At least she had a vacation story to tell that would top most of the others for the folks back home in Toledo.

  The rough brick paved streets rumbled under the wheels of my car as I searched for a place to park. Mid-afternoon on a weekday, the streets were sparsely populated, but there was no parking allowed on the
picturesque Seventh Avenue. I circled the block twice and finally found an open parking meter on the other side of the street. I pulled in and parked. Standing on the sidewalk facing my car to put eight quarters in the meter, I didn’t realize I’d parked illegally, facing oncoming traffic, right in front of a police sub-station.

  I hustled over to meet Olivia at a trendy place called Bernini where the food is unusually good and patrons can smoke cigars during dinner in the upstairs dining room. With its dark wood paneling and neoclassical wood furniture, Bernini reminds me of a few places that George and I have a fondness for, like the Gotham Grill, in New York City. For some reason, Bernini’s door handle is a huge bronze bumble-bee. Adds to the mystery, I guess.

  Olivia waited for me on the lower level at a corner table in the back, impatiently tapping the pointed toes of her chic four-inch-high heels. After greetings and small talk, I asked her where she’d been.

  “You don’t own my time, Willa. I needed a break. You probably did, too.”

  “I did need a break. But I needed to talk to you, too.”

  “Well, I’m here now. What did you want?”

  The hell with her. I’d defended my home from a rabid State Attorney and struggled through my workload, high on anxiety and tension. I was in no mood to put up with her attitude.

  “I wanted to ask you whether you killed General Andrews.”

  She held up her hand, palm facing me so that I could see the gold and platinum rings that adorned each finger and the backs of her expertly manicured nails. “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. It won’t happen again. Don’t get your panties in a wad.”

  She smiled, trying to cajole me into a nicer tone at least.

  I was placated, a little.

  After a couple of seconds, I said, “I accept your apology.”

  No reason to be too obsequious just because I’d made my point, though. “But it’s a good question, anyway. Did you kill him? Like a lot of other people, I’m finding out, you certainly had good reason to.”

  I was no longer belligerent, but I watched her reaction when she answered the question.

  Olivia looked me right in the eye, unwavering, as she’d done hundreds of times to juries, witnesses and convicted felons, and applied the defense lawyer’s creed: deny, deny, deny.

  “I did not kill General Andrews. If I was going to kill him, I would have done it a long time ago. And if I had killed him now, I would have simply kept quiet and let George take the rap for it, don’t you think?”

  Was she lying? I had no better luck divining her veracity than I’d had this morning with Tremain.

  “Do you have an alibi?” I asked her.

  She looked at me through narrowed eyes. I heard incomprehensible shouting from the kitchen and somewhere behind me, a tray of dishes dropped onto the floor, shattering the quiet as well as the crockery. Louder shouting ensued, in Spanish, chastising the clumsy one, apparently. Another pair of late lunchers entered the front door and waited at the hostess station for a table. I simply waited.

  Eventually, Olivia relented. “As it happens, I do. I was in Tallahassee. With the governor and about five hundred other lawyers. At a conference. Feel free to check.”

  Olivia must have wanted to kill Andrews, though. I think I would have wanted to, in her shoes.

  “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  She looked away, sipped her wine and reviewed the menu. Olivia signaled the waiter, a tall, thin man wearing the smallish grey-framed glasses that are popular with the twenty-somethings these days. We both ordered salads and decided to share the excellent fried calamari.

  When the server left, she spoke. “Look, Willa, this is totally non-productive. Why don’t we just bring each other up to date and get back to work? My psyche isn’t at issue here. I don’t owe you any explanations for my actions. You can believe I killed Andrews or not. You can investigate me or not. But you and I need to get George cleared before that indictment comes down. Why don’t we concentrate on that?”

  So, for the remainder of our meal, we did. Since she’d been recharging, she claimed, Olivia didn’t have much to report. I told her what I wanted her to know. We noodled for a while and then went our separate ways. I had a lot of work to do tonight and I needed to get started.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  Tampa, Florida

  Monday 6:30 p.m.

  January 31, 2000

  ONCE I FINISHED MY after work routine, I got out the pending motions for the Newton trial. The parties were expecting an answer in the morning. I thought I could get it out of the way quickly and then turn to the Andrews murder.

  Placing my reading glasses on my nose and with coffee for fortification, I began to review the list of club members that Tremain provided. I understood the legal arguments fairly well and I knew the decision was mostly a matter of judicial discretion. What that means is that the judge can do whatever she wants. This sounded easier than it actually was. It’s not always easy to figure out what I want.

  The title of the document was simply, The Men’s Tennis Club Membership List. It consisted of four pages of names, all men. The addresses included San Francisco and Key West, but also Indianapolis, Kansas City and other Bible Belt areas.

  There was an actor, several lawyers and doctors, a recently divorced state governor running for congress, and more than one law enforcement officer. A few military men were listed. Indeed, all occupational groups seemed to be represented. Many of these men, I knew, were married. Some of the older ones had been married several times.

  The list wasn’t arranged in any particular order that I could discern. Not obviously alphabetical, regional, or occupational. Two single-spaced columns contained names, job titles, business and home addresses and telephone numbers. A double space between each listing, as if the list was used to print mailing labels. Plenty of ammunition here to ruin more than a few lives.

  My fingers kneaded the space between my eyes, trying to rub away the dull headache that had begun there as I wondered why any group of otherwise intelligent men would create such a potentially explosive document.

  I read the first two columns carefully, feeling like a voyeur. This list was a private matter. It was true that many of the men on it were public figures who, for the most part, were not as protected by libel laws as ordinary citizens, even if their names were erroneously placed there.

  But the potential destruction of lives that would occur from making such sensitive information public without the knowledge or consent of the participants was overwhelming and offensive, to say the least. Did no one understand the concept of privacy anymore?

  My mind wandered as the headache became increasingly severe. Merely rubbing the place where the hurt started was ineffective. I got up, walked around, and then used the last of my cold coffee to help me swallow a few Acetaminophen tablets, hoping for the best with my liver.

  When I returned to the work, I tried to focus. After a while, I realized that I was reading a list of partners. A casual reader, without knowledge of the secret these men shared, might think this was a list of tennis partners. Which, of course, was the idea. But without a witness to testify that the tennis partners were all gay men, the list would be harmless and not probative of anything in the Newton trial. Without a live witness, the list was meaningless.

  But, the problem of needing a witness could be easily solved. All Tremain had to do was to call Nelson Newton himself to the stand and ask the right question. Tremain could prove his defense from Newton’s own mouth. That would likely be a slam-dunk winner as far as the jury was concerned.

  The problem for Newton was that, with or without the list, Tremain could simply call Newton to the stand and ask him whether he’d engaged in homosexual conduct. Now that I’d seen the list, and knew what the meaning of the list was, Newton would not get away with a lie in my courtroom. He’d be forced to admit the truth.

  My years in the legal biz had confirmed something one of my law professors had taught me years ago: A
ny evidence the jury hears from the witness stand, they may choose to believe. But if they see the evidence in a document or a picture, they will never believe anything else.

  With this list, Nelson would surely lose this case. But if I admitted the list into evidence, at least fifty other prominent men and their families would be the victims of a violation of their privacy. I would, in effect, be outing them, against their will.

  It was then that I noticed the date at the top of the list. October 11, which was National Coming Out Day.

  My eye continued to travel down the second page and I recognized more and more names. By the time I got to the third page, I had almost stopped registering the information.

  That was when I saw it.

  On the third page, near the bottom. Both names together.

  A. Randall (Andy) Andrews and John (Jack) Williamson.

  And then, the dots that should have connected when Dottie told me about the general and his lover, “Jack” with the prominent white widow’s peak, followed a straight line into my exhausted brain.

  General Andrews was having an affair with his son-in-law, Jack Williamson.

  And then maybe, or maybe not, depending on whether we believed Dottie or her equally nosey friend Eunice, Andy and Jack broke up.

  Once the truth settled in, I realized not only what my decision about the list would be, but how I would resolve my personal problem as well.

  Taking a full glass of gin and tonic along with a fresh Partagas onto the veranda, I stood in the light evening breeze and tried to let it cleanse away the sordid facts I’d learned when I lifted the rug of politics and looked at the rubbish underneath.

  I knew what I was going to do, but I wasn’t happy about it.

  The whole thing sickened me. Andrews wasn’t murdered because he was bisexual, although I believed he just narrowly missed being killed for having an affair with his daughter’s husband.