Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  The mental cost of not following through on her desire to kill her father might have been more than Robbie could cope with. She might kill herself instead, I thought. I couldn’t leave her alone because I had no idea what she might do.

  While I was trying to figure out what to do next, she pushed right past me. I had my guard down. I hadn’t realized that while I was feeling empathy for her, she was intent on getting away from me. I wasn’t prepared.

  She pushed past me, shoving me so hard that she knocked me to the floor. My body fell awkwardly. I landed somehow on my ankle and felt a sharp pain shoot up my shin.

  I rolled over in time to see her run, more quickly than I’d believed possible. I tried to jump up. When I got to my feet, pain pierced my leg and I cried out with the shock of it. By the time I righted myself, Robbie had made it down the hallway and out the front door. Belatedly, I realized what she had in mind.

  I hurried out the door, limping after her, fresh pain shooting up my shin with every step. I cried out, “Stop! Robbie stop!”

  The next time I saw her, she was in her car with the door locked, backing down the driveway.

  I hobbled after her, pounded on the hood and shouted again for her to stop the car. Robbie turned her face to me then, and I saw tears still streaming down her large, round cheeks and mucus pouring from her red nose. She glared at me as if pure hatred could strike me down, as her car backed out into the street.

  Limping quickly down the block, calling after her, I tripped on one of Tampa’s damned uneven sidewalks. I got up, still limping on my sore ankle, ignoring the bleeding scrapes on my arms that burned as if I’d scooted about fifty feet along the concrete. I pulled out my key and managed to get into Greta.

  Next time I looked up, Robbie was gone. I had no idea where she went. I pounded my hand on the steering wheel and said a few very unjudicial, not to mention unladylike, words. It didn’t help me find her, or ease my burning limbs.

  Guilt ridden, afraid I’d pushed her so far that she’d hurt herself, I picked up the phone and called Chief Hathaway.

  Not in his office.

  Why is it that you can never find a cop when you need one?

  Not knowing what else to do, I left Hathaway a long voice mail, explaining that I’d had an argument with Robbie Andrews, she’d left me very upset and I was concerned that she might hurt herself. And I told him where I was going next.

  I hung up feeling impotent to prevent another tragedy.

  But I now knew what I needed to finish the General Andrews business, once and for all.

  I dialed Olivia on my way. When she picked up, I got straight to the point. “What’s the status now?”

  “One witness left, then Drake’s summation.”

  “Can you stall him?”

  “How long?”

  I glanced at my watch. “An hour?”

  My cell phone started to crackle and sputter as I drove through a dead spot in the invisible airwaves that connected us. I couldn’t hear all of what she said.

  Just the one word: “Doubtful.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  Tampa, Florida

  Tuesday 4:30 p.m.

  February 1, 2000

  I DIDN’T WANT TO catch him at home. I wanted a nice, public place and some fresh air. I’d asked Jason where I could find the senator this afternoon and, to his credit, Jason had told me. Conveniently, Senator Warwick was playing golf at Great Oaks. Alone.

  The symmetry appealed to me. I’d been playing golf at Great Oaks the day I learned Andrews had died.

  Now, if I handled him correctly, I might collect enough evidence to prove my theories. I’d battled wits with Warwick several times recently and I’d come out the loser. This time, I planned to change that.

  I parked Greta myself and limped over to the pro shop where I picked up a driver, a five iron, and a putter. I held the clubs across my lap as I drove one of the carts toward the ninth tee.

  Sheldon Warwick stood on the fairway of the ninth hole, just in the middle of his backswing on what was probably his second shot. The ninth hole was a straight par three. The idea was to keep you playing, so your last hole on the first nine should be a fairly easy one. The senator was a good enough golfer to get on the green in one from the tee. Since he hadn’t done so, he must have flubbed his drive. Something on his mind, maybe.

  As he was walking back to his cart, his second shot having landed on the green where the first one should have been, I drove up to Warwick and stopped.

  “Hello, Senator. Mind if I join you?”

  He glanced up and noticed a foursome behind him and a pair of male golfers in front, realizing he was effectively stuck in the middle with me. “Is there any way I could stop you?” he asked.

  He was a fast learner, anyway. “We could go into the clubhouse to have this conversation,” I offered.

  “Not likely.”

  We drove both carts, me following him, up to the ninth green. He took his putter and I limped along without a club, just to watch. After three putts he managed to sink his ball. Neither of us said anything.

  We approached the tenth tee. I took out the driver I’d borrowed from the pro shop and put a ball down. I hadn’t hit a golf ball since the day of the Blue Coat. Usually, I take some warm-up shots, but I wasn’t here to impress anybody.

  I swung and hit the ball a respectable 150 yards, straight. Warwick took his time and hit his ball a little further. As we walked back to the carts, I said, “I thought you’d want to know that I’ve figured out who killed General Andrews. I’m on my way to Michael Drake’s office.”

  “Are you now?” he responded, as he got into his cart and headed off toward my ball, which was about twenty yards from his.

  “Either that, or Frank Bennett,” I told him. So I’d offered him the choice: tell me the truth or I’ll tell the media what I know and let the public sort it all out.

  Apparently Warwick was unwilling to get out in front of me on the fairway. Wise man. He sat in his cart, and after I hit the ball with the five iron, he sped off, leaving me standing there.

  I caught up to him as he walked back following his second shot, pulled in between him and his cart and got out. “Here’s the time for us to talk about this and get it over with.”

  “Willa, for God’s sake. First you invite yourself to join my game. Then you get in the way. And now you want to hold up that foursome behind us, too? Where’s your professionalism?”

  He stepped around my cart and got into his. As he’d done before, he sped away and stopped at my ball in the fairway. His shot had landed on the green.

  I followed him.

  When I got within hearing range, he said, “Hit the ball, Willa. We’ll talk at the pin where we’re not making a public spectacle of ourselves.”

  I hate it when men act so condescendingly to me. Who the hell did he think he was anyway? I had a pretty good weapon in my hand and he didn’t know I wouldn’t hit him with it, knock that attitude out of him.

  When we reached the green, he putted his ball in first. Then he stood by waiting for me.

  He said, “It was just a matter of time before someone killed Andy. He had cheated death a hundred times and there are at least that many people who are not sorry he’s dead. Maybe Andy’s not even sorry. He was a twisted, unhappy guy.”

  Takes one to know one, I thought.

  “If he’d been the first one out of his limousine the last Thursday of the hearings, he’d have been shot instead of Craig Hamilton right then. What difference does it make now who killed him?”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I put my ball down in two strokes and we drove separately to the eleventh tee.

  Again, Warwick arrived before me. I had beat him on the last hole, but he swaggered up and went first anyway, putting himself ahead of me, just like he’d put himself ahead of George and Deborah Andrews and Jason and everyone else.

  Gripping my club tightly, I felt a little of the way Robbie Andrews had felt the night she hadn’t killed her
father, but wanted to.

  “It makes a difference to me, Sheldon.”

  I could have gone straight to Drake or Bennett, but I didn’t have enough to nail Warwick. I needed more. I glanced at my watch. Most of the hour Olivia had estimated had already elapsed.

  “Why? You know George didn’t kill him, don’t you? Drake will never be able to convict him. Let it alone. Justice has already been done.”

  That much, based on everything I’d heard, was mostly true. “Not good enough. I don’t want my husband to go through a trial or risk a conviction. Things go wrong when cases are put to a jury, you know that.”

  I hit the ball, taking a cue from one of my friends who visualizes the heads of her enemies when she hits a golf ball. I imagined Sheldon Warwick’s disgusting smirk, grinning up at me from the tee and I hit that ball with all the strength of my indignation. It worked. This time, my drive was much longer than his.

  Who’d have thought being unwilling to pulverize my enemies was a golf handicap all these years?

  We rejoined at Warwick’s ball. I didn’t tell him how I’d hit mine so much farther, but it frightened me a little to acknowledge to myself that I felt a little calmer.

  I had no proof of my theories that would be admissible in court. There are two types of admissible evidence: direct and indirect. Physical, documentary and testimonial evidence is direct. Circumstantial evidence is indirect. And conclusions, such as the ones I’d come to based on deductive reasoning, as far as the law is concerned, are simply fiction.

  If I couldn’t prove Warwick killed Andrews, it didn’t happen. The only way I’d be able to hand Michael Drake the man who killed Andrews, and convince Drake to let George go, was to get a confession. Or, I could allow Frank Bennett to do the rest of the work for me. I worried that Warwick wouldn’t answer my questions, and I was a little surprised when he did.

  “How’d you get George’s gun?” I asked Warwick as he hit his second shot about a hundred yards off to the right. The fairway dog-legged to the left. Not his day. Next we met at my ball.

  As he watched my second shot, he said, “I didn’t get George’s gun. Andy had it. I think Robbie brought it with her when she meant to kill him.” Warwick smiled knowingly. “Andy laughed about it. He said Robbie had never done anything right in her life. She couldn’t even hold on to her husband. I picked the gun up off his desk and put it in my jacket pocket when he wasn’t looking, before we walked out to his fishing boat.”

  He seemed to enjoy taunting me with the details. Was he crazy, too? Or was it just arrogance? He probably felt safe because he knew I’d never be able to prove anything he said if he denied it under oath. I’d discovered no forensic evidence to tie him to the general’s murder and there had been no witnesses.

  Rage borne of impotence flooded my body and I gripped the golf club so tightly my hand began to throb. The intensity of my emotions shocked me. I really might have hit him. I imagined myself swinging the club upward to knock him down, knock that smug look off his face and that entitled attitude out of him.

  I wanted to do it. I really wanted to. Only forcing myself to put the club head on the ground and press it there kept it from flying toward his head until he returned to his cart. That, and knowing that if I didn’t get him to confess, George would be indicted for murder.

  We’d both need another fairway shot on this par five hole, so once again, we met at my ball. My anger hadn’t abated. This time, his ball was just a short distance away. I set up and hit. He hit a few seconds later. Both shots landed on the green, although his was closer to the pin.

  “Why’d you shoot him, Sheldon, if all you had to do was wait and let some anti-abortion nut do it for you? Or one of his kids or lovers? Why get your hands dirty? It’s the end of your career, you know.” He sank his putt and it was my turn.

  As I set up, he grinned at me. His arrogance was amazing. He actually thought he could commit murder and get away with it. But then, so far, he’d been right. “Timing, Willa, timing.” We both knew he wasn’t talking about the golf game.

  He leaned both hands on his club and waited. “He did it to himself. I finally realized that if Andy had been confirmed and gotten on the Court, he’d only have been satisfied for a while.”

  He walked a few steps, knelt down and eyed the supposed trajectory of the ball. “But his confirmation was not going to happen. Mostly because of his own belligerence and foolhardiness.”

  “Why did that bother you?”

  “I told him that night that I was voting against him,” Warwick said. “He said if I did, he would destroy us all. He said he’d frame me for the murder of Thomas Holmes. Which, of course, I had no part of. Except that he’d blackmailed me into keeping quiet about it after I found out he killed Thomas.”

  This story wasn’t what I’d expected to hear. I’d thought Andrews had threatened to expose Benson and Warwick’s own criminal conduct in covering up Charles Benson’s drug activities. “How was Thomas Holmes’s death a part of all this?”

  Warwick stood at the ball, leaning on his club, talking as if we were discussing the weather. His blasé, patronizing attitude was infuriating. “Andy made a pass at Thomas, but Thomas wasn’t gay and he had an immediate, visceral, irrational response. Panicked, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Thomas was high at the time, of course. On cocaine. He had a gun in his hand and threatened Andy with it. They struggled. Andy was stronger and quicker and a better shot.”

  He acted as if what Andrews had done was nothing more serious than a social gaffe. “He killed Thomas and then he covered it up.”

  If it really happened like that, I thought, the verdict could have been self defense. But the problem would have been explaining Andy’s sexual advance toward Thomas. For that alone, Andrews would have been court-martialed.

  Warwick shrugged again. “I swear, I didn’t know he was going to kill Thomas before he did it.”

  “But, when the other sexual harassment complaints came out during the hearings, you and Benson sabotaged Andrews, didn’t you?”

  He shrugged again. “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly. I went to talk to Andy, to try to persuade him to withdraw his nomination. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was raging, irrational. We argued. That was when he threatened to frame me for Thomas’s Holmes’s death.”

  “And how would he have done that?” The idea seemed too far out, even for Andrews.

  Warwick looked directly at me now. “Andy said he’d tell the world that I had asked him to kill Thomas to keep him away from my son. He would have done it, too. He said he could supply enough evidence that people would believe him.”

  And then it clicked. The surveillance tapes. They must have shown Shelly Warwick as well as Charles Benson and Thomas Holmes using drugs. Andrews still had them, after all these years. That must have been why Warwick helped with the initial cover-up. To keep his own son out of jail. That, and to keep from being personally embarrassed. It was the only thing that made sense.

  I’d never understood how Andrews got possession of the tapes in the first place, but this time, Andrews must have threatened to use the tapes to prove Warwick had a motive to kill Thomas Holmes. If Warwick was in Korea at the time Holmes died, the motive tape might have been enough to embarrass Warwick out of office. The report I’d read had not said exactly where Thomas Holmes’s body had been found. Somewhere that both Andrews and Warwick could have been, too, obviously.

  Without clear proof, Andrews’s threat might not have been strong enough to push Warwick to murder, unless both Andrews and Warwick believed the revelation would also open the old criminal case and its cover-up.

  Warwick said, “He laughed when I said I’d kill him first. He laughed at me. Me. Andy was laughing at me. Can you imagine?” His indignation was almost comical, except that he was so deadly serious.

  I could imagine, actually. I’d felt something like the same level of rage at Warwick just a few moments ago, myself.

  I
f Warwick was to be believed, Thomas Holmes had tried to kill Andrews, and failed. And Robbie Andrews had been goaded to take a gun to face her father’s condescension. I recalled how Andrews had baited Warwick and led both Tory Warwick and George to violence the night he died. Not to mention the heated argument the entire Andrews family had both on the way to dinner and on the way home that same evening.

  The general was more than capable of inspiring violent rage in others, even taking pleasure in it. In the end, Andrews pushed one man too hard. Andrews had inspired Warwick to kill him.

  Warwick, though, could have been discussing his last appearance on Meet The Nation. “So the world is better off. End of story.”

  He gestured to the foursome behind us, waiting for us to finish on the green. Was he insane? Had something in his brain simply snapped? His behavior was far from rational and an involuntary shiver made me glad we were in a public place.

  I glanced up to see the foursome advancing on us. “And what about the surveillance tapes? What did you do with them?” The tapes were tangible evidence I could use. I needed to find them.

  Warwick’s face flushed red again and he struggled to get himself under control. But he didn’t answer my question. Instead, he said, “Of course, you won’t ever be able to repeat any of this. Even to free your precious George.”

  Warwick had to think I’d go to the media with what I had figured out on my own to save George, even if disclosing Warwick and Benson’s secrets would cause their destruction. What choice did I have?

  As if he’d read my very thoughts, he told me why he’d bothered to confess his involvement to me.

  “You have no corroborating evidence and I’ll deny it all.”

  His smug derision caused me to retaliate, too soon. “Where’s that beautiful grey cashmere jacket I saw you wearing the night before Andy died, Sheldon? The one that must have a very inconvenient bullet hole in the pocket?”

  I’d asked Ben Hathaway to get a search warrant for Warwick’s house when I left the voice mail message on my way to the golf course. I’d also told Olivia about it. I expected that we’d find the same grey fibers in Warwick’s jacket that were stuck to the bullet that killed Andrews. The jacket and the tapes would free George.