Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  “The major players are all on my call list,” said Winters.

  “It needs to come from me. I’m a prosecutor, for God’s sake. I work with these folks. I can’t look them in the eye again if I don’t give them a personal explanation of what happened.”

  Winters seemed to understand that there was no debating it. “Fine,” he said. “But stay on message. And be careful using a cell phone. This goes for you, too, Angelina. The media is filled with eavesdroppers, and your only safe bet is a landline or a face-to-face conversation.”

  I agreed. But if I used his landline, “Law Office of Jeffrey Winters” would pop up on caller ID every time I phoned a friend in law enforcement. Not cool. It was time for me to leave, and not just to make phone calls. I had questions for my wife, and I wanted answers away from her lawyer.

  “When can you and I talk alone?” I asked her.

  “Let’s discuss that,” said Winters.

  “I was talking to Angelina,” I said.

  “I understand. But the question of where everyone goes from here is next on my agenda.”

  “I just want to have a conversation with my wife.”

  “And you will, as soon as we’ve sorted this out. I’ve made arrangements for Angelina’s parents to change hotels and stay here in Miami for a couple days. The media won’t be able to reach them. By the end of the week or so, when they feel rested and ready to travel, they’ll take a nice long vacation.”

  “They’re looking into New Zealand,” said Angelina.

  “Perfect,” said Winters.

  “I have a job,” I said. “I’m not going into hiding or running to the other side of the world.”

  “That’s not what I have in mind for you and Angelina. Your lives should return to normal.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “The sooner the better.”

  “My plan is to get Miami-Dade police to lift the crime scene designation from your house immediately. I’d like to see you sleep there tonight.”

  I wondered if that meant in the same bed. “That sounds good to me,” I said, glancing at Angelina.

  “Me too,” she said without making eye contact.

  “Then that’s our goal,” said Winters. “But first there’s work to do. The media presence will be huge. My preference is that neither of you leave this building until my consultant and I have choreographed everything from the car ride home to the way you look at each other as you walk through the front door.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I said. “Angelina, I say we do this right now and get it over with.”

  “No, no, no,” said Winters. “The only image I want out for public consumption today is the YouTube video. Let it play out for a good eight to twelve hours. That gives us time to rehearse.”

  “I don’t need to rehearse walking into my own house.”

  “You’ll be peppered with questions the minute you step out of the car. Saying the wrong thing or even just looking into the camera the wrong way can undo all the good we’ve just done. My consultant will role-play with you and make sure you’re prepared for that first live encounter with the media.”

  I looked at my wife. “Angelina, let’s go home.”

  “Why are you being so difficult?” she asked.

  “I’m being difficult? Why have we not spoken a word to each other so far without your lawyer in the room?”

  “That’s not fair, Abe. I’ve made some terrible decisions in the last few days. I need good advice.”

  “Mine’s free.”

  “Jeffrey’s is objective.”

  “Jeffrey is looking out for Jeffrey.”

  There. It needed to be said. I’d believed it from the day I’d first met him at the state attorney’s office. His determination to turn Angelina into a media darling and YouTube sensation had convinced me that it was truer than ever.

  “Abe, you should apologize to Jeffrey right now.”

  “No need,” said Winters. “Abe is entitled to his opinion.”

  They were both right, but this charade was all wrong, and I was not about to apologize.

  “Abe?” she said, nudging. I wasn’t biting.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Winters. “Cops, prosecutors, anyone in law enforcement. They have no use for criminal defense lawyers. Nothing personal, Abe, but I prepared Angelina for your reaction.”

  “All I want is thirty minutes of alone time with my wife.”

  “And you’ll get it,” he said, “maybe as soon as tonight, if all goes well. But these next twelve hours are crucial. Angelina needs a lawyer. As her attorney, I have advised her to avoid spending time alone with anyone who will try to convince her that she doesn’t need one. Even her husband.”

  “Especially her husband?”

  “I didn’t say that,” said Winters. “I suspected that you would fall into that category. Your behavior this morning confirms it.”

  “I’m going to make a few phone calls,” I said, rising.

  Winters seemed happy that I was leaving. “Remember what I said about the cell phone. The receptionist can set you up in a conference room with a landline.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll make the calls from my office.”

  “You’re leaving?” asked Angelina.

  “Yeah. Are you coming?”

  She looked at her lawyer, but she didn’t move. Winters had her under a sit-and-stay command worthy of the Westminster Kennel Club.

  “I didn’t think so,” I said, and I left the room.

  The morning rush hour had the courthouse district in a chokehold, and it made no sense to put off my calls until I could get to a landline. I phoned Carmen from my car while stuck in traffic.

  “This could turn into one hell of a mess,” she said.

  My first call had been to Rid, but it went to voice mail. Carmen was next. She’d read the press release from Jeffrey Winters, and I told her about the YouTube video that was ready to launch. Of course she was glad that Angelina was unharmed, but that didn’t alleviate her concerns about the growing “mess.”

  “You mean the media?” I asked.

  “That part I can handle,” she said. “I’m talking about Agent Santos.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “Yes. She has questions that I simply can’t answer, and if she doesn’t get answers, this is going to snowball into a very bad situation. It’s a federal crime to fake your own disappearance and disrupt the investigative work of a multijurisdictional task force.”

  “We know. That’s why Angelina has a lawyer.”

  “Listen to what I’m saying, Abe. Santos doesn’t believe that your wife pulled this off alone. She thinks that the only way this could have happened was if someone on the inside ran misdirection and got the cops to ignore leads and look the other away. Someone like her husband.”

  “That’s crazy. Even if she said that, it must have been in some kind of brainstorming session. She can’t actually believe it. Why would I get involved in a stunt like that?”

  “You’re right. I don’t know what’s inside Santos’ head. But I can think of one reason you might: maybe you and Angelina both came to the conclusion that the only way to keep her safe from Cutter was to make Cutter think she was killed by a copycat.”

  A copycat. I thought again of how Angelina’s phone had ended up on the Tamiami Trail, not far from where Tyla’s body had been recovered.

  “Carmen, you know I would never do something like this. I could be disbarred.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  “Is that what Santos wants?”

  “As I said, I don’t know where Santos is headed with this. Maybe she’s just pissed off that the media is paying more attention to Angelina’s return than to the FBI’s apprehension of a serial killer. But my advice to you is to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Good advice,” I said. “I will.”

  I hung up and stopped at the traffic light. I was about to call Santos, but my thoughts returned to Carmen’s mention of a copycat killer, Angelina’s c
ell phone, and her emphatic denial of any knowledge of how it had ended up near Tyla’s recovery site.

  No. I didn’t toss my phone on the Tamiami Trail. You’re asking the wrong person.

  It made me wonder. Who was the right person?

  Traffic was finally moving, but I pulled into a gas station and called Rid. It went to voice mail again. I dialed three more times without success. It was possible that he’d been tied up all morning, and it ran against my better judgment to think that he was anything other than too busy to answer his phone. But I was pretty sure Rid was avoiding my calls.

  I made a quick three-point turn, and the tires squealed as I started back to the law office.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Victoria Santos had one priority: find Tyla Tomkins’ killer.

  She knew it wasn’t Cutter, and not just because a black woman from Miami-Dade didn’t meet the victim profile of a white female from Palm Beach County who dated black men. There was no sadistic video of Tyla in Tommy Salvo’s computer and no sign of Tyla’s DNA in his kill room or anywhere else in his house or car. It technically wasn’t the FBI’s jurisdiction to solve a homicide unrelated to a federal offense, but legal technicalities aside, this one was different: Victoria had been lied to.

  The YouTube video had nearly sent Victoria over the edge. It was vintage Jeffrey Winters, a lightweight criminal defense showman who fancied himself a master in the courtroom of public opinion. Nothing would satisfy Victoria more than to hoist Winters by his own petard, to use his own strategy against him to crack the Tyla Tomkins case. She’d watched Angelina’s mea culpa video three times, then drove herself to the Beckham residence. An army of television journalists rushed toward her vehicle. She had to force the driver’s-side door open and push back the crowd just to get out of her car. They surrounded her as she cut across the lawn, and questions hit her from every direction.

  Does the FBI have any comment on this morning’s video?

  Will any charges be brought?

  Why is the Beckham house still a crime scene?

  At this stage, it was in Victoria’s interest not to answer any of those questions. She forged ahead, eyes forward, “No comment.” The reporters followed her all the way to the police tape at the front steps. Victoria ducked under the yellow ribbon of authority, went inside, and closed the door behind her. Detective Reyes of the Miami-Dade domestic violence unit was waiting in the living room.

  “A media circus out there,” said Reyes.

  Victoria looked out the front window. She recognized many of the same teams that had provided Find Angelina news coverage over the weekend, but even more had joined the frenzy for this latest development.

  “They smell blood.” Victoria took another step into the living room, then glanced back at the spot where they’d found the shattered beer bottle on Saturday morning. “And I smell spouse abuse.”

  “Smell won’t get me a conviction,” said Reyes.

  “No. But I’m pretty certain that a physical examination of Angelina’s body will. A woman doesn’t run out of her house after midnight and fake her own disappearance if she isn’t scared to death of her husband. There has to be a bruise or a cut somewhere on her body.”

  The detective shook her head. “You can’t force a victim to submit to a physical examination. I’ve tried.”

  “That’s where I can help you,” said Victoria.

  “How?”

  “You can’t force Angelina to submit to an examination. But if she’s staring at federal charges and five years in prison for faking her disappearance and obstruction of justice, she might very well ‘consent’ to it.”

  “Good of you to help,” said Reyes. “But I’m assuming that you didn’t throw yourself back into this mess out of the goodness of your heart. What do you want from me?”

  Victoria stepped closer, her expression very serious. “Spouse abuse is the tip of the iceberg here. I’m looking for Tyla Tomkins’ killer.”

  “Don’t you have that in Cutter?”

  “No.”

  “You should be talking to Detective Riddel about this.”

  “Detective Riddel talks too much to Abe Beckham.”

  “Are you sure Cutter is not your man? Is there nothing to connect him to Tyla Tomkins?”

  Victoria wasn’t ready to share Tommy Salvo’s mention of his encounter with Tyla at the Cortinas plantation in Nicaragua. Not yet. “Let me put it this way. I have one thing that may connect Cutter to Tyla Tomkins. On the night of Tyla’s memorial service, I looked across the street from the funeral home and saw a glowing orange dot in the dark parking lot. Someone was standing there watching and smoking a cigarette. Tommy Salvo is a chain smoker.”

  “So it was him?”

  “He denied it at first. Then we started talking about Cutter in the third person, and he insinuated that it might have been him, but I led him there in my questioning. It fits the stereotype of the serial killer who watches the funeral or visits the grave of his victims. Except that Tyla wasn’t his victim.”

  “Maybe he went there out of curiosity just to see why people thought Tyla Tomkins was one of Cutter’s victims.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

  “Okay. You know someone was smoking in the dark and watching from across the street. If not him, who?”

  “That is the question,” said Victoria. “The answer depends on what you find here as part of your domestic violence investigation.”

  “I hope this doesn’t make me sound like I have sawdust between my ears, but you want to tell me exactly what you’re hoping I find here?”

  Victoria slowly crossed the living room, walking around the cocktail table and past each of the end tables. “There’s not a single ashtray anywhere in this house, is there?”

  “None that I’ve seen, and none listed in the initial CIS inventory,” said Reyes.

  She walked to the drapes and sniffed the fabric. “No obvious smoking odor?”

  “I can’t say that I’ve detected any, but that wasn’t the focus of the forensic team’s investigation when Mrs. Beckham went missing.”

  “Here’s what I’m looking for,” said Victoria. “Anything—and I mean anything—that tells you Angelina Beckham is a closet smoker.”

  “How does that relate to my domestic violence investigation?”

  It doesn’t. “Trust me on this,” said Victoria. “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  I parked right beside Jeffrey Winters’ shiny new Tesla and hurried into his building. The elevator was packed, no room for me, so I ran up the stairwell. Sweat beaded at my brow, and I was breathing heavily as I entered his suite, raced past the receptionist, and entered his office. Angelina and her parents were with him.

  “Angelina, I have to talk to you,” I said.

  They looked at me with confusion, probably wondering why I was panting like a Saint Bernard.

  “Sorry, I ran up the steps,” I explained. “But Angelina, this is urgent. Give me five minutes alone and hear what I have to say. I didn’t rush all the way back here to tell you to fire your lawyer.”

  She glanced at Winters, who gave her the green light. “You can use the conference room,” he said.

  We walked across the hall together. It wasn’t as large as Winters’ office, but it was plenty big for the two of us. As I closed the door, I wondered if the room was bugged and if Winters could hear everything. I didn’t care. I was just glad to have Angelina’s undivided ear. We took seats at the conference table.

  “What is going on, Abe?”

  I was still winded and took a moment. “I’ve been thinking about your story.”

  “It’s not a ‘story,’” she said. “It’s the truth.”

  She was starting to sound like her lawyer. “Okay, let me start again.”

  I paused. I knew Winters would hold me to my five-minute limit and would knock on the door soon. But what I needed to say wasn’t something I could just blurt out. It was a delicate situation.r />
  “Angelina, I’ve met a lot of victims as a prosecutor. A lot of them have had horrible things done to them. No one ever wants to talk about it. It’s never easy. Some are able to recall everything, and they can describe it in amazing detail. Some remember what happened, but they just can’t talk about it. A few seem to have no memory of it. They’ve blocked it out for the sake of their own survival.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you,” I said.

  “It doesn’t sound like it.”

  “I’m worried about your story.”

  “It’s not a—”

  “Sorry, your statement. It may be ‘the truth,’” I said, making air quotes, “but not all of it sounds true. It has holes. I’m having trouble believing it. I don’t think the public is going to believe it either.”

  “That’s your opinion.”

  “Let me be more specific. I believe you got scared after I left. You did leave the house thinking that you’d be safer from Cutter if you went into hiding. Maybe you were even so pissed off at me that you decided to hurt me and sell Samantha’s ring for money.”

  “I didn’t do it to spite you.”

  “Stay with me on this,” I said. “Maybe you got yourself into a sketchy neighborhood at two o’clock in the morning, and something bad happened.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I know you didn’t. When I say something bad happened, I mean something bad happened to you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Something that you don’t want to talk about. That you don’t want to have to describe in painful detail to me, your mother, your father, the police, a jury, or anyone else.”

  She shook her head, but I read it more as confusion than disagreement. “Why would you think that?”

  “It started with your phone. You don’t really have a good explanation of how it ended up on the Tamiami Trail near the recovery site for Tyla’s body. You said Jerko made you give it to him. When I pushed for a better answer, all you could say is that I wasn’t asking the right person. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe the ‘right person’ did more than take your phone.”