Secret Justice

by Diane Capri

  Someone must have argued with Otter, pushed him harder than intended, and Otter, being drunk, fell and hit his head. That’s not really murder. But, leaving Otter alone on the street to die was at least negligence, if not depraved indifference to human life. He wouldn’t have died right away. It would have taken a while for the bleeding inside his skull to kill him.

  If the pusher had called for help, Otter might be alive today. Could Margaret have pushed Otter in anger, stalking off and leaving him there to die, not knowing the full extent of his injury? I now had to acknowledge that she could have done that. Anyone could have done that. It wasn’t murder without an intent to kill. But, Otter was dead, just the same.

  I continued to replay the scenes of that Saturday evening in my mind. Until I remembered the random thought I’d had when I first went down the stairs from our flat into George’s restaurant lobby. When I saw Margaret standing next to Sandra Kelley.

  They had been made up by the same artist, their black eyebrows, brightly rouged cheeks, and strong red mouths, applied with the same heavy hand. Their costumes had been the same colors and they both wore black wigs.

  Maybe the “disinterested witness” Hathaway had interviewed didn’t know both Margaret and Sandra. If not, an eyewitness easily could have confused them that night. Had Margaret pushed Armstrong Otter down to the sidewalk in anger? Or was it Sandra Kelley?

  I finally got home and was able to change into jeans, leaving George sleeping in the flat. The drive to Margaret’s house at two in the morning took only a few minutes. When I got there, the house was dark and not one small light was burning.

  I rang the bell several times, each ring longer and more insistent. Margaret never came to answer it. In freezing frustration, I jogged quickly around to the back of the house where I’d found the door unlocked once before. It was unlocked again and I resolved to tell Margaret that she absolutely had to be more careful.

  I opened the door quietly and went into the mudroom off the kitchen, just as I had the last time. I didn’t want to startle Margaret, but I didn’t want to kill myself walking around in the dark, either. I felt around the doorway for a light switch and found one, but it turned on the outside light over the door I’d just come through.

  The porch light provided dim illumination as I walked into the kitchen and continued feeling around for another light switch. I found it on the opposite side of the doorway from the last one. When I flipped it, the hanging lamp over the kitchen table came on and illuminated the entire kitchen. A good thing, because the light kept me from tripping over the body in the middle of the floor.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 12:07 a.m.

  March 4, 2001

  IT TOOK ME ABOUT two seconds to recognize Margaret laying there. She was fully dressed. I stooped down to check her pulse and found her breathing normally. Trying to wake her up took a few minutes, but eventually she did. I helped her to the living room couch. After giving her some water and finding her eyeglasses under the kitchen table, Margaret righted herself and was coherent enough to talk to me, but barely.

  I spoke to her gently. “Honey, what happened? Why were you on the floor? Did you fall?” Elderly people were always falling down and breaking their hips. I feared this had happened to Margaret, although she didn’t seem to be in any pain. She seemed bewildered and disoriented, but she knew who I was and where she was. As the doctors say, she was oriented to time and place.

  After a little while Margaret was able to speak coherently. “I don’t know what happened. I came out into the kitchen to get something and the next thing I remember is sitting here with you.” As she exhaled, I got the slightly sweet smell of processed alcohol on her breath. I never thought of Margaret as a closet drinker. Maybe she’d gotten drunk and passed out. People have been driven to drink by lesser things than she had been dealing with lately.

  “Well, come on, we’re going to get you over to Tampa General and have them take a look at you.” I started trying to get her up, but she was surprisingly resistant. She refused to budge.

  “I’m not going to the hospital. I think I must have fainted or something. Nothing’s broken. I don’t hurt anywhere. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.” Margaret started feeling her hands, her arms, her feet and her legs.

  She turned her head this way and that, feeling it with her hands as she did so. She straightened her shoulders and flexed them. Finally, she stood up, bent over at the waist, then stooped down by bending her knees and standing back up. All while I watched in silence. Her flexibility was remarkable. But then, I was learning how remarkable Margaret really was in many respects.

  “You could have had a stroke or something, Margaret. Be reasonable. We should check it out, at least,” I pleaded with her.

  “I’m fine. Nothing’s broken. I’ll be okay,” she told me, with firmness that meant I’d never get her to the hospital unless I called an ambulance and they sedated her, which I wasn’t going to do. She patted me on the hand sitting in my lap. “Don’t worry so much, Willa. I’ve been taking care of myself and Ron for a long time. I know when I need a doctor. I don’t need one now.”

  We sat there in silence while she let me decide for myself that she wasn’t going to any hospital with me voluntarily. Then she got up and went into the kitchen to put on the kettle for tea. I had no choice but to go after her.

  “Why are you here, Willa?” she asked, her back to me while she worked at getting the tea put together.

  “I came to tell you that Ben Hathaway is planning to arrest you for the murders of Ron and Armstrong Otter. Unless we can figure out a way to do something about that, he should be here bright and early.”

  Margaret’s hands shook as she got the china cups and saucers out of the cabinet, but she said nothing.

  “I need you to talk to me, Margaret. I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s going on here. I tried asking Larry Davis, but he rightly feels he can’t disclose your confidences to me.” I got up from the table and walked up behind her, giving her a hug. She was so tiny, especially next to me. She felt so frail in my embrace. “Let me help you, Margaret. I really want to.” And then she crumpled in my arms and started to cry. I held her for a while as the tears fell. When the tea kettle began whistling insistently, I helped her over to the table and handed her the tissue box.

  I finished up the tea while she composed herself. Then I sat down across the table from her and asked my question again.

  “Tell me what’s going on here. I have some influence with Ben Hathaway, but I don’t know what to tell him. I need something to work with.” Margaret nodded her head, not trusting herself to speak yet, lest tears begin afresh. I continued in her silence. “Okay. Here’s what I’ve been told. I know that Ron was dying of ALS. I also know his death wasn’t by natural causes. Hathaway believes you were having an affair with Armstrong Otter and that you killed Ron to be free of him so you could be with Otter. Then, he thinks you killed Otter in a quarrel, unintentionally. He says he has a witness who saw you two arguing and saw you push Otter after the parade Saturday night. I don’t know what other evidence he thinks he has, but this is a big piece to start with.” As I recited these facts, tears began to fall from her eyes again, but she was composed. Just sad. “Tell me about this, Margaret. Did you kill Ron?”

  Her voice was quiet, but I could hear her. “No.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Do you know who did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, Margaret. If you want to stay out of jail, I need to know.”

  “My first husband killed Ron.”

  If I hadn’t been sitting down, I’d have fallen down.

  “You were married before Ron? I had no idea. When was this?”

  “Years ago. I was young. So was he. I thought he’d died, but he hadn’t.” Tears continued to pour out of her eyes and down her cheeks. “I’d never have done it if I’d known he was alive. Never.”

  I was confused. She told me she ha
dn’t killed Ron. “Done what? What wouldn’t you have done if you’d known your husband was alive?”

  “I’d never have given our baby away.” And she began to sob in loud gulps. Margaret put her head down on the table and cried with deep grief, for her lost child, her lost husband, and her lost life. There was nothing I could do but wait it out, feeling such sadness for her that tears appeared on my own cheeks.

  By the time she stopped sobbing, Margaret was so exhausted she couldn’t keep talking. It was after four o’clock in the morning. If I put her to bed, she’d sleep until Chief Hathaway came to arrest her in the morning.

  No matter what else happened, it would do no good to put Margaret Wheaton in jail. I couldn’t call Hathaway at this hour and ask him to put off the arrest another day, although I believed he would do so if I told him why.

  If I called the police station and left a message, it would be recorded. I didn’t want that. Besides, why did Hathaway tell me he was going to arrest Margaret tomorrow if he didn’t expect me to do something about it?

  So, what I did next wasn’t obstruction of justice. Not exactly.

  I found Margaret’s coat and helped her into it. I packed her a small bag, carried it out to the car, and then helped her into the car. As I drove back to Minaret in the deep darkness of early morning, I tried to plan how I would explain this to George, who would definitely understand. And how I would explain it to Hathaway, who might not. I avoided thinking about how I might have to explain my behavior the next time I was testifying under oath in the CJ’s hearing.

  It was too late, or too early, to go to bed after I had Margaret safely stowed in our guest room again. I made coffee and settled in the den with my journal. It was still quite cold, so I started another fire. While George, the dogs, Dad, Suzanne, and Margaret all slept, I picked up my journaling where I had left off, adding Margaret’s revelations to what I knew already.

  “Find Margaret’s first husband and you’ll find Ron Wheaton’s murderer,” I wrote.

  Margaret had given me few clues before she’d completely broken down in her kitchen. But she said she’d been married a long time ago, for a very short time, and had a child. There must have been a record of the marriage somewhere. I logged onto my computer and entered the programs available to me through the contract the courts have with a public records search service.

  If I wanted more information, I’d have to call one of my friends in the U.S. Marshall’s office, and for now I wanted to avoid the questions that would raise. I found Margaret Rodriguez Wheaton’s Social Security number and ran a check on it. I found the calculation of her benefits when she would turn sixty-five next month and her work history reflected in the list of deposits to her account through the years.

  Margaret had been employed by the U.S. Government as long as I had. We’d started at the courthouse the same month and the same year, because I hired her right after my appointment had been confirmed. Before that, she’d worked in law offices around Tampa. Her last law firm secretarial position was with my old firm. I knew she’d been married to Ron Wheaton for over thirty years, so her earlier marriage must have been when she was less than thirty years old.

  I scrolled back to the early deposit records, checking from her first employment in high school at the Colonnade, which was then a drive-in restaurant on Bayshore popular with the kids. Probably, she’d been a waitress. Her earnings were reported at less than a dollar an hour.

  There were a few more entries in what looked like a series of waitress jobs in her teens and then a curious entry by an employer listed as “Mrs. Robert Prieto.” The contributions continued each year for three years. There was a gap in the history then for about six months, and the next entry was another waitress job in Tampa. After that, all the entries were from Tampa law practices until she became employed as my secretary.

  In the 1950s, a pregnant widow of very modest means with no family would have had a hard time taking care of herself and her child. My own mother was in the same situation, and she had told me many times how hard it had been for her. She said it was so difficult for her to manage even when Kate Austin had helped her by taking us in. We lived with the Austin family while Mom finished nursing school and got a job. If Margaret didn’t have a Kate to help her, and I knew she had no family, being a young woman with a child and without a husband would have seemed impossible.

  I looked at the records a little more closely. My eyes were so tired and the screen print was small. Even with my bifocals, I could barely read the tiny print.

  Now, though, I focused on that six-month gap in Margaret’s employment history. I calculated that in 1957, Margaret would have been twenty-one years old. Her work with Mrs. Prieto must have put her in a position to meet her husband. I looked closer at Mrs. Prieto’s contribution history. The address listed was Coconut Grove, the same suburb of Miami that housed the branch of Tampa Bay Bank where Gil Kelley had worked.

  So Margaret had left Tampa when she was eighteen, probably right after high school. She began living in Miami with Mrs. Prieto, doing some kind of domestic work, I imagined. She’d met and married, gotten pregnant, and then her husband had died. Margaret gave the baby up for adoption and then returned to Tampa, where no one would know she’d been married or pregnant. A few years later, she met and married Ron Wheaton.

  Only Margaret’s husband hadn’t really died. Margaret must have found out at some point. How did she know? When did she know? Where was her husband now? And where was the child? I finished off my journaling with the questions that were puzzling me now. Maybe, my sleep-deprived brain said to my still-awake and coffee-wired self, the answers would come to me if I could just close my eyes for a little catnap.

  My head fell back against the chair and the next thing I knew, Harry and Bess had two feet each in my lap, licking my face with the vigor only well-trained Labradors can manage.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 7:00 a.m.

  March 4, 2001

  JUDGING FROM THE WAY I felt, Margaret must have been at least as tired, so I let her sleep. It was seven o’clock Sunday morning, but I called Hathaway at home anyway. The last thing I wanted was for him to go to Margaret’s to arrest her and find her gone. Then, I’d have hell to pay. It was going to be only slightly better when I told him myself that she wasn’t at her home before he got there.

  I held the cordless phone to my ear as I walked around the kitchen collecting coffee-making materials. I heard the telephone ring several times and then Hathaway’s machine pick up. At least it was his home answering machine and not the office. Still, I was careful with my message.

  “Ben, this is Willa Carson. Please call me first thing this morning. I have something important to tell you.” That was urgent enough, I hoped, to keep him from making a fool of himself at Margaret’s and then doing something equally stupid to save face.

  After that, I argued with myself for a while over whether to call Larry Davis, going back and forth, with excellent arguments on both sides. A good lawyer can always argue both sides of any issue. Before I decided, George walked into the kitchen, gave me a hug and a morning-breath kiss. I held onto him much too long.

  I was lucky to have him and feeling worse about Margaret’s situation by the minute. She’d lost not one husband she loved, but two. Not to mention her child. How far would Margaret go when pushed beyond what a woman should be forced to endure?

  Was she capable of murder?

  We forget, sometimes, how fragile humans are. Maybe Margaret snapped.

  It’s happened before, under far less onerous circumstances.

  “Hey,” George said, as he gently pushed me away so he could look into my face. “Let a guy get a cup of Joe before you go mauling him in the morning so he can at least be awake enough to enjoy it, hmm?”

  He gave me a kiss on the top of my head and then turned to pour himself some liquid fortification.

  “The coffee’s a good idea. I have a lot to tell you and no
t a lot of time to do it in.”

  I poured a cup for me and placed the cordless phone back in its cradle. I moved both of us into the den where we could close the door and talk undisturbed. I told him about my evening’s adventure.

  George is used to my nocturnal wanderings around the house and Plant Key, but he doesn’t like it when I leave our island in the wee hours. Before he could get his protective bluster up, I gave him the short version. George is a quick study. It didn’t take him long to grasp the implications of Margaret being in our guest room, both to Margaret and to me. But we’ve been married a long time. He knows better than to try to scold me into changing my mind. Especially over something I’ve already done.

  “So, where are we?” he asked, when I’d finished.

  “I’m not sure. Margaret said she didn’t kill Ron and I believe her. She said her first husband did it. I still don’t know why or how. I need to find that out.”

  “Aren’t you a little confused here? Isn’t that Ben Hathaway’s job? Finding killers?”

  When I started to say, “But, George,” he cut me off at the B.

  “It’s one thing to rescue people you know and care about, Willa. I’ve accepted that I can’t keep you from doing that. But you don’t know anything about this character except that he’s a killer. You’ve helped Margaret. Hearing the piece of news that we know who killed Ron Wheaton will be enough to get Ben Hathaway not to arrest Margaret until he checks it out, at least. Why not stop while you’re ahead? Think about that while I refill my cup,” he said, as he patted my knee and walked out of the room.

  Before George came back for my answer, the telephone rang.

  Ben Hathaway returning my call. I could tell he was up and dressed and ready to get to work, even if it was Sunday. He was wary of my tale, but knew me well enough to trust my word. At a minimum, he knew I believed Margaret’s story. That was enough to make him want to investigate it.