Secret Justice

by Diane Capri

  Ben Hathaway has arrested the wrong person more than once when I told him not to. The State Attorney was getting a little sore about looking like a fool in public because Hathaway had done the wrong thing. Ben must have been “talked to,” as they say downtown. He was a little more cautious than he’s been in the past.

  Ben agreed to meet here with Larry Davis, Margaret, George and me in three hours when I convinced him Margaret needed to sleep and I hadn’t called Larry yet. At least now I knew I was going to do so. That was progress, of a sort.

  Larry was home and answered the phone on the first ring. If you despise telephone tag and answering machines, early Sunday morning is a good time to call people in Tampa. Larry wasn’t too keen on my interference with his client last night, but he agreed to come right over to Minaret and discuss it with me. “Then, I’ll decide whether and what we tell Ben Hathaway, Willa. It’s my job to represent Margaret. I’m not sure what it is you think you’re doing.”

  A half hour later, I’d showered and changed into clean jeans and a long-sleeved tee-shirt. As an accommodation to the temperature, I’d put on socks with my Topsiders. I was forced to put some concealer on the dark circles under my eyes to keep from looking like a raccoon. Otherwise, I wore no makeup and no jewelry, the same as any other Sunday when I expected to stay home alone.

  Larry Davis arrived on time. He and George and I repaired to the den and I told him everything I’d told George. Again, the short version, although he’d want more of the details later.

  “So,” Larry summarized at the end of my narrative, “what we need to do is to get Margaret to identify her first husband, to tell us how she knows he killed Ron Wheaton, and to give that information to Hathaway in exchange for his agreement not to further harass Margaret. Do you think he’ll go for that?”

  “I think he’ll investigate it. If he confirms Margaret’s story, no one need ever know that he was planning to arrest her today. Then the question is whether she can testify against the killer,” I said.

  Both men looked surprised at that. “Why couldn’t she testify?” George was first to ask, which gave Larry a minute to think about it and reach his own conclusion.

  Larry said, “Because Margaret was married. She never divorced him. We don’t know whether he was ever declared legally dead. If he wasn’t, the spousal privilege could keep her from testifying against him. On the other hand, she’ll have to disclose whatever Ron Wheaton told her about wanting to die, because he wasn’t really her husband.”

  I finished up, “And two marriages may also make Margaret a polygamist, technically. She could be prosecuted for that, although I doubt anyone would press charges, especially since she didn’t intend to marry twice. But if she’s not technically his wife, it may mean that Margaret won’t collect Ron’s life insurance or the rest of his estate. If anyone protests her claim to be Ron’s sole beneficiary, it would be one unholy mess, that’s for sure.”

  Larry said, “Trusts and estates are something I know about. It’s highly unlikely that Margaret’s first husband wasn’t declared dead. Given that she believed he had died, surely there was a body, a death certificate and a funeral.”

  George seemed perplexed by all of this. “But, if he wasn’t really dead, isn’t all of that null and void?”

  “Actually, no,” Larry explained. “Once you’ve been declared dead, in the eyes of the law, you’re dead. To change that, there’s yet another legal procedure to go through.”

  “That figures,” George said, with a wry smile. “You can’t even be alive in this country without government intervention.”

  Larry laughed. “At least, not if you’ve been dead, first.”

  “Just one more thing I need to bring up,” I said, finally deciding that now, if ever, was the time. They looked at me expectantly. “I have a piece of physical evidence to give Hathaway. I think it will help Margaret, but I’m not sure.”

  Larry was the first to jump in, “What kind of physical evidence?”

  “I found a syringe in the bushes outside the veranda where Ron died. I suspect the syringe is the murder weapon. And that it’ll have the killer’s fingerprints on it. I want to give it to Hathaway.”

  As I thought, this piece of news didn’t make George or Larry very happy. Before they had time to jump all over my frame about it, though, Dad showed Ben Hathaway into the room, saying, “I found this guy ringing the doorbell downstairs when I returned from my run. He says you’re expecting him.”

  Another hour later, Larry and I had filled Ben in and secured his promise to investigate Margaret’s claims that her first husband had killed Ron Wheaton. But to do that, he needed more information.

  By now, it was going on eleven o’clock, so I thought I could awaken Margaret and have her come in to help us with this piece of the puzzle. I went down the hall to the guest room to find her while the others drank even more coffee.

  I knocked on the guest room door, calling Margaret’s name several times. When she didn’t answer, I pushed the door open and looked into the room.

  Margaret’s bed was empty. The door to the bathroom was closed, so I went over and knocked there several times. Again, no response.

  When I opened the bathroom door, it was empty, too.

  Margaret had left sometime this morning, but when? Where did she go? And how did she get there?

  The four of us discussed what to do about finding Margaret and investigating her claims about the mysterious husband, divided up the job and went our separate ways. Larry fought with me over who got to go to Margaret’s house, but in the end, agreed it was a job I could do best while he went to his office and began preparing to defend Margaret’s arrest, if it came to that.

  I gave Hathaway the syringe I’d been keeping in Greta’s glove box. After sputtering at me about chain of custody and obstruction of justice for a relatively short time, he went off to investigate Margaret’s claims. He had some ideas as to where he could look, and access to law enforcement files, he said. George, who was feeling a little left out, although he tried to describe it differently, came with me.

  George drove us over to Margaret’s house, which looked empty from the outside. I had him pull up in the driveway and we went to the back door, which had been unlocked the last two times I’d come here. It was unlocked again. George protested at just walking in without ringing the bell, but I was fairly sure Margaret wouldn’t be here anyway, so I wasn’t worried about catching her in flagrante dilecto or anything.

  George walked into the house calling Margaret’s name. After we’d made a thorough check of all five small rooms, even he was convinced that Margaret wasn’t here. I’d expected as much.

  The reason I arm-wrestled Larry Davis for the right to come here was so that I could look around for evidence about the mysterious first husband, not because I really thought Margaret had gotten up this morning and taken a cab back home.

  By now, I knew her agenda was something more complicated than that. There was more to Margaret Wheaton than I had initially suspected.

  Hathaway was checking with the cab companies to see who picked Margaret up at Minaret this morning and where they took her. He had the manpower for that. I needed to investigate more cleverly.

  After facing down George’s protests, I began a systematic search of the places in Margaret’s house where I thought she might have hidden something related to an earlier marriage and birth of a child that she’d wanted to keep from her husband for thirty years. It was pure assumption on my part that Ron Wheaton hadn’t known about Margaret’s first marriage, but it was based on knowing Ron as I had.

  I believed that when they couldn’t have children of their own, Ron would have suggested that they find and attempt to reclaim Margaret’s first child, if he’d known about the child. Ron loved children and it had been a source of great sorrow to him that he and Margaret had never had any. They’d tried to adopt, I think, years ago.

  Ron would definitely have taken Margaret’s child, if not when he first met h
er, certainly in later years. I felt sure of it.

  “I don’t know, Willa. It’s not right to snoop through Margaret’s things. And, I have no idea what Ron would have done.” George was getting in his usual mode of trying to do the “right thing,” which I didn’t have a lot of time for.

  I let him keep talking, but I continued to search.

  I tried under the bed, behind all the pictures, in her lingerie drawer.

  What I was looking for would have been overlooked by Hathaway and his men when they searched because they weren’t looking for old documents and pictures.

  George kept up a steady stream of objections until I finally turned to him and said, “Just look in plain sight, then. Don’t touch anything. Or wait out in the car. I’m going to finish here, one way or the other.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 1:00 p.m.

  March 4, 2001

  GIVING ME THE “I know that voice” look, which is the way he deals with my stubborn refusals to listen to his good counsel, George left me to go back into the living room and wait. I kept looking through drawers, books, and other likely hiding places in Margaret’s room.

  The Wheaton house doesn’t have a basement. Most houses in South Tampa don’t. The water table is too high. But the small ranch style house does have an attic that I could reach by pulling down the stairs in the hallway between the two bedrooms. Despite the cold outside, the tiny crawl space was stifling. No air had circulated here for a long time.

  The attic was filled primarily with dust, bugs, cobwebs and stale air. Ron Wheaton had probably never been up here. He was as tall as I am, if not taller, and quite a bit heavier before he got sick. Ron couldn’t have maneuvered around the ceiling joists and the electrical wiring on his stomach. There wasn’t enough room for him to walk around on his knees, if he’d been so inclined, even before he developed ALS. After ALS, such a maneuver would have been impossible.

  No, this attic was Margaret’s exclusive domain. She was so small, she could have stored things here that no one else would ever find. There was no lighting except for what came in through the vents on the side of the house.

  Between sneezes caused by the dust, I cursed my lack of planning in not bringing a flashlight. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. After a while, I was able to make out boxes. They were just out of arms’ reach from the opening where I stood, trying to figure out how to get to them.

  I hoisted myself onto the floor and slithered out toward the boxes off to the left side. The dust continued to make me sneeze and I felt a couple of crawly things on my bare midriff when my tee-shirt bunched up. Was I out of my mind? Probably. George says I’m stubborn, but I like to think of it as tenacity. Whatever you call it, I thought as I sneezed again, it’s not always a positive trait.

  Slithering a few more inches, I was able to touch the boxes, grab their flaps with my fingers, and pull them toward me. There were five in all. I couldn’t raise up enough to move them quickly. Eventually, I inched them all toward the pull-down stairs and lowered myself back out through the opening. I took all five boxes down the stairs and sat them on the floor. When George came around the corner, he burst out laughing.

  “What?”

  “You look like a fly caught in a giant spider’s trap,” he said, when he could contain his mirth.

  “Thanks a lot. I sure appreciate your help,” I said, with more than a little annoyance, as I started to brush the dust and dirt off my black jeans and black tee-shirt.

  My hands and face felt positively grimy, so I didn’t dare wipe one with the other. I folded the stairs back up and went into the bathroom to survey the damage and wash up. George was right.

  I saw my ridiculously filthy visage in the mirror and did the best I could to repair myself.

  When I got back into the hallway, I found George had taken the boxes and put them on the kitchen table. He’d apparently decided that he’d speed up the process by helping out. He’d already opened the first box.

  I surveyed the boxes first. This was where Margaret’s organizational skills, so important in a legal secretary, had spilled over into her home life. Each box was clearly marked. As I suspected, all pre-dated Margaret’s life with Ron Wheaton. Maybe, she’d put them up in the attic crawl space and forgotten them.

  In any event, they were labeled “High School,” “Taxes 1952-1965,” “Mother,” “Miami,” and “School.” All the boxes were the same size and color, suggesting they had been bought and organized around the same time. They were also about the same weight.

  “George, let’s take these home and look through them. I want to finish up here while Margaret’s not home.” To his credit, he’d given up arguing with me. He re-closed the box he’d opened and began carrying them all out to the trunk of the Bentley.

  I went back to Ron Wheaton’s bedroom for a last look.

  Ron’s room had been thoroughly searched by the police and I had watched them do it. I didn’t really think there would be anything here that would help me solve Margaret’s life riddles. But I looked anyway. I checked the drawers of the nightstands, looked in the dresser drawers, under the bed and in the closet. I felt inside the pockets of all the jackets and shirts.

  I used to hide things in clothes I hadn’t worn in a long time. I’d once lost a pair of diamond earrings for over five years because I’d hidden them in a pair of snow boots left in our attic.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, but apparently Margaret and Ron Wheaton either never had anything to hide or had better hiding places than I’d been able to find. There was nothing in any of Ron’s pockets and I was about to give up.

  Then, I decided to go ahead and check all the pockets in all the closets. There were only three closets, so it wouldn’t take long.

  Glancing down at my watch, I saw we’d been here over an hour and a half, and I was worried that Margaret would get home and keep me from taking the boxes from the attic. Yet, I felt pulled to try the pockets before I left.

  In the guest bedroom, all of the clothes were packed in hanging garment bags. I started with the first bag and checked Margaret’s clothes.

  Judging from the number of outfits she had, she and Ron must have once been avid square dancers and party goers. The closet was filled with petticoats and western wear, evening clothes and party outfits, all from an earlier time. The closet was small, like the other two, and I found nothing remarkable in any of the clothes: a few tissues, a pen, some coins and one or two matchbooks.

  Remembering how I’d lost my earrings, I bent down and opened the large plastic boxes on the floor that contained western boots and dress shoes, one for Ron’s and one for Margaret’s. In Margaret’s box there was a pair of red cowboy boots. I smiled at the younger, more vibrant Margaret that I imagined must have worn them. But I found nothing hidden in their depths.

  A similarly thorough search of Margaret’s closet revealed nothing but the matronly dresses and sturdy shoes she now wore to work. I dutifully, and with much less enthusiasm, felt each of the pockets in her sweaters and dresses.

  Then I bent down to check the shoes. The only thing I found was a great deal of sand on the bottom of her sneakers. I’d wasted over thirty minutes on this project and I could feel time was running out. I closed the closet door, took one last look around the bedroom, living room and kitchen, and let myself out.

  I left the back door unlocked, the way I’d found it.

  George and I had Margaret’s boxes on our kitchen table. We both knew what we were looking for. I was tempted to start with the box labeled “Miami,” but I thought it would reflect more general information about Margaret’s work for Mrs. Prieto. Instead, I selected the box labeled “Mother” on the theory that what I was interested in happened long after “High School,” and the “Mother” box might contain clues about Margaret’s child. George had taken the “Taxes” box. I felt I already knew what it would contain, since I’d seen Margaret’s Social Security records. Dad walked
in just as we got started and for sheer speed, we gave him the box marked “High School.”

  “Mother” turned out to relate not to Margaret as a mother, but to Margaret’s mother. She had died in 1954, the year Margaret graduated from Plant High School. There were neatly labeled manila folders with Margaret’s mother’s birth certificate, death certificate, and life insurance policies that had paid just enough to bury her.

  The death certificate listed her as “widowed” and said she’d died of “heart failure.” I recalled Margaret telling me her father had been killed in World War II and her mother had never remarried. The death certificate gave the age at death as forty-three, significantly younger than Margaret was now.

  There were a few pictures of Margaret’s parents and Margaret with her mother, who was a much larger woman than Margaret, although still small.

  The rest of this box contained memorabilia and letters between Margaret’s parents when her father was stationed overseas during the war. Although the letters probably would have told me a lot about their marriage and the young Margaret’s life, reading them felt too intrusive, somehow. I might read them later, I thought, but not right now. I set the letters back in the box, put the dusty lid back on and set the box aside.

  I stretched my back and got a glass of water before attacking the box labeled “School,” thinking I could get through it quickly. I noticed that Dad was completely immersed in the box labeled “High School.” He’d only removed about half its contents, and he’d made little progress with what he’d taken out. I could see yellowed newspapers poking out from more labeled manila folders.

  Whatever he’d found, it was certainly capturing his imagination.

  George was just as immersed in the “Taxes” box, which from my van¬tage point looked like old tax returns and back-up receipts. Of course, George is a numbers man. Just looking at the prices of goods and salaries from 1954 to 1965 would interest him.