Defiled

by Mike Nemeth

  “She misplaced some files, but now she’s found them. She’ll find the legal file when she remembers where she put it—and her gun, if there ever was one. Of course, she could be faking it for the insurance money.”

  “Maybe. She claimed her furs and purses were stolen, but the cops found them in a second-floor bedroom. The problem is that a Lieutenant Callahan told me the alarm was tripped by someone who had a key to get in and locked up on the way out, so that would be you.”

  What? I almost said I didn’t hear an alarm. In a daze, I said, “I don’t have a key.”

  “There’s no way to prove you don’t have a key, Randle. You didn’t give her the keys the day you were served. You waited until you moved your stuff out of the house, so you had plenty of time to make a copy.”

  “She’s lying to get back at me for the psychiatric examination.”

  “It happened, Randle. Don’t you want to know what’s missing?”

  “Not really.”

  “Jewelry worth a hundred thousand dollars. Did you buy her that much?”

  “I bought it, but I didn’t steal it. Never earned me any gratitude either.”

  I received no commiseration from my lawyer. “The cops want to know when you’ll be back in Florida.”

  “Tomorrow. I need to print some pictures of the house so you can get them to the shrinks. Forgot to give them to you before.”

  “Too late, the examination is over.”

  “They haven’t published their findings. These pictures are conclusive proof of insanity.”

  Silence crept down the phone line like a high tide sweeping over the shoreline as he calculated the probability that I had taken the “forgotten” pictures when I broke into the house this past weekend. “They have a date and time stamp for the day you moved?”

  Uh-oh. “Nah, I don’t use that feature.”

  To mollify me, he said, “Send them to me electronically, and I’ll decide if they’re relevant enough to break the rules. If they are, I’ll print them for you.”

  And charge me for it. “Thanks, pal.”

  “Don’t have any jewelry with you, Randle. The cops will be waiting for you.”

  This call had become a nuisance. “I don’t have her jewelry, Tony.”

  “Drive safe, buddy.”

  Fewer than a dozen cars were scattered around the Municipal Marina parking lot when I arrived on Monday evening. I drove slowly up and down the aisles verifying that no one was sitting in any of the cars—no cops, no Carrie. Pulling to the curb at the walking gate entrance to the docks, I scanned the dock but the only suspicious person in the marina was me. I dumped the luggage on the sidewalk and drove down the street to The Vinoy hotel, where I left my car with the valet. Mumbling to the attendant that I was going to get a bite to eat, I walked back up the street, collected my bags, and punched the security code into the dock gate. My dock was the left-most arm of a “Y” and my boat was third from last in the row, near the channel that exited the harbor. Backed into the slip, the boat faced the hotel anchorage and, across the street, The Vinoy. It was a lovely, peaceful setting, and on this night, a quiet one.

  I climbed onto the Wahine II and found nothing amiss on the decks or in the aft cabin until I approached the sliding hatch to the interior spaces. Someone—it had to be Carrie because cops hand you search warrants—had used a bolt cutter on the padlock. Through the hatch, I walked into the aftermath of a small tornado.

  A trashcan had been dumped onto the galley floor, and the garbage had been trampled as the intruder walked around the spaces. The bow stateroom had been used as a collection point for possessions moved out of other spaces. Bedclothes had been torn off the bow bed and bedclothes from the master stateroom had been piled on top of them. The under-bed storage had also been emptied onto the bed, and all closet contents had been stuffed into the small stateroom. In the galley cabinets stood open, their contents dumped into the sink and onto the counters.

  As I moved through the salon, I saw that one edge of the salon carpet was curled under the lounge settee as though it had been pulled up and not replaced correctly. The hatch to the engine room was under the carpet. Did they sabotage my boat, plant a firebomb that would ignite when I cranked the engines? I pulled the hatch and dropped into the tight space between the two big diesels. Like a greenhorn, I tugged on hoses and checked caps and bolts to ensure they were tight. No expert at engines, I saw no obvious signs of tampering and nothing that looked like a bomb. Promising myself to test the engines tomorrow, I climbed out of the pit and resumed my tour.

  In the master stateroom, the mattress had been moved off the bedframe. The master closet had been emptied; the master bath had been trashed. The contents of the medicine cabinet lay in the sink; the contents of the trashcan lay on the shower stall floor. Begrudgingly, I gave them credit for being thorough. It crossed my mind to call the police, but nothing had been stolen and Carrie obviously had broken in to find her missing things. Add the fact that no detective had contacted me about the beach house break-in and reporting this intrusion seemed a waste of time. Too tired to clean the place, I grabbed a pillow and blanket from the bow stateroom and lay on the couch that encircled the dining table in the salon. I cocked the Beretta and laid it on the dining table. I considered a barricade. I considered sleeping on the foredeck. I considered hiding at The Vinoy. Before I could decide what to do, I was asleep, too fatigued to be scared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In a funk over the fact that I had no private space immune to Carrie’s tampering, I spent the next morning cleaning and organizing the interior of the boat. As promised, I started the engines and let them idle long enough to become convinced they were in good working order. After shutting them down, I found a small padlock in a kitchen drawer and affixed it to the engine room hatch.

  I didn’t feel obligated to work, so I sat in the aft cabin, drinking port and smoking cigars as I watched the walking gate. No one came to visit. I did not hear from Connie. The cops did not come to interview me. That evening I walked through the park, up to Beach Drive, and ate dinner at a Cajun restaurant. Afterward I sat for a long while on a park bench watching the parking lot for suspicious activity. It did not appear that I was under surveillance. Neither was I being watched, nor protected.

  On Wednesday, I felt like a sitting duck on the boat, so I camped out in the park with my tablet computer. I monitored my email as I monitored the marina. There was no sign of Carrie or any co-conspirators. Connie never called. Nonetheless, I felt safer in the park. If Carrie came alone, “dressed to kill,” I would execute my plan. If she arrived with reinforcements or snuck up on the boat, I would exit stage left to The Vinoy, retrieve my car, and escape via Fourth Avenue North.

  I was about to walk down the street to grab some lunch when a black four-door sedan pulled into the front of the parking lot. A middle-aged, heavyset guy exited the driver’s door and two younger men with Marine Corps haircuts also emerged from the sedan. All three wore cheap sports jackets and polyester slacks. They had to be cops. At the gate they were met by the marina store clerk, who let them onto the dock.

  It was easy enough to guess they were looking for me, so I followed as they strolled down the dock, checking names on the backs of boats, looking for the Wahine II. When they reached my boat, they immediately climbed aboard, which told me they weren’t experienced mariners who would have respected the privacy of a boat. I boarded my boat and found the senior cop and one of his minions in the aft cabin. The third cop had gone belowdecks.

  To the senior cop, I said, “Since you’ve already invaded private spaces, I hope you have a search warrant.”

  He gave me a surprised look and said, “We do.”

  He handed me a stapled sheaf of paper, and I took a look. The warrant authorized them to search my boat and my car for jewelry, a pistol, and “personal items,” i.e., a diary. Attached to the boilerplate was a detailed list of all Carrie’s jewelry, including the yellow pendant and matching earrings. Photos
of the jewelry were appended to the list.

  I handed the warrant back to the senior cop and said, “My wife’s jewelry collection. Very comprehensive. Kind of amazing she’d have all that information at her fingertips.”

  A thoughtful look crossed his face as he folded the document and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “I’m Detective Lieutenant Michael Callahan of the St. Petersburg Police Department. Are you John R. Marks?”

  “I am. People call me Randle.”

  “Do we have permission to execute the warrant?”

  “You already are.”

  He motioned to the younger cop, who immediately opened the cupboard under the wet bar and began pushing things around to see if there was a hoard of jewelry hiding behind the liquor bottles. Callahan waved me to the couch, and he took a seat in a side chair. He pulled out a notebook and a pen and said, “You mind if I ask you a coupla questions?”

  The younger cop moved onto the bridge and peered under the dashboard.

  I said, “Not a bit.”

  “Where were you last Saturday?”

  “In Atlanta. I had business on Friday and Monday, so I stayed the weekend instead of driving back and forth.”

  “Where did you stay?”

  “The Technology Park Hilton.”

  Callahan wrote that down. “Where were you at ten p.m. on Saturday?”

  I took a second to reply. “On my way back to the hotel after a Braves game. I think I have the ticket stub in my wallet.”

  One of his eyebrows twitched just enough for me to notice. I reached for my wallet, but he waved a hand to let me know it wasn’t necessary.

  “We’re going to run a check on your credit cards, see where you filled up with gas over the weekend.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.” Dry hole, my friend. I paid with cash at every stop.

  “We’re going to pull your cell phone records too. See which towers you were pinging on Saturday.”

  I shrugged again. “Okay.” Another dry hole. I left my cell phone in Atlanta and carried a disposable with me on the trip. I never had to use it.

  The younger cop went belowdecks, and soon we heard pots and pans clanging and glasses clinking as he searched the galley.

  Callahan said, “Do you have a key to your wife’s house?”

  “No I don’t, officer.” Honest answer. “I’m sure she changed the locks the second I moved out.”

  Lieutenant Callahan’s fleshy face formed a self-satisfied smile. “Your wife says she never got around to changing the locks.”

  I shot him an incredulous sneer. “Have you checked with Jimmy’s Lock and Key in New Port Richey? That’s who we use.”

  He blinked a couple of times, wrote a note.

  I went on, “My lawyer told me she reported a break-in, but I don’t know the security access codes.”

  Callahan recovered quickly. “Neither did the thief. The alarm was tripped, but Mrs. Marks had it on silent so the thief wouldn’t know it was sounding. She wanted to give the police time to react and catch the thief in the house.”

  It took me a few moments to figure it out. Battery backup. I had forgotten the system has a battery backup, and I hadn’t disconnected it before I entered the house. I heard no alarm because it was on silent alert. Sloppy! “I guess they didn’t catch the thief or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Callahan looked resigned to that failure. “No call was ever made to the monitoring station. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “Maybe the call was made, but the monitoring station screwed it up.”

  “Maybe.” He sucked on his pencil a minute, then said, “Tell me somethin’ else: You friends with that dog of hers?”

  “Hell no! She bought it after she kicked me out. I saw it the day I moved my furniture. Had to keep the monster locked in the sunroom.”

  “The burglar trapped it upstairs. Tore the hell out of the media room. She’s pretty upset about that.”

  “Maybe there was no burglar. My lawyer tells me you found the things she thought were missing. Maybe my wife is lying about the whole incident.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  I laughed. “To frame me.”

  Callahan looked thoughtful again. Just then, the two cops who had been searching belowdecks popped through the hatch. They shook their heads at Callahan—they hadn’t found anything incriminating.

  Callahan asked me, “Can we have the keys to your car please?”

  I reached over to the side table, grabbed the keys, and tossed them toward the younger cops in one motion. It took them by surprise and they got in one another’s way and fumbled the catch. One cop stooped to pick them up while the other glared at me. Then they left for the parking lot.

  Callahan turned back to me. “If your wife was going to frame you, who would help her?”

  Without hesitating, I said, “Larry Pardeaux—P-a-r-d-e-a-u-x—her handyman. Uses him as a bodyguard. They assaulted me in this parking lot a few days ago. I didn’t want to hire him, but Carrie liked watching him work bareback in the yard. He was a bodybuilder when he did time, and he’s covered in prison tattoos.”

  Callahan jerked in his seat. Cops like nothing better than a suspect with a criminal history. “Did he have a key to the house?”

  “Yes.” And a garage door opener and the access codes. “So does the maid and Carrie’s momma. We used to hide a key in the yard too.”

  “Not anymore. We asked.”

  “And you believed her?”

  Callahan sighed. “Walk with me to the parking lot, see what my boys found in your car.”

  As we walked down the deserted dock, Callahan questioned me about the boats in the marina: how much to buy one, what did they cost to maintain? He was shocked by my answers. Clearly, he was disappointed at how far out of his price range even the smaller boats were. In the parking lot, the two younger cops were leaning against the unmarked cruiser. They shook their heads in unison. I wasn’t sure either of them had vocal chords. One of them threw my keys at me, and I made a leaping catch. I gave them my sports hero smile, and they glared back.

  Callahan thanked me for my cooperation, and they drove away. As I walked back to the boat to see how badly they had trashed my private spaces, I wondered if they’d get another warrant for the beach house.

  After cleaning up the boat yet again, I logged into the cloud account to see what Carrie had been doing on her computer. As had been the case since installing the keystroke recording software, Carrie had logged onto Facebook and her public email account once per day, but she had not checked her secret account, shadylady44. Was she doing that from a computer I didn’t know about?

  Irritated that Carrie received more attention from the police than I did, I called Officer Williams again. The young cop was apologetic and promised once again to follow up with detectives. Right.

  Later that afternoon, Tony called me to his office. When Melissa ushered me through the door, I could see it wasn’t going to be good news.

  Tony’s mouth drooped, and his heavy Italian face sagged. “I got the psychiatrists’ report on your wife’s little holiday at the funny farm.”

  “Are they going to put her away?”

  “No,” he said in a dejected voice. He handed me a packet of documents.

  As I scanned the ten pages, Tony said, “They presented their findings to Judge Smithson this morning. She doesn’t qualify for an involuntary commitment.”

  I tried to interrupt, but he held up a hand and continued. “She is sick, but not in the right way. You’ll see in there that she has several personality disorders—narcissistic, paranoid, avoidant, and histrionic. Probably antisocial disorder, but they’d need more time to decide.”

  “They could have kept her another day. The woman is a psychopath!”

  “She’s a nasty piece of work, but that’s not enough for a commitment. Even if they had diagnosed her as antisocial, it wouldn’t have mattered. The statute explicitly exempts antisocial personality disorder as a reason for involuntary co
mmitment because we have drugs to treat the problem. You have to hallucinate and hear voices to get a room at the asylum.”

  “Psychopaths commit mass murders. They should be committed.”

  “The legal definition of insanity is knowing the difference between right and wrong. Psychopaths know the difference; they just don’t care about the distinction. So we convict them and send them to jail.”

  “So you’ll wait for her to hurt someone—probably me—and then you’ll throw her in jail for a while. That’s what’s insane!”

  Tony was tiring of the debate. “If we sent every sicko to the funny farm, we’d need more asylums than prisons.” He said it as though the absurdity were evident.

  “Exactly! We don’t have a criminal behavior problem; we have a mental health problem.”

  Tony waved the argument away with both hands. “Bottom line: Smithson ordered mandatory outpatient care from the hospital, not from her shrink in Safety Harbor.”

  “Did you get the pictures to the shrinks before they wrote this report?”

  “Those pictures were very disturbing. I showed them to Smithson, and he agreed. He had them hand-carried to the shrinks, but it was too late to question your wife. She had been released.”

  “File another Baker Act petition and include them as new evidence. Keep doing it until they finally realize they should hold her.”

  “You’re not going to get a second bite of the apple, Randle. It’s on to the next phase. Mediation has been rescheduled for a week from Friday with Ross again. He cleared his calendar just for us so we can comply with the judge’s order.”

  “I’m not doing another mediation, Tony. My offer is on the table. Mediation is a waste of time, so cancel it.”

  There was a pause as he struggled to form sentences that wouldn’t completely enrage me. “You won’t get a trial without mediation, Randle.”

  As fiercely as I could, I said, “You can tell the judge she won’t get a settlement unless I get a trial.”