“It would be as easy to order your death.”
“I know you don’t mean that, Philippe. You are speaking from rage and anger. And believe me, I know how you feel. But I should give you fair warning, if you let anger guide you, all our children will be left orphans. And that is in nobody’s best interest. All I ask if that you don’t do anything rashly and in haste. Think about what you’re doing, and what is in Andre’s best interest. He loves his mother and his father. Even if you decide to leave Aline, an arrangement can be worked out. “
There was another long silence, so long I thought he had hung up.
Finally:
“I admit. You have surprised me, Bill. I never expected this from you.”
“I never expected it from me, either.”
After the line went dead, I sat holding the phone. She was 3000 miles away. Their life was completely beyond my power to influence. I could threaten, but I wasn’t going to call down Armageddon for a custody battle. And I knew Philippe might threaten me, but….. If I’d been standing in front of him with a firearm in his hand I’d be worried. I had hurt him in the realm of the personal where that iron self-control might not apply. But he wouldn’t, couldn’t use the power of his office to strike at his wife’s lover. He wasn’t that kind of man.
And the worst of it was, even if I had the power to influence events, I had no idea what the hell I wanted to happen.
I sat back in my ergonomic office chair which I had lived in for the past five years. One of the perks of the job was that I could and did order a chair that I probably could have lived and slept in. It was that comfortable, that easy on the body.
Outside I heard people leaving, heard a few murmured goodbyes. In a little while there would be only a handful of office staff and attorneys left and then the cleaning people. This was my time. When the job had swallowed my life, this had been my other home. When I had lost my life, this had become my shadow home. My world had begun to expand again, but this was still the heart of it.
I could have called Myra. I would, but right now I drank in the silence. I needed to be alone.
In my mind’s eye I saw his square jawed, crew-cut features, the dark shadow of stubborn stubble that my mother could never eradicate no matter how closely she shaved him. In my eight-year-old’s mind, I sensed that she wouldn’t have, even if she could. I had seen them a few times when they weren’t aware of me, him holding her small body to his, her hand stroking in a caress the black beard that was always present when he came home from the mines.
I still saw him as the giant he appeared to me to be then. He had been only six-two with the body shaped by backbreaking physical labor all his life. His shoulders were broad, arms heavily muscled. I could envision him now as the man he was if he sat in one of the chairs in front of my desk.
I stared at him as he looked around my office, so alien to everything he’d known growing up in a small West Virginia mining town. I thought as I had so many times how I wished I could have talked to him about my life, about my triumphs, my challenges.
I knew that he would have understood, would have approved of how I had lived my life. I had lived my life to be worthy of him, of being his son. I had done stupid things, foolish things, hurtful things. But I could have looked him in the eye and told him anything.
Until right now. I stared across the years at him. And I knew what he would have said, how he would have looked at me at this moment.
He was a man and he had loved my mother and I knew they’d had sex, so he would have understood the pain I had felt when Debbie had betrayed me. He would have understood the hunger in my flesh to feel a woman who WANTED me, wanted me inside her, after Debbie had destroyed me.
And I knew that he would have looked at me in shame if he had lived to have known about Aline and myself.
I had lived my life trying to do the RIGHT thing, no matter how hard. And I had known what the right thing to do was when Aline came into my stateroom that night. I had known and I had gone ahead and violated my conscience and taken advantage of an emotionally needy woman. I had violated another man’s marriage. And not just any man. A man who had been my friend. It didn’t matter what any other man would have done. I knew better.
But I had taken her, and as a consequence probably destroyed her marriage, and maybe – cost her her son.
I stared at the phantom in the room and saw the expression shift from shame to disappointment. I couldn’t be sure which was the hardest to bear.
He was gone now and the room was mine again. But I knew how he would have felt about a man who would have stolen another man’s wife. The same way I would have, once.
The phone rang again. An inside line.
“Would this be the hardest working man in the State Attorney’s office?”
“I think you’re confusing me with the hardest working man in SHOW BUSINESS, James Brown. In any case, would this be the hottest Personal Assistant/secretary in the Southeast?”
“You tell me. Am I?”
“Nah, but you’re okay.”
“I think I’ll make you eat those words – and other things – tonight.”
I let the warmth of her voice, the picture of her face and body in my mind’s eye drive away the phantom of my father from my office.
“You have no idea how badly I need to see you, Myra, to hold you.”
“I’m only one floor away. But wouldn’t you rather wait until we got to your place, or mine.”
“No. Any other time, maybe. But not now.”
“Bad day?”
“You have no idea.”
“I’ll be right down. Mr. Edwards is gone. Your door still locks?”
“I had it fixed. It locks.”
She was in the doorway as I stood in the window looking out at the gathering darkness of a Jacksonville November evening as the sky turned bronze and shadows advanced.
She was there and she was in my arms and I held her warmth to me and tried to fight the chill that had settled deep into my bones. I felt colder than I ever had, as cold as I’d felt the morning I’d fled Gainesville running home, running away from Debbie and the knowledge that I would never have the thing I wanted most in my life.
She gave off a warm, female heat that I struggled to absorb into myself.
“You’re shivering, Bill. What’s wrong?”
“I’m not the person I thought I was.”
“Who is?”
“I thought I was.”
She looked up at me and pulled me down to her mouth.
“Do you want to know who you are?”
“I’m not sure I want to know anymore.”
She kissed me again and then stepped back away from me until her luscious bottom met the cold glass of the plate glass window.
“You’re the man who I’m going to be fucking in a half hour, here, there or wherever we land. You’re the man who’s going to be inside me tonight. You’re the man I want inside me tonight. You’re Bill Maitland, the best man, the best prosecutor, that I know.”
I pinned her against the cold glass and we writhed together while I thought of Father Eagen Dunleavy and regretted he was no longer around. I really would have liked to have talked to him.
But I’d have to make do with Myra Martinez, who really wasn’t Myra Martinez, and her green eyes and heaving breasts and a body that was every teenage fantasy I’d ever had.
CHAPTER TEN: SATSUMA COMES CALLING
November. 12, 2005
Friday, 11 A.M.
I pushed the wheelchair ahead of me down the hallway. Mitch McConnell walked beside me holding the IV and pushing the electronic monitor which was beeping reassuringly. Deputy Kirk Deel walked beside us. He wasn’t crazy about walking away from the short, curvy Latina nurse he’d been working on for the past three weeks while he was babysitting Wilbur Bell, but I didn’t leave him the option.
“You come with us or I’ll tell Knight that you’re getting bored with hospital duty and he’ll pull you off and you’ll have to work on
your little cutie – who has a very big and mean looking black orderly boyfriend – without the excuse of spending eight hours a day here. Personally, I think you’ll be lucky if he just tears your arm off and beats you to death with it. But it’s up to you.”
“I ever tell you you’re a son of a bitch, Maitland?”
I just grinned at him.
“No, but I have no doubt a lot of you guys have thought it.”
“Why the hell do you need me to hold your hand anyway? All you’re doing is taking him out for some air. It’s not like you need a bodyguard. And did you see the body on her? God, it would be worth taking a chance on going up against that gorilla. The worst he could do was kill me.”
McConnell grinned at him and said, “Why don’t you just rent some pornos and jerk off. Or I heard that that one of the new female recruits going on duty on the Westside has bigger tits than…”
He thought for a minute and then gave me a sideways glance.
“Bigger than any secretary now working for the SA. Or the PD. Hard as that is to believe. Supposed to be a sweet girl, too.”
“And how the hell would you know?” Deel asked McConnell. “I hear you’re happily engaged.”
“Engaged to be engaged. Anyway, just professional curiosity. I hear there’s a pool going on which guy is going to be first to tap that.”
“Please,” Wilbur said. “I’m starting to get a hard-on just listening to you young bucks talking. And if I get a hard-on I’m liable to drop dead on you. I don’t know that my heart can handle it.”
I tapped him on the shoulder.
“They’re going to shut up, Wilbur. You just go back to thinking about the sunshine and the St. Johns River and – maybe butterflies outside even though temps aren’t right. Think placid nature thoughts.”
I knew I was stupid to be doing this. I should be keeping Wilbur Bell under wraps and in as germ free an environment as humanly possible. Macon and his people were fighting for every minute they could delay the case. When Wilbur died, and that was almost a certainty in the near future, I’d go into an almost impossible case with even fewer chances for success than I had now.
So why was I doing this?
I honestly didn’t know. Maybe there were some things that were more important than making the scales balance. I never would have thought that I could live with the idea that Sutton would cheat justice and earn $5 million for killing his wife and unborn son. There was a part of me that viscerally rose up in rage at the thought that that son of a bitch would win. That he would win it all.
But…was it worth it to let this old man breathe his last shut away from the sun and the fresh air so that I had a chance at putting an evil man behind bars.
Maybe, maybe I thought, it had been the conversation with Prentice. It had stirred up old feelings and old memories. My father had died doing what he thought was the right thing. And I’d spent my whole life trying to live up to his memory.
But doing the right thing wasn’t necessarily doing the legal thing. I had broken the law, more than once, doing things that were illegal. But they were right. And if my father had in some miraculous fashion come back and I’d had to justify my life, I could have done so.
If I focused solely on putting Sutton away, of that conviction, how far was I willing to go? Who would I sacrifice on the altar of necessity? What did it matter if an old man who was willing to sacrifice the last days of his life to help put away an evil man died without being granted his last wish?
Maybe it didn’t matter at all, but I didn’t want to go there. There had to be SOME things that I wouldn’t do, no matter the goal.
I made up my mind. If by some mishap, Wilbur didn’t make it back to his room, if he died out in the cool November sunshine, I’d go after Sutton with anything I could scrape together. And if the son of a bitch beat me, I’d wait. Even rich, he would still a cold blooded monster. A selfish, greedy, amoral son of a bitch. You can’t change what you are at the core. Guys like him would always screw up again. I’d have another shot at him.
We had arrived at the seawall. There was a metal railing, the St. Johns in front of us and St. Vincent's parking garage on one side behind us and the hospital on the other. A circular drive connected the streets that ran to the hospital and back to the through street. I’d been looking out at the metallic blue of the river’s roiling surface and just enjoying the look on Wilbur’s face.
Deel and McConnell stood to one side. They had been talking women – nurses, female cops, teachers and just women in general - when their attention was grabbed by a yacht powering slowly down the river. The yacht was impressive, but not as impressive as the four nubile young things cavorting on deck. All four of them took their tops off and flung them in the air. They were close enough to the shore that it was easy to tell they believed in overall tans. And there were acres of goose pimples which was understandable because even in the bright sunlight it was still November and the wind was a little cool. On the water it must have been freezing.
Deel turned to me with a grin.
“Alright Maitland, give me a legal opinion. They’re violating the city’s ordinance forbidding public nudity, aren’t they?”
“Seems so.”
He turned to McConnell and said, “I don’t see where we have any choice. We’ll have to flag them down, get on board and give them a lecture about the need to observe local laws. You want to do it, or should I. I’ll just show the badge.”
Wilbur smiled at me and I just said, “Boys will be boys.”
I don’t know why, but something drew my gaze to a car that while unmarked was unmistakably a police cruiser pulling into the turn-around. The car stopped in an area reserved for picking up and dropping off patients. Two men stepped out of the driver’s and passenger side, looked around and walked toward the main hospital entrance. It was cool in the November
morning sunlight, but they seemed to be heavy, unusually long overcoats.
One of the security guards approached them. Normally police cruisers came and went from the backside of the hospital. They exchanged a few words and then walked away.
I was close enough to catch the expression on his face. Whoever these guys were, they hadn’t been trained in public relations. I looked at the cruiser. It was a late model Ford Police Interceptor. It must have been silver at one time, now it was just dusty. It looked like it had been down a lot of dirt roads. And the windows had been tinted so dark there’s was no way to even guess what was inside.
There was what had once been a large, very orange orange complete with green stem on the passenger door. Underneath it, faded lettering read, “Satsuma County Sheriff’s Office.” I knew there was a Satsuma County somewhere in the middle of the state, more south than north I thought. I wondered how it could possibly be that cold wherever they came from. Wherever, they were a long way from home.
I tore my eyes away from the car. It was none of my business.
Deel and Mcconell had caught the eye of the girls on the yacht deck and it drifted closer to the shoreline. There was no place to moor any kind of boat or sailing vessel this far south of the Riverwalk which the city fathers had built along the riverfront on the southern bank and across the nearly mile-wide river on the northern side.
The operator of the yacht maneuvered it to within 10 yards of the bank. It didn’t look like it would require water of any great depth and the river was deep enough to allow a vessel of that size to get close without any danger of running aground.
A grinning Deel continued to flash his badge and the topless beauties were flashing their own best features at him and McConnell as they giggled and deliberately jiggled. They looked to be in their early 20s.
Wilbur looked up at me and said laughing, “I know I wanted one last time out in the fresh air but I don’t know that my heart can stand the strain.”
“Just enjoy the beautiful river and the sunshine and blue skies and ignore those bouncing boobs. They’re beginning to raise my blood pressure. Among other thin
gs.”
He smiled at me and then looked toward the yacht.
There was no smile in his voice.
“You never live long enough, Maitland. Remember that. Last night I was twenty and I’d have a chance with any of them. I was a good looking boy. This morning I woke up and I was a dying old man and I haven’t been with a woman in 10 years. It gets away from you.”
“From all of us, Wilbur. Probably just as well we’re too old for them. They’d be liable to kill us both anyway.”
A man in a captain’s hat, white shorts and a white tee-shirt had stepped onto the deck. The girls clustered around him and there was excited babbling in what sounded like Italian or Spanish. After a moment he stepped out toward the edge of the yacht’s deck and waved at us.
“Gentlemen. I am the owner of this yacht. My friends tell me you are the carabinari? I see you have badges. What can I do for you.”
“I’m Deputy Roger Deel with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, sir. Could you bring your yacht up to the Riverwalk and secure it. I’ll be up there in a few minutes. I’m going to need to issue a warning – just a warning – about your violation of city ordinances. Maybe come on board and inspect your vessel.”
His handsome 30-ish face showed confusion.
“Violating ordinances? What laws have we broken?”
Deel looked over at me and grinned. I hoped he’d have sense enough to know when the joke had gone far enough. Whoever owned this yacht had enough money to yell very loudly if he really thought the police were harassing him.
“Jacksonville has strict public nudity laws. I’m afraid your friends are in violation of those laws by appearing topless. And they might as well be bottomless. Besides violating the nudity laws, they pose a hazard to maritime navigation. Any vessel operator is going to be looking at them instead of where they’re going.”
One of the girls, who looked to be 15 but whose breasts and woman’s hips showed she had to be legal, spoke to the owner in fluent Italian. He looked at her chest and with a straight face replied in what had to be Italian.
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