Ring of Truth

  “Hi, Charlotte,” I say, and go into a coughing jag.

  The good news about being a bestselling author is that your stuff gets read immediately. It’s very early by New York publishing standards; if she’s at the office, that means she has come in early to talk to me without being interrupted by all the million and one things that keep editors from actually editing these days. When she says she had to stay home a day to read my manuscript, she means it; otherwise, she’d have to read mere snippets in between maddening meetings.

  “Are you all right, Marie?”

  Getting my voice under control, I ask, “So what do you think of it?”

  “It’s beautifully written.”

  Oh, shit. My heart goes from overdrive to park. My knees feel as if somebody removed my kneecaps during the night while I slept. The bad news about being a bestselling author is that you get the bad news faster. This is not what your editor is supposed to say after she reads your manuscript. She’s supposed to say, “I couldn’t put it down.”

  “I love the prologue with the two little girls,” is what she actually says. “I don’t see any changes there, it really pulled me into the story. And you’ve done your usual wonderful job researching the backgrounds of these people.”

  Oh, God, she’s complimenting my research. This is worse than I feared. My research is something she ought to be able to take for granted, and the quality of my writing, too. Feeling hopeless, I wait for the ax.

  “I just love it from start to finish.”

  I wait for her to say, “But . . .”

  “Marie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “You love it?”

  “You sound so surprised.” She laughs at me. “Don’t I always? Are we having ourselves a little attack of neurotic writer, Marie?”

  “Must be,” I agree. “Did you find anything you didn’t like, Charlotte? Any stuff for me to work on?”

  “Don’t you even want to know what I like about it?” She’s highly amused at my perversity. “And you call yourself a writer? You don’t want to hear all the praise first? But that’s what they taught me in editor school. Praise first, criticize later. Do you want me to lose my editor credentials? I have to spend at least fifteen minutes gushing over you. Which I will do with utter sincerity, of course.”

  “Sincere gushing is my very favorite kind.”

  So I sit through a painful five—not fifteen—minutes of being appreciated for all my sterling writer qualities, none of which seems very much in evidence to me in the manuscript that she and Franklin have both read and which both now claim to like very much. As I listen to her talk about me, I make grateful noises, like a magpie doing a good imitation of somebody who believes what she’s hearing. Finally, she gets past the gooey part to the problems. I knew it. I knew there were problems.

  “I do have a couple of problems with it, Marie.”

  I brace myself. It’s going to be major. But at least Charlotte’s now going to tell me how to fix it. I gird myself for the sting of the wasp soaked in the honey.

  “First of all, I wondered why you put in so much about the murder of that poor girl in Lauderdale Pines?”

  “You mean Allison Tobias?”

  “Yes. That’s such a sad story, but I think you give it too much emphasis—in relation to your story as a whole, I mean—by going into such detail there in the beginning. Do we really need that much? Could you boil it down, do you think? Otherwise, I’m afraid your readers are going to think it’s more important than it really is. To the story of Susanna and Bob Wing, I mean.”

  “Hm,” I hedge. “I thought I needed it there.”

  “Really? Why do you have so much about her murder?”

  “Well, uh, because her killer was the guy Bob Wing was trying to save from execution, and, uh, that’s why the cops had to bend over backwards to be fair, because they couldn’t stand him, and I thought that made it, uh, kind of interesting. And then there’s the incredible irony of the fact that after the preacher is sentenced to death, he gets put into a cell right next to Stevie Orbach . . .”

  “There’s too much about her,” my editor says, kindly, but briskly. “It diverts our attention from the main story.”

  “Okay. Let me think about it.”

  “Of course. And . . .” She pauses, while I’m still waiting for the worst of it. Rewrite the whole thing? Reorganize it all? Charlotte has uttered several words before I am aware that she’s even talking. “ . . . Marie?”

  “Oh! I’m sorry, Charlotte. Would you repeat that?”

  “I just said that I don’t know Artemis very well, isn’t that odd? Here, she’s a major player in the case, and yet I don’t have as clear a picture of her as I do of the other people.”

  “Hmm,” I say, hardly surprised to hear this. What a coincidence—I don’t know her very well, either. I’m taking notes, but still not listening very well.

  “And that’s it, Marie.”

  “What else did you notice?”

  “I just said, that’s it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Marie!” She’s laughing. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” I hasten to assure her. “Hey, I’m a writer, and we’re weird. You know that.”

  “You’re telling me? Try shepherding a whole flock of them sometime. You are one of the few sane ones, so don’t go getting all neurotic and writerly on me.”

  “Sane is my middle name.”

  “Really,” she says, in a very New York way. “We left that off the cover.”

  “Maybe next time.”

  “Sure, right next to your photograph.”

  “Charlotte, thank you. Really. Thanks so much.”

  “No, thank you. You’ve guaranteed my salary for another year.”

  “Not that you want to put any pressure on me or anything.”

  “Heavens no. I merely expect you to write bestsellers every time. No problem for you, right?”

  “Nope.” No, writing bestsellers is no problem for me. Writing a good and true book, however, now that may be more difficult. As I hang up, I’m thinking: What if everybody else thinks this book is fine just the way it is, and I’m the only one who feels there’s something missing? Can I let it go? If it appears to satisfy everybody else? I don’t think so. “Letting go” is not my middle name.

  * * *

  In the bedroom, I find the state attorney still sleeping. It’s 7:00 A.M. Late, for him. Mercilessly, I shake him awake. “You still here?” he mutters, turning over and smiling lazily up at me.

  “Yeah, and I can tell you really miss me when I’m gone.”

  I can only see half of his handsome face, because he’s got an arm thrown over it to protect his eyes from the sunlight, but I get a glimpse of a sly grin below his forearm. I ease myself down onto the edge of the bed, pulling my bathrobe around me, keeping just slightly out of the reach of his long arms.

  “My editor just called, Franklin. She hates my book.”

  The grin vanishes and he sits up with satisfying alacrity. The covers fall away from his lovely brown body, and he says, with a vigorous indignation that does my heart good, “You’re kidding. What do you mean, she hates it? How can she hate it? What’s to hate, for Christ’s sake? It’s terrific. I liked it, what’s the matter with her? What the fuck does she know? Damn, Marie. What will you do now?”

  “Kill myself.”

  “After that.”

  I smile at him. “Just kidding.”

  “You’re not going to kill yourself?”

  “No, she loves it.”

  “She loves it?” He grabs for me, pulls me down on top of him and then starts tickling me. “You little liar!” Within seconds the tickling turns into something else, and soon I’m taking my punishment like a woman.

  Anything to Be Together

  By Marie Lightfoot

  CHAPTER 7

  It was not the police but a carload of Sands Gospel Church members who eventuall
y found Susanna Wing’s white Mercury Mystique with the WG-PRYR license plate. Although every instinct in them rebelled against the idea, when one of them suggested looking at the airport, they checked it out. Slowly, they cruised the lanes of all the lots, growing more and more sure this was a wild-goose chase, until they reached the farthest parking lot.

  “Oh my God, there it is.”

  And there it was, nose in, license plate out toward them. The four church members in the car—one at each window, assigned to look out in that direction—didn’t know whether to feel elated or dismayed. They didn’t yet know about the trick the Bahia police had pulled on their minister, or even that Susanna was dead, so they finally decided that relief was the only truly spiritual response. “Hallelujah,” murmured the driver, who was an agnostic. They all hoped that finding the car meant she was alive. But they also thought it might mean she had left her husband—and them—and had run away from home for reasons that were a mystery to them. If Susanna Wing had been unhappy living with Bob, they hadn’t been aware of it, though there had been an undercurrent of nasty gossip recently, some unlikely story about Bob and that nice Artie McGregor. But they didn’t believe that for a minute. No, if Susanna had felt restless or unappreciated as a minister’s wife, they didn’t know why.

  “Thank heavens we found it,” said one of the passengers.

  After the initial excitement, a strange stillness descended inside the car, a feeling of a weight that instead of lifting had just grown heavier. Nevertheless, they tried their best to put a good face on things. “She’s sure to be okay, don’t you think so?” the left-backseat passenger asked the rest of them. “This has got to mean she took a flight somewhere, right? Here—somebody use my cell phone to call him.” Nobody immediately took her up on that offer; finally, reluctantly, the passenger in the front seat reached over, grabbed the little black phone, and dialed in the number at the Wing home. It was hard to know how to present this information, and she decided to say it in a neutral, calm sort of way that wouldn’t excite any false hopes, or betray any of her own misgivings about what this discovery might mean.

  But her minister didn’t answer the phone in his home.

  Somebody else said, “Wing residence.”

  “We found her car!” The passenger couldn’t help but burst out with the news. “That’s got to mean she’s alive!”

  “No,” said the voice on the other end, in a deadened tone. “She’s not. They’ve found her body in one of the properties she had listed for sale. Somebody beat her to death . . .”

  The woman holding the cell phone gasped in horror, but the church member who had answered the phone in the Wing home continued inexorably with what he had to say: “And the police seem to think Bob had something to do with it—” Again his listener gasped, while the other three in the car said, “What? What’s happened?” and leaned toward her, touched her, tried to get her to tell them what she was hearing on the phone. She pressed the receiver closer to her ear, batted them away, closed her eyes in dismay, as she heard the words, “—and they’ve taken him down to the police station for questioning. They haven’t arrested him, at least not that we know. But you should have seen the terrible way they treated him when they came to tell us about Susanna. He was in shock, and they didn’t even give him time to cry over Susanna. It makes me so angry! Is this what we pay our police to do?” His voice had risen in anger. “We’re getting a legal defense team ready.”

  “Who’s going to pay for it?” she asked, feeling frantic.

  “There’s still some money in the legal defense fund. If we have to take the attorneys off the capital-punishment appeals and put them onto this, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “Bob won’t like that.”

  “We won’t give him a choice in the matter.”

  It honestly didn’t even occur to the church member holding the cell phone to wonder if her minister was guilty or innocent. Of course he was innocent! If there was ever a fact she could take for granted in this life, that was it. This was Robert Wing they were talking about, her minister, one of the finest members of the clergy in the whole country, a man renowned for mercy and for charity, a famous opponent of the death penalty. This was Dr. Wing! Surely once the police realized the nature of the man, there wouldn’t be any question of his involvement, and they’d release him immediately and look for the real—

  She turned to face her three friends in the car.

  “Susanna’s been killed,” she said, and began to cry even before she got out, “and the police suspect Bob.”

  In the right-hand seat in the back of the car, a member of the church turned his face and stared blindly out at the parked cars across from the Mystique. He had been a member of the ministerial search committee that wooed and won Robert and Donna Wing in 1996. One of the perks that had been thrown into the compensation package had been generous life-insurance policies on both of them. It wasn’t cash, or a big house, but it was something nice the church could offer their clergy, especially to one like Bob whose crusades led to death threats now and then. When Bob Wing’s first wife, Donna, had succumbed to cancer two years later, the policy on her had paid out $ 100,000 to her grieving husband, who had turned around and started putting it to charitable uses rather than spending it on himself. Everybody in the church admired him for that, for not personally benefiting from Donna’s death.

  That money was almost gone, spent on Bob’s crusade.

  Now there would be a second payout, on his second wife.

  The member in the backseat grew very quiet, even as his three friends were exclaiming and weeping over the terrible news. He felt sick, and couldn’t bring himself to tell them what he knew. He sensed, with a terrible queasiness, that somebody was going to have to inform the police. Not that it meant anything, not at all! But it was the sort of thing the cops would want to know, wasn’t it? For homicide investigations? It was just routine, anybody who watched television knew that, he tried to reassure himself.

  It didn’t make him feel any better.

  * * *

  The Major Crimes Case Squad met Saturday evening, eight hours after the body was found, four hours after the first interrogation of the victim’s husband. At the request of the squad commander, Detective Carl Chamblin stood at the front of the conference room, summarizing the Susanna Wing homicide case for his fellow officers.

  “. . . one of the mothers called 911, who alerted us, and we were over there by twelve-thirty. The medical examiner puts the time of death at around noon Friday. Her husband looks good as a suspect. Reverend Wing attended a national church convention in Boston this week. We re checking that out. The victim picked him up at the Bahia airport yesterday morning from a flight that got in at around seven-thirty. Her car, the white Mercury. They drove home and had breakfast together. They also had intercourse. Before breakfast, he says. He says she left the house about nine-thirty to hold an open house at a property. He claims that’s the last time he saw her alive.

  “This is how I think it went down.” As he talked, Carl wrote key words on a large white board at the front of the room. “Reverend Wing’s wife drives him to the airport on Wednesday morning. He flies to Boston. Attends his meeting. She returns to the airport to pick him up yesterday. They drive out to the mansion, not to their home. He forces her to have sex with him and then he kills her. He took care not to leave prints and he must have cleaned himself up before he left the crime scene. Maybe he took water along, and different clothes. At any rate, he dumps her clothes and his bloody ones. He returns the car to the airport, parks it in satellite parking at one-oh-five P.M., then he takes the satellite parking bus up to the terminal, where he gets a cab. He has the cab drop him off somewhere close enough that he can walk the rest of the way to his home.

  “Her body could have rotted there before anybody found it. He could have been counting on that. It’s a deserted house. No transient who finds a body is going to report it. The only other person who went in there regularly was a guy who w
as hired to mow the driveway and the paths. Tell them what he told you, Norm.”

  Detective Jill Norman stood up to report. “He said he mowed twice a month. Any day, except Fridays. He was told not to show up on Fridays because that’s when Mrs. Wing showed the property to prospective buyers. So her husband would know they’d be alone.”

  “Wasn’t the killer taking a chance that the guy who mowed the grass would find the body?” one of the other cops inquired of her.

  “No,” she said. “Here’s the kicker. He got fired last week. Says he got a postcard telling him not to show up anymore.” “Has he still got the card, Norm?”

  “No. Tossed it.”

  She sat down again, leaving the floor to Carl.

  “Who owns that place?” somebody else asked.

  “A woman by the name of Artemis McGregor,” Carl replied. “I’ll come back to her.” After pausing to gather his thoughts again, he summed up what they’d heard so far. “So the Reverend thought he could report her missing, eventually we’d find the car at the airport, and we’d all think she had run away from home.”

  “Whoa, Carl,” somebody said. “You sound so sure. Why him?”

  The squad commander interrupted to say, “We have reason to believe he was having an affair with another woman—Artemis McGregor, the one Carl just told you about. We have also been told—though we have yet to confirm any of these reports—that Susanna Wing has a big estate, a lot of money from a previous marriage. In addition, there was major life insurance on her.”

  Somebody whistled, and an officer said, with dry humor, “Is that all? Just another woman, a rich wife, and life insurance? Damn, you mean we don’t have video of him killing her? What kind of impossible case is this?”