Ring of Truth
“Please, do not leave her alone now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. For once in her life, let there be people who care about her. You. And me. There was no one to care about Susanna after her parents died, no one to love her in all those foster homes, or when her first husband passed away. Please, do not leave her alone again.
“Be her friend, by being her advocate along with me.
“Stand up with me and say no! This sad life must not end without some vindication. There must be some justice for this lonely woman who had no one to protect her. Now she has me, which may not be much. But she also has the law, and you, and you have the power—the only power—to stand up for her now. I ask you, on behalf of Susanna, to find them both guilty of her brutal, lonely, terrible death.”
It was theater at its best, sincerely meant and delivered, and riveting, if only half successful.
* * *
I can’t get the damn book out of my head.
Though it beats obsessing about George Pullen’s death.
When Antonio Delano calls to say he heard what happened, I recall an earlier comment of his. “Why can’t you give it up?” I’d asked him. “This isn’t about me!” he’d exclaimed. If all else failed, if he couldn’t convince me otherwise that Artie was a killer, he had sarcastically advised me to think about “public safety.”
“I should have listened to you, Tony,” I tell him over the phone. “If she’s the one who killed George, I’ll never forgive myself for taking her so lightly. What are the chances of convicting her on this one?”
“About as good as the last time, Marie. A search warrant hasn’t turned up the bag at her house or in their cars. If we can’t put her at the scene with some kind of physical evidence, we’re going to lose this one, too.”
I say nothing, feeling awful.
“Marie, if it’s any comfort, you’re hardly the only one to underestimate Artemis McGregor. A whole jury did, remember? I’ll bet Bob Wing did, too.”
“How can somebody look so sweet and do so many good works, yet be so evil? She didn’t fool you, Tony. I should have paid attention.”
“So should your two friends,” he says, gently. “For god’s sake, they owned a security company, Marie. They’re ex-military. If they couldn’t anticipate hazardous duty, how could you?”
But as I hang up from his call, I know that guarding our culde-sac hardly prepared George and Bennie for what I led them into. It’s many years since Vietnam. They were too old for this job, their skills were too rusty for what I asked of them, even if none of us guessed I was asking it.
Suddenly I feel another emotion arising out of the morass of regret and self-pity I’ve been struggling in. It’s rage. I hate her. Hate it that she can kill people with impunity. And I hate the idea that my book is going to let her off, just as the jury did, and only because nobody can seem to prove anything against her. I hate it. This is personal now.
When I think about a certain moment in the trial, a moment that turned the verdict in her favor, my skin crawls.
Tammi had put a character witness for Artie on the stand, a nurse from one of the retirement homes that Artie and Bob visited regularly. This young woman from the EverCare Center cried on the stand when she told about one demented old man.
“He doesn’t have anybody. No family. No sons or daughters. And he’s so sweet. Mrs. McGregor is the only person on earth who ever came to see him. Her and Dr. Wing. But she’d hold his old hands and talk to him as if he could understand her, and he’d just smile and smile. He misses her visits so much! Even though he doesn’t know exactly who he’s missing, he knows that somebody he loves is gone. I wish she could come back and see him again.”
That did it. One juror said afterward, “My mom is in a nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients and it takes everything out of me to go see her, and she’s my own mother. Anybody who would go visit senile people she doesn’t even know has got to be a saint. Nobody like that could ever kill another person.”
It makes me feel sick to think about it.
And there’s not a damned thing I can do about it.
* * *
But Sunday night I wake from a nightmare of being chased and feel in my gut an even more sickening thought: What if we’ve all been wrong? What if they’ve never been guilty, they’ve always been innocent? That’s what they’ve claimed, without any quarter, both of them. What if an innocent man is sitting on death row and an innocent woman is holed up in her house, afraid to go out, pilloried by former friends and by people like me?
Sitting up in bed, I realize the key to that interpretation lies in the very words of my own book that have been haunting me since Friday, when George was killed. Suddenly the admirable qualities of Artemis McGregor and Bob Wing pop into high relief, forcing me to look at them without prejudice: her selfless good works, the high recommendation from that unusual source—her ex-husband—and the way she looks, and conducts herself, like a sweet, kind, modest person. Then there’s her reputed lover. But there’s no proof of that beyond the infamous phone call and—possibly—the contents of a canvas bag that has never even been established as belonging to either of them. Contrast that, I instruct myself, with what is missing from the testimony against either of them: no other allegations of impropriety, no other women coming forward to accuse the handsome minister of sexual advances, not even a hint of infidelity by either one of them. If he’s the sexual scoundrel he’s made out to be, wouldn’t there have been some other hint of it? Think of his dedication to the lives of other people, his crusade to extend the lives of other people, not to end them.
Once I have admitted these thoughts into my consciousness, I am forced to consider the fact that somebody else could have placed that bloody bat in Bob Wing’s house. Many, many people had access to that foyer. In addition, why would a man so careful about footprints, a man who hid his own and Susanne’s bloody clothing so well that it was never found, why would that man leave his handprints all over the murder weapon?
Tammi Golding made some of these points in her closing statement, but the jury—and I and most observers—didn’t buy it. Maybe if she’d been able to offer up another suspect—anybody at all—she might have been able to create an aura of reasonable doubt, but she didn’t. The jury was left with the murder weapon, the semen, and, worst of all, the lousy alibi, all pointing, reasonably, toward the Reverend.
I can see my way around those pieces of evidence.
But what I can’t get around is the overheard conversation. You’ve already got a wife and I’m it. If Tony’s right and those three women told the truth, then Bob Wing was having an affair with Artemis and I believe they killed Susanna. Which means I still believe that Artemis struck George Pullen over the head and killed him, intentionally or not.
When I fall asleep again, the nightmares do not return, at least temporarily. By entertaining a fair doubt of my own prejudices, I have granted myself some peace of mind at last. As a result, I wake up feeling more rested, but also filled with even greater resolve to bring some kind of justice to the memories of Susanne and George. I rise from bed, thinking, “There must be something else left to investigate, some little thing we’ve all overlooked until now. There must be.” I can think of only two anomalies that have haunted me throughout my involvement in this case and in the lives of these people: one is sex, the other is rings and panthers. And while panthers are elusive creatures, I decide to go hunting for them first, because it feels as if the sex—the passion—is hidden even more deeply in the foliage, if it’s there at all.
Susanna
12
On Monday, before I can leave on my hunting expedition, my new research assistant calls to report on what she had been doing for me. It feels like a total non sequitur to hear her talk about the Tobias chapter when I’m focused so intensely on more important things.
“I can’t find out anything about the note,” Deb Dancer tells me. “There’s nothing about it in your file and I checked with a couple of the sheriff’s deputi
es who were there at the time, and they don’t remember. You’ve got a copy of the inventory lists, and it’s not on them. I went ahead and called Lyle Karnacki—remember him? Lucy’s brother? Allison’s uncle who’s a Bahia cop? And he said he made them go over the place with a fine-tooth comb, but he doesn’t recall ever seeing it. So is it okay with you if I contact Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and ask them if they know?”
This seems so trivial compared to the weight on my heart from George’s death. I can barely concentrate on what she’s asking, much less give a damn, but I play along because it’s not her fault that I’m such an emotional wreck this morning. “Why would they know?”
“They probably don’t,” she admits. “But I also want to know what happened to that cake tin—remember that?—and I want a description of it for your book.”
“I like your attention to the telling detail, Ms. Dancer. Be tactful, all right?”
“Tact is my middle name,” she says, sounding strangely like me.
We’re just about to hang up when it occurs to me to say, “I ought to warn you that you may not like Allison’s parents. I don’t know if it comes across in what I wrote about them, but she’s an incredible control freak and he’s like her slave who’ll say anything to keep the peace with her.”
“Yeah, I sensed that, plus I read your background notes on them.”
“Okay, well, good luck. Let me know how it goes.”
“Ms.—Marie?”
“Yes?”
“Are you all right? I’m sorry, but you sound kind of down.”
“I am a bit, but you’ve cheered me up, Deborah.” And it’s true that her energy has reinfused me with some of my own. “Call any time, okay?”
“Okay,” she agrees, sounding pleased and happy.
She didn’t mention George Pullen’s murder and I don’t want to talk about it, so I didn’t say anything, either. If she hasn’t heard about it at the newspaper where she works, then maybe I’ll get lucky. So far, it’s been a brief news item, only one of several violent crimes that happened in Bahia on Friday, and not even the “worst” of them. There was a multiple homicide that distracted everybody. So unless some reporter learns that it was connected to the Wing homicide and that a celebrity author was involved, I may escape without the publicity. It’s going to be hard enough to report it—confess to it—in my own book. I felt painfully foolish explaining to the Bahia cops why we were there in the first place, although Bennie told me not to feel that way. “Look,” he said, even in the midst of his own grief, “we were trying to do what these cops never managed to do—prove once and for all that she’s a killer. As far as I’m concerned, George died in the line of duty, trying to do a righteous and necessary thing. Don’t apologize for this, Marie, because if you do I’ll consider that an insult to his memory.”
I pray he’s right and not just trying to make himself feel better, too.
But now it’s time to corner little Jenny Carmichael and find out if there’s anything else she’s hiding from the grown-ups. When she and her mother brought their surprises to me, that mischievous slip of a girl made a slip of the tongue and I think I’d better check it out. Besides, they deserve to be told what happened to the bag. If nothing else, it should reassure Anne that she was absolutely right to be afraid of it for her family’s sake,- although she may also judge that it was a mistake to turn it over to me.
* * *
To distract myself from the annoying traffic of Spring Break, I play old interview tapes from my research on Allison Tobias. If I can’t do anything profound for Bennie, maybe I can do something small for Deborah by listening for hints about the details that interest her, the note and the cake that Lucy left. A less sympathetic mother I have never met, and Ben Tobias wasn’t much better. In my book I tried to put them in the best light I could, because they’ve suffered enough without my adding gratuitous insults to their grievous injury.
I particularly remember how the landlord hated them.
When I interviewed the old man, he had become a renter himself. After the murder, he told me, the Tobiases sued him and his wife for failing to provide security adequate to protect their tenants. A jury awarded the parents a large verdict that forced the landlords to sell the Hibiscus Avenue house and their other properties and would have confiscated most of what they both earned for the rest of their lives. Rather than allow that, the couple—already in their sixties—retired and lived on their Social Security payments. The old man’s wife died three years later, he told me, from “heart.”
“There’s nothing special to remember about the night she was killed,” the old man tells me on the tape of that interview. “No screaming, no unusual commotion, nothing like that. The computer boys came home together real late like they always did. The other girls, they were always so quiet we hardly could hear them on the stairs. Oh, we heard Allison come in, all right. She was drunk, you know, and even quiet drunks are loud. We heard her laugh in the back hall and we figured that must have been when she met up with Stevie. I guess we were both asleep when she went upstairs, ’cause neither the wife nor me heard any of that. We felt just terrible that we helped that boy. Thought we was doing a good deed for a young man needed a fresh start. You don’t never want to do a good deed,” he tells me, bitterly. “It’ll come back on you real bad like it did on us.”
After that, I managed to locate one of Allie’s friends who had gone drinking with her that night—Emily Rubeck Richards—later a teacher, married, with two kids.
“There isn’t a day I don’t think about it,” she says in that interview. It seemed to me that she still had the earnest appearance of the “good girl” she was in high school. A nervous temperament had turned her into a nonstop talker and she told me more than I needed, or could use, in the book. “Did you know Allie’s dad made us leave the funeral? We went in the church with our parents, and Mrs. Tobias saw us and made him come over and tell us we weren’t welcome. He said it would upset Mrs. Tobias too much for us to be there, since it was all our fault for taking Allison out and getting her drunk. It was terrible when he did that in front of everybody at the funeral. I think it was the worst moment of my life, except for when I heard Allie was dead. Gretch never has got over it, I don’t think. It’s kind of ruined her, but I never believed that, that it was all our fault. My parents felt real bad about Allie, but they were furious at Mr. and Mrs. Tobias for doing that to us. Gretch and I never forced Allie to go or to drink, and it wasn’t us who wanted her to be all by herself. She wanted that. What were we supposed to do, force her to let us stay there? We were just kids ourselves, doing what teenagers do. It’s not our fault, it’s that horrible Stevie Orbach’s fault. But Mrs. Tobias was always a bitch, so I wasn’t all that surprised when she treated us so rotten. Do you know, she used to ground Allie for weeks if she got in five minutes late? Weeks! She’d stand at the door and grab Allie and yell, ’Get in here!’ She was a trip. We hardly ever went over there. He was nice enough, but kind of a wimp. Whatever Mrs. Tobias said, that was the law. After Allie died, I felt bad for Mr. and Mrs. Tobias—like you would for anybody—but that didn’t give them the right to act so mean to Gretchen and me and to hurt our parents’ feelings like that.”
Emily and the old landlord helped me locate three of the tenants, so now I listen to their interviews, too, fast-forwarding over the extraneous parts. Finally, I go through the painful interview with the parents, but there’s nothing on the tape for Deb, just a reiteration of how Lucy set the cake in its tin outside her daughter’s door and how, later that night, she taped a note to the door of the house.
This seems like a ridiculously small bit of business to be paying Deborah to research, but I can feel myself getting caught up in it, too. I’m catching from her the bug of obsession that compels a writer to worry some little detail to death. Sometimes entire books can turn on just such a detail that opens the door to greater revelations. Not this time, though. These are just small, human touches to round off a chapter and lend it that v
erisimilitude that makes readers trust me. It won’t hurt, however, to go to the trouble to get it right.
Susanna
13
The seven Carmichaels live in a sweet stucco house that would be roomy for three people but is noisy and crowded with all of them there at one time, which they are when I arrive. Anne’s clever warning sign is still propped up on the front porch so it can be seen easily from the street. Herb’s mowing the lawn, with two little boys trailing behind him, dragging lawn bags in his wake. Inside, I find three more red-haired children—with uncountable numbers of their buddies—and Anne, unloading more bags of groceries than I thought any person could buy at one time.
“Welcome to Bedlam,” she calls to me, from the kitchen to the front door.
I open the screen and go on in.
“What’s everybody doing home on a Monday, Anne?”