Ring of Truth

  “If you ever got out of here,” I say, feeling cruel, “what would you do?”

  His eyelids twitch again, small muscles he can’t quite control.

  “I don’t care to say,” he says.

  “You get to talk much to Bob Wing?”

  He quirks the side of his mouth, giving himself a sarcastic expression. “Yeah, we talk about ‘justice.’ ”

  “What’s he like?”

  “What’s he like? Look at him, for Christ’s sake, listen to him. Look at the work he’s done for sons a bitches like me. He’s a righteous man. And an innocent one. He shouldn’t be in here, neither one of us should.”

  “What about Mrs. McGregor?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she guilty?”

  “No way.”

  “Does he miss her?”

  That gets me a cold stare. “He misses all of his friends.”

  “How’s he doing in here?”

  “If you want to know, ask him yourself. Listen, you trying to get me to tell you stuff about him, I’ll tell you one thing. If they execute Bob, then you can blame that murder on me.” For the first time, I see a hint of passion in his expression. His jaw and his lips have tightened. “He should have left my case alone, I’ve told him that. From the beginning, I told him, don’t be a fool, stay the fuck away from me. I’m death for anybody who touches me. I told him. I warned him. He can’t say I didn’t. And now he’s in here because of me.” Suddenly he leans forward and whispers intensely at me. “You write that in your book. That they went after him, that they framed him, to keep him from springing me. He’s here because of me and he’s going to die because of me. You tell those bastards that, you tell them that I know, even if nobody else does.”

  “What is it you know, Steve?”

  “What I just said.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  He looks contemptuous. “Because somebody killed that cop’s niece. They weren’t going to stop till they pinned it on somebody, and I was available, wasn’t I? I was a cockroach down in the basement, that’s all I was to them. They didn’t look any further. Why look for anybody else when they already had a real live killer right there on the premises. And they’re going to go after anybody who gets in the way of executing me. That’s the way it works. Welcome to the real world. Bob Wing was a pain in the ass to everybody who wants me dead, so when they got a chance to get rid of him, they did it the easy way, just like they did to me.”

  “Do you think he killed his wife?”

  “Yeah, he killed her like I killed Allison.”

  And what am I to make of that statement? Take it as pure sarcasm, or as a disguised confession of truth?

  “Fuck it,” he says, turning his body away from me. “Nobody gives a damn, nobody ever will. I’m a piece of trash to the world and so is he. Just a couple of sacks of garbage they’re going to set out at the curb. Fuck it. Forget it.”

  But those aren’t Steve Orbach’s last words to me.

  Before he leaves the cubicle, he leans close one last time to breathe into the circle these words: “Watch your step. People who get involved in my life get dead in their own life. If you get hurt it’s your own fault. I’m not taking responsibility for it. Stay away from this, let it die. Let them kill me. That’s what Bob should have done, and he didn’t, and now they’re going to kill him, too.”

  I stay seated a little while after he has gone, pretending to finish my notes. The truth is, I’m too disturbed to get up and leave yet. He accused law enforcement of framing Bob Wing—and, indirectly, Artie McGregor—in order to halt the effort on Orbach’s death-penalty appeals. It’s the Howard County Sheriff’s Department, the Lauderdale Pines Police Department, and the Bahia Beach Police Department that he’s talking about. God knows he wouldn’t be the first convict to yell “frame-up,” and it used to be that nobody paid any attention. But lately in this country there have been so many publicized and proven cases of that very thing in the criminal so-called justice system that it’s much harder to deny and ignore them.

  There’s no denying the cops hate Bob Wing and Steve Orbach.

  In Bahia, they even keep a poster counting down the days until Steven Orbach’s execution. They’re not interested in any late evidence that might suggest the presence of somebody else in the mansion where Susanna Wing was killed. And the police chief is eager to get his hands on my book before it’s in print. Is that to please his wife, as he claimed? Or is it to make sure that I tell these stories the way the cops want them told?

  It’s true that when Bob was arrested, the campaign to save Steve Orbach hit a wall, and they were his last, best, only hope.

  So, is this a condemned man who’ll say anything to save himself? But even if he is, it’s still possible the cops “rushed to judgment,” as Tammi said. They might have been honest, but prejudiced. What if they were too quick to grab Orbach just because he was a natural suspect? What if they didn’t frame Bob Wing but were just a little too quick to arrest him, too?

  “No,” I say out loud. No. Even if you discount the baseball bat, even if you claim somebody else put it there; even if you claim that he and Artemis were telling the truth about their infamous two-hour drive in her car, there’s no way around that telephone conversation the women overheard. The minister was screwing around on his wife. And she had a million-dollar life insurance policy on her life and he’d nearly gone through all the money he’d inherited from his first wife’s death and how was he going to continue to look like the local saint if he didn’t have money to spend on his pet causes?

  No, he did it; he had to have done it.

  Because if he didn’t, who did? Not just a stranger, no way. It wasn’t a stranger who used that baseball bat to kill her and then put it back in their hallway. It was either Bob Wing, or somebody close to them. But it had to be Bob Wing. It has to be, because of the affair, because of the money, and because the evidence points to him and to nobody else, except possibly her.

  Orbach’s desperate, that’s all, and grabbing at straws.

  I do know one thing: I will never again think of him as “Stevie.”

  * * *

  Upon leaving a prison—any prison—the sunshine always feels so good on my face, and so does the fresh air. I savor the comparative quiet, the taste of freedom on my tongue and the muscularity of it in my body as I stride away from all those locked doors. Sometimes it makes me feel as if I just want to keep walking, just to prove I can and that nobody can stop me.

  Today, as I step outside, the sun stabs my eyes, but who cares?

  As I traverse the parking lot, I glance back over my shoulder at the red brick administration building, wondering if we were taped or monitored. I’ve asked before, at this and other prisons, and I’ve never quite believed it when they told me no.

  I take my keys out to unlock my car, trying not to touch the door, because it’s stinging hot. As I stand there, the key half in and half out of the lock, I am struck, as if by lightning, by two of the wildest, most appalling thoughts I’ve ever had. Maybe it’s the influence of what Orbach said to me in there, but whatever it is, I am momentarily paralyzed with the shock of my own epiphanies, if that’s what they are. The next second, I’m frantic to get inside my car, to my cell phone, and I turn all thumbs doing it. Finally, I’m in and dialing Deb Dancer’s work number at the newspaper.

  “Deb’s out for the whole day,” I’m told, “on a story.”

  “Can I reach her?”

  “You could leave a message on her voicemail.”

  I do that, saying, with as much urgency as I can force into my voice, “Deb, it’s Marie. Do not go to see Ben and Lucy Tobias without talking to me first. Even if you have to miss the appointment. Don’t do it until you’ve checked with me. I think it could be dangerous. I’m not kidding. Don’t go.”

  Then I call her pager and hope she will either call in for her messages or call me back when she sees the page, and that she’ll do it in plenty of time. r />
  Then I act on my second insane thought, by calling Tammi Golding at her law firm. When she says hello, I say, “Tammi, when I interviewed you several months ago, you said you thought the death penalty in this country wouldn’t be abolished until a provably upstanding, innocent person gets executed. You believe that Bob Wing is innocent. I don’t know about that, because even if you could account for the evidence against him, even if you went so far as to say it was planted by somebody else, there’s still not one single thing that points to another killer. Not unless it’s Artie herself, and why would she set Bob up when it meant she would be arrested, too? But let’s assume you’re right. Let’s say that he’s innocent. What I do believe is that I’ve never met anybody who cares as passionately about abolishing the death penalty as he does. We both know he’s probably going to be executed. So, Tammi . . .”

  I take a breath, then just say it.

  “Tammi, if he knew of exonerating evidence, would he say so?”

  There’s a silence. And then she gasps. “Oh, my God in heaven, Marie.”

  “Would he sacrifice himself for the sake of the cause?”

  “Sweet Jesus, he might. But the world would have to find out that he really was innocent.”

  “Yes, after he died. Might he leave that evidence somewhere it could be found after his execution?”

  “Not at the church,” she says, sounding as frantic as I felt a few minutes ago. “Too many people going through his things there. His home. His private papers, that’s where it would be if it does exist. Marie, could you meet me there? Will you help me look?”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “If he’s really planning something like this, he’ll never tell me so.”

  “Give me that address again and tell me when to meet you.”

  “Shit, I’ve got to be in court the rest of this afternoon. How about tomorrow morning, Marie? Early, like around six, is that too awful for you?”

  “No, I’ll be there.”

  “Jesus, Marie,” she says, and laughs a little, “I don’t know whether to hope you’re right or you’re wrong. If you’re wrong, he dies. If you’re right, I can get him off, but I’ve got a lunatic for a client.”

  “I wouldn’t be a lawyer for anything,” I tell her.

  “You’re wise,” she says and hangs up.

  Only then do I leave the parking lot. As I drive out, under the arching sign with the capital letters that spell out Florida State Prison, I feel dizzy from the heat and from my own precipitous actions.

  * * *

  The rest of the long drive home I am anxiously waiting for Deborah to call me. Periodically I try calling her again but never raise her. I call Information and get her home phone, try that, leave a message, get nowhere with it. Why doesn’t she answer her page? Isn’t that what the damned things are for? When she doesn’t, with every hour I drive south, a fear builds in me that brings back all the worst moments of the night that George Pullen died. Oh, Lord, please, don’t make me responsible for another death of somebody who is only trying to help me. Finally, and only as a last resort, I place a call to Detective Lyle Karnacki at the Bahia Beach Police Department, but what I have to suggest to him makes him so angry that he slams his phone down in my ear.

  I can’t think of another cop who will want to hear what I have to say.

  When I call Franklin and lay it out for him, he says exactly what I’d expect a prosecutor to say. “You’re dreaming, Marie.” He’s not offensive or condescending when he says it, not at all. But just as Tammi Golding is convinced of her man’s innocence, so Franklin takes for granted that his side is almost always right. “Stevie’s guilty as sin.”

  “But what if—just what if—he isn’t, Franklin? What would you advise me to do?”

  “I’d say be careful and I’d tell you to protect the evidence. But I still say you’re dreaming up a little extra plot for your book.”

  “I hear you.”

  It doesn’t offend me. You can’t blame him for sounding unconcerned. He trusts the system, because it’s his system. But I’m not like him. I’m an outsider, constantly looking in at that system he loves so much, and not everything I see in it—nor everyone—inspires my trust.

  So I can’t get a cop to help me, and my very own personal prosecutor thinks I’m dreaming. But that isn’t going to stop me. Maybe nobody’s life depends on whether or not I persevere, but maybe—just maybe—it does.

  Susanna

  16

  Ben and Lucy don’t live in the same house where they raised their daughter. By the time I interviewed them for my book, they had taken some of the money from their various lawsuits and bought themselves a much larger home on the water. It’s not on the ocean but rather, on one of the narrow dredged canals that stripe South Florida. This house is painted pink; it’s big but not pretty, being all angles and juttings that translate into high ceilings in the interior of it. Lucy has furnished the rooms with overstuffed, upholstered pieces so that even the largest of the spaces feels cramped. Ben has a pool table in the family room, but it stays covered most of the time. He told me he never plays. She told me that’s because he’d rather watch television with her than waste his time playing a stupid game with beer-drinking men.

  When I met them, they didn’t seem heartbroken so much as incendiary.

  “Our daughter would still be alive,” Lucy declared to me, growing red-faced as she spoke, “if it weren’t for those criminally negligent landlords. They should have been charged with some crime, we tried to get the police to charge them with something, but nobody listened to us.”

  “Nobody cares about the victim’s family,” Ben chimed in.

  “You did win your civil suit against them,” I observed.

  “That’s nothing,” she said, dismissing with two words the valuable property in which we sat, not to mention the livelihood of the landlords, who lost almost everything as a result of the suit. “It’s our daughter we’re talking about, my own flesh and blood. Isn’t she worth more than a house? They should have gone to jail, but that’s never going to happen.”

  “I think the wife’s dead now,” I pointed out.

  “Well, he’s still alive,” Lucy snapped. “And our daughter isn’t. He’s still walking around, enjoying life, and hers got cut off before I even had a chance to hold my grandchildren.”

  “I’m not sure I’d say that he enjoys life, Mrs. Tobias.”

  Ordinarily, I don’t argue with the people I interview, but there was something about this woman and her husband that got my back up at almost everything they said. I tried to make myself stop, for fear I’d alienate them so much that they wouldn’t talk to me, but I soon discovered there wasn’t any danger of that. Lucy Tobias was on a roll, with a rare captive audience to hear her out. After a while I realized she probably wasn’t really hearing me, anyway.

  “They should have had a foolproof security system, for one thing. Why, I walked right in there with a key and nobody stopped me or so much as asked me what I was doing there.”

  “But that didn’t contribute to her death, did it?”

  “No, but it just goes to show how careless they were with other people’s property. And, imagine, hiring a known ex-convict, a murderer, a person who had killed his own mother. It is simply beyond my comprehension. I cannot understand how any human being could behave so irresponsibly.”

  “They should have checked his background,” Ben said.

  “I believe they did, Mr. Tobias. They thought they were doing a good thing, giving a young man a second chance—”

  “A second chance to commit murder,” Lucy interrupted. “They were as good as accessories to my daughter’s murder. They ought to be charged, just like him. They ought to be in jail for the rest of their lives. And those so-called friends of Allison’s. Those immoral, drunken girls, Emily and Gretchen.”

  “Whores,” her husband called them.

  “They killed her. Poured alcohol down a girl who had never had a drink in
her life and then abandoned her so she could get attacked and killed by that horrible boy. If I had my way, they’d all get the death penalty, all of those people who killed my daughter.”

  “You don’t think she ever drank before, Mrs. Tobias?”

  “Heavens, no. She knew what I’d do if I caught her.”

  “What would you have done?”

  She never answered that, except to repeat, “She knew what I’d do.”

  Neither of them were what you’d call well-adjusted, but she, especially, seemed unbalanced to me when I met them. So I can’t say that it surprises me to hear that she may have slipped further off the deep end. Lucy Tobias has been “unbalanced” all along. That was always simmering beneath the words I wrote about them, when I was trying to bend over backwards to be kind to this couple—and not to libel them—who had lost their daughter so horribly. It was obvious, too, in what Emily Rubeck said in her interview, as well as in the extreme financial vengeance that Lucy and Ben wreaked on the hapless landlords. By the end of my first meeting with them, I knew that this was a woman I would never want to cross, because she had already shown me she would stop at almost nothing to satisfy her compulsion for revenge. And for punishment. She had always punished Allison far beyond the pale of ordinary discipline. The slightest infraction of her impossible rules seemed to propel her into uncontrollable rage and cruelty.

  Now I worry: At the outer limits of her fury, how far would she go? What sort of punishment would she lay on a daughter who had moved out over her objections, who disobeyed, who didn’t call, who got drunk, who had sex with a stranger?

  If there was any truth at all in Lucy’s offer to show Deb the actual note and the cake tin, then Steven Orbach didn’t kill Allison. “Whoever it was, she had to let them in,” he said to me today. And then he said, “Or they were already inside her room.”

  And who, besides the landlords, had a key? Her mother.

  * * *

  By the time I turn off the highway into the Lauderdale Pines, it is dark. I can just barely remember the Tobias address and how to get there, but eventually the ugly house rears up in front of me.