Ring of Truth
When we’re almost through and still haven’t found anything that leaps out at us, Tammi says, sounding worried, “If it’s so obvious, why can’t we find it?” And then, a little later, with her hands hanging limp in the last drawer, she sighs, “It’s not here.”
“There was always the possibility that this was nonsense,” I admit. “But let’s not give up so soon. Maybe he wanted to make it look as if he didn’t do this on purpose.”
She brightens up a little. “Yeah.”
“Maybe he wants you to trip over it accidentally, so no one will suspect that he planned things this way.”
We both get to our feet again and start putting drawers back in the desk. Then we split up to cruise the small house, looking for we know not what. Fifteen minutes later, I hear a jubilant cry from the direction of the kitchen. “What?” I yelled back.
“It’s here!” Tammi shouts, and then comes running into the bathroom, where I’m standing in the middle of the room. She waves a small piece of paper at me and keeps shouting, even though I’m only a couple of feet away from her. “It was posted to the door of the refrigerator with a magnet. Look, it’s a receipt from a filling station! They were at a garage! The date and the time is here, and it’s perfect! It’s right in the middle of the time when Susanna was getting killed. Marie, they couldn’t have gotten to the address on this station—and got gas—and driven back in time to do it! This is the alibi, Marie. This is it! I’ll get witnesses from the station and this receipt and take them to a judge and I’ll try to get him out of there.”
“He’s going to be disappointed,” I say, a bit wryly.
“Tough. He’s going to be alive. What’s the matter?”
She has noticed that I am not responding with as much enthusiasm as I might. But that’s because I’m transfixed by my own discovery. In front of me, on a rack, are two hand towels, one of them blue and the other one orange. There are matching bath towels above the bathtub and extra towels in the same colors on shelves above the toilet.
They are identical to the bath towel and washcloth in the canvas bag.
In my mind’s eye, I see Bob Wing grabbing them out of the linen closet and stuffing them into the boat bag.
A little numb, I pick up one of the towels and hand it to her.
“Tammi, they may not have killed her, but they were having an affair.”
“Let’s go see Artie,” Tammi suggests, holding the towel away from her as if it’s something dangerous that might bite.
* * *
“Artie . . .” Tammi doesn’t say anymore than that as she hands the precious filling-station receipt to the other woman.
Artemis Hornung McGregor, when she sees what it is, leans heavily back into the sofa, where she’s sitting in her own family room, and then she begins to sob, saying, “Thank God, oh, thank God somebody found it.”
* * *
She wants to get out of her house to talk about it, so we walk, the three of us, down to her dock. Artie, with her cheeks still wet from tears, unties a sweet little motorboat and we help each other into it. It’s easy for me, since I’m in shorts and sandals, but it takes both Artie and me to help Tammi, in her snug suit and stylish shoes, to get in and get settled. Without complaint, the lawyer takes off her jacket, turns it so the lining side is up, and folds it in her lap. Her skirt may soon be ruined by splashing water, but I doubt very much that Tammi cares about that.
Artie sits at the stern, so she can steer.
Under her commands, I unhook us from the final cleat and we’re off.
With a minimum of noise and wake, we glide into the residential canal on which she and Stuart live. Their house is a huge, modern one, but it’s one of the rare examples that’s beautiful. That’s due, in part, to artful landscaping that all but hides the house—no mean feat—amid dozens of palm and fruit trees, vast flowering shrubs, and winding hedges. It’s easy to forget, because she has been hidden and silent since her arrest, that in her other married life Artemis was one-half of an extraordinarily successful business team. There’s something in the unhesitating, confident manner in which she captains this small craft that brings that other, earlier, image home to me.
“Sound carries across water,” she comments as her hair blows about in the soft, warm breeze. We’re swiftly moving toward the much larger, much choppier Intracoastal, where this little boat will be a minnow among whales. I check the location of the life jackets on board, count enough for all of us, and then just grab a railing and relax. I love boats, love to be on the water, have many times been in much rougher water, in even smaller boats than this. “I’ll take us where nobody can hear us talk.”
Tammi and I exchange glances: Are we alone together on a wide body of water in a small boat with a murderer? Apparently neither of us believes so.
“I have to be in court by one-thirty,” Tammi calls to her.
“No problem,” Artie responds.
* * *
We moor in a backwater canal where signs warn boaters to go slow to avoid hitting manatees, the lovable, ugly “sea cows” of Florida, with their propellers. Artie tosses me a line and I tie us up to a hanging mangrove root while she jockeys the boat into position to secure another line to hold us steady so we won’t float into the rat-infested mass of mangrove roots that lie all around us. We haven’t seen a house or a boat or another human for at least a couple of miles. You don’t have to travel far in these parts to get the feeling you have returned to old Florida and left noisy, glittering new Florida far behind. Jets leave contrails in the sky above us, but apart from that and our own boat, this could be another century.
Seated in the stern, facing us, she finally speaks.
“The day that Susanna died went just the way we said it did, Tammi. We set out to visit the nursing homes, as usual. We really did have car trouble, but I managed to glide us into a filling station. We ran out of gas, if you can believe that.” She shakes her head in a kind of wonder at the vagaries of her fate that day. “That’s all it was. Stuart had used my car last and he forgot to tell me it was on empty, and I didn’t notice until it was too late. By the time the warning light came on, we were on the highway. We thought it was a miracle when we managed to drive a while, get off an exit ramp, and coast into the filling station.”
She looks up at me. “Maybe it was a miracle, after all.”
“Why haven’t either of you told me all this before?” Tammi demands, sounding as infuriated as she has every right to feel. “Why didn’t you produce that receipt to establish your alibi?”
But that, it seems, was where their story took a darker, secret turn.
“We were shocked when Bob was suspected, then arrested,” Artie tells us, looking as if she still feels that way. “And we were even more shocked when I was.” For the first time, there’s anger in her face. She adds, in a tone caustic enough to eat through steel, “I guess we hadn’t heard the rumors.”
“Were you having an affair with Bob?” I ask her, since Tammi doesn’t.
“No! We were both married, for heaven’s sake. I respect and admire and love Bob, but I don’t love him.”
“And he feels about you . . . how?”
“The same, I think.”
Tammi says, “Pat Danner thought you two were immediately attracted to each other the day you met.”
“Oh, he’s handsome,” Artie concedes. “I could hardly miss that. And he’s charming as all get-out. But he’s my minister, and he’s married. I would never do that. Never.”
“What did you talk about in the car the day that Susanna died?”
“Our marriages,” she says. “We told you the truth about that, and I still think that’s private, Tammi. Why should I have to divulge everything we ever said to each other? We’re innocent. We shouldn’t have to do that. But if you just have to know, I started it, by telling him that sometimes I worried that I rushed into marriage too soon after my divorce. I didn’t feel as if I knew Stuart very well, because it all happened so fast. And he—just being nice, probabl
y—told me that sometimes he felt the same way about Susanna, that they had rushed it.”
It is dawning on me that Artie McGregor may actually be the tremendously decent person she was once considered to be. Either that or she’s a tremendously good actress. None of this explains the phone call that the church women say they overheard, however.
“How do you account for that?” I ask her.
“They lied,” she declares, looking straight at me.
But why would they? I wonder.
“Go on,” Tammi urges her.
“We were hit out of the blue with everything that happened, Tammi. But then Bob realized that God was giving him a chance to do something important for the world . . . to let himself be wrongfully convicted and to be executed, so that the people in this country would finally see that under our system of laws it is possible for an entirely innocent person to be put to death for a crime he didn’t do. He intended you to go through every legal maneuver, Tammi. That was very important, so that nobody could say later that you hadn’t exhausted every appeal and every avenue to free him.”
“My God,” their lawyer says, looking as appalled as she sounds. “But what about you? You may have been acquitted, but everybody thinks you’re guilty. Your reputation, your name is completely ruined.”
“My name was ruined by the rumors and the arrest,” she retorts. “I had nothing left to lose. I’d lost my friends, my church, my good name. Whatever I said, there would always be people who thought the worst of me. Even people who don’t think I’m a murderer think I was having an affair with him, and they probably always will think that. You know how it is, how it still is: when it comes to sexual misconduct, people are still inclined to blame the woman more than the man.”
“But still—” Tammi says.
“Why did I go along with his martyrdom? Because my minister, my spiritual counselor, asked me to, Tammi. I could have said no, of course. But I didn’t, because some things are bigger and more important than my reputation or any individual life.”
“And yet,” I say to her, “when we showed the receipt from the gas station—”
“I burst into tears and said thank God.” With a single nod she acknowledges the contradiction. “The longer it has gone on, the longer he’s been on death row, the closer he gets to actual execution, the more doubt I have about this plan of ours. I think this is a wrong thing for him—for me—to do. I can’t help to murder him. And that’s what it would be. It’s absurd. It may even be wicked. It’s all built on a lie—that we can’t prove our innocence. But we can. If you hadn’t come to me with this receipt, I was about to come to you, Tammi.”
I see her clearly now—her beauty, her own great personal charisma—and I see why people once adored her on sight, why even her ex-husband had only praise for her. Once again, it was all hidden in plain sight in my own research and manuscript, but like the police, I was too blinded by my assumptions to see it. Except, except, the telephone conversation and the blue and orange towels . . .
“You’ll get him off now, won’t you, Tammi?” she pleads.
“Let’s hope that I can.”
Artie and I both stare at the lawyer.
“Hope?” Artie repeats. “But surely with the proof of that receipt—”
“Ladies,” Tammi says, looking somber, “many a man has remained in prison his whole life long in spite of better exonerating evidence than that. Some have even gone to the death chamber in spite of somebody else confessing to the crime, in spite of new witnesses coming forward, in spite of everything short of DNA. Can I get Bob off? I’ll tell you the truth, Artie. Marie. I don’t know.”
In the stern, Artie’s face goes pale, while I feel a little sick myself.
It’s obvious that this dreadful possibility never occurred to Artie, but I wonder if Bob has been so naïve. Far from being the exonerating evidence it looks like, that gas receipt could be his “fail-safe” mechanism for demonstrating in a horrible way that the system failed to protect an innocent man. If Tammi can’t get him freed on the basis of it, if he dies in spite of it, that will prove his point, most tragically.
“There has to be something else,” I blurt.
They turn to stare at me, but Tammi catches on instantly, and snaps her fingers. “Of course,” she says. “Bob knows the law of capital punishment cases better than I do. If he has set things up so that he will be proved innocent only after his death, then there has to be something absolutely incontrovertible that we haven’t found yet. The problem is, he’s so damned smart, he may have hidden it in a way that guarantees that we can’t find it until he’s dead. Artie, what is it?”
“I don’t know of anything else! I’d tell you if I did, Tammi.”
“We have to find it,” Tammi says intensely. “Can you talk him into telling us?”
“Are you kidding?” Artie looks at her lawyer as if Tammi still hasn’t quite gotten it yet. “This is a holy crusade to him, as it was to me.”
* * *
On the way back in to Artie’s home, Tammi asks her about her husband’s role in all this: “How much does Stuart know?”
“Everything.”
“My God, Artie, he let you—”
“Let?” I see another hint of the successful businesswoman in the fiery look that Artie gives to her lawyer. “That wasn’t his choice to make. Oh, he could have stopped us, for his own sake. I would have agreed to that in a minute. It isn’t pleasant to be married to a woman who goes on trial for adultery and murder, let me tell you. He knows that people think he’s a fool to stay with me and to believe in me. Stuart has been a saint about all this. But you’ve got to understand, he’s a man of high principle, too. We all chose freely to make our own sacrifices for this cause.”
It’s the most amazing pact that I have ever heard of. And the frightening thing of it is, it still might work. If the receipt alone, and Artie’s testimony, don’t suffice to get Bob off, and if we never find any other exonerating evidence, he will die for his cause.
* * *
Stuart McGregor meets us at the dock and helps us tie up.
I have a feeling that Tammi and I both are looking at this tall blond man with the youthful face with much greater feelings of respect than we ever did before. We may personally think that the pact the three friends made is lunacy, that it’s a horrible sacrifice of several lives, but there’s no denying the high conscience of it, or the courage of these people.
Tammi strikes just the right tone as Stuart gives her a hand up out of the boat. With utter casualness, she says to him, “Did you get my letter about reversing the power of attorney? Now that we know for sure that Artie’s not going to prison for the rest of her life, you won’t be needing that.” She looks back over her shoulder at his wife. “Just sign the papers and mail them back to me.”
“I didn’t see them, Tammi.”
“I’ve got them, honey,” Stuart tells her, and then he explains to me, “When we were afraid that Artie might be convicted, Tammi suggested that I get power of attorney so I could handle Artie’s affairs in her absence. Thank God we won’t be needing that.”
“Who’s got Bob’s power of attorney?” I ask them.
“I do,” Tammi tells me. “Stuart, let’s go in the house. We have something to tell you. And we need to enlist your help in searching for something.”
* * *
When I run all of this past Franklin, he rather surprises me by being willing to consider that it might be the truth. But he’s pessimistic that the receipt alone will do the trick.
“It still looks as if they were having an affair, no matter what she says.”
“I know,” I agree, feeling anxious about that myself.
“And,” the prosecutor adds, “if they didn’t do it, who did?”
I have Tammi Golding’s go-ahead to be telling this story,- if we can get prosecutorial or police cooperation, we’ll take it, gratefully. But Franklin warns me not to expect much sympathy from Tony Delano, and he turns out to be rig
ht about that. “It’s all her word,” Tony complains to me, over the phone. “And you already know how I feel about that lady.”
Detective Carl Chamblin does not surprise me with his reaction to the same story.
“I don’t buy this for a fucking minute.”
“So I guess we can’t count on the cops to help us look for new evidence?”
“You can count on me to hold the stopwatch till his time runs down.”
“But, Carl, you were wrong about Steven Orbach.”
There’s a long pause, and then he says, true to character, “Maybe he didn’t kill Lyle’s niece, but he was still a killer and he deserved to die.” But then Carl says something that does surprise me: “You actually saw her? Artie? She look depressed to you? Her husband told me she tried to kill herself after we questioned her about George Pullen’s murder. He said she drove out to the old mansion and was going to throw herself out of the tower, but he stopped her. I wanted to ask him why the fuck he bothered. I say, next time let her jump.”
Part of me can’t believe this, because it seems so at odds with the intensely alive woman who took us out in the boat today. But that was after we told her we’d found the gas receipt. Before that, the woman who met us at the door was guarded, quiet, withdrawn. God knows, it would be understandable if she had been depressed to a point approaching suicidal despair, especially if she felt she was conspiring in an act that was tantamount to killing Bob Wing.
“You’re all heart, Carl,” I tell him.
He laughs and hangs up.
Susanna
18
Two weeks have gone by and although Spring Break is cresting, nothing else has broken through. When Tammi Golding tries to talk to Bob Wing about his plot to save the country’s soul, she gets nowhere. He pretends to be astonished she would even suspect him of attempting such a thing. Nor has our search for any other evidence proved fruitful, and Tammi’s attempts to get him a new trial—much less get him set free—on the basis of the gas receipt and Artemis’s new testimony are falling on deaf ears in the justice system.