Ring of Truth

  “No, this was personal,” he muttered to himself.

  It wasn’t just the appearance of the victim’s body that spoke to Carl of an unusually vicious beating. There was blood everywhere, on the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. It was nearly impossible to avoid stepping in it, which surely meant that the killer had, too, leaving footprints behind him. He must have been a mess afterwards, covered in it. Some of the blood in the room had dried and gone black. Carl wouldn’t have recognized it as blood if he hadn’t seen blood like it before, so shiny it looked like glass. Some of it was so thick—and the temperature and humidity so high—that it was still damp. In those patches, it looked exactly like what it was, so that even a child could have identified the substance.

  A child had seen it, Carl recalled. Two little girls.

  He was glad he wasn’t their father, trying to calm their nightmares tonight. His own three girls had heard it all, all the gory stories. Their mother had also been a cop once upon a time, which was how she and Carl had met. But Yvonne and Carl Chamblin had made sure their babies didn’t see any of it. As far as the three grown Chamblin girls knew from their direct experience, life was suburban, safe and clean. It was too late to protect the little girls who’d found this mess.

  The tech was back. “I wonder how she got here.”

  So did Carl. “You find the ring?”

  “No. They don’t want to turn her until they get the okay.” She went back to her original line of inquiry. “I didn’t see any car outside, did you?”

  He shook his head, but then raised his glance to one of the glassless windows. Beyond a brick patio and a weedy backyard the length of a football field, there was water, the Intracoastal Waterway. He was facing east. Federal Highway was at his back, and past the Waterway, to the east, was beach and ocean.

  The tech caught his glance. “Boat, maybe?”

  Carl didn’t see a dock down there, and didn’t expect to find one. Boats would get bashed to splinters on this stretch of the Intracoastal. “She didn’t get here by boat.” Staring at the Intracoastal, it struck him that they shouldn’t have been able to see all the way to the canal. The rest of the property was way overgrown. But somebody was keeping that back lot mowed and the driveway cleared, or else the police cars would never have been able to get up to the house. It was a jungle out there, he thought, half-humorously. It also suddenly struck him what a weird and perverted thing this was: he was standing here with a stranger young enough to be his daughter, both of them staring at the voluptuous naked body of a dead woman. What kind of way was this to make a living?

  “How longs she been dead?” he muttered to himself.

  “Not long,” the tech said, thinking he was asking her. In Florida, bodies decomposed fast. She went off into a riff about tissue morbidity and the life cycle of maggots, but Carl barely listened. He’d been gauging the length of time bodies had been dead for longer than this tech had been alive. He glanced at her name tag again: Martina Levin. He wondered why she was sticking so close to him when most young cops and techs were intimidated by him, his reputation, his length of service. Over the years, he had allowed a reputation for being gruff and taciturn to grow up around him because it served so well to keep pests, fools, and administrative assholes at a distance. Then it struck him that she was stalling. That’s why she was hanging around him. She didn’t want to get any closer to this job.

  He didn’t blame her, it was a particularly nasty one.

  It was possible that the victim was killed somewhere else and then beaten postmortem, but the excess of blood made him doubt it. It appeared she had died right there where she lay on the bare wood floor. He looked around. This was once a dining room. Two-story house. Open-air tower at the upper right front of it. He hadn’t been up there yet, or anywhere else on the property except straight through from the gate to here.

  The young tech misunderstood his interest.

  “Cool old house, isn’t it? Too bad it’s so run-down, or maybe I’d buy it, fix it up.

  “You’d buy it?” he asked, amused.

  “Well, it’s for sale,” she said, defensively.

  His head jerked around again and he stared at her so fiercely that she backed up a step. “Its what? For sale?”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking a little scared, but also confused, as if to say, “So what?”

  “I didn’t see a sign out front,” he challenged her.

  “It’s in back,” she told him, still defensive.

  “Show me.”

  Nervously, with the big cop at her heels the young tech led him through French doors onto the decrepit patio. And there, leaning up against the house was the FOR SALE sign. Carl took out a handkerchief, placed it over the edge of the sign so he could tilt it up to read it without getting prints on it.

  FOR SALE, it read. A WING & A PRAYER REALTORS. SUSANNA WING.

  “I’ll be damned,” he muttered, with a quickening of interest that he hadn’t felt inside the house. This case had just gotten a whole hell of a lot more interesting. Staring down at the sign, Carl smiled, but so coldly that the tech backed up another step away from the big detective.

  “Is that important, or something?” she bravely asked.

  “Hell, I know who she is,” he said out loud.

  “You do?” she exclaimed, impressed at this apparent evidence of super detective powers.

  “Has to be her. Too much of a coincidence otherwise.” This was no prostitute. No tourist, no homeless woman. There was a missing persons report on this beaten woman, but he hadn’t connected the MPR with the nude, bloody body in the mansion. It just hadn’t fit his mental image of—“A preacher’s wife,” he said out loud, his voice holding the satisfaction of a mystery solved.

  “A what?” the tech asked in shocked, disbelieving tones.

  Carl pointed at the FOR SALE sign: A Wing & a Vrayer.

  “But how do you know?”

  “There’s an MPR on her,” Carl said.

  “A Missing person’s report? Really?” The techs eyes were wide. “Since when?”

  “Last night.”

  “That’s quick!”

  “Yes,” Carl agreed, and then added in a low, contemplative tone, “I expect she wasn’t supposed to be found this soon.” At the quizzical look on his companion’s face, he explained, “Whoever killed her, he must have thought it would be a while before anybody found her body.”

  “Why didn’t he just dump her in the canal?”

  “Because bodies float.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Martina said, flushing. “I knew that. Say, if she’s a real estate agent, I’ll bet one of her clients killed her, don’t you? Maybe he lured her out here on the pretext of buying this property, and then he attacked her?”

  “Could be,” Carl murmured, but was distracted by the arrival of another homicide detective, Jill Norman, to whom he said, “Hey, Norm, looky here who our victim just may be.”

  The other detective stood only three inches shorter than Carl, but she was ten years younger, a short-haired blonde in a prim white blouse and dark trousers who could have passed for a preacher’s wife herself. She focused on the real estate sign he was pointing at and a startled laugh burst out of her. “Oh, my God,” she said, looking incredulous. “I don’t believe it.”

  The two homicide detectives exchanged amused glances. “Any other ID turn up?” he asked her.

  “No. No purse, nothing with a name on it.”

  “Except this sign,” he suggested, in a dry tone.

  “And wouldn’t it be something, if that’s who this is.”

  “I believe there’s a word for situations like this.”

  “Yeah?” Norm asked, in a tone that suggested she was awaiting a punch line. “What?”

  “Poetic justice.”

  The woman detective laughed, and moved away again.

  Martina Levin stared at them, shocked at their humor. She fumbled to cover the lower half of her face with her partial gas mask. “I’d better get back to w
ork.”

  He heard how tight and offended her voice sounded.

  “Let me explain something to you,” he said in a tone that brooked no sentimentality on her part. “The victim’s husband crusades against the death penalty. He’s famous for it. The joke is, what’s he going to do now? Protest the execution of his own wife’s killer?”

  “Oh, my God!” she responded. “Talk about your moral dilemmas.”

  Sweetheart, you don’t know the half of it, Carl thought.

  “Tell somebody else to look for the other ring,” he said to her. “Let’s find some shade. I’ll tell you a story . . .”

  Susanna

  3

  What am I going to do about Carl?

  What he really said was: “Wing and a Prayer? Too fucking cute.” And what he really said about the victim was: “Nice legs.” He’s a tough cop; there’ve been complaints, one shooting death of a suspected felon, a couple of hearings in front of the Florida Criminal Justice Standards & Training Commission, which licenses and disciplines cops. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has a disciplinary file labeled “Chamblin, Carl E.” But he has always walked away with nothing worse than a letter warning him to watch his step, as if he were merely a rambunctious kid in high school. Defense attorneys are suspicious of his means, of certain confessions he has obtained, but nobody’s ever made any charges stick.

  “I’m not popular with rapists and thieves, or with defense attorneys,” he will tell you, with an aggressive jut to his jaw. “So sue me. They’re the only ones who complain I’m too hard on suspects. You won’t find any complaints in my files from the victims of crimes. They like me just fine.”

  So do prosecutors, who, to a man and woman, think he’s a good cop and a clean one. It was, as I said before, the state attorney for Howard County who recommended Carl—and this case—to me. But if Carl’s not brutal, at the very least he’s ugly, he’s brusque, he’s lazy, and he’s tired of being a cop; in other words, he’s not exactly the heroic figure that readers like detectives to be. Have I softened his rough edges enough to make him acceptable to most of my readers?

  Maybe, though I don’t necessarily feel good about it.

  I’m standing in front of my sliding glass doors, staring blindly out at the sunny day, feeling craven. It’s not that Carl did a bad job on the case, or that he’s dishonest; he’s probably just an ordinary cop who’s been on the job for too many years. Oh, well. If this book makes it to the movies, maybe an actor like Danny Glover can transform Carl into a gruff but lovable character. Carl’s not black, like Glover, but he should be so lucky as to be played by an actor of that caliber.

  At any rate, the manuscript—and Carl in it—is gone now, flying to New York City. Hell, I tried to make him admirable—I threw in stuff about his family, didn’t I? And I cleaned up his language. If readers think he comes off like an SOB in what I’ve written, they ought to see what I left out. For one thing, in real life his every other word is “fuck”; and for another, Carl doesn’t loathe only that particular preacher. He hates them all, having been raised by a virulent example of them. To say it soured him on the clergy is an understatement. Nor have I mentioned the prior blots on his police record, the ones that have nothing to do with this case.

  “So sue me,” I challenge myself, sounding like Carl.

  “Forget it,” my kinder, gentler self replies. “Your book’s in the mail. You should feel relieved. Try to relax, okay?”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  I live close enough to the Bahia Boulevard Bridge that sometimes I walk across it, then stroll four more blocks to the beach. Maybe I should do that to celebrate now—warm my feet in the sand, splash them in the waves. And speaking of missing sex, I should call the man who may or may not still be my lover, invite him over for a glass of champagne and whatever ensues from that, if I can remember how.

  But I don’t move, I keep staring outside, avoiding real life.

  “Shit,” I mutter, getting that queasy feeling about my book again. “It’s all wrong. My good guys look like bad guys and my bad guys don’t feel bad enough. And there’s too much innocence, not enough sin.” My story should feel bloody and dark; instead, there’s too much sweetness and light—the two little girls, to begin with. And then there’s the victim—victims are always perfect, you know. And there’s even Martina Levin, the naïve young crime-scene technician. Not to mention the fact that I could hardly get anybody to say anything bad about either of the defendants.

  I don’t know what to do about it; I can’t change real people.

  “I give up.” My own life calls. Get on with it.

  * * *

  A few minutes later, I review my phone messages to see who I’ve ignored for the past three weeks. After I finish a book I usually have to spend a good week saying I’m sorry. Sure enough, I discover a batch of calls I don’t want to return, and one that I do. I know I should make the calls related to the book first.

  “Do it,” I command myself.

  “You are such a bossy bitch.” I pick up the phone and dial the first number on the list. “This is Marie Lightfoot,” I tell the secretary who answers. “Is that you, Frances? Your boss has been—”

  “Trying to reach you!” she exclaims. “Did you go out of the country, Marie? Hold on!”

  Within seconds he’s on the line: Antonio Delano, an assistant state attorney for Howard County—this county, my own. As the lead prosecutor at the Susanna Wing murder trial, Tony’s one of the stars of the manuscript that I’ve just shipped off to New York. There’ll be a black-and-white photo of him in my book, and readers will see a small, thirtyish, curly-haired, very Italian-looking man in a suit, staring intensely into the camera over a mess of papers on his desk. Not good-looking in the least, but compelling somehow, if you think intelligence and wit are attractive, which, as it happens, I do.

  “Marie! So did you make me six-foot-four in your book?”

  “Tony, I described you as a giant among men.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just an intellectual giant.”

  “No, no. I left it to the readers to assess your height relative to the ground and your intelligence relative to the defense.”

  Over the phone, he snorts. “So since I got one conviction and lost the other, that means I come off as half-witted and midsized, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  I laugh. “I believe you called me first?”

  “Repeatedly! Where the hell you been, girl?”

  Tony’s got a husky voice that I love to listen to in trials. It gives everything he says a slightly flirtatious edge, which is no handicap in a courtroom. I’ve told him that I think it makes him sound like law is only his day job, and singing blues in a smoky bar is his real profession, but he claims he can’t carry a tune. As usual, he sounds both friendly and businesslike, an overworked lawyer with too many trials to conduct at one time. As far as the practice of law goes, Florida is no state for the lazy.

  “I go into a cave when I’m finishing a book. T’sup?”

  “It stinks, Marie.”

  I figure he’s not talking about my work habits. I’m guessing he means the surprise outcome of the double trial he just prosecuted. A single jury convicted one defendant in the Susanna Wing murder trial—the preacher—but it set the courtroom and the media atwitter by acquitting the other one—his lover. It always infuriates prosecutors to lose at trial, but Tony was truly incensed in the hallways after this one. It appears he has not cooled off very much since then.

  “Well, Tony, if they didn’t both do it—”

  “Are you saying you doubt it?”

  “Who cares what I think, Tony? Or what you think, either, now.” I won’t insult him by soft-pedaling what I see as the truth. “In the end, you only had circumstantial evidence and hearsay on Artemis, and your codefendant refused to rat her out. The jury didn’t buy it, and if I’d been on that jury I wouldn’t have bought it, either.”

  He makes a disgusted sound on his end o
f the line.

  “Well, would you?” I demand. “If you’d been on that jury, could you have sent somebody to prison for life, or recommended a death sentence, with only the evidence the jury heard?”

  “There’s more than one kind of court, Marie.”

  “You got me baffled here, Tony.”

  “There’s the court of public opinion. Look at O. J. Simpson. He’s got the mark of Cain on him and he always will, because no matter what that jury in his criminal trial thought, the media tried him and found him guilty as sin. We can do that in this case, too.”

  “Now wait a minute, Antonio.”

  “Marie, one of our defendants has got the mark of Cain now and the other one should, too. I couldn’t get it done in court, and I regret that, but you can still do it. With your book! You can make sure the public understands that they’re both equally guilty, even if the jury was too goddamned picky to—”

  “And how am I supposed to do that if you couldn’t, Tony? I don’t have any information that you didn’t present. I can’t—won’t—convict somebody in print if there isn’t evidence in fact.”

  “Oh, come on, tell me the truth. Don’t you think she did it?”

  “Sure, yes. I think they’re both guilty.”

  “Right. Well, there’s things I could tell you, Marie.”

  That statement sits there all by itself for a long moment.

  “Things I wasn’t allowed to bring out at trial,” he adds, seductively.

  “Really?” I say, dryly, and then quote a country-western lyric, “Well, this is a fine time to tell me, Lucille. I’m only talking to you on the phone right now because my book is done.”

  “And so you don’t care if it’s wrong?”

  That stings, so I bite back. “And maybe you’re a sore loser, Tony.”