“Touché. I’m asking you to come see me, Marie.”
“Always a pleasure. But you lost, Tony. Why can’t you give it up?”
“Oh, for chrissake, this isn’t about me! It’s about justice! It’s about warning other people about a murderer who got out of jail free. It’s about—” Suddenly he laughs, a short, sharp, cynical bark. “Public safety.”
In the end, of course, I give him the appointment he wants.
We agree to meet in his office at the county courthouse tomorrow morning. In the casual tone of a mere afterthought, I inquire, “You going to ask Franklin to sit in?” I mean Franklin DeWeese, his boss, the state’s attorney. There’s a pause that I can’t interpret before Tony says, “No, why should I? I hadn’t considered it. Is there some reason you want him to be here?”
“No, no, I just wondered.”
I hang up quickly. Before I can hang myself.
Then I return calls to the diehard supporters of the Reverend Bob Wing. They’re as unhappy as Tony, and as unwilling to let this thing die, albeit for a different reason. They want publicity, too, but for their cause of saving their preacher from the death penalty. Don’t these people understand that after a jury says guilty or not guilty it’s supposed to be overt But that’s disingenuous of me, isn’t it? I have written about enough homicides to know that murder is a rock thrown into the pool of life. For some people, it disrupts the current forever, creating ripples that only seem to get bigger and wider as the years go by—as it probably did for the friends and family of a young woman in Lauderdale Pines whose murder was oddly and loosely connected to the death of Susanna Wing.
Anything to Be Together
By Marie Lightfoot
CHAPTER 3
It was only slightly cooler down by the water, where the detective and the crime-scene tech found places to sit on a seawall, under the shade of a live oak tree. A few feet away the Intracoastal Waterway pounded like surf on a rocky shoreline, from all of the boat traffic passing north and south. Yachts big enough to land their own helicopters, elegant sailboats, trawlers, fishing boats, and little runabouts all jockeyed for space on the famous stretch of man-made canal.
The story that Detective Chamblin told Martina Levin was a long one. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with the murder they were investigating, but Martina Levin listened carefully anyway, feeling it was only respectful to do so, and besides, it sure beat going back into that bloody, stinking room that made her feel like retching.
With a sarcastic twist to his mouth, Carl began his story, “Once upon a time, there was a nice girl named Allison Tobias, and she lived with her parents in Lauderdale Pines . . .”
“What’s this got to do with Mrs. Wing?” Martina dared to ask him.
“Wait, you’ll see,” he told her. “Allison was a sweetheart—”
* * *
Everybody said so. If she had a fault, it was that she was a little too sweet, a bit too giving and generous, a shade too inclined to reach out a helping hand to anybody with a sad story, without first checking to make sure it was true.
In 1990, she was eighteen years old, just graduated from high school in Lauderdale Pines, Florida, and though a majority of her fellow seniors were going on to college, Allison hadn’t taken any entrance exams or written any applications.
“I want to make some money first,” she told her parents, Ben and Lucy, at the end of her junior year of high school. For a semester she’d put them off whenever they wanted to sit down and talk about college, and now they understood why. “I want to work for a while, so I can pay my own expenses and don’t have to be a burden on you.
The elder Tobiases appreciated the sentiment, and it was true that they were not wealthy people. Financing their daughter’s education, even just for the two years of an associate degree, would be a major strain on their single-income budget. Ben was a thirty-year man at a lumber yard; Lucy had devoted herself to taking care of him, their little house and their child. But they suspected that what this announcement of Allie’s really meant was that their daughter wanted to be able to afford to rent her own apartment, so she didn’t have to live at home with them anymore, which she would have had to do if she had enrolled, as they had expected her to do, in the nearest community college.
“I was hurt,” her mother admitted.
But Ben Tobias remembered his own need to assert his independence when he was a teenage boy, and he reminded his wife that they had married when they were only one year older than Allison was then.
“She has never even dated,” Lucy objected, thinking of the perils of too much independence too soon for a girl who was shy around boys at the best of times.
“Neither had you,” her husband retorted.
His wife tried to smile at the good-humored jibe. “Yes, and that’s just what I’m afraid of! She’ll fall for the first man she meets out there, just like I did, and look where I ended up!” But then she softened it with a smile, to let Ben know that she wouldn’t have had it any other way. For herself. But not for Allie. For her daughter, Lucy had other plans: college, slow maturation, a carefully thought-out career path, with marriage and children down the line at the appropriate juncture. But not now, and not anytime close to now.
“We can’t tie her to the bedpost,” Ben gently reminded her.
Still, Lucy Tobias wouldn’t hear of it, at least not without laying down a few safeguards first. She finally capitulated enough to say that she and Ben would give Allie enough funds to set up modest housekeeping if—and only if—the girl could find an apartment within walking distance of their home. She would have to check in with her mom whenever she was out late at night, and once a day all of the rest of the time, and her father would need to install security locks and an alarm system in the new residence.
“She was only barely eighteen,” Lucy says in defense of her concern, which in hindsight seems almost prescient rather than overprotective. “And a shy eighteen, at that. She had a couple of nice friends, but no circle that she hung around with, like some of those girls who get in trouble do. I wouldn’t have that, no mall rats for my child. I always told her she had plenty to keep her busy, with schoolwork and piano practice, and a little soccer when she was younger, and helping me around the house. There was no need for her to be gallivanting around the town without her dad or me. Why, she’d never even taken a trip out of town without us, and here she wanted to go off and live by herself.”
They didn’t have any other children; they wanted to shelter their one.
Lucy Tobias secretly hoped that Allie wouldn’t be able to find a place that met the criteria; theirs was a single-family residential neighborhood for the most part, with nearby rental space at a premium, it being so rare. But find it Allie did, though she had to keep checking the FOR RENT notices everyday for three months before she finally stepped into what seemed the perfect one, at 22 Hibiscus Avenue. It was a mere three blocks away, walkable even for Lucy. The only thing left from her mother’s original conditions was for Ben to install enough security to fortify a Fort Knox, or a beloved daughter.
The Hibiscus address was a house, larger than its neighbors, with two upper floors that were always rented out, mostly to young, single working people and to students. Allison Tobias would have the sunny studio unit at the back of the second floor; directly across from her was a law student who was more often at the library than at home, and on the other side of the shared bathroom was a kitchenette/bedroom that was rented by a young tax accountant whose entire income was derived from freelance accounts, and who was also home a lot. The third floor was one large, self-contained apartment that was rented by a pair of self-described computer nerds who galloped up and down the stairs at the odd hours when they left for work and came home again. The owners of the house, a retired couple from Michigan, lived on the first floor and never kept a noisy tenant around long. They made an exception for the clatter of the “computer boys,” up and down the stairs, because they had such an exemplary work ethic
. Down in the basement apartment, where few people would have wanted to live, an elementary school custodian kept three rooms as neat and tidy as he maintained the halls and classrooms of the Briarwood Academy, a private school for privileged and scholarship children of the beachfront town of Lauderdale Pines.
Lucy Tobias had a brother who was a narcotics detective for the neighboring Bahia Beach Police Department, and she got him to look up the backgrounds of all of Allie’s new neighbors on his police computer.
“Lucy, you know this is illegal,” he told her.
“So is double-parking,” his sister said tartly, “but I’ll bet you do it now and then, and so do I. You can’t tell me that you cops don’t look up people you meet. If this were Marilyn”—his daughter, Allie’s cousin—“you’d check them out.”
He had to admit that was true.
“Clean,” he reported back to her.
There wasn’t a mark against the owners of the house or any of their tenants in any of the criminal records databases that Detective Lyle Karnacki—Uncle Lyle—checked for his sister.
That made her feel better, although she still would have much preferred for Allison to stay home. “Think how much money you could save that way,” she argued with the girl. But her daughter, who had been so easy to get along with all of her life, seemed to have become uncharacteristically stubborn, and Lucy couldn’t get her to change her mind about moving out. “You go over there and meet those people yourself,” she instructed Ben. “There’s nothing like looking people in the eye.”
So Allison’s dad made a point of introducing himself to everyone who lived there, and shaking their hands to get a sense of who his daughter was going to be near. They seemed like normal people to him, people with jobs who kept decent hours, except for the computer nerds, who claimed they didn’t even know what their regular hours were supposed to be. They just worked as long as it took, one of them told him with a grin. Ben rather approved of that, because that’s the way life was—you worked as long as it took at whatever it was you were committed to do.
“I didn’t much care for the handshake of the fellow in the basement,” Ben reported back to Lucy, out of their daughter’s hearing. “You can judge people by that, you know, or at least I’ve always found you can. And that kid had one of those handshakes that makes you want to wipe off your hand afterwards. Kind of sweaty, you know? But I liked the way he offered to help me put the locks on Allie’s door and on her windows.”
The janitor was a young man—only twenty-one, he told Ben—but accomplished with the tools of his janitorial trade, it appeared. He wielded a screwdriver with confidence, handled a claw hammer as if he’d been born with one in his hand. No silver spoon for him, unlike the kids he cleaned up after at the Academy.
His name, he told Ben, was Steven Orbach.
But all the kids called him Stevie.
He was a burly guy, easily six feet tall and 200 pounds, with sandy-colored hair that he wore cropped in military fashion, and a square, open, if rather inexpressive, face. Ben Tobias almost asked him if he’d recently been in the service; he had that kind of shaved, muscular appearance to him.
“If your daughter ever needs any little repairs done,” the husky young man said to the doting father, “just tell her to leave a note at the top of the basement stairs.”
“I imagine I’ll be taking care of things like that,” Ben answered, rather stiffly, but he added, “Thanks just the same.” Nor did he pass the offer on to Allie. Why encourage her to be dependent on other people, when she was going to have to start fending for herself? If she needed a drain unplugged, he’d clear it; if she had car trouble, he’d take care of it as he had always fixed the family cars.
Allie moved into her new little place the day after graduation.
Her mother took a white cake with lemon icing—Allison s favorite—over that night after dinner, and tried not to cry when she knocked on Allie’s door and nobody was home. Lucy had insisted on making keys for herself and Ben so they could open the backdoor downstairs and Allie’s door upstairs. “In case you re ever sick, honey,” Lucy had explained in defense of the idea. “Or you go somewhere and we need to get in to water your plants.”
But now, faced with the closed door on the second floor, Lucy couldn’t quite bring herself to use that key, even though the delivery of a cake did seem to her like sort of an emergency. Somebody might knock it over, she reasoned, if she left it out in the hall. But Allie had made a point about saying, “Now, Mom, you can’t just come in anytime you want to. You have to knock, just like you do on my door at home.” That, itself, had been a battle royal several years earlier, with Mom arguing that it was her house and she had a perfect right to enter any room of it, and Daughter arguing it would be an invasion of her privacy. When Ben had weighed in on Allie’s side, Lucy caved.
Lucy knew she’d better respect this door, too.
With a defeated sigh, she set the cake tin on the floor just to one side of the door and hoped none of those other people who lived there would step on it, or steal it.
“Don’t cry,” Ben told her when she got home. “She has to grow up.”
But it was hard for Lucy to let go, and not to worry and feel rejected. Already she suspected that Allison was off doing things Lucy didn’t know about, and probably with people that Ben and Lucy hadn’t even met.
* * *
The two high school girls who were Allison Tobias’s friends helped her celebrate her new freedom that first night at the Marina Bar & Grill, a popular hangout overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. The girls were too young to drink legally, but they had fake IDs, like almost every other high school student they knew, and the Marina was too crowded to be particular.
If Ben and Lucy had known, they’d have had a fit.
“I love my parents,” Allie declared, raising her first glass of draft beer and looking solemn. “God bless ’em.” Then she broke out in a huge grin that was instantly mirrored in the faces of Emily Rubeck and Gretchen Hansford. “May they put my old room to good use!” The three gaily clicked their glasses together, and then chugged their beers. None of them normally drank that fast, or very much at all, but this was a special night of long-awaited independence for the most protected one of their trio. Emily and Gretchen were both headed for out-of-town universities, even though they didn’t quite have the grade-point average of their smart and diligent friend Allison. What they did have were more permissive parents; Lucy and Ben were well known among their classmates for keeping their only child on the tightest of leashes.
“It’ll always be 1950 for Lucy and Ben,” Gretchen said, as she set her now-empty glass back down on the little paper coaster. Already her brain felt a little dizzy, but she was having fun; they all were, and they had agreed that they wouldn’t drive on this festive night, they’d walk—or wobble—back to Allie’s new place. If they didn’t find a party first, or three cute guys to drive them. “Nineteen-fifties!” she repeated.
This observation struck the girls as hilarious.
But Gretchen and Emily knew that it made Allison feel guilty to make fun of her well-intentioned parents, so they didn’t press the jokes too far. Besides, there was so much else to discuss over their second, and then their third, beers. What should Allie put up on her bedroom walls to decorate them? How much stuff could the other girls get into their dorm rooms without ticking off their roommates? And had Allie met any of the guys in the other apartments? Were they nice? Were they cute? Should the girls have a little party and invite Allie’s neighbors?
“There’s this really built guy who has an apartment down in the basement—”
“In the basement! Oh, yuck, I’d never live in a basement.”
“And these computer guys who live upstairs, but I’ve never seen them, because they go to work, like, around two in the morning, and they don’t get back until, like, one-thirty the next morning—”
“Never date a computer guy—”
“And the other two people on m
y floor are girls.”
“Are they nice?”
“I guess. I don’t really know.”
“Yeah, ’cause you’re too busy checking out the guys!”
Giggling turned to guffaws, until other patrons at the increasingly packed and noisy tavern turned to look at the three young women who were having such a terrific time together. “I hope you’re not planning on driving,” the waitress observed, on her fourth trip to their table. “ ’Cause if you are, I’m staying off the roads.”
“Not us!” Gretchen told her, pretending to be serious for a second.
“Absolutely not,” Allie echoed, with a straight face that she couldn’t maintain. She laughed up at the waitress, who couldn’t help but smile back at the girl with the face that looked so young, so innocent. The waitress, in her late twenties, remembered how it felt to be a graduate fresh from high school. She was tired on this night, as on most nights, and she thought to herself that these silly girls had no idea what life had in store for them.
“Gonna walk to Allie’s place,” asserted Emily.
Allison Tobias beamed with pride at those two words: “Allie’s place.” The waitress caught the look, and even intuited its import. She, too, had once known the excitement of moving out, getting a place of her own. Now it only seemed to represent more hard work, but once it had been exciting. She had a strange sense, one that she didn’t recall ever having before, of wanting to warn the giggling girls somehow—but warn them of what, the waitress didn’t know. Of life in general? Of enjoying this moment in particular, because it might never feel this good again? She didn’t know, and the odd moment passed.
“Are you really sure you want another round?” she inquired.
Gretchen crossed her eyes at Allie. “Everybody’s a mom.”
“Yes, Mother,” Allie said to the waitress, and then blushed a deep scarlet that made the waitress smile a little and shake her head at them. Encouraged, Allie added impishly, “We’ll be good.”