Ring of Truth

  “I doubt that very much,” the waitress teased as she left them.

  The three friends drank, talked, and laughed until one in the morning. No “cute guys” had approached them, but the more the girls had to drink the braver they got, until Gretchen worked up the nerve to do the approaching. By the time they weaved out the front door, they were accompanied by two men, strangers to each other, both a few years older than the girls who were flirting with them. One of the fellows seemed to have his eye on Gretchen, the other one was paying all of his attention to Emily.

  Allison walked behind the quartet, trying to join in.

  But that’s hard to do when you’re the odd man out, when everybody’s got a partner but you. When it’s supposed to be your special night, it really stings to be the one not chosen.

  But Gretchen and Emily were good friends, loyal friends, and no fools, either. It was one thing to flirt outrageously with strangers in a bar, but it seemed to strike both of them at the same time that it was another thing entirely to leave that bar with men they didn’t know. If it was possible to sober up fast, those two did. They managed to talk their way away from the two men, and once that was accomplished they each grabbed one of Allie’s hands and started running away with her, down the sidewalk, giggling. It didn’t take long for their friend to feel right in the thick of things again. But it’s possible that she didn’t quite sober up as quickly as they did, or perhaps the alcohol had hit her harder—she was thinner than both of them by a good ten pounds. Or maybe the feeling of being a wallflower stuck with her, even as the trio jogged together to her new apartment. Whatever the reason for it, when they’reached 22 Hibiscus Avenue, Allie Tobias encouraged her friends to go on to their own homes.

  “I’m going straight to sleep,” she told them.

  “I thought we were going to spend the night here,” Emily protested, feeling a little hurt herself. She spied a folded piece of yellow paper taped to the door jamb. It was addressed to Allie, so Emily pulled it off and read it. “Oh, God, Allie, your mom’s been here, and you’re supposed to call her as soon as you get in.”

  Allie grabbed for the note and read it. “Uh-oh.”

  “Are you going to call her?” Emily asked.

  “No way!” Allie said, looking aghast. “She’d know!”

  “What are you going to tell her, if you don’t call her?”

  The three of them were used to this, to being “creative” in the pursuit of independence from their parents.

  “I’ll just say I didn’t see the note.” Allie gave the appearance of trying to wrack her tipsy brain to come up with a believable excuse to give her mother. “And I didn’t call, because I was so tired from moving that I fell into bed early, and slept through all night, without even taking my clothes off.”

  “But what if she’s called here? Wouldn’t you have heard it?”

  “No, if I was that tired, I might sleep through a hurricane.”

  Gretchen wasn’t crazy about the idea of going to her own home at this hour with liquor on her breath. “My parents will know I’ve been drinking if I go home.”

  “You can come to my house,” Emily offered.

  Emily’s parents were the soundest sleepers.

  They both turned to look at Allie, still hoping she’d invite them in.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she looked so inebriated that Emily laughed and asked her, “Are you sure you can get upstairs?”

  “I’m sure! It was great, guys. Thank you.”

  They watched her go inside and close the door. As they turned to run the two blocks to Emily’s house, Gretchen said, “You think she’s mad ’cause of those guys? Because they paid attention to you and me and not to her?”

  Emily didn’t know about that, but they both felt bad about the way the evening had turned out.

  * * *

  In the morning, Emily and Gretchen felt worse, with ferocious hangovers. They waited a long time to call Allie at her new telephone number, in order to give her plenty of time to sleep in. When they finally agreed they couldn’t wait one minute more—at 11:30 A.M.—Gretchen dialed the new number.

  She let it ring six times before hanging up.

  “She’s already gone out, I guess.”

  “Or she’s in the shower.”

  “Or she’s mad and she’s not speaking to us.”

  “Allie wouldn’t do that, would she?”

  “I didn’t even get her answering machine.”

  “That’s weird. Why didn’t it pick up?”

  Gretchen shrugged. “I don’t know, but I’m starved. Can we fix some breakfast? Do you think your mom would mind?” When Emily indicated that would be okay, her friend suggested, “Bring the phone, Em.”

  All through breakfast they called, and beyond that.

  But they never did reach their friend.

  * * *

  In the little house on Thirty-seventh Street, where Allison’s parents lived, Ben and Lucy weren’t having any luck contacting their daughter, either. Over a period of ten hours, Lucy’s feelings changed from hurt to annoyance, and then to fear, and finally to a sickening terror.

  “Her very first whole day on her own and she doesn’t call us,” Lucy complained on the night when Allie was out celebrating with her friends. After leaving the cake, Lucy waited and waited to hear from the daughter who had promised to call her mother every day. “This is a poor way to start a new life, I must say.”

  “You want me to go over and check on her?” Ben asked. “No, I’ll call her myself.”

  “She won’t like it.”

  “Well, she’d better get used to it, or remember to call me.”

  But when Lucy called, she didn’t get any answer, because Allison, Emily and Gretchen were down at the Marina, giggling, drinking beer, and working up the nerve to flirt with guys.

  Finally, around midnight, Lucy insisted that Ben drive her by the Hibiscus address, so they could see if there were any lights on in Allie’s room. From the street down below, they saw that their daughter’s apartment was dark. Lucy jumped out of the car and left a note in a prominent place on the backdoor where the tenants let themselves in: “For A. Tobias,” it said on the front, because Lucy didn’t want to give away any signal that a single woman lived there alone. Inside the little folded piece of paper was a note that said: “Call us when you get in, no matter how late it is! Love, Mom & Dad.”

  The telephone in their home never rang that night.

  And although Lucy called the new number every hour on the hour all night long, no one ever picked it up. She didn’t know what to think, or what to do. This couldn’t be right; it wasn’t like Allie to be so irresponsible as to fail to call home when she was supposed to. But what if this was just a stupid way of trying to assert her independence; what if she was really there—or if she’d gone to stay at a friend’s house—and was just stubbornly refusing to give her mother what she wanted. Or what if she’d brought a boy back to her room—

  It would be awful, to walk in there and discover that.

  But wouldn’t it be worse not to discover that?

  How could she help her daughter, and be a good mother, if she didn’t know everything that was going on in Allie’s life? A young girl needed guidance in all things, because there were so many dangers, so many ways in which she could make mistakes, bad judgments, come to harm.

  Lucy Tobias spent a miserable night.

  The morning would only get worse for her and Ben, for Allie’s two friends, and for everyone else who cared at all about a sensitive, unassuming eighteen-year-old girl with a bright and hopeful future in front of her.

  * * *

  It was one of those awful coincidences that make you wonder if there might truly be such a thing as a fate that cannot be denied: the day after Allison moved into her new apartment, her police officer uncle in Bahia Beach felt something nudge his memory. It was a name, one of those that had been given him by his worrywart of a sister. Lucy was going to ruin that girl if she didn
’t cut the apron strings, Lyle Karnacki thought. They were apron strings made of iron; it would take a blow torch to cut them, he thought, and shook his head ruefully as he made the trek personally from his division to Juvenile.

  When he got there, he inquired of a cop he knew, “The name Steven Orbach mean anything to you?”

  The woman rolled her eyes, and said, “Stevie? Killed his mom when he was fourteen. Why?”

  “Oh, fucking shit,” Lyle breathed. “Tell me the whole thing.”

  “Well, that’s it. Beat her, stabbed her, and choked her until she was dead. Stevie didn’t get tried as an adult, unfortunately, so he—why?”

  “His record’s been sealed?”

  “Probably. He was a juvie. What’s he done now?”

  “Nothing, I hope. My niece up in Lauderdale Pines has just moved into an apartment house and he’s one of her neighbors. That could be him, couldn’t it? I mean, this guy is twenty-one—”

  “It’s probably him. How many Steven Orbachs can there be? That’s about his age, and that’s where he moved to, last I heard. You might want to tell your niece to find herself another place to live.”

  “Fucking shit!” Lyle exclaimed, feeling as if he couldn’t get to a telephone fast enough. “My sister’s going to have a fit. Can I get an outside line off your phone?”

  But it was already 9:00 A.M. when he called up to Lauderdale Pines.

  “Lucy? It’s Lyle—”

  The medical examiner of Howard County later determined, at Lyle’s grieving insistence, that he had been approximately six hours too late to save his niece. Ever after, his sister blamed him and he was never able to refute her accusations. He hadn’t taken her request very seriously; he’d made a halfhearted check; and now no one could accuse him as harshly as he accused himself. But when the detectives launched their search for the killer, Lyle put everything he had into it, and nobody could ever say he didn’t.

  * * *

  “Raped and murdered?” Martina Levin asked the veteran detective. Despite the shade from the tree above them, she felt as if she’d been left to bake too long in an oven. Even the hair on the top of her head felt hot when she reached up gingerly to touch it. The cop beside her had long since taken off his suit coat and laid it on the cement seawall. They’d both put on sunglasses, but she was still squinting behind the lenses of hers. “What happened to him?”

  “To Stevie Orbach?”

  Carl told her that in 1991 Orbach was convicted of the rape/murder of eighteen-year-old Allison Tobias in the early morning hours of May 27, 1990. Upon the unanimous recommendation of the jury and the fervent agreement of a district court judge, Orbach was sentenced to death, at a time when the electric chair was still the sole means in Florida of carrying out that punishment. When the state changed its laws he was presented with an alternative: death by lethal injection. To which he famously responded, “The hell with you. If I get off easy, that means you get off easy. You kill me, you bastards, for a crime I didn’t do, then you can by God watch me fry.”

  “Jeez,” Martina breathed, feeling fried herself.

  “That’s who our victim’s husband is fighting for,” Carl told her with an angry jerk of his head toward where the body lay in the decaying mansion. “That’s who the Reverend Bob Wing is trying to save from the electric chair. So do you get it now?”

  The expression on her face told him she got it now.

  “When’s Orbach scheduled to die?” she asked him.

  “Not soon enough.”

  When they walked back up to the house together, they discovered that the body had already been removed and that apparently the killer had covered his shoes in plastic to keep from leaving prints. That spelled premeditation to Carl. It suggested that a killer so careful would also cover his hands, taking pains to leave as clean a trail as possible. But one axiom of crime-scene investigation, as even young Martina Levin knew, was that every criminal leaves something of himself behind, even if it’s only fibers or hair.

  Carl learned they had not found a wedding ring to match the gold and diamond engagement ring and so it was assumed the killer had taken it. Later, when the cops found the victim’s rings at home in her jewelry box, the notched ring was determined not to be hers. Neither would it be tied to the female defendant. Once the case was closed, the rings were forgotten. They were just one of the several unsolved puzzles that crop up in any homicide. “You don’t have to find every little piece,” cops will tell you, “if you can see the big picture without them.”

  Susanna

  4

  I wonder: Did I put in too much about the Tobias murder? I think I had good reason—it shows why the Bahia cops hate Bob Wing so much and it sets up the irony of the fact that he landed on death row right next to the very man he’d been lobbying to liberate. But I’ve got so much about it you’d almost think I should have written about that murder instead of Susanna’s.

  Well, too late now.

  As if my telephone hasn’t already tortured me enough with its demand for an audience with Tony Delano and its complaints from Bob Wing’s supporters, it rings. Damn, and there’s somebody I really do want to call. I feel weak-kneed just thinking about making that call, about seeing him again. Well, he’ll just have to wait a little longer. For the first time in three weeks, I pick up a receiver, instead of letting the call shunt to the automatic answering mechanism.

  “Marie?” A familiar bass voice inquires.

  “Hi, George,” I say, with some foreboding. It’s George Pullen, up at the guardhouse at the front gate of the housing complex where I live in luxurious paranoia.

  “You taking calls now?” he asks. “You surprised me, picking up like this. I expected to hear the recording. Well, say, you’ve got a couple of visitors who aren’t on your list, and I’m calling to see should I send them on up to you?”

  Just what I feared, visitors. There’s no other reason he would be calling, except to announce the delivery of some package or other. Visitors. Damn. Just what I want in my disheveled condition—drop-ins.

  “Who is it, George?”

  When he tells me their names, I am slightly amazed at the coincidence of this event. “Send them up,” I tell him, feeling resigned. “How’s your asthma?”

  “Not so good, thank you for asking. I’m trying not to use my inhaler so much, though. Afraid of the long-term effects.”

  “What are they?”

  “Nobody knows.” He chuckles. “That’s what scares me.”

  “I see your point. There’s nothing so dangerous as unintended consequences, is there? In the short-term, though, a man’s got to breathe.”

  “That he do. How ’bout you? Finish that book?”

  I hate that question until a book is done. “I did, indeed, thank you. Not an hour ago. That’s why the Federal Express truck was here.”

  “Congratulations! Did you put me in your book?”

  “Not this time. I’m sorry, George. But listen, if you’d just kill a few people in an interesting way, I’d write a whole book about you. Can’t you do that for me, huh?”

  “I can think of a few people I wouldn’t mind—”

  I laugh. “Yeah, can’t we all.”

  “You going on vacation now, you and that boyfriend of yours?”

  “I’m just about to call him and find out.”

  “Take me with you?”

  George is a fifty-six-year-old gay man with a longtime love. They’re both former military men on good pensions, but they get bored; hence George’s part-time job in our guardhouse, where he can read espionage novels to his heart’s content.

  “What would Bennie say if I did?”

  “He’d be jealous. That boyfriend of yours is too pretty to be a lawyer.”

  I laugh, as will the “boyfriend” when I tell him this. “George, you’ve never told anybody but Bennie about my friend, have you?”

  “ ’Course not. Didn’t you ask me not to? But listen, Marie, if you’ve got to conduct a relationship in secret
, you might as well be gay.”

  I know he means well, but it annoys me to hear him say the truth. I can’t even work up a laugh about it, and he meant it halfway joking, I know. Ignoring his last comment, I tell George to shoo my visitors up this way.

  “Bye,” he says, sounding contented.

  I put my phone down, thinking: There’s not enough time to clean up. The best I can do is unclasp the barrette and pull a brush through my hair.

  * * *

  That’s the doorbell ringing, isn’t it?

  I dimly recall that sound from the days when I wasn’t writing night and day, from when I was a fairly normal human being. Now, let’s see, what do people do when their doorbell rings? Oh, yes. They get up, they walk through their house to the door, and they peer through their peephole, because they are paranoid, in spite of living in a residential enclave with round-the-clock security. And they are sometimes completely bemused to find coincidence waiting for them on their doorstep. Hadn’t I just been reading my own words about these people?

  I recall how to open the door and do so, squinting into the noonday sun and the faces of the two people on my front stoop.

  “Oh, Ms. Lightfoot, thank God you’re here.”

  It’s little Jenny Carmichael and her mother, whose name I can’t immediately call to my mind. She’s looking frazzled, as befits the mother of this child, and of four other little Carmichaels. Both of them are in sundresses and sandals with their gorgeous red hair held back by elastic bands. Jenny and her hair have both grown a lot since I last saw her. Jenny and her mom are carrying a large white canvas boat bag between them. Jenny’s got one handle of it, her mother’s got the other. Anne! That’s her name, Anne Carmichael. She’s a forty-one-year-old version of Jenny, and married to Herb Carmichael, who calls this child their “little handful.” I wonder what he calls his wife.

  “Anne?” I say, forcing pleased surprise into my voice. “Jenny.”

  The child glances quickly up at me, then down. This bold and forthright child looks scared. Of me? “I apologize for doing this,” her mom says, frowning in the sunshine and talking so fast you’d think somebody was timing her, “but I’ve been trying for a week to get hold of you and I keep getting your message machine.” She waits a beat, to give me time to make excuses for myself, but I just nod. “I didn’t know if you were out of town or what, but we finally took a chance and came by to see if we might find you home.”