Ring of Truth (5 page)

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.”

“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
over?
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.”