Ring of Truth (26 page)

“They will believe that forever,” her brother, Lieutenant Lyle Karnacki said after they were taken into custody. “My sister will now blame
me
for everything, from Allie's death to her own execution, if that's what it comes to. She's always been right and the rest of the world has always been wrong. She'll never change.”

Maybe not, but Lucy Tobias is going to have a long, long time to think about rules and punishments, although in her increasingly confused state of mind, it is possible that she will eventually forget she even had a daughter, much less that she murdered her.

Susanna
17

That night, I insist on sleeping over at Franklin's condominium, because he's got the hot tub. After a long, naked soak in his bubbling spa, he whispers four perfect things in my ear: he tells me he was wrong; he says that I am brave; he says that I may have saved my assistant's life, and certainly Steven Orbach's; and he tells me he's never had better sex in his life than we've had the last few times we've been together. Like tonight. As he carries my sleepy body off to his bed, I wonder if I ought to remind him that he now has less than a one-month reprieve himself.

The morning will come too soon. I hurry into sleep to greet it.

“What's funny?” Tammi Golding asks me, in Bob and Susanna Wing's living room the next morning. “What'd you find over there?”

“Nothing. I just remembered something.” She knows, and is jubilant, about Orbach's impending freedom, but she doesn't know every detail of how he got it. “Last night when we finally left the Tobias house, my assistant says to me, ‘So, did I do a good thing, wanting to know about the note and the cake tin?’ ”

Tammi smiles at that, too. “I hope you said yes.”

“Are you kidding? I gave her a raise on the spot, and she hasn't even worked for me long enough to collect her first paycheck.” I
stand in the middle of the living room and look around it, imagining it filled with church members on that long-ago Saturday morning when they were looking for Susanna. “Maybe we need her here. You and I don't know what we're looking for, Tammi.”

“I have a theory about that.” She's dressed for court, in a blue silk suit with a demure ivory blouse, while I'm slopping around in writer clothes: sandals, shorts, and T-shirt, with my hair pulled back in a ponytail. Trying not to yawn, I listen carefully to her. We're both tired and neither of us quite believes this possibility, in the bright light of early day. But we're going ahead with this search-and-rescue mission, just in case. “This evidence that Bob is innocent, if there is any, will be plain as day. We'll know it when we see it. I think it has to be that conclusive and that obvious, or he wouldn't have used it.”

“If he has actually done this thing we think he may have done.”

“Yes. If. Okay, you're a writer, follow me in a little suspension of disbelief. Let's say it's the day after his execution, all right? Yesterday they killed him and today, as his lawyer, I have come to his house as he once asked me to—”

“Did
he, Tammi?”

“Yes, actually. Before he entered prison, I told him to turn all of his important personal and professional documents over to me for safekeeping. His will, tax papers, everything. He gave me a pile of stuff. But he also said, “Tammi, there are a few things I didn't have time to gather up. Go over to my house right afterwards and go through the drawers in my desk—’ ”

“That's where it is, then.”

“ ‘—and take anything that you'll need to clean up my affairs.’ ”

“That must have been a terrible conversation to have with him.”

“It was.”

Drawer by drawer, file folder by file folder, we look through everything.

“Look at this, Tammi,” I say, drawing her attention to a file labeled “Susanna.” Inside is her birth certificate, a list of names and addresses, and a single photograph of her as a teenager. She's seated on the wide stone railing of a porch, beside a teenage boy, and there's a white cat walking away from them. While Tammi exclaims over how attractive Susanna was then—“sexy little thing!”—I am frowning over the birth certificate. “Wait a minute. I have in my book that she was born in California. This says Denver, Colorado. Everybody told me she spent her entire life on the West Coast, until she married her first husband. I'm really glad I found this. I don't like to put mistakes like that in print. That can happen when I don't get to talk to a person myself. Especially with victims, I have to rely on other people's memories and impressions of them.”

Tammi hands the photo back to me, with the single comment, “Sad,” and I slip it back in the file and set the whole thing aside for perusal later.

“Why haven't you done anything with this house, Tammi?” I inquire a little later, as we're working our way through papers and odds and ends. “Doesn't the church own it? How can they afford to keep it like this for Bob?”

“I know,” she sighs. “They haven't had the heart to hire a new minister, so there's nobody else to live here. And they refuse to sell it, because they want to keep the faith.”

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, probably—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.”