Ring of Truth (7 page)

“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.”

“Why?” I asked her, trying not to sound rude.

“Jenny's got something to show you,” Anne tells me, looking tense and sounding really angry at her daughter, whose averted eyes begin to leak tears that surprise and dismay me. “It's something that she didn't show you before, something she found in the old mansion, that she hid and never showed anybody. I think it's important, but I can't get anybody to listen to me!” Her eyes seem to be begging me to give them an audience, so how can I refuse her? But what really prompts me to admit them to my house, and what disturbs me as much as her daughter's tears, is the matching look of fear on Anne's face. While I hold the door open, she pulls her daughter past me as if somebody is chasing them.

Anything to Be Together

By Marie Lightfoot

CHAPTER 4

Early in the morning of the day Susanna Wing's body was found, a man called Bahia Beach 911 to report his wife was missing. His voice, which was being automatically recorded, sounded as if he was barely holding panic under control. He stated his name, Robert F. Wing, and then he gave his address, though that wasn't necessary since addresses automatically come up on the screen. Upon hearing why he was calling, the 911 operator told him he'd have to file a report with Missing Persons, and she gave him a number to call. In Bahia, as in most jurisdictions, an adult who is missing for fewer than seventy-two hours is not considered an emergency. Spouses who don't come home are given the benefit of the doubt, which means the cops assume they've left home for their own reasons.

In Missing Persons, a new transfer from vice spoke with the distraught husband. Perhaps because she was new on the job she took his report more seriously than an older hand in the department might have at that point.

“What is your name, sir?”

“Bob—Robert F.Wing.”

“And your wife's name, sir?”

“Her name is Susanna.”

“SusannaWing?”

“Yes, Susanna Louise Wing. I'm worried. She was supposed to—”

“How long has she been missing, sir?”

“A few hours. I was out of town this week, and she picked me up at the airport this morning . . . I mean yesterday morning . . . and brought me home, and then she left to go to work in her car. She was supposed to be home around five last night. We were going to a church dinner together—I'm a minister—but she never came home. You have to believe me when I say this is not like her. She would be here, or she would call. Susanna would never let me worry about her like this. Something has to have happened, or she'd have come home.”

“You expected her around five, yesterday, and it's a little after midnight now, so you'd say she's been missing about . . . five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven . . . eight hours?”

“Yes, although if anything did happen, if her car ran off the road, or something like that, it could have happened a lot earlier, because she left the house at nine
A.M.”
The caller had a beautiful baritone voice, resonant and compelling, even in the midst of strain. “She was supposed to be showing a house all day—she's a realtor—but I don't know if she even got there. My wife is self-employed, so there's no company I can call, and the house she was showing is empty, the owners have already moved out—”

“Where is that house?What's the address—do you know?”

“Four-twenty South Ocean. I've driven over there.”

“Did it look as if your wife had been there?”

“I couldn't tell.”

“What else have you done to try to find her?”

“I've called every friend that I could think of, and I've
asked members of my church to drive around looking for her. I called 911, but they told me to call you—”

“Yes, that's right.You're doing the right things, sir.”

“But we're not finding her! Please, can you help me?”

The gorgeous voice sounded anguished, and so the police officer responded in a calming manner that was both businesslike and sympathetic.

“I'd like for you to describe her for me, sir, and I'll want a description of her car, and the license—”

“I can't find where all our pictures have gone!” He sounded frustrated, helpless, pleading. “I can't even find our wedding pictures. Susanna must have stored them away somewhere. She's a very organized person. That's one reason I know something's really wrong. I can ask my church members if they have any pictures of her—”