Twisted Justice

by Diane Capri

  “You mean you’ve never played golf before in your life?” Marilee, a scratch golfer, was appalled. She’d sooner dine with gators.

  “Nope. And I wanted to play with the best, so I paid extra to get teamed up with you,” he grinned again.

  I think I heard growling from Marilee, but maybe it was the cart engine. Mitch laughed out loud.

  A few times in the first six holes, I shared a cart with Marilee Aymes, attempting to smooth the open hostility between her and Grover. Marilee was unpredictable and fun, but many people found her an unsuitable companion. Which was one of the reasons I liked her, even if her behavior was often outrageous.

  On the fourth fairway, our talk turned to General Andrews and his nomination. All of Tampa had been discussing nothing else for weeks.

  Marilee was angry over Craig Hamilton’s shooting. “These anti-abortion nuts are getting to be a real problem, Willa. I’ve cut down my volunteer work at the free abortion clinic in the projects to one day a month. It’s so unsafe now,” Marilee told me.

  “You’re a cardiologist. Why are you volunteering at the abortion clinic?”

  Marilee’s tough exterior exuded indifference, but I knew her better than many people. Volunteering at a clinic was exactly the kind of thing she often did, but abortion was definitely out of her area.

  “Somebody’s got to do it,” she said. “I mostly do the counseling and help out with the medical stuff if there’s no one else. Some of these patients are so poor they can’t feed themselves and the kids they’ve already got. I sympathize with them.”

  “It’s a tough issue. I don’t think I’d ever be able to get an abortion and I thank God I’ve never needed one,” I told her.

  “Amen,” she said, in the first vaguely religious comment I’ve ever heard her make.

  We reached the seventh hole with Grover never having hit another ball as well as his first three-foot drive. Marilee’s patience stretched to the breaking point. When the drink cart came around, we took a break for cold water and sodas. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, maybe.

  Grover ordered two beers and Marilee ordered scotch.

  Mitch and I struggled not to laugh.

  Mary Rose Campbell, the pretty, young drink cart driver who doubles as the club’s barmaid told us that General Andrews had never arrived. They’d tried calling him for the past two hours, but got the answering machine. Someone had been sent out to his home to find him.

  “No one can figure it out. Why, General Andrews hasn’t missed a Blue Coat in ten years. What do you think happened to him?” Mary Rose said in her whispery little voice. She bent over to give the guys a good view of her rump while she dug down in the ice chest looking for Grover’s beer.

  Whether to tweak Marilee or because he really is grossly rude, Grover punched Mitch conspiratorially in the arm and said, “Don’t you want to order a beer, too, Mitch? Sure improves the scenery.”

  Before anyone else could react, Marilee hauled off and punched Grover right in the jaw, knocking him onto the grass.

  Howling, he grabbed his face and shouted that he’d sue her for battery.

  It was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that I’d seen a mature woman act like an immature child. My mouth fell open in amazement.

  “Kiss my grits,” she said. She jumped into their cart and sped off.

  Mary Rose Campbell seemed to have a great deal more sympathy for Grover’s sore jaw, so we left Grover with her and the drink cart.

  Mitch and I rode all the way to the eighth tee, but we couldn’t hold back any longer. The morning had turned into a comic farce that lightened all of our spirits probably even Grover’s. We laughed so hard we were holding our sides and trying not to wet our pants.

  Marilee returned quickly with my brother, Jason, in her cart. When they drove up, she said, “Here’s my new partner.”

  Then, she walked right up to the tee and hit the ball over 280 yards.

  Jason leaned over and said, sotto voce to Mitch and me, “She just swooped into the clubhouse and grabbed me. Is now a good time to tell her I’ve never played golf before?”

  Mitch’s turn was next and he gathered enough composure to hit the ball in the right direction and then join Marilee in her cart. I managed about 150 yards and Jason, who I think was kidding about never having played golf before, at least made contact with the ball. Marilee snorted when Jason’s ball landed about fifty yards out and took off with Mitch toward her ball, which was clearly the farthest drive.

  That left me with Jason and Jason with Mitch’s clubs. What a day. And we had eleven holes to go. The purple egg on my head started to throb as I took the wheel and headed off down the cart path.

  “Did General Andrews ever show up?” I asked Jason.

  “No, and we’re all pretty worried about it,” he said. “He doesn’t answer his telephone and no one has seen or heard from him. They sent someone out to his house, but Andrews lives all the way out at Tampa Green, so it will take a while to get there.”

  “Does Warwick know of any reason Andrews wouldn’t show up? It’s not like him to skip an event he’s been sponsoring for years.” I was a little worried, but not overly so. “Andrews told me last night he’d be here.”

  Jason looked away from me and denied having any inside information, which I took to mean that he knew something he wasn’t at liberty to divulge.

  I respected Jason’s confidential capacity as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Andrews’s private sponsorship of a golf tournament shouldn’t have been an issue in his confirmation. There was no reason for secrecy.

  “Are they worried about a repeat of yesterday’s shooting?” I pressed him.

  Jason seemed to consider his answers carefully.

  “I don’t think so. The local cops wanted to give him police protection, but the general refused. He’s refused all extraordinary security measures, even though we’ve told him it’s standard procedure for any nominee.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Andrews says a U.S. Army Four Star General can take care of himself. It would be nice if he’d start doing it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve all counseled him on how to get his nomination approved. But he just won’t cooperate. He makes it damned difficult for the party to support him, even if he was the President’s choice.” Jason sounded disgusted, whether for the nominee, the President or the process, I wasn’t sure.

  “Despite what you told Frank Bennett last night, does the party want to support the President on this one?” I asked him. During the hearings, it seemed to me there was little about the process that was supportive, of the President or anyone else, but particularly General Andrews.

  Jason looked at me shrewdly. “What have you heard from George about that, Willa?”

  The question startled me. George was very highly placed in Republican circles but his influence with Democrats was non-existent. George thinks all Democrats are ideologically incompetent to sit on the Supreme Court, as he’d made plain to everyone he’d spoken to during the past few weeks, often to my complete mortification.

  “What would George know about the Democrats’ strategy? He’ll barely talk to your boss on the street and he threw him out of our house last night.”

  One of the many subjects George and I disagree on is politics.

  George is on top of all the issues, fully cognizant of the nuances of each. He’s the only man I know, besides maybe Frank Bennett, who can identify all 100 senators and most congressmen by sight.

  I, on the other hand, used to be able to identify both Florida senators and Sonny Bono. Since Sonny died, I’m down to two.

  Jason shrugged, maybe a little too casually. “I’m sure you’re right. It’s just that there are so many rumors floating around Washington and George knows everything that happens. I thought maybe he’d told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  I was really getting exasperated. If this cloak and dagger is how all of Washington works, no wond
er they never get anything done.

  Jason pretended to consider the question, stalling until we got to the ball and he could get out of the cart near the others so he wouldn’t have to answer. When he tried to get into Marilee’s cart afterward, I made it impossible. Unless he wanted to acknowledge that he was trying to ditch me, which would tell me something, too.

  “I’m not going to let this drop, Jason, so you might as well tell me now,” I said with the courtroom sternness I reserve for lawyers about to spend the night in jail for contempt.

  “You know, you’ve always been so supremely stubborn.” He said it fondly. I think. “How much do you know about the history of Supreme Court appointments?”

  “Very little. Why?”

  “It’s fascinating, really. For instance, did you know that when Taft was President, he was promised a Supreme Court appointment by Teddy Roosevelt in exchange for political support?” Jason asked. “Then, Roosevelt didn’t live up to the bargain, so Taft asked President Harding to appoint him Chief Justice and Harding did it.”

  “You’re right, Jason. That’s just fascinatingly irrelevant. What does that bit of history have to do with Andrews?”

  Strategies that worked in my courtroom were less effective on the golf course, but I had no way to force Jason or any other private citizen to tell me anything.

  As if to underline my impotence, he ignored my question and asked one of his own. “Do you know how the selection process works?”

  “Not really.”

  “When a Supreme Court Justice resigns, retires or dies, the President asks his chief of staff for nominees. The chief works with the Attorney General and White House Counsel on a list of potential candidates.”

  Hoping this was going somewhere, I murmured encouragement.

  He continued, “A tentative choice is made and then the Chief of Staff asks key party senators for their views. The President usually talks to the opposing party whip, to judge the opposition.” He must have sensed I was chafing with impatience. “It is a highly political process.”

  I gave him a small grin along with a dose of sarcasm. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “The point is that the normal process wasn’t followed in Andrews’s case. None of us knew about his nomination until it happened.”

  I must have looked puzzled still, so he spelled it out for me. “The senators are not happy about that. It discounts their power. And it means none of their favorites got a chance.”

  “So the contentiousness, the hostility, is some sort of play-ground squabble between the big boys over who’s more important?” I asked, not bothering to hide my disgust. The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys and the size of their battles.

  Jason sighed. “Partly. But it’s more than that.”

  He waited a couple of seconds, as if he hadn’t already made up his mind how much to tell me. “The rumor is that the President appointed Andrews because of some secret deal between them. President Benson’s part of the deal was just to make the appointment. Which he did.”

  Jason took my arm to draw my glance toward him, briefly, before he told me something I should have guessed long ago. “The President doesn’t want this nomination confirmed. Andrews will be too unpredictable once he gets on the bench.”

  It made sense, in a politics-as-usual way. If President Benson didn’t want Andrews confirmed, that explained why the members of his own party had felt free to show open hostility to Andrews instead of closing the ranks to protect him.

  “And what about Warwick? Where does he fit into all this?” I asked.

  “Exactly where you’d think,” Jason said, sounding indignant now, as if I should know that Warwick was above all reproach. “He’s furious with the President. But he can’t show that on national television.”

  Almost like a cartoon light bulb going off in my head, I finally got it.

  “So Warwick’s joined forces with George and the Republicans to defeat the nomination?” My incredulity was plain.

  “Politics makes strange bedfellows, Willa. You know that.” Jason was resigned and tired of talking about it. “Are you happy now that you know the whole story?”

  The throbbing purple egg on my forehead seemed to mock me, pounding home my naiveté. “I don’t know if I’m happy or not. It sounds like politics at its worst to me. What possible reason could there be for the President to ignore the best interests of the country and appoint Andrews in some sort of horse trade?”

  “That would depend on what the trade was, wouldn’t it?”

  Now Jason just sounded tired. I noticed deep circles under his eyes suggesting he’d had another sleepless night.

  It didn’t occur to me to wonder what he’d been doing all night. He was resigned to see this thing through, but he didn’t like it. Nor did I.

  The rubber chicken lunch, served on the patio, was all the more unappetizing because Senator Warwick delivered the keynote speech.

  The mayor’s foursome won the tacky and cheap blue sport coats that were the first prize, along with bragging rights for the next year. Our group finished ten over par; not a stellar score for a scramble and we had no hope of winning, even after we applied Grover’s big handicap.

  As I exited the locker room a few minutes after the final awards were handed out, I felt all of the jocular energy in the club had shifted to something much more somber. The few people who remained were gathered around in small groups. The buzz of conversation was quiet, but anxious. I looked around for someone who could tell me what had happened, but everyone I knew well enough to trust had already left.

  I glanced up and saw the television in the bar area, usually tuned to a sporting event, running a cable news bulletin, but I couldn’t hear what was being said over the din of the crowd.

  Men had bowed their heads. They were speaking to each other, with worried frowns on their faces. I saw a couple of women near the service station, including the pretty bar maid, Mary Rose Campbell, crying.

  “What is it?” I asked someone standing next to me. I touched his arm and felt alarmed, absorbing the impact of the unnamed disaster through my senses. “What’s going on?”

  A man I recognized as a part of the Mayor’s winning foursome, still wearing the tacky blue coat that was his trophy just an hour or so before, turned his now ashen face toward me and said, “General Andrews was found dead about eleven-thirty this morning.”

  I rushed out to my car and turned on the radio, where I hoped to get accurate information that I could understand. The story was to the point, but contained enough detail to make me realize that some investigation had been done before the information was released:

  Tampa’s first Supreme Court nominee, General Albert Andrews, is dead. The general apparently committed suicide, despondent over the course his confirmation hearings had taken and the shooting of his long time secretary, Craig Hamilton, Thursday.

  Police Chief Ben Hathaway announced just a few minutes ago: “It appears that General Andrews shot himself early this morning. His body was found in his fishing boat on the small lake in back of his Tampa Green home.”

  Of course, the general was upset over the turn the hearings had taken. But enough for a man who’d fought and survived three wars to kill himself? How could this be true?

  Tears sprang to my eyes as I thought instantly about Deborah’s hopeful face when I first saw her last night. She and Andy had seemed so happy together then, before he’d made such a spectacle of them all and she’d looked so stricken.

  How must she feel now? Wouldn’t a wife see this coming? Had she?

  A tear made its way down my cheek and I brushed it away.

  Judges don’t cry, I reminded myself, even in private.

  And how could I be crying for Andrews anyway? I hadn’t even liked the man.

  I pulled over to turn down one of the side streets off the Bayshore and sat for several minutes. Exhaustion settled in on top of the pain in my head, to say nothing of the pain in my heart, th
e exact source of which I still hadn’t located.

  I sat there a long time, trying to deal with the news and listening to the radio for more information.

  Finally, the driver of a city garbage truck behind me laid on his horn, jarring me back to the present. The truck appeared huge in my rearview mirror.

  He leaned his head out and shouted, “Hey, Lady! Get out of the way! Can’t you see? I got to get those trash cans!”

  I looked blankly in front of me and saw the trashcans plainly, for the first time. I pulled slowly back onto the road.

  During the short drive home, I heard the Andrews suicide story repeated on three different stations. No one knew any more than what Chief Hathaway had said at the press conference. I didn’t notice the scenery I passed the rest of the way.

  At Minaret, I left Greta with the valet and went up the stairs two at a time, running on adrenaline. I burst into the living room calling for George. Harry and Bess came bounding toward me, but George was nowhere to be found in any of the ten rooms of our flat. Granted, I looked quickly. But I’m sure I would have found him if he was there: there just aren’t that many places to hide.

  I went back downstairs and into the Sunset Bar, where neither the bartender nor the waitress had seen George all day. I checked the kitchen, the dining rooms and the outdoor dining areas. There were a few late lunchers, but no George. Finally, I found Peter in the office tallying up the sales for the morning.

  “Have you seen George?”

  “Not today. I thought he was with you.” I must have looked confused, because he followed up, “Not to play golf, of course. I just thought he had gone out to the club early this morning when you did. When I got here, his car was gone and so was yours.”

  Deflated and worried now, I walked slowly back to the Sunset Bar and sat at my favorite table overlooking the water where George and Jason and I sat last night. Being able to sit outside and watch both the sunrise and sunset is one of the best things about living on Plant Key. Now, I barely noticed the view.

  Where could George have gone?

  I reviewed my efforts to find him.