Twisted Justice

by Diane Capri

He sat down in the chair next to me, the one that faced the water. Somehow, he didn’t strike me as the kind of guy I wanted to hug. In fact, I was so wary of the Andrews clan by now, I didn’t even want to shake hands with him.

  David had always been the serious one. He was a shy and quiet teenager the last time I’d had a conversation with him. The intervening years didn’t seem to have changed his approach to conversation any. The only small talk was of the “nice to see you again” type that takes about thirty seconds. Then, he waited for me to say something.

  I started in a direction that I was fairly sure he wouldn’t have anticipated. “Did you know Thomas Holmes?”

  His eyebrows shot up. Good. I’d surprised him. “Sure. I knew Thomas. He was a couple of classes ahead of me at West Point. Why?”

  “Do you know how he died?”

  Seemingly without guile, he said “Killed in a training accident. On maneuvers, somebody had live ammunition in their gun. It was investigated. No one was ever charged. I don’t think they could find the gun that shot him.”

  It interested me that David knew the contents of the slim file that Jason had given me. The folder contained Thomas’s death certificate. Killed by a single gunshot wound to the heart, it said. Age at death was twenty-eight. Manner of death was accidental.

  Also in the folder was the final report of the investigation reflecting that Thomas had been shot during a training maneuver. Did David know that the murder weapon was conclusively identified as a handgun issued to Thomas himself, although the verdict on his death was not suicide? General Andrews’s name appeared nowhere on the paperwork. There was no mention in the report of who found Thomas’s body or where he’d been discovered. The documents looked official enough to be the official cover-up version Olivia had mentioned. I’d thought of about fifty questions to ask in the past thirty minutes.

  Now David asked a question of his own. “Why? That was a long time ago.”

  “Was your dad there at the time?” His eyes widened and he looked at me with an inquiry that hadn’t been there before.

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “Andy was there. But he wasn’t in the field with Thomas. Why do you ask?”

  I’d tried to figure out how Olivia’s version of Thomas’s death could be true, and the plausibility of her theory completely escaped me. I just couldn’t see how Andrews might have killed Thomas and gotten away with it. And the paperwork certainly didn’t support her idea. “But couldn’t he have put the live ammunition in one of the guns, maybe?”

  David shook his head. “I don’t see how. How could the general know where Thomas would be, who would be in a position to kill him and what gun he would have? I don’t think that’s possible,” he concluded. Then he added, “I’m willing to believe a lot of bad things about my father, but I don’t see how he could have killed Thomas Holmes.”

  I let him think about it for a while. Then I said, “Let me put it this way. If the general had wanted to have Thomas Holmes killed in that training exercise, could he have arranged it?”

  He considered the question. “I suppose so,” he said, thoughtfully drawing out each word. “A four-star general can arrange just about anything.” He leaned back and folded his hands over his flat stomach. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he did do it. But why would he bother?”

  That was another good question, the one Jason had posed and suggested I should answer. “David, you said Thomas was at West Point with you. How well did you know him?”

  “Pretty well. I knew President Benson’s son, Charles, too. We hung out together. My brother, Donald, and Sheldon Warwick’s son,” he answered me frankly. “Those were the early days of the Benson Presidency. We’d get invited to the White House. It was all pretty cool, really, for army kids.”

  This came out of left field for me. “Charles Benson and Shelley Warwick were in the army?” I had never heard this before. “Shelley was. Charles just hung out with us. It’s kind of hard for the President’s kid to find friends, you know.”

  I thought about the presidential children I’d heard of over the years. All of them had seemed to experience a difficult adolescence. Living in the White House fishbowl was not easy, even for adults. For kids, it had to be equal parts excitement and prison.

  I drew my attention back to David’s story. “Charles was kind of a behavior problem even before his dad got elected. After they got into the White House, the general told me Charles became quite a handful.” He took a break and looked across the water at the convention center, where the winter boat show was in full swing. “As a favor to the President, Senator Warwick and Dad arranged for Charles to hang out with us when we had the time. That’s all.”

  Charles Benson, Shelley Warwick, Thomas Holmes and both of General Andrews’s sons were friends, hung out together at the White House. And Charles Benson was a juvenile delinquent. I was getting warmer. The little hairs on the back of my neck were tingling.

  “Are you and Charles Benson still friends?” I asked him.

  He gave a quick, negative shake of his head again. “Something happened with Thomas and Charles. The general said we couldn’t hang with either of them anymore.”

  “What about Shelly Warwick?”

  “Shelley was a little older than us. He’d left West Point already.” With a little grin, David added, “Charles was kind of a pain anyway, always getting into stuff and then we’d get into serious trouble for it. It wasn’t worth it.”

  “What do you mean it wasn’t worth it?”

  He grinned now, applying adult insight to adolescent behavior. “Our Dad was a general, but Charles’s Dad was the President. We had more clout with regular army guys, you know?”

  I got it. The general’s sons, the Senator’s son, and Thomas Holmes, the son of generations of West Point graduates before him, had high status among their peers, but Charles Benson, the President’s kid, was a notch or two up the ladder. None of the other boys would have been friends with Charles in the normal course of Washington hierarchy. Which meant that being friends with Charles would diminish the status of the other boys in Charles’s presence, so they’d rather be the big fish in their own West Point pond than the minnows in the White House pool.

  “How about Thomas?” I asked. “Did he mind being banished from Charles’ company?”

  As if he’d never considered the question before, David said “Actually, he did, now that you mention it. Thomas really liked Charles, you know? Shelley, Donald and I were just being his friends because the general said we had to. But Thomas and Charles were really close.”

  “How close were they?” The little hairs on the back of my neck were fairly vibrating now. Maybe it was the power of Jason’s suggestion, but I felt I was finally getting somewhere.

  “Inseparable in some ways, I guess,” David told me. “Thomas was really pissed when the ‘hands off’ order came down from the general. Thomas said he wasn’t going to do it. He said the army couldn’t order him to abandon his friends; the general’s reach didn’t go that far.”

  “What happened?”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Sunday 1:45 p.m.

  January 30, 2000

  “THE NEXT WEEK, THOMAS got orders to maneuvers in Korea. He was killed there a few months later. I never saw him again.” David said this as if he was putting the pieces together in his mind.

  “Was your father in Korea at the same time?” I asked.

  He answered me slowly, “I think so,” drawing the words out.

  From the expressions that passed over his face, I could almost see the gears meshing, see him adding two plus two and coming up with what I had come to believe was the only possible four.

  “Still think Andy didn’t kill Thomas?” I asked him.

  This time, he didn’t bother to argue. He asked, “But why? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He sat up a little straighter in the chair, mused aloud, “Andy was capable of killing. He’d done it a lot in Vietnam and other places.�
� He stared out over the water again, thinking, trying to put it together.

  When he spoke again, his tone was distracted, as if he was pondering the vagaries of human existence. “But why kill Thomas? He’d already sent Thomas half way around the world to separate him from Charles. That would have been enough, even for Andy. It was the army way.”

  I now considered seriously, for the first time, that Olivia could have been right. General Andrews might actually have killed Thomas Holmes, directly or indirectly, and it was something Jason must have known.

  I realized I might never figure out exactly how Andrews had killed Thomas, but Jason thought the real issue was why.

  Did David Andrews know the answer?

  People who claim that they just know what to say when the time comes to say it infuriate me. I’ve never been able to do that. I usually plan out most important conversations in my head well in advance. Some of the dialogue I actually get to use.

  Right now, my logic and imagination had failed me. So I used the direct approach, my usual fallback.

  I leaned in to David and looked directly at him, resisting the urge to delay so that something more appropriate might occur to me.

  “I guess you’ve heard that George has been charged with murdering your dad.”

  He actually smiled. Not a happy smile. Just one of those lines of the mouth that turn up on one side to let me know he found the statement mildly amusing. He nodded, but he didn’t say anything.

  “George didn’t kill the general.” I said, with as much conviction as I felt in my heart, which was considerable.

  He nodded.

  “You knew that?”

  “Sure.”

  “How did you know?”

  He studied me for a while, and I thought he was going to ignore my question.

  But he answered. “George has too much to lose.”

  Then, maybe feeling a little sorry for our situation, he broadened the grin on his face and offered something he must have viewed as close to a joke. “Besides, he would’ve had to take a number and stand in line for the privilege.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He straightened himself in the chair, put his forearms on the small round glass table between us and leaned toward me, like he didn’t want to be overheard, even though we were the only ones on the patio. As if he was about to tell me a secret, but his whispered tone was farcical and exaggerated.

  “Maybe you didn’t know this, but Andy wasn’t a very nice guy. He had a lot of enemies. It’s not really a surprise that someone killed him, is it? Isn’t it more of a surprise that someone didn’t do it years ago?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows as if trying to clue me in that I should find his statements hilariously funny.

  But I didn’t find him funny at all.

  The situation was tragic, for everyone. His behavior was odd, inappropriate.

  I remained sincere, ignoring his attempt at comedy, and responded to his words. “I know he had a lot of public enemies, but I don’t think any of them would have taken the trouble to try to make his murder look like a suicide. What I’m interested in are his private enemies.”

  His weird humor continued, as if he was sharing some blazing insight with a comic audience. “Most homicides are committed by family members or someone close to the victim, right?”

  “You think someone in your family killed Andy?”

  “I think all of us would have had good reason to. If incentive, motive, and opportunity count for anything, it makes sense, don’t you agree?”

  David’s continuing sarcasm began to grate on my last nerve.

  I said, “Yes. I do. But you know much more about the family than I do. Why don’t you fill me in?”

  His humor switched abruptly to anger.

  “Dad,” he emphasized the word with such vindictiveness that small droplets of spit hit me in the face. I struggled not to recoil from his fierceness. His hands gripped his highball glass so tightly I thought he might crush it. Now I realized that this wasn’t his first drink of the morning. Many drinkers get quieter when intoxicated, and David was speaking in unnaturally quiet but angry tones now. Just how much in control was he?

  “Dad loved all of us. Especially me and Donald.”

  He emphasized “especially” in a vicious way, like he was giving me a clue, trying to communicate something without saying anything specific.

  Now, his tone changed abruptly again, to mock innocence: “Why would we want to kill Dad?”

  He looked directly at me, almost challenging me to understand. Maybe he’d been thinking about this for some time. Perhaps he’d decided to tell someone and I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Or maybe he was out of control, drunk, or something else I hadn’t figured out yet.

  I leaned back and took a look at him again, resisting the urge to wipe his spittle off my face. David Andrews was tall, lean, strong and good looking. He’d been so since he was about nine or ten years old. He and his brother were as different from his sister in body type as they were in temperament, goals and life achievements. Neither of the brothers had ever married. Nor were they now in any kind of long-term relationships.

  Sometimes, I’m quicker to catch on than others. This one took me another few seconds. “Are you saying Andy abused you?”

  He raised his eyebrows again, in that mocking way, as if to say, so you finally get it.

  Then, he answered my question. “Not sexually. He did manage to draw the line there. But psychologically. Emotionally. Yes. Every day.” He drained his glass and gestured to the waitress for another. “Our lives were pure emotional torture. He was so happy that we were just like him. He just loved us so much, see? He’d punish us because he loved us, he said. He’d threaten us, freeze us out, keep his nose in every second of our personal lives because he loved us, you know?”

  The vulnerable boy David had been was nowhere to be found in the angry man sitting across the table from me. His face worked around his memories and took on a nasty frown. He stood up abruptly, knocking over his plastic chair, then strode over to the rail and leaned both forearms on it, as he faced the water.

  I followed him warily. I’d thought him one of his mother’s harmless cats, but now I realized I’d opened the cage door and let an unpredictable tiger out.

  David’s father had been an extremely violent man and probably a murderer, if Olivia Holmes was right about what happened to her brother. Usually, the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  Not at all confident of what David might do next, I glanced around and saw no other people on the patio with us. If I needed help, I realized that a loud scream would reach the tourists across the harbor at the boat show.

  Boldly, I joined David at the rail, but I stood aside, keeping my gaze firmly on his body language, leaving enough room to get away fast, should it come to that.

  When the waitress brought him another drink, he took a big gulp, for fortification, maybe. Then he turned to face me. “I think now that he was trying to change us, to force us to be different. Straight. If such a thing was possible, he would have succeeded in changing us. I think he hated us and what we were. We definitely hated him. We would have done anything to get him off our backs.”

  When he saw that I finally understood, he seemed to calm down a little. He returned to his chair and relaxed into it, extending his legs out in front of him and crossing them at the ankles.

  David sunned himself. He closed his eyes and dropped his head back, slouching further in the chair.

  My mind twirled possibilities; each forced attention back to him. Eventually, he began to speak, without changing his position in any way. His voice was low and I had to strain to hear him.

  He said, “Andy figured out we needed changing when we were about ten. When we were just figuring ourselves out. When we needed him the most.”

  David didn’t say so, but that must have been about the time when he and Donald began to realize they were gay. It would have been
a confusing time for them. An overbearing father, an alcoholic mother. The situation was no less difficult because it was a common one. What a horrible time the two young boys must have had trying to grow up.

  “Dad spent all his free time raising us up right. Sexual orientation is nature, not nurture. But Andy was on us all the time to be different. To change. Mom saw what we were and how he treated us. So did Robbie. They did nothing to help.” David didn’t seem to have any emotion left.

  He drank and recited the story as if it had all happened to someone else. “Guilt, I think. That was when Mom really started drinking heavy and Robbie just started getting heavy. She was a pretty girl before that, you know? But it was weird that she just got so jealous of us. We would have happily traded places with her.”

  The waitress came by with another highball for him. I wondered how he’d be able to walk to his room. He was already pie-eyed.

  He said, “The only break we got was when he was away. We prayed he would go. As soon as we could get away to military school, we left. No matter how hard it would be for us there, it was the only place he’d release us to attend. We were out of our home like a shot. And we rarely came back.”

  “Why’d you come back now? To celebrate his birthday?” Seemed far-fetched at this point.

  That’s what John Williamson, Robbie’s husband, had told Olivia. That Deborah had gathered the family together to celebrate the end of the confirmation hearings and her husband’s birthday. Given the level of hatred I’d witnessed in David just now, I didn’t think he was all that into making his father happy.

  He sighed. “You get older. You try to forgive and forget. You recognize that he has no power over you anymore. You know that you are what you were born to be. Your other family members have to be forgiven, too.”

  He looked at me again and drained his glass once more. “Anger eats you up, you know? It destroys your life. You try to get past it.”

  He set the glass down and looked around for the waitress to order another.

  “Did you? Get past it?”

  “Before he died, you mean?”

  “Yes.”