by Diane Capri
Ben stood beside the four-poster where Cilla reclined fully clothed in the dress she’d worn to Michael Morgan’s funeral.
Ben checked Cilla’s carotid artery for a pulse while deliberately punching buttons on her phone with his left thumb. He made no effort to resuscitate. He responded to quick questions, finally saying, “No need to hurry.”
The room was high ceilinged and spacious. Front windows overlooked Hillsborough Bay, and I could see our home, Minaret on Plant Key, clearly.
Cilla was born in that bed, as all four of her children had been. It was there she’d slept with O’Connell for forty-seven years. Maybe she just couldn’t sleep there without him.
Did Cilla kill herself because she knew her husband was dead? Or had she thought to prevent him from suicide? Or had they planned joint suicide? We’d never know.
Two envelopes and a wrapped package rested on Cilla’s dressing table. I slipped the envelope addressed to Carly and the small package with my name on it into my pocket.
The other envelope was addressed to Ben Hathaway. It contained a full confession, executed and notarized by O’Connell Worthington, a gentleman even after death.
O’Connell provided the hard evidence of his guilt that Chief Hathaway had been unable to find. Motive: O’Connell said he’d killed Morgan because Morgan’s theories were timed to insure his financial ruin. Means: He’d included a purchase receipt showing his ownership of the murder weapon. But he said he’d thrown the gun into the Gulf at the same time he’d thrown in the body. Opportunity: Well, we had Carly’s eye-witness account for that. He apologized for the inconvenience.
EPILOGUE
CHIEF HATHAWAY MARKED THE Michael Morgan murder closed. O’Connell’s firm was for sale, half a step ahead of foreclosure after over-extended their lines of credit for breast implant litigation. His written confession contained lengthy details of his downward financial spiral, meant to persuade doubters of his guilt. Hathaway and the State’s Attorney accepted.
O’Connell and Pricilla had been the epitome of our society for fifty years, as had their families before them. Public disgrace was more than they could bear.
I chose not to challenge O’Connell’s bluff.
The Worthington’s joint funeral was standing room only. Everybody, including me and George, Kate, the Warwicks, Carly and Grover, and the rest of Tampa, was visibly saddened.
Bill Sheffield told us his bank had been providing Worthington’s financing. The firm declared bankruptcy; lawyers scrambled for new jobs.
CJ occupied in the family pew, sobbing like a child at the death of his only sister and his life-long friend. Would he be more antagonistic toward me, or less, because of the role I’d played in their deaths?
When he couldn’t pin it on Grover, Ben Hathaway gave up and charged Fred Johnson with blackmailing Morgan. Johnson was disbarred, convicted and ordered to make restitution to Morgan’s estate. No one’s figured out what to do with the money. The legal wrangling will likely last beyond our lifetimes.
The package Cilla left for me on her dressing table before she died contained her diary and the four missing pictures from Morgan’s piano. The two nudes were Morgan and the very young, very beautiful Pricilla Worthington. Glory days?
I only read three sections of Cilla’s diary.
First, the passage describing the coincidence placing both of us in Carly’s apartment. She’d been searching for Morgan’s disk; panicked when I showed up. She said she’d never hit anyone on the head before, and thought she’d killed me, but was glad she didn’t.
Me, too.
Not a bowling ball, though. She’d used a Steuben vase. Good to know. Maybe a bowling ball is softer.
The second segment, her account of the night she killed Morgan, contained few surprises. After I’d discovered her name on Morgan’s list of accounts receivable and recognized her nude picture captured in Robin’s video, I’d suspected her. Saving her reputation, the rest of her money, and her husband was plenty of motive. Under the circumstances, many women would have done what Pricilla did. When O’Connell surrendered, my suspicions had been confirmed.
The final pages outlined her plan to kill herself. Sooner or later, she said, Hathaway would have found the evidence to arrest Morgan’s killer even after her husband took the blame. Pricilla knew O’Connell Worthington III would never have allowed his wife to be charged or convicted. Her death, she thought, would set him free.
Before she died, had she known she’d waited too long to save her husband?
A few days after the funerals, I had lunch with Carly at Minaret. Gave her Cilla’s letter. I watched her read it, and watched her cry.
Dear Carly,
I’m sorry, dear, because he was your father. He didn’t deserve a fine daughter like you. You’re better off without him.
He did deserve to die. When I first knew him, he was kind and caring. But he changed. Maybe it was the drugs, or the women, or the success, or the failure. I don’t know why. He became cold, greedy. The world is better off without him, too.
Much too late, I learned he didn’t love me, that I was only one in a long line of women. I broke it off immediately, and then spent the rest of my life trying to buy his silence. He demanded money for years. He took everything but our house. O’Connell never knew. I never wanted him to know, but it took every cent of my inheritance to keep Morgan quiet.
It was the video. He recorded our affair. Others, too. He threatened to show those tapes unless I paid him. I burned every last one after he died.
I paid the money he demanded and other women did, too. I might have paid him forever. But he wanted to destroy O’Connell. That, I would not allow.
Pricilla Worthington
Carly cried for a while after losing her father. Maybe it helped that he wasn’t a father worth crying over, but I’m not sure.
Unfortunately, Carly seems quite fond of Grover. Maybe her brothers can handle that catastrophe-in-the-making. Mark’s been promoted and is moving his family to Tampa. Kate, the grandmother, is thrilled. Jason called from Washington last night. He said he’d been in Romania for a couple of weeks and wanted to catch up on the boring stuff happening at home.
George and I enjoyed nightly sunset cocktails. Early February breezes were soft, skies cloudless blue, and the temperatures near eighty. My feet rested in his lap; he massaged achy toes gently. Harry and Bess splashed each other in the salt water.
“How much do you love me,” I asked him one night, eyes closed, totally relaxed.
“More times than you can count,” he replied softly.
“Would you die for me?”
“You mean like Romeo and Juliet?” I could hear the smile in his voice.
“No.” I said. “Like Cilla and O’Connell.”
THE END
For Robert
CAST OF PRIMARY CHARACTERS
Judge Wilhelmina Carson
George Carson
General Albert Randall Andrews (Andy)
Deborah Andrews
Roberta Andrews (Robbie)
John Williamson
Donald Andrews
David Andrews
Senator Sheldon Warwick
Victoria Warwick (Tory)
Sheldon Warwick, Jr. (Shelly)
Olivia Holmes
Thomas Holmes
President Charles Benson
Charles Benson, Jr.
Chief Ben Hathaway
State Attorney Michael Drake
Chief Ozgood Livingston Richardson (Oz or CJ)
Margaret Wheaton (secretary)
Kate Austin
Jason Austin
CHAPTER ONE
Tampa, Florida
Thursday 8:50 a.m.
January 20, 2000
THE BULLET THAT KILLED General Andrews was the same one that pierced my heart, although we were thirty miles apart when it happened and no blood soaked my chest. The damage was permanent, if not immediately obvious.
The new millennium was off to a d
isastrous start.
Thursday morning, two days before Andrews died, held the blessed promise of a return to normalcy. I had thrown myself back into my office routine, but I was entirely preoccupied by televised coverage of the most important national event since the war: Senate confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court nominee, General Albert Randall Andrews.
Once the hearings concluded that morning, I naively assumed, my husband would magically transform into the man I had loved and somehow lost. After seventeen years of marriage, another woman would have been easier for me to deal with than George’s passionate devotion to the greater good, working to defeat the Andrews nomination.
Seated at the battered desk in my hideously decorated chambers in Tampa’s Old Federal Courthouse, I tried to focus on the draft orders that had been prepared by my clerks and appeared on my desk with the regularity of the daily sunrise. I signed the orders, again and again, methodically moving them to my outbox on the front of my desk where my secretary would pick them up.
Like other United States District Court judges here in the Tampa Division of the Middle District of Florida, I had a never-ending, boatload of work that threatened to bury me long before I had a chance to die a natural death. Already, the workload made me feel much older than the thirty-nine years reflected on my driver’s license.
Regardless of what time management methods I tried, I never seemed to get ahead. I rarely glimpsed the scarred surface of the old mahogany desktop I’d inherited from the little Napoleon who’d occupied this office before me.
I read the draft order in front of me: Marital Privilege is a legal term that means one spouse cannot be required to reveal confidential communications from the other spouse. Marital privilege was a concept that didn’t apply to me at the moment because my husband, George, and I weren’t communicating at all. For example, I had no idea where he was that morning. I knew I couldn’t reach him very easily by phone because I had already tried.
George was consumed with General Andrews and his confirmation hearings and I was consumed with desire for the entire process to go straight to hell and leave me and my marriage alone.
Wilhelmina Carson, I wrote, pressing the pen so hard that a hole appeared over the dotted ‘i.’ I placed the executed order on the top of the outgoing pile.
“Not since Clarence Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1991 has there been such a public display of outrage at a President’s choice,” the television analyst said. “Since General Albert Randall Andrews, formerly Tampa’s highest ranking Army officer, was nominated to join Thomas on the bench, the country has resided in a state of outrage over his offensive political and ideological positions on a variety of issues.”
The hyperbole brought a smile to my lips that didn’t lighten my heart. I found it hard to believe that anyone was taking the Andrews nomination seriously. Andrews was a rogue. To my mind, he was such an unsuitable candidate that he should never have been nominated in the first place.
Andrews was more obstinately opinionated than a cable television talk show host, and twice as vocal about it. There was no way he’d ever do the one thing required by the job: remain impartial and consider each case individually as it was presented to him. Once nominated, Andrews should have been summarily rejected.
But that’s not what happened.
The analyst continued reading from his prepared script. “Today, the crowd outside the Capitol building here in Washington, D.C. is larger than any of the earlier days of the hearings. . . .”
I felt sorry for the protesters. It’s not easy to have the courage of your convictions after standing outside for nine days in January ice showers.
At the beginning of the march, the protesters had been neatly organized, with the right to lifers on the left, the gays and lesbians on the right, and the anti-military group in the center, flowing out to the back. Today, the factions mingled into a single, huddled mass.
Icy rain soaked the homemade signs they carried. Blue magic marker ink ran off onto their heads, giving them an even more defeated look. Many huddled near fires in old barrels to catch a small slice of warmth. Even the commentator shivered as ice water dripped off his umbrella in the cold. I shivered, too, remembering how it felt to be chilled to the bone by bitter January cold only too well. It was a visceral memory that might never be baked out of me here in the Sunshine State.
I glanced out my window and saw clear blue skies, palm trees, and two homeless men across the street wearing short-sleeved T-shirts sharing a cigarette. It so rarely rains here in January that I leave the top down on my car for weeks at a time. The contrast between my world and the world I saw on television couldn’t have been more complete. This, at least, was a fact that cheered me.
In the nation’s capital, despite the horrid weather, the protesters had come and waited and every day their numbers had grown. They chanted, picketed, sang songs.
I shook my head and ran my fingers through my short auburn hair, causing it to stand straight up on top. The futility of their struggle would have persuaded me to quit long before now. I admired their determination. I liked to think I’d had that once.
When I was young and idealistic. Not anymore.
To do what these protesters were doing, what my husband had been doing, required the kind of conviction I no longer possessed. Before I was appointed to the bench, I practiced law long enough to learn that there are always too many sides to every story. I no longer believed in solid black and pristine white, self-evident truths and indisputable wrongs.
In politics, the question has always been “what have you done for me lately?” General Andrews was probably finding that out now. It must have been a hard lesson for a popular war hero to learn.
For almost an hour, the television commentators had rehashed the entire course of the hearings and predictions of the outcome, which ranged from promises of complete victory to devastating loss for both sides. Whether the nominee would be confirmed was alternately feared or cheered, depending on the speaker’s point of view.
My patience had been stretched to the breaking point by the weeks of bickering. I was sick to death of the constant analysis and conjecture. I wanted the matter to end. Confirm Andrews’s nomination or not, but just finish the damn thing.
Just before nine o’clock, the Supreme Court nominee’s limousine pulled up to the curb. The Capitol Hill Police personnel assigned to assure his safety surrounded the car and the passenger door opened.
I glanced up from my work to see the first man step out of the car. It was Andrews’s personal secretary, Craig Hamilton, a pleasant little man almost a foot shorter than me, whom I’d met several times over the past few years.
As he straightened up and rose to his full height of five feet, he looked around at the crowd. For just a second, I thought I saw something like shock on his face as he faced the angry, chanting mob.
I thought again of Andrews. Why he subjected himself and his family to this abuse was a complete mystery to me. To what kind of man was the promise of power so seductive that he would struggle against hostile strangers to achieve it?
Hamilton reached out to accept an opened black umbrella offered by one of the officers standing to his right while I watched, waiting impatiently for the real story to start.
When Craig Hamilton stood to the side to let Andrews, the nominee, out of the car, I glanced down at my work.
I heard a loud, quick pop, pop, pop over the noise of the chanting crowd. I jerked my head up to see Craig Hamilton crumple to the ground. He was quickly surrounded by police officers.
Complete chaos followed instantaneously. My stomach recoiled in horrified impotence as I grabbed the remote control to turn up the volume on the set.
My other hand flew to the phone to call George, but just as quickly withdrew, as if the receiver was hot to the touch. George wouldn’t be answering his cell phone. He’d be on his feet, rushing to help Craig Hamilton in any way possible. I hoped George wasn’t in Washington, D.C. right now, but whe
rever he was, my anxiety told me, he was involved.
The screaming drew my secretary, Margaret, into my chambers.
“Willa, what’s wrong?” she asked as she hurried over to me.
She put her hand on my shoulder and looked directly into my face. I realized that the screaming that drew her had been my own.
I closed my mouth and patted her hand. I nodded to the television set. Margaret watched with me as we saw falling bodies everywhere. I heard no more shots, but they could have been fired. “Just like Jack Ruby,” Margaret whispered, referring to the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, right in front of God and everybody, on television after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Americans have a long history of trying to solve political problems with guns. Presidents Lincoln, King, Ford and Reagan, among others, had all been targets of assassination attempts.
Being younger than Margaret by thirty years, my thoughts jumped to the attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. The thought that sprang, unbidden, to my mind and flew out of my mouth was, “Just like Jim Brady.”
Like Jim Brady, Craig Hamilton was in the way between the killer and his target.
I moved to one of the ugly green client chairs on the front side of my desk, where I’d get a better view of the small screen. Margaret continued to stand. Our gazes were glued to the television set now as the small picture divided into three sections. A commentator was featured in a small box on the top on the screen. Another small box reflected the real time events.
On the rest of the screen, a replay camera panned the front lines of the crowd. Involuntarily, I drew a quick breath when the camera spotted a man with a gun making his way up to the curb toward the waiting limousine.
The instant replay showed Craig Hamilton step out of the car. I watched in appalled fascination as the shooter raised his arms while holding a hunting rifle. The rifle recoiled three times as the shooter pulled off the three shots that hit Hamilton’s chest. Watching felt nothing like viewing a Hollywood movie. This was too vivid, too close to home.
