Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  George let out a long breath and asked, “So, how long will all these shenanigans take? I have a restaurant to run, a life to live here.”

  His impatience with what he viewed as the ridiculousness of all this was obvious, even to Olivia.

  She leaned forward, crossed her wrists, “Both of you need to understand something. This is a long process. I don’t know when you’ll be indicted. It could be as much as another two weeks.” When George started to sputter, she held up her hand for him to wait. “But I think Drake will move quickly to indict. After that, you’ll be arraigned and then we can begin the formal discovery process.”

  Olivia delivered the bad news, straight up. “It will take at least nine months to get this case to trial, and we’ll be working like crazy between now and then to be ready.”

  George exploded. “Nine months!” he shouted as he jumped to his feet. “I’m not going to be consumed by Drake for nine months! This is outrageous!”

  He paced our small den like a caged beast. Which is exactly what he had become. Used to roaming around at will, moving in powerful circles, George would not flourish while being watched under a microscope.

  Olivia explained things patiently, but firmly and without any particular optimism. “Yes, George, it is outrageous. But there is not one thing you can do to rush it.”

  She began gathering her documents and stuffing them back into her file. “What we have to do is to try to end the process long before trial. We have to persuade Drake that they’ve got the wrong man. Our best shot is to do that before the indictment,” she said, echoing my own thoughts two days ago.

  It made me feel a little sick that the conclusions I’d reached on my own were valid; I’d have preferred to be wrong.

  George digested Olivia’s comments for a little while, and then said, “What if we can’t persuade him? Drake is not my number one fan.” He looked over at me then. “Or Willa’s.”

  Olivia nodded. “Then we’ll just have to keep trying.”

  She stood up to leave, and when the two of them were side by side, George looked like a giant. “You’re in trouble. We might be able to get you out of this mess with an airtight alibi.”

  She looked at him pointedly, but he said nothing. “Just as I thought. I’ll do the best I can. I’m hopeful that this will all be put behind you eventually and you’ll be able to go on with your lives. No promises.”

  Lest we took comfort from her prediction, Olivia was quick to add, “But it won’t happen quickly and it won’t be painless. You two are just going to have to suck it up and show the world what you’re made of.”

  George and I walked her toward the door.

  She delivered final instructions. “The last time I checked, you both had responsibilities. Keep going. Behave as normally as possible. Let me do my job and,” this last part was directed at me, “stay out of the way.”

  George and I talked briefly after she left. I tried not to let him see how totally befuddled I was. Not over the process. I was all too familiar with that. No, what upset me was the sheer absurdity of it all.

  How could this possibly have happened? I am a good person. A public servant. My husband is as honest, kind, and traditional as any man anywhere.

  The idea that we were involved in murder was a very, very bad joke. Right?

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 5:30 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  THE TAMPA GUN CLUB and Shooting Range was about fifteen miles from downtown, out on Tampa’s all purpose commercial highway, Dale Mabry, named after a popular local son. The club was quite a distance from Plant Key and it took me over forty minutes to travel ten miles in the early afternoon traffic.

  George had learned to enjoy shooting handguns during his army days. He said shooting released tension and sharpened his reaction times. When we lived in Detroit, where the weak are killed and eaten, he used to keep guns in the house. No matter how much I insisted that I would never, ever use one to shoot an intruder or anyone else, George remained confident that I would if I had no choice. So far, neither opinion had been tested.

  Years ago, George kept handguns around the restaurant, just because, he said, “you never know.” Our home was open to the public and at least once a week or so, some diner wandered up toward the flat, out of curiosity, to look at the house. We’d never, knock on wood, had any kind of trouble with George’s guns. Until now.

  Greta and I continued north on Dale Mabry, where homogeneity flourished. If it’s true that every American lives within three miles of a McDonald’s restaurant, metro Tampa is beating the national averages soundly.

  I passed franchise after franchise, home improvement, furniture and discount stores, hotels and motels gathered near the airport, and the relative newcomer’s book superstores with coffee shops and live entertainment, that had become the gathering places for Tampans after dark.

  These days, every city in America contained the same. It was hard to distinguish Los Angeles from Boston anymore. Nervous travelers who once felt uncomfortable leaving home, concerned about bad food and worse sleeping conditions, now worry needlessly. Whatever they have back on the farm, we have everywhere. But for me, all the individualism of the country’s regions has been destroyed. There seemed to be no reason to leave home.

  Eventually, I passed most of our driveway-to-driveway civilization and ended up on the very north end of Dale Mabry Highway. The gun club was on the right. I turned in.

  Maybe there wasn’t a lot of money in running a gun club because the driveway wasn’t paved and neither was the parking lot. Dry and dusty now, the lot must have been a river of mud every summer afternoon when the skies opened up and flooded everything without copious manmade drainage.

  Fortunately, I wore washable clothes and hadn’t put Greta’s top down this morning. When I got out of the car, a cloud of dust settled over us. A small breeze moved the dust imperceptibly.

  About ten similarly dusty vehicles, mostly old, beat-up trucks, resided in the parking lot. I couldn’t really visualize George’s Bentley parked out here. I walked the few yards to the door holding my breath.

  The inside lighting was dim and the noise deafening. Unlike other gun ranges George had dragged me to over the years, this one did not have a soundproof wall between the shooting area and the front door. Here, I looked through clear glass to an area where the shooters were standing. They all wore ear-muffs. I tried lifting my palms to cover each ear, but that only improved the situation marginally.

  At the counter, a middle-aged, over-weight man with a shaved head and a day’s growth of beard stood, also wearing ear protection. I walked over and introduced myself. He didn’t move. I touched his arm and he glanced up, apparently used to being touched to get his attention.

  The guy looked me over and gestured to a door at one side of the counter. I went through it into what must have been a soundproof room. He followed me in and closed out the noise with the door. The quiet was startling.

  Now, I stood in a soundproof room where various shooting equipment and ammunition were sold, with a gun nut I’d never met and no one knew where I was. I’m generally not given to paranoia, but this situation made me wildly uncomfortable. I decided to take care of my business and get out of there as quickly as I could.

  “Can I help you?” He asked me again.

  I held out my hand. “I’m George Carson’s wife, Willa.”

  He took my hand in one big, hairy paw and covered it with his other paw. On one hairy forearm was tattooed: Semper Fi. He looked so sorrowful, and held my hand so gently, I was ashamed of my earlier paranoia.

  “I am truly sorry about George, Mrs. Carson. He is one fine man. I just can’t believe he killed General Andrews.” He spoke slowly and clearly, still holding onto my hand. As if I might be hysterical and he needed to talk me down off a high building before I jumped. “If there’s anything I can do for George, you just let me know, okay?”

  Maybe I’m not as good at hiding
my feelings as I think. Or maybe he talked to all the little ladies this way. At least the ones who might be married to murderers.

  I cleared my throat and tried to extract my hand from the warm, moist grip that swallowed it. “Actually, uh, what did you say your name was?”

  “Curly, ma’am.” I tried again to pull my hand away, but he kept a tight hold on it.

  “Um, Curly. Of course. George has mentioned you. It’s nice to meet you.” George had never said anything about this man to me in my life, but I wanted to get my hand back. I pulled gently. No luck.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, ma’am,” he said, sorrow for George and me practically seeping from his pores.

  Yes. Well. Let’s get to the point.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 5:40 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  “CURLY, I NEED TO see George’s locker and pick up some things. Is that okay with you?”

  I gave my hand another little tug, just to see if I could dislodge it. He tightened up. It was like playing with Chinese handcuffs. The more I tried to pull my hand away, the tighter his hold became.

  “Sure it is, ma’am. But you need a key to get into George’s locker. Did you bring one?”

  “I guess I just thought you’d have a key. You do have one, don’t you Curly?” I wasn’t batting my eyelashes and blushing, honestly.

  He hesitated a few seconds, looking at me with more curiosity than hostility. If George had guns in his locker, which I suspected he did, Curly had to be wondering what I wanted them for.

  “Do you want to shoot, Miz Carson?” He asked me, his head titled sideways in a gesture that reminded me of our dogs when they didn’t quite understand my instructions. “I don’t know if I can let you do that without Mr. Carson’s permission.”

  Shoot? A gun? Me? I felt my head shaking back and forth, almost involuntarily. I tried to put him at ease. “I just need to look for the shooting log George keeps, Curly. I know he keeps track of when he shoots and how well he does. And he keeps an inventory of his guns. I want to look at that.”

  And I wasn’t pleading, either. If my tone was a little less confrontational than the one I use in the courtroom with recalcitrant litigants, it was purely expedience.

  Curly thought about it, at glacial speed. It wasn’t smart to underestimate your opponent, but Curly was either dim-witted or foxy and slow on purpose.

  I bet on the former. “You can come with me and watch what I look at, if you want,” I suggested, as if he wouldn’t have thought of that on his own.

  I wanted to rifle through George’s locker by myself, but if the only way I could get Curly the Giant here to let me do that was with his supervision, that would be better than no look at all.

  About a month later, Curly finally nodded his head and released my hand, which now felt curiously cold and lightweight after its imprisonment in the damp recesses of Curly’s grip. He told me to follow him and we went back out into the noise where conversation was, thankfully, impossible. Curly picked up his keys and walked through another door, into the locker room, while I followed.

  Apparently you don’t have to shower and change clothes to use a shooting range, because there was only one room filled with lockers and nothing else.

  The lockers were numbered and stacked in sets of two, one on the top and one on the bottom, with a long bench separating them horizontally. Lockers abutted each other in rows covering every wall of the room. Two or three rows of back-to-back lockers rested, freestanding, in the middle of the room. The noise was a little less earsplitting in here, but multiple gunshots continued, like closely set fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  Curly led me toward the back wall of the locker room. There were men and women standing around the lockers. I didn’t recognize any of them and they didn’t recognize me. And to be honest, I wasn’t looking too closely. The last thing I wanted was to see someone I knew.

  When we got to George’s locker, I almost laughed out loud. The locker number was 007. Did George imagine himself as some sort of James Bond? Reliable, sturdy, predictable George? Did he have a Walter Mitty life? Or was this just a joke?

  Curly opened the locker for me, and stepped aside to let me see. Hanging on the hooks on either side of the locker were two sets of ear protectors that resembled the ones Curly now wore around his neck like a choker.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when I found the spiral notebook containing George’s shooting log on the bottom shelf. Either Michael Drake didn’t know enough about George’s habits to have obtained a search warrant for the locker, or he simply hadn’t gotten to this point in his investigation yet.

  Under the log was a single sheet of plastic laminated paper containing a list of his guns with serial and license numbers neatly printed. The licenses themselves, I knew, were kept in our safety deposit box.

  I picked up the log book and flipped back through the last few entries.

  George is a man of habits and rituals. Maybe all humans are. His habit here was to shoot each gun in the order it was listed on the inventory. The log reflected that he’d come to shoot at irregular dates and times, which was a little unusual, and not enlightening.

  But then I noticed that he had been here every Wednesday morning for more than two years. And on Wednesdays, he shot the snub nosed .38, the gun that killed General Andrews.

  The log also reflected that George sometimes lent his guns to other people. His blocky printing listed the borrowers’ names, most of whom I recognized, but some of them were strangers to me.

  Curly cleared his throat. “Um, Miz Carson, are you about finished here? This is kinda unusual, you know?” He seemed to be a little impatient with me, now. Perhaps he was having second thoughts about letting me in here.

  Actually, I found that comforting, in an odd way. If Curly didn’t want to let George’s wife into his locker, maybe he kept other unauthorized people away. That wouldn’t be a good thing for George’s defense, but it made me feel safer to know that just anyone couldn’t walk in here and steal a murder weapon.

  Quickly, I counted the number of guns listed on the inventory. Seven. Then, I looked at the boxes stored inside the locker. Seven.

  I counted again.

  How could that be?

  I flipped through the log, checking to see whether George had, for some reason, listed more guns in another location. I didn’t find any such list.

  Long ago, I learned that I think best in pictures, so I closed my eyes and visualized George removing the .38 and using it. In my mental movie, he cleaned the gun thoroughly when he was finished as I knew was his habit. When he’d cleaned the gun, he returned it the purple velvet bag and then the black, clearly labeled box.

  The box sitting right there, in plain sight, on the shelf in front of me. Stacked neatly with all the other boxes. All seven of them. I felt like shouting Eureka! but that would have drawn more attention than I wanted. I reached up and lifted the box slightly, without bringing it out of the locker. I was right. The box was empty.

  George, my ritualistic, practical husband, would never, ever, have taken the gun away from here without the box. And without the box, the gun would have been so much easier to conceal. Another question arose now: how did the gun and the box get separated?

  Glancing up, I noticed Curly watching me, shifting from foot to foot. Sometime this century, he might decide I shouldn’t have had access to George’s locker at all. There were other people in the locker room and none had seemed to recognize me yet.

  “Curly, does George have more than one locker?”

  The puzzled look on his face was almost comical. “No, ma’am. This is the only one. Why?”

  Ignoring the question, I counted once more. I pulled out my digital camera and took a picture of the locker, inside and out. If Curly wanted to know why I did so, he didn’t ask.

  Then, I told him, “I’m going to take George’s log and inventory with me.” I stuffed the documents into my tote bag b
efore he could protest. Without making the mistake of offering to shake hands in farewell, I said, “Thanks for your help,” turned around and headed out of the locker room.

  “You’re welcome, Miz Carson,” he said to my retreating back as I beat feet with the log and the inventory in the bag under my arm.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 5:50 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  OUT IN THE PARKING lot, seated in the car, engine running and air conditioning on, I pulled George’s gun log and inventory out of my tote bag and began to study them. My journal and digital recorder were also in the bag, but I was too impatient to dictate.

  I pulled out my checkbook, which had a tiny, unreadable pocket calendar going back two years and forward three more. I’d left my reading glasses at the office and I couldn’t read the miniscule numbers on the calendar in the darkened interior of the car. I fished out the small, flat flashlight I’d been carrying in my purse the past couple of years. Even with the light, I could barely make out the calendar’s markings.

  Squinting at the tiny print, I saw my quick observation inside had been right. George had recorded a regular schedule of Wednesday morning shooting in his log for the past three years.

  Aside from Wednesdays, his shooting schedule was irregular. Some days, he shot in the morning, some days in the afternoon. Some weeks he shot two or three times, and some weeks, only on Wednesday.

  The really interesting thing was that on Wednesdays, he always shot the .38, the murder weapon. But I noticed that he sometimes shot it on other days of the week as well.

  If someone wanted to steal George’s .38 without his knowledge, the best time to do it would be Wednesday afternoon. That way, they might have kept the gun for about a week before he planned to shoot it again. Maybe he wouldn’t miss the gun during the week. The thief couldn’t be sure, but it was as close to a reasonable bet as he could make.