Licensed to Thrill: Volume 3

by Diane Capri

  The Andrews murder took place on a Saturday, so the gun thief could easily have gone undetected.

  Of course, the thief would have to get past Curly, but surely another member or guest of a member could have done so, using the right amount of guile and speed. Curly was by far the most physically intimidating person I’d come across, but his reflexes and movements were slow and, I suspected, he was not a Rhodes Scholar, although appearances are often deceiving.

  Someone could have gotten past him. After all, I just walked out with the log after taking photographs.

  And someone had definitely removed the gun from George’s locker and the club.

  That fact couldn’t be denied.

  Looking back at the inventory, I confirmed that George had seven guns listed. He’d bought the .38, the inventory reflected, about five years ago.

  Once I found the .38 on the list, I compared the inventory to the gun log. George’s meticulous rituals were evident again. He shot the guns in order, from the top of the inventory to the bottom. If someone had wanted to predict which gun George was likely to shoot next, that would have been fairly easy to do.

  After staring at them for a while, I realized neither the log nor the inventory reflected whether each gun was in the locker at any particular time. That is, George didn’t have the equivalent of a library card to document when each gun was removed or returned.

  My methodical husband would have had no need for such a system. George always keeps track of his possessions. He never loses anything. It’s quite annoying, really.

  But in this instance, I knew that if George’s guns were taken out of the locker, he would have been the one to take them. And he’d know exactly where each one was.

  Unless it was stolen, and his response to my questions about his gun led me to believe that George felt otherwise.

  Drake assumed George took the .38 out to Andrews’s house and killed him with it. I would never believe that happened. So the question was still: how did George’s gun get into the hands of the killer?

  Three hard, rapid knocks on the window inches from my face sounded like gunshots.

  I jumped and whipped my face around to see Curly standing outside my door.

  My hand flew to my pounding heart as I tossed the log onto the passenger side floor and gave thanks for Greta’s automatic door lock feature. I felt like he’d startled three years off my life.

  When I’d calmed down a second or two, I realized he was talking to me, through the closed window.

  “Miz Carson? Miz Carson?” He held up his right hand, showing me my digital camera. “You left this inside.”

  I pulled the button to lower Greta’s driver side window. Then, I reached out and snatched the camera with my left hand. “Thanks, Curly,” I said, pressing the button to automatically raise the window again before I moved the gear shift into reverse and waved goodbye, leaving him staring after me.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 6:45 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  IN THE AFTERNOON DALE Mabry traffic, even though most of it was headed out of the city in the opposite direction, it took me too long to reach South Tampa. I finally made it to Robbie Andrews’s house, but it was later than I’d wanted to be.

  God watches over fools and children, because as I rounded the corner onto Jetton Street, I saw Gorgeous Gargoyle get into her Honda and pull out of the driveway. Mercifully, she went the other way. I didn’t think she’d noticed me.

  I made a mental note of the time she left. If I wanted to surprise Robbie Andrews again, I would make it a point to come by after her assistant had gone for the day. All I wanted was to confirm her alibi for myself. It seemed weak to me. And she was just a little too quick to point the finger at George. But then, maybe I was just engaging in denial and wishful thinking.

  Which started me to thinking about when Gorgeous Gargoyle might arrive for work in the morning. Maybe ten? So how could she know when Robbie’s online therapy sessions began?

  I pulled into Robbie’s driveway and parked Greta in the middle, blocking both sides. Halfway up the front walk, I heard the automatic door opener lifting the heavy double garage door. I returned to the driveway just in time to see Robbie entering her car inside the garage.

  “Hello, Robbie,” I said as I approached.

  For a woman who worked at home on a computer where no one could see her, Robbie certainly was well dressed. When I work at home, I favor cotton shorts and T-shirts. Not Robbie.

  Except that she was larger than three runway models, Robbie could have come straight from the fashion houses of Paris.

  She wore a trendy haircut, great makeup and flowing caftan type clothes, all suggested her clothing budget exceeded her huge size. Spiked heels caused her to appear taller than five-feet-three. And she had beautifully manicured hands and feet.

  Robbie held her purse straps near her shoulder with one hand and her keys in the other. Slung over her back was one of those fashionable and pricey bags that everyone in Tampa seemed to carry since the new International Mall opened. The bag looked like an open horse feeder, what the designers call a bucket bag. I stayed far enough away from her that she couldn’t hit me with it. That thing would pack quite a wallop, I imagined.

  Looking at her, it occurred to me again why advertising works. The newspaper is full of bad news while advertising sells hope, possibilities, potential. We want to believe. Advertising, like multiple marriages, was the triumph of hope over experience.

  Robbie bought it all. She tried to hide her size by covering it in expensive packaging, probably hoping people would focus on the wrapper and not the contents.

  “Willa, I really have an appointment and I don’t have time to deal with you right now.” She snapped at me, nastier than she had been at her mother’s house a few days ago.

  Holding onto my patience, I ran my hand through my short hair, which had been blowing around since I’d left the Gun Club and stopped to put Greta’s top down. I hadn’t replaced my lipstick and my clothes looked like I’d been walking around in a dusty parking lot. Which, of course, I had. I felt tired, grimy and not really up to doing battle with Robbie Andrews.

  “I only need a few minutes. Since you can’t get out unless I move my car, why don’t you just talk to me and get it over with.”

  The war of her emotions was plain on her face. First anger, then outrage, and finally, resignation. But she didn’t have to be nice about it.

  “Alright. What do you want?” She emphasized the want, managing to put as much derision in the word as possible.

  What I really wanted was to scream at her, and maybe hit her a couple of times, too. But I didn’t think that was a good idea. I really had very few options. If Robbie didn’t talk with me voluntarily, I had no legal right to force her. It’s not like I owned a badge.

  I tried reason first. “I need to talk to you and I don’t think either one of us wants to discuss this in the driveway. Why don’t we go inside? I won’t keep you long.”

  Without another word, Robbie walked right past me and up to the front door, digging deep into the bucket bag for her keys. When she got to the door, opened it and stepped inside, she turned around and snapped, “Come on then. Let’s get this over with. I have to be somewhere else in fifteen minutes.”

  I hustled to get through the door before it slammed in my face.

  Robbie continued walking through the house and into the dining room where she remained standing and didn’t offer me a seat. I followed quickly after her, but I noticed the beautiful antique furnishings in the house. Many of them would have looked perfectly suited at Minaret.

  “What do you want?” she said again, emphasizing each word and stressing the last one as she had before.

  Maybe she could have been more disagreeable. I didn’t know her that well. She acted like a spoiled child. Perhaps in her world, people talked to each other like that. In my world, we didn’t.

  Her behavior made me really want to
beat the snot out of her, and the feeling surprised me. I’d never been in a physical fight in my life. I realized it was a good thing I didn’t carry a gun. At this moment, I might have been tempted to threaten her with it.

  I pulled up some much needed strength from somewhere, instead, and made myself respond to her churlishness with calm reason. “Robbie, you must want to know who killed your father. That’s what I want, too.” I spoke politely to her, but she wasn’t fazed.

  As rudely as before, she said, “George has been arrested already, in case you’ve forgotten. I’m interested in putting this behind me and going on with my life. And I don’t want you pestering my mother, either.” She stopped for a second and gave me another of her scowls. “Now if there’s nothing else, you’re making me very late.”

  Oh, the hell with it. “Look, Robbie,” I said, more firmly, as I pulled out an antique oak dining chair and sat down, “neither one of us is going anywhere until I get the answers I came for. Now, you can sit down and talk to me for about ten minutes and then I’ll leave. Or you can keep up your routine and we can stay here until all Florida freezes over.”

  Maybe it wasn’t my best moment. But I had very little choice. I had no legal right to press her, and we both knew it. Either I had to motivate her to talk to me, or I’d go away empty handed. George had too much at stake for me to give up so easily.

  She waited several seconds, apparently concluding she’d have to throw me out bodily if she wanted to get rid of me before I was good and ready to go. She sat down, folded her hands on the table, and in what I can only assume was the best manner Dr. Andrews the psychologist could muster for badly behaved patients, she snarled, “What is it you’d like to know?”

  I resisted the urge to slap her, but I had to sit on my hands to do it. My patience was exhausted by the situation and her histrionics. I deliberately asked her something personal. “Tell me about your relationship with your father.”

  She bristled again, raising her hackles, whatever hackles are. “My relationship with my father wasn’t any different when George killed him than it was years ago when you and he were friends, Willa.” Her voice broke just a little, I thought, but I might have imagined it. “He detested me. He had no use for girls or women. You know that.” She started to rise. “Is that it?”

  “Not quite. How did you feel about him?” I watched her closely. She actually started to get a little blinky, like she had some feelings under that armadillo exterior she dressed in Chanel.

  She steadied her chin and returned to her armor of belligerence. “I loved my father because he was my Dad just like any girl loves her daddy. But I didn’t like him very much. I didn’t know him well enough to like him. He saw to that. He wasn’t much of a father, really. Not to me, anyway.”

  Robbie stopped for a few seconds, and then, as if she’d made a decision, she added, “You’d have to ask my brothers how he was to them. I’m sure he loved them very much when we were all younger.”

  She said the words with such bitterness that I involuntarily recoiled. There was something more there, something under the surface that didn’t make sense.

  Her reaction to her father’s misogynistic view of women was understandable maybe, but her comments about his relationship with her brothers was unnecessarily poisonous. “And how about his relationship with your husband? Did they get along?” I almost whispered the question, trying not to antagonize her further.

  Her eyes widened, then she pursed her lips and pressed them together so that hard white lines formed at the corners. “Yes. My husband and my father got along. They got along as well as anyone could.” She paused, then added, “Which is to say they could be in the same room without getting into a fist fight, something George couldn’t manage.”

  Biting my tongue to avoid the sharp retort that bubbled up from somewhere south of civility, I said, “Only one more thing, Robbie. How about your parents? I know for a long time, there was a lot of trouble between them. How was their relationship just before he died?”

  I struggled to sound friendly and sympathetic. From long experience, I knew that I could get more from a hostile witness with sympathy than by badgering.

  Like everything else I’d tried, it didn’t work. Robbie stood up, picked up her purse and turned toward the door. “This interview is over. If you want to sit in my dining room until Chief Hathaway gets here to escort you out, feel free. But if you don’t leave in the next ten seconds, I’m calling the police.”

  And to emphasize her threat, she dug into the bucket bag and pulled out one of the things she kept in there in addition to the kitchen sink her cell phone. She must have bumped her house alarm button in the process because the alarm started its loud, shrill screaming as she dialed 911.

  Unwilling to be intimidated, I continued to sit and look steadily at her while she dialed. When the operator answered, Robbie said, “I’d like to report an intruder in my house. I know her name. Would you like me to tell you on this recorded line?” She looked at me meaningfully.

  I could barely hear her over the noise of the house alarm. But, she’d effectively called my bluff. It wouldn’t be good for me to be named as an intruder in a recorded 911 call by Robbie Andrews when my husband was out on bail after being charged with murdering her father. Those 911 calls are all taped and I’d heard the tapes played back in murder trials. The evidence was always riveting to the jury.

  A siren wailed somewhere in the distance, growing louder. It couldn’t have been dispatched in response to her call, not that quickly.

  The siren’s noise level increased, now combined with the house alarm. I could barely hear myself thinking, She could shoot me and no one would hear the gun go off.

  Even if the siren I’d heard hadn’t been sent in response to Robbie’s call, it could easily be diverted here.

  “Judge Willa Carson is her name,” Robbie said. “I’m afraid of her. Her husband killed General Andrews, my father, last week. Please send a car to my house. Now.”

  I could only hope that the 911 operator couldn’t hear her either. Before Robbie had a chance to repeat what she’d said, I snatched her phone out of her hand and hung up. I handed it back to her and then I left. Slowly.

  Seated in my car, I told myself leaving the house instead of wrestling Robbie to the ground was the wisest thing to do. Otherwise, I might have been arrested for assault. I gripped my hands into balled fists so tightly that my short trimmed nails bit into my palms.

  No wonder her father hated her, I thought rather uncharitably. There’s not much there to like. Nature or nurture, though?

  Robbie hadn’t figured out how to rise above her upbringing and make a success of her life, that much was obvious. No one who is happy with themselves could be so blatantly superficial and so miserable to everyone else.

  On my way home I began to feel sorry for her husband, John Williamson.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 8:30 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  BY THE TIME I got home, ran the dogs, spent some time with a Bombay Sapphire and tonic over ice with lemon and a good Partagas, I felt a little more charitable toward Robbie, but not much.

  I logged onto the Internet to check my letter to Ask Dr. Andrews. My letter wasn’t in Robbie’s column for today. She’d responded to a couple of questions about personality conflicts at work (grow up and get along), three problems with teenage rebellion (this, too, shall pass) and a question of infidelity (nobody’s perfect, forgive and forget).

  All were interesting and much more colorful than my newspaper’s Dear Abby column, but seemed irrelevant to George’s case. Since I still hadn’t figured out a way to use the encrypted service, I logged off.

  Engaged in quiet but heated conversation, George and my brother, Jason, didn’t notice my approach. They were seated in the dining room at George’s place and probably had consumed more than one cocktail each. I was only about an hour late.

  George said, “He shouldn’t have d
one it. I don’t care what his reasons were. It was not called for. The vote was going the way he wanted it. He was just trying to manipulate the process.” Jason was just as hot. “The whole process is about manipulation, and you know it. Andrews came by Warwick’s office to lobby for a yes vote. I heard he went to every one of the senators on the committee with the same plea. You can’t blame Benson for playing the same game.”

  “But the President was trying to torpedo his own nominee,” George responded.

  “Good evening gentlemen,” I said. Still glaring at each other, Jason stood up and gave me a quick hug and a kiss. George stood, too, held my chair and kissed me briefly. How gallant.

  I pasted a smile on my face and kept my voice very quiet. “Don’t look now, but you are beginning to draw attention from the crowd. I don’t know what you were discussing, but unless you want everyone in the room to witness it, you should keep your voices down.”

  George poured me a glass of wine and Jason steered the conversation to his mother. We all talked affectionately about Kate for a while. After we ordered appetizers, I took advantage of the lull in conversation. “What were you two talking about when I came in?”

  “Just politics. Nothing you’d be interested in,” George said.

  I smiled sweetly. “It sounded interesting to me. Did I hear Jason say that Andrews visited every one of the senators on the judiciary committee the day before he died?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Tampa, Florida

  Friday 9:30 p.m.

  January 28, 2000

  BOTH MEN LOOKED UNCOMFORTABLE, but Jason was the one who answered me. “It’s not something we’re supposed to talk about, now that he’s dead. But what he did is not that unusual. It’s been done before.”

  “I didn’t realize the vote on a Supreme Court nominee was a popularity contest,” I said.

  “It’s not. But it is politics as usual. The senators take the Supreme Court appointments very seriously because of how long the justices serve and the impact they have on the country. No one wants to vote yes on a man they know nothing about,” Jason explained.