Cruel and Unusual ks-4

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Yeah.” Marino looked interested. "As n matter of fact, she did.”

  'Willie Travers had an energetic, pleasant voice over the phone when I finally reached him at the Pink Shell resort in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. But he was vague and noncommittal when I began to ask questions.

  "Mr. Travers, what can I do to make you trust me?” I finally asked in despair.

  "Come down here.”

  "That's going to be very difficult at moment."

  "I'd have to see you.”

  "Excuse me?’

  "That's the way I am. If I can see you, I can read you and know if you're okay. Jenny was the same way.”

  "So if I come down to Fort Myers Beach and let you read me, you will help me?”

  "Depends on what I pick up.”

  I made airline reservations for six-fifty the following morning. Lucy and I would fly to Miami. I would leave her with Dorothy and drive to Fort Myers Beach, where there was a very good chance I would spend a night wondering if I'd lost my mind. Chances were overwhelming that Jennifer Deighton's holistic health nut of an ex would turn out to be a great big waste of time.

  Saturday, the snow had stopped when I got up at four A.M. and went into Lucy's bedroom to wake her. For a moment I listened to her breathe, then lightly touched her shoulder and whispered her name in the dark she stirred and sat straight up. On the plane, she slept to Charlotte, then wallowed in one of her unbearable moods the rest of the way to Miami.

  "I'd rather take a cab," she said, staring out the window…

  "You can't take a cab, Lucy. Your mother and her friend will be looking for you.”

  "Good. Let them drive around the airport all day. Why can't I come with you?”

  "You need to go home, and I need to drive straight to Fort Myers Beach, and then I'm going to fly from there back to Richmond. Trust me. It wouldn't be any, fun.”

  "Being with Mother and her latest idiot isn't any fun, either.”

  "You don't know he's an idiot. You've never met him. Why don't you give him a chance?”

  "I wish Mother would get AIDS.”

  "Lucy, don't say such a thing.”

  "She deserves it I don't understand how she can sleep with every dickhead who takes her out to dinner and a movie. I don't understand how she can be your sister.”

  "Lower your voice," I whispered.

  "If she missed me so much, she'd want to pick me up herself. She wouldn't want someone else around.”

  "That's not necessarily true," I told her. "When you fall in love someday, you'll understand better.”

  "What makes you think I've never been in love?” She looked furiously at me.

  "Because if you had been, you would know that being in love brings out both the best and the worst in us. One day we're generous and sensitive to a fault, and the next we're not fit to shoot. Our lives become lessons in extremes.”

  "I wish Mother would hurry up and go through menopause.”

  Mid-afternoon, as I drove the Tamiami Trail in and out of the shade, I patched up the holes guilt had chewed into my conscience. Whenever I dealt with my family, I felt irritated. and annoyed. Whenever I refused to deal with them, I felt the same way I had as a child, when I learned the art of running away without leaving home. In a sense, I had become my father after he died. I was the rational one who made A's and knew how to cook and handle money. I was the one who rarely cried and whose reaction to the volatility in my disintegrating home was to cool down and disperse like a vapor. Consequently, my mother and sister accused me of indifference, and I grew up harboring a secret shame that what they said was true.

  I arrived in Fort Myers Beach with the air-conditioning on and the visor down to shield the sun. Water met the sky in a continuum of vibrant blue, and palms were bright green feathers atop trunks as sturdy as ostrich legs. The Pink Shell resort was the color of its name. It backed up to Estero Bay and threw its front balconies open wide to the Gulf of Mexico. Willie Travers lived in one of the cottages, but I was not due to meet him until eight P.M. Checking into a one bedroom apartment, I literally left a trail of clothes on the floor as I snatched off my winter suit and grabbed shorts and a tennis shirt out of my bag. I was out the door and on the beach in seven minutes.

  I did not know how many miles I walked, for I lost track of time, and each stretch of sand and water looked magnificently the same: I watched bobbing pelicans throw their heads back as they downed fish like shots of bourbon, and I deftly stepped around the flaccid blue balloons of beached Portuguese men-of-war. Most people I passed were old. Occasionally, the high-pitched voice of a child lifted above the roar of waves like a bit of bright paper carried by the wind. I picked up sand dollars worn smooth by the surf and beached shells reminiscent of peppermints sucked thin. I thought of Lucy and missed her again.

  When most of the beach was in shade, I returned to my room.

  Showering and changing, I got in my car and, cruised Estero Boulevard until hunger guided me like a divining rod into the parking lot of the Skipper's Galley., I ate red snapper and, drank white wine while the horizon faded to a dusky blue. Soon boat lights drifted low in the darkness and I could not see the water.

  By the time I found cottage 182 near the bait shop and thing pier, I was as relaxed as I had been in a long time. When Willie Travers opened the door, it seemed we had been friends forever.

  "The first order of business is refreshment. Surely you haven't eaten," he said.

  I regretfully told him I had.

  "Then you'll simply have to eat again.”

  "But I couldn't.”

  "I will prove you wrong within the hour. The fare is very light. Grouper grilled in butter and Key Lime juice with a generous sprinkling of fresh ground pepper. And we have seven-grain bread I make from scratch that you'll never forget as long as you live. Let's see. Oh, yes. Marinated slaw and Mexican beer.”

  He said all this as he popped the caps off two bottle of Doe Equis. Jennifer Deighton's former husband had to be close to eighty years old, his face as ruined by the sun as cracked mud, but the blue eyes set in it were as vital as a young man's. He smiled a lot as he talked, and was beef jerky lean. His hair reminded me of white tennis ball fuzz.

  "How did you come to live here?” I asked, looking around at mounted fish on the walls and rugged furnishings.

  "A couple of years ago I decided to retire and fish, so I worked out a deal with the Pink Shell. I'd run their bait shop if they'd let me rent one of the cottages at a reasonable rate.”

  "What was your profession before you refined?”

  "Same as it is now.”

  He smiled. "I practice holistic medicine, and you never really retire from that any more than you retire from religion. The difference is, now I work with people I want to work with, and I no long have an office in town.”

  "Your definition of holistic medicine?”

  "I treat the whole persons plain and simple. The point is to get people in balance.”

  He looked appraisingly at me, set his beer down, and carne over to the captain's chair where I sat, "Would you mind standing up?”

  I was in a mood to be agreeable.

  "Now hold out one of your arms. I don't care which one, but hold it straight out so it's parallel to the floor. That's fine. Now I'm going to ask you a question and then as you answer I'm going to try to push your arm down while you resist. Do you view yourself as the family hero?”

  "No.”

  My arm instantly yielded to his pressure and lowered like a drawbridge.

  "Well, you do view yourself as the family hero. That tells me you're pretty damn hard on yourself and have been from the word go. All right. Now let's put your arm up again and I'm going to ask you another question. Are you good at what you do?”

  "Yes.”

  "I'm pushing down as hard as I can and your arm is steel. So you are good at what you do.”

  He returned to the couch and I sat back down.

  "I must admit that my medical teaching makes me s
omewhat skeptical," I said with a smile.

  "Well, it shouldn't, because the principles are no different from what you deal with every day. Bottom line? The body doesn't lie. No matter what you tell yourself, your energy level responds to what is actually true. If your head says you aren't the family hero or you love yourself when that's not how you feel, your energy gets weak. Is this making any sense?”

  "Yes.”

  "One of the reasons Jenny came down here once or twice a year was so I could balance her. And when she was here last, around Thanksgiving, she was so out of whack I had to work with her several hours everyday.”

  “Did she tell you what was wrong?”

  "A lot of things were wrong. She'd just moved and didn't like her neighbors, especially the ones across the street.”

  "The Clarys," I said.

  "I suppose that was the name. The woman was a busybody and the man was a flirt until he had a stroke. Plus, Jenny's horoscope readings had gotten out of hand and were wearing her out.”

  "What was your opinion of this business she ran?”

  "Jenny had a gift but she was spreading it too thin.”

  "Would you label her a psychic?”

  "Nope. I wouldn't label Jenny - wouldn't even begin to try. She was into a lot of things:" I suddenly remembered the blank sheet of paper anchored by the crystal on her bed and asked Travers if he might know what that meant, or if it meant anything.

  "It meant she was concentrating.”

  "Concentrating?”

  I puzzled. "On what?"

  "When Jenny wanted to meditate, she would get a white sheet of paper and put a crystal on top of it. Then she would sit very still and slowly turn the crystal around and around, watching light from the facets move on the paper. That did for her what staring at the water does for me.”

  "Was anything else bothering her when she came to see you, Mr. Travers?”

  "Call me Willie. Yea, and you know what I'm about to say. She was upset about this convict who was waiting to be executed - Ronnie Waddell. Jenny and Ronnie had been writing to each other for many years and she just couldn't deal with the thought of him being put to death."

  "Do you know if Waddell ever revealed anything to her that could have placed her in jeopardy?”

  "Well, he gave her something that did.”

  I reached for my beer without taking my eyes off him.

  "When she came down here at Thanksgiving, she brought all of the letters he had written and anything else he had sent her over the years. She wanted me to keep them down here for her.”

  “Why?”

  "So they would be safe.”

  "She was worried about somebody trying to get them from her?”

  "All I know is, she was spooked. She told me that during the first week of this past November, Waddell called her collect and said he was ready to die and didn't want to fight it anymore. Apparently, he was convinced nothing could save him, and he asked her to go to the farm in Suffolk and get his belongings from his mother. He said he wanted Jenny to have them, and not to worry, that his mother would understand.”

  "What were those belongings?” I asked.

  "Just one thing.”

  He got up. "I'm not real sure of the significance - and I'm not sure I want to be sure. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Dr. Scarpetta. You can take it on back to Virginia. Share it with the police. Do with it what you want.”

  "Why are you suddenly being helpful?” I asked. "Why not weeks ago?’

  "Nobody bothered to come see me," he said loudly from another room. "I told you when you called I don't deal with people over the phone.”

  When he returned, he set a black Hartmann briefcase at my feet. The brass lock had been pried open and the leather was scarred: "Fact is, you'd be doing me a big favor to get this out of my life," Willie Travers said, and I could tell he mean it. "The very thought of it makes my energy bad.”

  The scores of letters Ronnie Waddell had written Jennifer Deighton from death row were neatly bundled in rubber bands and sorted chronologically. I skimmed through few in my hotel roam that night, because their importance all but disappeared in the light of other items I found.

  Inside the briefcase were legal pads filled with handwritten notes that made little sense, for they referred to cases and dilemmas of the Commonwealth from more than ten years ago. There were pens and pencils, a map of Virginia, a tin of Sucrets throat lozenges, a Vick's inhaler, and a tube of Chapstick. Still in its yellow box was an EpiPen, a 3 milligram epinephrine auto-injector routinely kept by people fatally allergic to bee stings or some foods. The prescription label was typed with the patient's name, the date, and the information that the EpiPen was one of five refills. Clearly, Waddell had stolen the briefcase from Robyn Naismith's house on the fateful morning he murdered her. It may be that he had no idea who it belonged to until he carried it off and broke the lock. Waddell discovered he had savaged a local celebrity whose lover Joe Norring, was then the attorney general of Virginia.

  “Waddell never had a chance," I said. "Not that he necessarily deserved clemency in light of the severity of his crime. But from the moment he was arrested, Norring was a worried man. He knew he had left his briefcase at Robyn's house, and he knew it had not been recovered by the police.”

  Why he had left his briefcase at Robyn's house was not clear, unless he'd simply forgotten it on a night that neither of them could know was her last.

  "I can't even begin to imagine Norring's reaction when he heard," I said.

  Wesley glanced at me over the arm of his glasses as he continued perusing paperwork. "I don't think we can imagine it. It was bad enough he had to worry about the world discovering he was having an affair, but his connection with Robyn would have instantly made him the, prime suspect in her murder.”

  "In a way," Marino said, "he was lucky as hell Waddell took the briefcase.”

  "I'm sure in his mind he was unlucky either way he looked at it," I said. "If the briefcase had turned up at the scene, he was in trouble. If the briefcase was stolen, as it was, then Norring had to worry about it turning up somewhere:" Marino got the coffeepot and refilled everyone’s cup. "Somebody must have done something to ensure Waddell's silence.”

  "Maybe.”

  Wesley reached for the cream. "Then again; maybe Waddell never opened his mouth. My guess is he feared from the beginning that what he had stumbled upon only made matters worse for him. The briefcase could be used as a weapon, but who would it destroy? Norring or Waddell? Was Waddell going to trust the system enough to badmouth the AG? Was he going to trust the system enough years later to badmouth the governor - the only man who could spare his life?”

  "So Waddell remained silent, knowing that his mother would protect what he had hidden on the farm until he was ready for someone else to have it," I said.

  "Norring had ten damn years to find his briefcase;" Marino said. "Why did he wait so long to start looking?”

  "1 suspect Norring has had Waddell watched from, the beginning," Wesley said, "and that this surveillance was stepped up considerably over the past few months. The closer Waddell got to the execution, the less he had to lose, and the more likely he was to start talking. It's possible someone was monitoring his phone conversation when he called Jennifer Deighton in November. And it's possible that when word got to Norring, he panicked.”

  "He should have," Marino said. "I personally searched through all of Waddell's belongings when we was working the case. The guy had next to nothing, and if anything belonging to him was back on the farm, we never found it.”

  "And Norring would have known that," I said.

  "Hell, yes," Marino said. "But he's going to know, there's something strange about belongings from the farm being given to this friend of Waddells. Norring starts seeing that damn briefcase in his nightmares again, and to make matters worse, he can't have someone just barge into Jennifer Deighton's house while Waddell's still alive. If something happens to her, there's no telling what Waddell will do. A
nd the worst possibility would be if he started singing to Grueman.”

  "Benton," I said, "would you happen to know why Norring was carrying epinephrine? What is he allergic to?”

  “Apparently, to shellfish. Apparently, he keeps EpiPens all over the place.”

  While they continued to talk,, I checked the lasagna in the oven and opened a bottle of Kendall Jackson. The case against Norring would take a very long time, if it could be proven at all, and I thought I understood, to a degree, how Waddell must have felt It wasn't until close to eleven P.M. that I called Nicholas Grueman at home.

  "I'm finished in. Virginia," I said. "As long as Norring is in office, he'll make sure I won't be. They've taken my life, goddamn it, but I'm not giving them my soul. I plan to take the Fifth every time.”

  “You will certainly be indicted.”

  "Considering the bastards I'm up against, I think that's a certainty anyway.”

  "My, my, Dr. Scarpetta. Have you forgotten the bastard representing you? I don't know where you spent your weekend, but I spent mine in London.”

  I felt the blood drain from my face.

  "Now, there's no guaranteeing that we can slide this around Patterson," said this man I used to think I hated, "but I'm going to move heaven and earth to get Charlie Hale on the stand.”

  14 January 20 was as windy as March but much colder, and the sun was blinding. as I drove east on Broad Street toward the John Marshall courthouse.

  "Now I will tell you something else you already know," Nicholas Grueman said. "The press is going to be churning up the water like bluefish on a feeding frenzy. You fly too low, you lose a leg. We'll walk side by side, eyes cast down, and don't turn and look at anyone no matter who it is or what he says.”

  "We're not going to find a parking place," I said, turning left on 9th. "I knew this would happen.”

  "Slow down. That good woman right there on the side is doing something. Wonderful. She's leaving, if she can ever get the wheels turned enough.

  A horn blared behind me.

  I glanced at my watch then turned to Grueman like an athlete awaiting last-minute instruction from the coach. He wore a long navy blue cashmere coat and black leather gloves, his silver-topped cane leaning against seat and a battle-scarred briefcase in his lap.