House Witness

by Mike Lawson

  “Who provided the reference for him?” DeMarco asked.

  “A company like ours in Seattle, one that manages top-of-the-line properties. Mr. Cantwell rented a penthouse apartment there in 2004.”

  This was getting better and better. It was in Seattle in 2004 that the former Microsoft executive had been acquitted of rape because a witness changed her mind.

  “Can you tell me Cantwell’s social security number, and can I have a copy of the reference letters and his driver’s license?” DeMarco asked.

  “You bet,” Judy said.

  “By the way, do you know if Cantwell was married?” DeMarco asked.

  “I don’t know if he was married or not—he didn’t list a wife on any of the paperwork I have—but I think he lived with a woman.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because once a month I’m required to check on the properties we rent. Normally, Mr. Cantwell would be there when I dropped by, or sometimes he’d just tell me to use my own key to get in, but once a woman let me in.”

  “Did she give you a name?”

  “Not that I recall. I knocked on the door and she said something like, ‘Yeah, Bill told me you’d be dropping by.’ But I don’t remember her telling me her name.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Very pretty and very young. I mean she was way too young for him.”

  “How young was she?”

  “Early twenties, I’d say.”

  Meaning she’d be in her early thirties now, DeMarco thought.

  “What did she look like?” DeMarco asked. “Blond, brunette? Tall, short?”

  “Oh, she was blond, but I don’t know if that was her natural color. I remember she had a cute, short haircut and thinking if she’d been more approachable I would have asked her who cut it. And she was tall. I’m five six, and she was at least three or four inches taller than me.”

  So who was the woman? Was she just Cantwell’s girlfriend or was she his partner? And could she have been the woman who visited Randy White’s sister in the nursing home?

  Well, he’d worry about the woman later. Right now what he needed to do was track down Cantwell, and having the guy’s picture and social security number meant that it shouldn’t be too hard. And if he was involved in the Toby Rosenthal case, he’d be in New York.

  DeMarco called Sarah right after leaving Judy Gleeson’s office and gave her everything he had on Cantwell.

  “You got him!” Sarah said.

  “No, Sarah, we got him. Now we just have to find him.”

  He called Justine next. He told her about Cantwell, how he’d identified him, and how he was fairly sure that he was the man involved in the cases in Houston and Las Vegas as well as Phoenix—although he didn’t have proof, not stand-up-in-court proof. But at least he was no longer chasing a shadow.

  “I told you there was a guy,” Justine said, sounding smug.

  “But I don’t know if he’s in New York,” DeMarco said.

  “He is,” Justine said.

  DeMarco started to pack, but then decided to head over to the hotel bar and have a martini. He figured he deserved a drink or two for having ID’d Cantwell.

  Then Sarah called.

  “William Cantwell’s dead,” Sarah said. “He died in 2014.”

  29

  Two years earlier

  Santa Barbara, California—2014

  Bill’s getting sick and dying was the worst experience of Ella’s life.

  They’d just finished a job in Las Vegas and were planning to take the year off. Bill, for whatever reason, had a hankering to go to New Zealand, and he wanted to take cruise ships to get there, stopping at a few islands in the South Pacific along the way.

  Bill loved cruising. He liked the entertainment on board the ships; he liked going to the casino and playing craps with a crowd of cigar-smoking, boisterous men. He liked sitting on the deck sunbathing with Ella at his side, looking good in a small bikini. He liked sipping a drink on the balcony of their suite—and they always had a suite with a balcony—and looking out at the ocean, hoping to spot porpoises or dolphins or whales. He acted like a little kid every time he saw one.

  What he really enjoyed were the dinners. On a cruise ship, unless you asked to sit alone, they’d seat you at a table with a bunch of strangers—or at least they were strangers at the start of the trip. By the end of the cruise, they were all Bill’s best friends. Bill was the life of the party, got everyone talking, knew more jokes than anyone else; he’d buy the table bottles of champagne to celebrate virtually anything. Everybody loved Bill.

  On the way to New Zealand, he started to feel tired all the time; the slightest activity would wear him out. And despite having always had a good appetite, he didn’t seem to feel like eating. Then the abdominal pains started, the pain radiating to his back, and Ella started to get worried. The doctor on the cruise ship, who Ella suspected was a drunk, couldn’t find the problem and didn’t have the equipment he needed to do all the tests he’d have liked to. By the time they reached Australia, Bill’s eyes had a yellowish tinge, which Ella knew was a bad sign and could indicate liver problems. Lord knows, Bill drank enough to have screwed up his liver.

  Ella forced him to go see a doctor in Sydney, and that’s when they found out what was wrong. It was pancreatic cancer, the really aggressive, always fatal kind. And the cancer had already started to metastasize. The doctor told them that Bill had maybe nine months to live, more likely six, and the last three were going to be bad. And they were.

  They decided to go back to the States to get a second opinion even though they both knew it wasn’t going to make any difference. They flew to Los Angeles, where another oncologist confirmed what the Aussie doc had told them. Bill was going to die.

  The way Bill reacted surprised Ella. She thought he would have gotten angry and bitched about the unfairness of life. She thought he’d spend hours weeping and feeling sorry for himself, bemoaning the hand that Fate had dealt him. But he didn’t. He said repeatedly, except at the very end, when the pain was unbearable, that he’d had a great life and had lived it to the hilt. Sure, he’d said, I’d expected to live to eighty or ninety, but when you think about all those poor bastards out there who’ve never had what I had … Well, I really can’t complain, and I have no regrets. And the amazing thing was that he seemed to mean it. They talked it over and decided to spend his last few months in Santa Barbara, where Bill’s mother lived. It was a gorgeous place to live—or die.

  Ella had liked Bill’s mom the first time they met, at their wedding, and in the next five months they became close as they cared for Bill together. Janet Kerns was a lot like Ella in many ways. She hadn’t been raised dirt-poor in some backwater town, but she hadn’t come from a rich family, either. And like Ella, she married the first time for love. Bill’s dad had been fairly well-off, but he hadn’t been superrich. Husbands two, three, and four—the ones who followed after Bill’s dad died—were superrich. And none of them stayed married to Janet all that long. What did last was the money she got when the divorces were final, including her fully paid-off home in the hills of Santa Barbara.

  After the initial shock wore off, Janet stopped crying and rolled up her sleeves and pitched in with Ella, doing what needed to be done. In the evenings when Bill was resting fitfully, they’d have a drink together and talk about everything under the sun. One thing they didn’t talk about was what Bill had been doing for a living since he was disbarred. Janet was smart enough to know that she didn’t want to know and Ella, of course, didn’t volunteer a thing.

  By the time the end finally came, when Bill was nothing more than skin and bones surrounding a sack of pain, Ella helped him on his way. The hospice nurse said the morphine should be used as needed to control his pain, adding, “At this point, you really can’t overdose him.” What the nurse meant was: When the pain gets to be too much, it’s okay to give him enough to kill him—and Ella did.

  Neither she nor Bill’s mom cried m
uch the day he died; they’d done all their crying a long time ago, and both were relieved that he was no longer suffering. He was cremated, then Bill’s mom rented a sailboat—one of her ex-husbands had taught her to sail—and she and Ella spread Bill’s ashes in the Pacific. When Ella saw a porpoise surface, she didn’t think it was a sign from God or anything foolish like that—but she was pleased, and knew Bill would have been delighted.

  After Bill died, Ella took stock—the way she took stock the day she graduated from high school in Calhoun Falls.

  Most of the money Bill had made in his lifetime was gone. Most of it he’d spent simply living—on the homes he rented, on the cars and boats he leased, on living life to the fullest. Bill Cantwell had never traveled in anything but a first-class seat. Then there were the bad investments: the land deal in Florida and the software company disaster in San Diego. And the cancer, of course, ate up a good chunk of his money, as he and Ella didn’t have health insurance. Ella figured that in the time she’d known him, Bill had made about eleven million dollars, and all that was left was about three million. How in the hell could he possibly have gone through eight million dollars in a fifteen-year period? Or to put it differently, how had she allowed him to blow through eight million?

  While three million might sound like a lot of money, Ella was only thirty-one years old when Bill died, and you can’t retire at the age of thirty-one with only three mil in the bank. For one thing, the money she and Bill had made couldn’t be put into mutual funds or invested with Edward Jones and allowed to grow; that would leave a money trail for the IRS to follow, and she couldn’t afford the risk. In other words, the three million she had was basically stuck in a coffee can, buried in the backyard, instead of generating income for Ella to live on. One of the things Ella needed to do was figure out how to launder the money so she could invest it in something safe—and not in get-rich-quick schemes involving people willing to take dirty cash. Like the people in the disastrous Florida land deal.

  But say Ella lived to ninety, which was not an unrealistic possibility. That meant three million dollars would have to last about sixty years, and three million divided by sixty was fifty thousand per year. Who wanted to live on fifty a year? Ella certainly didn’t. That was the very definition of middle class, and she had no intention of living in some tiny house, buying a gas-friendly car, agonizing over every purchase she made.

  Ella had a fuzzy idea of the future she wanted. She wanted to be retired by the age of forty. She wanted oceanfront property in California—Santa Barbara, Monterey, Carmel, someplace like that. She wanted to summer somewhere cool, yet civilized, like the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast or Whistler up in Canada. Maybe she’d start up a little business that might be fun, like an art gallery, or learn to sail like Bill’s mom. And there might be a man in this hazy vision of the future, but if there was, the most important thing about him would be his net worth. Whatever the case, all she knew for sure was that three million bucks wasn’t going to cut it.

  So Ella decided that she was going to keep doing what she and Bill had been doing together. At least for a few more years. Bill had taught her all she needed to know—and the truth was, she was actually brighter than Bill. Maybe at some point she’d get a partner—a junior partner—but her initial inclination was to go it alone.

  She thanked Bill’s mom for all she’d done for Bill and her, left Santa Barbara, and drove to San Antonio. She could have flown, but she liked the idea of driving to the place where Bill had his start; it was sort of like a pilgrimage, and as the highway passed under the tires, she thought about Bill and the life they’d had, occasionally weeping but more often smiling.

  The morning after she arrived in San Antonio, she walked into George Chavez’s office as soon as the office opened. He had no idea who she was, as Bill had never introduced her to him or told him about her. She bluntly told George that Bill was dead and that she’d been working with him since she married him—and that things were going to continue the way they’d always been. George would still act as her agent/middleman, and when a defense lawyer needed an “exceptional jury consultant,” he’d call Ella and he’d continue to get his 10 percent commission.

  After George got over the shock of Bill’s death, and after Ella convinced him she wasn’t some sneaky undercover cop, it didn’t take him long to make up his mind; going along with Ella’s plan was better than losing 10 percent. Plus George really had nothing to lose. From his perspective, he didn’t do anything illegal; he just put Bill—now Ella—in touch with other lawyers, and what happened after that didn’t involve him at all.

  Unfortunately, the first solo job that came her way was the Toby Rosenthal case—a job more complex than any she and Bill had ever handled together.

  Part IV

  30

  After DeMarco learned that he’d been chasing a dead man all over the country, he decided to return to New York and regroup.

  He called for a meeting with Justine and Sarah; that it was a Sunday didn’t matter to him. Sarah recommended they meet for breakfast at a place in the East Village, explaining that its brunches were the best.

  Justine arrived on time, wearing jeans and a sunflower yellow blouse, her gray-streaked brown hair tied back in a sloppy ponytail. The bright morning light did not do her any favors.

  Sarah was ten minutes late and wearing a short red dress and high heels, and DeMarco suspected she was wearing what she’d been wearing the night before. Her hair was in disarray—but then it usually was—and she looked … well, “sated” was the only word that came to mind. For a moment DeMarco had an impulse to give her some fatherly advice on the fickle nature of young men, but he decided to keep his mouth shut.

  They ordered breakfast, and while they were eating DeMarco told them he now firmly believed that Bill Cantwell had been involved in undermining the trials of the men and women accused of murder and manslaughter in Phoenix, Houston, and Las Vegas. He concluded with, “I mean, I can’t prove that this guy blackmailed and bribed and disappeared witnesses, but I think he did. Hell, I know he did.

  “I also know that Cantwell had a woman working with him,” DeMarco said. He went on to explain that the law firm secretary, Elinore Rodgers, who delivered the medical records to Cantwell’s home in Phoenix, saw her. So did Judy Gleeson, the lady who worked for the property management company. Both Elinore and Judy had described her as young, blond, and pretty, and Judy said she was about five foot nine.

  “But was the woman Cantwell’s girlfriend or his accomplice?” Justine asked.

  DeMarco said, “I think she was his accomplice. Most likely a woman, not a man, helped Randy White’s sister commit suicide—and that means she’s a serious player and not some gal who just collected Cantwell’s mail and shared his bed.”

  “But you can’t prove this,” Justine said.

  “No. I can’t prove anything,” DeMarco said. “And even if I could prove the woman was helping Cantwell, there’s nothing to link her to the Rosenthal case.”

  “Well, there’s one thing,” Sarah said.

  “What’s that?” DeMarco said.

  “San Diego.”

  DeMarco said, “What are you talking about? I didn’t get any indication that Cantwell or the woman was involved in acquitting the heiress in the San Diego.”

  Sarah said, “The lawyer in the San Diego case went to law school with David Slade. They graduated the same year, and based on some comments on Slade’s Facebook page, I know they’re good pals.”

  “Why are you just telling me this now?” DeMarco said.

  “I’m not. The file I gave you identified where the various lawyers went to school. Maybe I should have highlighted it for you.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be a smart-ass,” DeMarco said.

  Turning to Justine, DeMarco said, “So where do we go from here?”

  “Find the woman,” Justine said. “See if she’s in New York.”

  “How do I do that?” DeMarco said. “All I know
about her is that she’s blond.”

  “I’ve got some ideas,” Sarah said.

  Justine rose and said, “I gotta get to the office. I’ve got a trial that starts tomorrow.”

  “It’s Sunday,” DeMarco said.

  “Tell me about it,” Justine said.

  “You need some help?” Sarah asked Justine.

  “No, but thanks for offering. And good job, Sarah. You’re going to make a great lawyer.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer,” Sarah said. “I mean, I’ll get a law degree, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll get a job with the FBI. I kind of like hunting criminals.”

  “FBI!” DeMarco said. “I’ve got boots taller than you.”

  “That’s why they give you a gun,” Sarah said.

  Sarah identified the woman—and it didn’t take her long at all.

  She used three different online companies who claimed they could provide information contained in public records, such as divorces, liens, and criminal convictions. One of the companies turned up the fact that Bill Cantwell married a woman named Ella Fields in Hawaii in 2003. The state of Hawaii had a record of the marriage. Now all DeMarco had to do was find the woman; how hard could that possibly be?

  It turned out to be impossible.

  DeMarco told Sarah to see if Ella Fields had ever obtained a driver’s license in the states of Washington, Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, or Nevada—the states where DeMarco suspected Bill Cantwell had plied his trade. What DeMarco wanted was a photo of Fields and her social security number. But Sarah struck out; no pretty blonde named Ella Fields or Ella Cantwell had a driver’s license in any state. She checked with NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, to see if Fields had a criminal record. She did not.

  So DeMarco called Justine and asked her to use her clout to see if anyone named Ella Fields or Ella Cantwell had ever obtained a passport. DeMarco needed her help, because if he and Sarah tried to penetrate the bureaucratic titanium shield surrounding the State Department they might not get what they needed until the next millennium.