Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

“The tech report shows otherwise,” said Santos. “Voice-mail messages are not like texts or e-mails. They don’t float around in cyberspace forever. Once a voice mail is deleted, the message is gone. But our techies can confirm when the message was left, when it was deleted, and when it was permanently deleted. Each of these four voice-mail messages was deleted the same day it was left.”

  “Then I must have deleted them before listening to them. I never got a voice-mail message from Tyla Tomkins.”

  Santos looked skeptical. “Is it your practice to delete voice-mail messages before listening to them?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Do you have an assistant who checks your messages for you?”

  “No. It’s my cell. I check it myself.”

  “Is your cell password-protected?”

  “That’s office policy,” said Carmen. “Our attorneys can’t use any mobile device unless it’s approved by our tech department and protected by a password. Each attorney creates his own. It can’t be something simple, like one-two-three-four, and it’s absolutely forbidden to share the password with anyone, even other attorneys in the office.”

  “It was a secure password,” I said.

  “So you accidentally deleted four new voice-mail messages on four different days? And all of those messages happened to be from Tyla Tomkins?”

  I hesitated, fully aware that Santos had framed a question that didn’t lend itself to a believable response. “All I can tell you is that I never got any of these voice-mail messages. Maybe it has something to do with this prepaid phone she used.”

  “People use prepaid phones all the time. They work fine.”

  “And then there’s the last call,” said Santos. “It’s two minutes long, and our tech agents found no evidence of a voice-mail message. That’s an actual conversation.”

  “Two minutes could be a hang-up.”

  “The entire Gettysburg address was delivered in two minutes, Abe.”

  “I never spoke to her on the phone.”

  “Then how do you explain the phone record?”

  “It must be a mistake.”

  “So four inadvertently deleted voice-mail messages, and a two-minute billing error? Is that your story?”

  “I understand it looks fishy.”

  Santos nodded, her first sign of agreement with me since the start of the meeting. “Given the fact that you admit to a past intimate relationship, I would say more than fishy.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Carmen intervened, putting it as delicately as possible. “It’s the question I asked on the phone last night, Abe.”

  Were you having an affair?

  “I was not sleeping with Tyla Tomkins, if that’s where this is going.”

  Santos said, “That’s exactly where this is going.”

  “Which, again, would be none of our business,” said Carmen. “Except that it was with the victim of a serial killer you may be called upon to prosecute, and you didn’t disclose it.”

  “Carmen, it didn’t happen.”

  Santos retook control, speaking as much to Carmen as to me. “It actually goes deeper than a question of whether Abe should continue on the case or not.”

  “Deeper in what way?” I asked.

  “I realize that this is a serial killer investigation,” said Santos. “Nonetheless, in any homicide investigation, a married man who was sleeping with the victim is always a person of interest. Especially when the married man is lying about the affair.”

  “I’m not lying, and I wasn’t having an affair.”

  “Hold on,” said Carmen. “Before this thing spirals out of control, let’s make some simple adjustments. Abe, I love you, but I have a lot of talented prosecutors. You’re off the Cutter investigation.”

  “I was going to suggest that,” I said.

  “Which is the stand-up thing to do,” said Carmen. “Now, as for this person-of-interest discussion. Agent Santos, I understand the cheating-husband angle. But Abe didn’t kill Tyla Tomkins. So if you feel compelled to put him on some list that the task force is maintaining, I urge you to be extremely discreet about it. This is a fine man’s professional reputation at stake, not to mention his marriage.”

  “Discretion is a good thing,” said Santos.

  “Thank you,” said Carmen. “So, I think we’re all good here?”

  No one disagreed. Carmen rose, thanked us, and showed us to the door.

  Rid had work to do with another prosecutor and headed one way. Santos went the other way, toward the elevator.

  It bothered me that things had turned icy between Santos and me. I was off the Cutter investigation, so it was no longer essential that we get along, but I hated to lose the respect of any law enforcement officer. I followed her down the hall.

  “Agent Santos?”

  She stopped, and I caught up with her at the bank of elevators. “I feel like there’s been some damage to our relationship here.”

  “You think?”

  “I want you to know that I did not have an affair with Tyla Tomkins.”

  I got nothing from her—nothing but an eye of disapproval for a man whose wife was the last to know. The elevator bell chimed, and the doors opened.

  “I’ll be in touch, Mr. Beckham.”

  Suddenly I was Mr. Beckham.

  She stepped onto the elevator, and Santos was gone.

  Chapter Ten

  I drove to Coconut Grove after work. I needed to talk to Rid.

  George Washington Carver Middle School is a top-ranked magnet school in an area that was once known as the Grove Ghetto. The Grand Avenue neighborhood isn’t the war zone it had been when Janet Reno was state attorney in the 1980s. Back then, butting right up against Miami’s most expensive real estate was a ghetto that could accommodate just about anyone’s bad habit, from gangs with their random hits to doctors and lawyers who ventured out into the night to service their addictions. That had been Samantha’s neighborhood. Carver Middle was the first punch in her ticket out. J.T. wasn’t as lucky, having wandered the streets too late at night for too many years.

  The neighborhood wasn’t quite so bad anymore, but it was fair enough to call it hardscrabble, especially after dark. One thing surely had not changed: basketball ruled. I knew I would find Rid coaching his eighth-grade boys’ team in the Carver gym.

  “Be with you in a minute, Abe,” he shouted from across the court.

  His players were running “suicides” up and down the court, the sprint-until-you-puke ritual that the toughest coaches imposed on the best teams. I took a seat in the bleachers, ready to dial 911 or administer artificial resuscitation, as necessary.

  “This ain’t a walk!” he shouted to his team. “Everyone under thirty seconds!”

  My friendship with Rid went beyond the cases we’d worked, deeper than the double dates with Samantha and his wife for dinner or whatever. He’d even convinced me to be his assistant coach for one season. I loved it so much that I’d decided to coach my own team. It wasn’t easy to land a head coaching job at a school, so I formed a “travel team,” which operated in a private league completely outside the school system. I lasted one season. My team was getting slaughtered, fifty-point blowouts or more. We had no height. I wondered how the other coaches were able to find fourteen-year-old boys who stood six-foot-four and could dunk with either hand, dribble behind their back, and shoot free throws with their eyes closed; how they persuaded parents to move the entire family from as far away as Orlando or Jacksonville just so their extremely talented son could play for Coach Nobody in a south Florida travel basketball league. Then I snagged my own ringer from Pompano Beach, and my eyes were opened. It started after our first big win. Ringer’s momma came up to me before the ink was dry on my stat sheet. “Coach, uh, the phone company canceled my phone. Can you loan me two hundred bucks?” Next win: “Coach, uh, my car—I’m two payments behind.” And on it went. “Coach, you know, the rent’s a problem for me this month.” “Hey, Coach, my
new boyfriend says I’d be bitchin’ with a weave.”

  “Coming back to be my assistant?” asked Rid.

  I rose and smiled. “I wish.”

  His team was in the locker room, and it was just the two of us courtside. “Give me a hand with the equipment?” he asked.

  “You got it.” I draped a dozen jump ropes around my neck, gathered up as many basketballs as I could carry, and followed him into the storage room.

  “You were pretty quiet in this morning’s meeting,” I said.

  He shoved a stack of orange training cones onto the top shelf. “Maybe you should have been, too.”

  “Did I talk too much?”

  “You denied too much.”

  “You mean the voice-mail messages?”

  “You’ve got shit for brains if you expect anyone to believe that Tyla Tomkins dialed your number for no reason, that you never listened to her messages, and then you deleted them by accident. And even if that’s true, it doesn’t even begin to explain the two-minute phone conversation where there was no voice-mail message.”

  We stepped out of storage, and Rid locked up. “Answer me this,” I said. “Do you honestly think I had something to do with Tyla’s disappearance?”

  “Shit no, Abe. I think you slept with her, and this song and dance is the typical married man’s bullshit denial.”

  I followed him back into the gym, across the court to the exit. “That’s not what this is.”

  “That’s how it’s coming across.”

  “Then I need to fix that.”

  We stopped at the metal exit doors behind the bleachers. “Abe, let me give it to you straight. You violated rule number one of being interrogated: Always assume the guys asking the questions know more than you think they know.”

  “Okay. You gonna tell me what Santos knows, or you gonna make me beg?”

  “Let me give you a hypothetical.”

  “Is her name Tyla?”

  “Yeah. Tyla Hypo. She’s young, gorgeous, great body, smart, and married to her career. No time for a relationship, never been married. But she owns three different diamond engagement rings with wedding bands. Different size diamonds, from half karat to two karat. What’s your take?”

  “I don’t know. She collects rings?”

  “She was wearing a set when her body was found. She doesn’t just collect them.”

  “So she wants people to think she’s married.”

  “Not people, Abe. Men. She wants married men to think she’s married.”

  “Why?”

  Rid shook his head and pushed open the door. “Damn, Abe. Don’t play dumb on me.”

  I followed him out of the gym. The sun had set, and the yellowish glow from the fire department’s five-story training facility next to the school was the only light in the parking lot.

  “I’m not playing dumb,” I said, walking. “Really, why would she do that?”

  “You missed the key fact. She has no time for a relationship. The only men she wants are men who don’t want to move into her apartment and complicate her life. Men who are too afraid of creating a message trail to text her all day long and interfere with her work. Men who have no expectation that she’ll hang on their arm at some fancy-pants gala that she has no time for, because she needs to be out doing her own business development. Men who have no interest in taking her home to meet Mom and Dad. You get it?”

  “That all makes sense. But her friends, people at her law firm—everyone she knows—would think she’s crazy. They know she’s not married.”

  “She doesn’t wear the rings around people she knows. Tyla worked for a high-powered law firm. She was in London one week, San Francisco the next, Hong Kong the week after that. Instead of eating in a hotel room alone, she hooked up with lonely married men who spend two hundred business days a year away from their wives.”

  “But she doesn’t have to pretend to be married to have an affair with a married man.”

  We stopped at Rid’s car. “Are you really this dumb?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Abe, go get yourself a copy of Cheating for Dummies. Chapter one: Never cheat with someone who has more to lose than you do. If I’m married, and I’m banging a single woman, she’s got the power. I live in fear that she’s going to want more from ‘us,’ call my wife, and bust me. But if I’m banging a woman who’s also married—who has something to lose—we’re equal.”

  “So if Tyla wears the rings . . .”

  “The world is wide open,” he said. “Single guys, married guys, even married guys with something to lose. Married men who are too smart to risk everything for some gold digger will sleep with a married woman. They’re all in play, and they all want the same thing she does. A good time, no strings attached.”

  “That’s pretty calculating on her part, if you’re right.”

  Rid unlocked his car door. It creaked as he opened it. “No one said Tyla Tomkins was stupid.”

  “No one ever will,” I said.

  Rid climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine. “By the way, Abe. About that list of phone calls you saw this morning from Tyla’s prepaid?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There were six different numbers she called on that cell. So far, we’ve tracked down five of them. Every one of them was a married man. Including you.”

  It was like a punch to the chest. That explained the late-night telephone call from Carmen, why she’d dropped the gloves and popped me right between the eyes: Were you having an affair?

  “I got your back, Abe. But do yourself a favor. Have a talk with Angelina.” He closed the car door and backed out of the parking space.

  I watched the red taillights disappear into the darkness, standing alone in the parking lot, right outside Samantha’s old middle school.

  Chapter Eleven

  Victoria Santos rode the express elevator in silence, fifty-five stories up. The paneled doors opened, and she stepped onto inlaid floors of polished Brazilian hardwood. Silk wall coverings and museum-quality rugs softened the conservative decor, and the Baccarat chandeliers were an added touch. Just beyond the grand staircase was the main lobby, an atrium in the sky, three stories in height and enough floor space for a basketball court. The entire east wall was an arched window that, this close, was much larger than it had appeared to Victoria from street level. Seated behind the mahogany and glass reception desk was a young woman who could have been a Cosmopolitan model. Behind her, mounted on the wall, was a larger-than-life oil painting of three old white men, who Victoria could only assume were the late Belter, Benning, and Lang.

  Victoria wondered if any of them had ever bumped heads with J. Edgar Hoover.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist asked.

  Victoria stepped toward the desk. Her appointment was with Brian Belter, BB&L’s managing partner and the grandson of the firm’s founder. Belter’s assistant had specifically asked that Victoria not announce that she was an FBI agent, so she obliged, giving only her name and the time of her appointment with Belter.

  “It should be just a few minutes, Ms. Santos. If you’d like to have a seat, I’ll call you when Mr. Belter is ready. Mr. Riddel is already here.”

  “Mr. Riddel?”

  The receptionist double-checked her appointment screen. “Yes, he’s part of your meeting. I’ll call you.”

  Victoria went to the seating area. Riddel rose from the leather couch to greet her.

  “Wasn’t expecting to see you here,” said Victoria.

  “That’s because you didn’t invite me. I called Belter yesterday to set up my own appointment and found out that he already had a meeting scheduled with the FBI. I suggested we consolidate. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Actually, I do mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Abe Beckham is your friend.”

  “So?”

  “My goal is for the FBI to sift through every e-mail, every voice mail, every text message, to or from Tyla Tomkins over the past six mon
ths. I don’t want any communications between her and your friend Abe to, shall we say, fall through the cracks.”

  “Nothing is going to fall through the cracks.”

  “Call me paranoid, but maybe once or twice in the history of the universe a man has probably covered for another man who cheated on his wife.”

  “Abe denies he had a relationship with Tyla Tomkins.”

  “Great. Two more times, and the cock will crow.”

  Riddel smiled a little, as if he liked her style. “Okay. Look, I have my doubts, too. But even if Abe had a little indiscretion, it has nothing to do with Tyla’s death.”

  “Nothing would make me happier than to look at all the e-mails, all the evidence, and come to that conclusion. And I do mean all.”

  The receptionist came for them. “Mr. Belter will see you now.”

  Riddel stepped aside for Victoria and said, “After you,” making it clear that he wasn’t leaving and would be right behind her.

  The receptionist led them down the center hallway to a double-door entrance to a conference room. The door weighed much more than she did, and she nearly fell off her four-inch heels trying to open it.

  “Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” she said as Victoria and Riddel entered. The door closed, and Belter crossed the room to greet them.

  Belter was a handsome man in his late forties, much better looking than his grandfather in the oil portrait. Two other lawyers were with him. One was a young associate who would surely say nothing, but who would probably be up all night drafting a forty-page memorandum for Belter that summarized the meeting, identified all potential legal issues, and analyzed every legal precedent since Blackstone that favored their position. The other lawyer was Maggie Green, a former federal prosecutor who had recently joined BB&L as a new partner, earning at least ten times her annual government salary to develop a white-collar criminal defense practice.

  “Very nice to meet you,” said Victoria, conveying not an inkling of her true feelings for prosecutors who cashed in.

  The players took their seats, law enforcement on one side of the long walnut table, the lawyers of BB&L on the other. Victoria began with an update on the status of the investigation. Maggie Green interrupted several times with questions, not all of which Victoria could answer.