“Ruben's dead?” She frowned and took a breath, her red lip-sticked lips thin and pursed so that they looked like a cut. From the way she took the news, I gathered it wasn't the first time she'd heard one of her paying customers would no longer be making contributions to her beach house. “I called him only last week,” she said.
“I know,” I replied.
“He missed an appointment.”
“Yes.”
“He was in the Air Force? I thought he was a personal trainer.” I sensed real disappointment, almost hurt. Judith Churcher believed she'd had a deep and honest rapport with Wright.
“He didn't let anyone know the truth, Dr. Churcher,” I said, giving her a break, letting her off her personal hook. “He couldn't, otherwise he'd have been bounced out of the Air Force. We don't let people with MS jump out of planes. He came to see you precisely so that we wouldn't know.”
She nodded and allowed herself to relax a little.
“I want to ask you about his mental state.”
“You're thinking he might have killed himself?”
“We're just closing down options,” I said ambiguously. “I've already spoken to the referring doctor—”
“Dr. Mooney.”
“Yeah, so I know he was on medication for depression. You were helping Ruben come to grips with his new reality, easing him through the grieving process of losing the life he'd lived.”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“In your opinion, do you think he was capable of suicide?”
This was a difficult one for Churcher to answer, and I could see by the lines in her forehead that she was wrestling with it. If she believed it was a possibility, why hadn't she done something about it, even if it was only to warn Mooney? And if she hadn't seen Wright's suicide coming, what did that say about her ability to do the job? In the end, Churcher came down on the side of her own professional defense. “Suicide? No. I didn't think he was at risk of that. He was unhappy about the MS, which is only healthy—and natural. But the Effexor seemed to be getting on top of the depression, and the other prescribed drugs were helping him manage his symptoms. Most days, he said, he was actually feeling pretty good.” She glanced up at the ceiling, hunting for a summary. “No, I'd say his state of mind was positive—realistic, but positive. Did you know Ruben?”
I said that I did, that we'd worked together some years back.
“Then you know the kind of person Ruben was—a tower of strength. He was coping well—better than well, in fact. He knew what he was in for, that there were speed bumps ahead, but he appeared to be prepared for them.”
That all sounded like the Ruben Wright I knew, but I also knew that the bigger folks were, the harder they fell. And Ruben had fallen hard. I'd seen the photos. “Were you aware that he was throwing money around like water these past couple of months, pretty much from the time he was diagnosed with the MS?”
Churcher appeared disappointed with the news. She looked at the floor. “No, no, I wasn't.”
“Now that you know, what do you think?”
“I know what you think,” she said.
Amazing, I thought. A shrink who makes statements rather than asks questions. “So tell me.”
“You think he was spending all his money because he intended to kill himself.”
I shrugged. “You can't take it with you.”
“Look, it's possible. I just…”
“Just what?” I pressed.
“I just don't… he wasn't the type. He wasn't suicidal.”
“But it fits.”
“Yes, it does. I have a few MS patients. It's an expensive disease. You need a lot of drugs to control the symptoms, and when the disease advances, earning an income gets difficult. There aren't many jobs around for people with memory loss, right?”
There was always politics, I thought.
Churcher continued. “The point is, securing your financial situation should be one of your first priorities—there's a long and bumpy road ahead. Instead, he began frittering it away, wasting it. That's a pretty big signpost.”
That was the way I figured it, too.
We sat around for another forty minutes, going well past the booked hour. I rehashed the interview with her—asked the same questions different ways, in case anything I'd missed popped out, but I seemed to have picked everything up on the first sweep. At the end, Churcher asked, “Do I have to worry about any repercussions because of this, Officer?”
“If you're worried about the Air Force—no. Hiding a medical condition from the military is not unheard of. You're not responsible for Ruben's actions—he was.”
She nodded, but I knew she wasn't totally satisfied. Like every shrink I'd ever met, Churcher believed she could look into a patient's soul, locate the hidden truth, and help the patient find it, too. It was a big blow to her ego to realize that—at least in the case of Ruben Wright—she'd looked into his soul and failed to spot the lies. I handed her my card and told her she could call me if anything we hadn't covered came to mind, which was pretty much the way I concluded every interview. I took a few steps into the reception area. Two men in business suits and a woman in a hoodie and sweatpants grazed among the medical paperbacks and pamphlets. The woman picked up something about the inner child and flicked through it. That reminded me. I went to the rack and lifted out the Have a Nice Flight booklet. Maybe a little self-help wouldn't hurt. I turned to Churcher and said, “How much do I owe you for this?”
“Have trouble flying?” Churcher checked the title, her smile turning vaguely knowing, in the everyone-has-issues way you get from people who make their living convincing the rest of us that healthy self-doubt is a sickness.
“I think it's more a problem with crashing.”
“Nineteen ninety-five,” she said.
I gave her the money and took a receipt. I had at least one more stop to make, and I was late.
TWENTY-SIX
It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the offices of Wright's attorney. The guy sat in a one-room office over a chemical-supply warehouse. The room smelled of unwashed-body odor and bleach. Under Juan Demelian's arms, half-moons of perspiration had stained his yellowing business shirt gray. He chewed gum aggressively while his right leg vibrated with nervous energy under the desk. A pack of NicoDerm patches lay open on top of a collection of folders. An ex-smoker near breaking point.
Demelian looked South American, perhaps Uruguayan. His brown eyes bulged with what looked like a thyroid condition, the gray skin beneath them wrinkled with lack of sleep. He was the compact type, small and swarthy. I didn't need a sixth sense to know business was going no place for Juan Demelian, except down the drain. Maybe that accounted for the bleach smell.
“Wright, Wright, Wright… yeah… File's here someplace. Got a reading of the guy's will next week,” he said as he chewed, staring at the voice recorder in my hand, its red light flashing. He sifted through the desktop sea of paperwork with his fingertips. I sat back and let him get on with it, feeling the vibration of his jiggling leg through the floorboard under my foot. Demelian and I had already gone through the prelims. He knew who I was, where I was from, and what I wanted. This wouldn't take long.
I made use of the time by checking it; it was after 3 p.m. By now I'd hoped to have received a call from Boris down at Elmer's, letting me know that Amy McDonough had arrived for what was left of her day's work. Maybe she hadn't come back. Maybe Boris was holding out on me.
“Okay, here we go.” Demelian lifted a pair of bifocals onto the end of his oily nose. He picked out a folder that had been used many times over, earlier titles scribbled on it in black pen and subsequently crossed out with red. He flipped it open and scanned the contents. “Yeah… Notes here say he called seven weeks ago, made an appointment that was rescheduled a few times. He was on my calendar for an appointment ten days ago. Next I heard, he was dead.”
“Who told you?”
“The Air Force.”
“So you knew he was in the Ai
r Force.”
“Of course.”
“Do you know what Ruben Wright wanted when he called you?”
He shrugged. “I handled the guy's will—that's all. I can only assume it had something to do with that.”
A reasonable assumption. “Is this the will you handled for Sergeant Wright?” I took a copy out of my pocket, unfolded it, and then passed it to him across his desk.
He took it, scanned it, then compared it with a copy in the folder that had Ruben's name scrawled across it. “Yeah, that's the one.” He handed it back.
“What might he have wanted to change, do you think?”
“Do I look like a mind reader?”
“Guess.”
“The law doesn't guess.”
“Humor me.”
Demelian rolled his goldfish eyeballs. “As I said, I only handled his will. He might have wanted it altered, even just a change of address, for example. He might have wanted to change the beneficiaries—maybe leave everything to a Romanian orphanage, or something. After I got the call about his untimely demise, I sent a copy of the will to Hurlburt Field by registered mail.”
“You think it likely he made an appointment just to change his address?”
“Nope.”
I wasn't getting far. “Was there anything you noticed about his will that was at all unusual?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“I don't know. You do wills; I don't. Use your imagination.”
“I don't have an imagination; I'm an attorney—I have process and precedent.”
I stared at him like I had all day to do this.
Demelian took a resigned breath and shook his head. He pushed a pellet of gum from a blister pack and dropped it in his mouth. “An unusual will? No. As you know from reading it, Wright had a distant relative in Gainesville. He left a few family photos to the guy, but everything else he had he was going to hand over to an Amy McDonough, who I assume was his squeeze. She lives here in Pensacola. You should go talk to her; maybe she knows.”
“Good idea,” I said. “I'll keep it in mind. Had Wright changed his will before?”
Demelian thumbed through his notes. “No. Not in the last two years.”
“What did you change back then?”
He called up a file on his laptop. “Um… made McDonough the sole beneficiary.”
“Nothing from him after that?”
“Not a peep until seven weeks ago.”
“Did you know Wright had been diagnosed with MS?”
“Wright had multiple sclerosis?” asked Demelian. “Shit…”
“You didn't know?”
“Nope.”
“He was diagnosed a couple of months ago, about when he called you for the first time in two years. Is that the kind of news that prompts people to change their wills?”
Demelian shrugged. “Beats me. Why don't you ask him?”
The attorney's concern for his late client's health and state of mind was touching. I had to admit, though, my line of questioning was a reach—and I wasn't even sure what I was reaching for. Two years ago, Ruben Wright made a new will that gave everything he owned to Amy McDonough. And then seven weeks ago, he wanted to make another change, not long after discovering the spasms in his legs were the first signs of MS. Coincidence? Or was there another reason for the decision to alter his will?
“Well, thanks for your time,” I said, standing to leave.
“Don't thank me. Just pay my bill when you get it.”
“The name of your firm—Demelian and Partners…”
“Having partners gives clients a sense of security.”
“Where are they?”
He gave me a snide twist of his lips, which I took to be a smile. “I got three partners—Me, Myself, and I.”
“Have you ever been in a bank with a lawyer buddy while it was being robbed?”
“No, why?”
“Never mind.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I parked a block from Amy McDonough's house, and walked the rest of the way. Her place still looked and felt every bit as empty and deserted as it did that morning. Nevertheless, I went to the front door and rang the bell.
Nothing.
I took a step back, stood on the porch, and wondered where she'd gone after the doctor's appointment she'd told Boris about—assuming she even had a doctor's appointment in the first place. It was 4:47. On the walk back down the path, I called Elmer's. After six rings a recorded voice message clicked in and told me my call was important to Elmer's and that I should try ringing during business hours, which were between nine a.m. and five p.m. Monday to Saturday, and nine a.m. to two p.m. Sundays and public holidays, except for Christmas Day, New Year's Day, and Thanksgiving when they weren't open at all, and my call would be happily handled by their expert trained staff. I wondered in what field Boris's expert training lay. Maybe it was in finishing up early.
Despite my earlier belief to the contrary, I was reasonably sure Boris took me seriously enough not to piss me off. I believed he would have called had Amy turned up for work, even if just to get revenge on her for leaving him alone in that wasteland of weight machines for the day. I got to the SUV and wondered what to do next. It would be dark in an hour. If I drove to Hurlburt Field, I'd only have to drive back out to Pensacola in the morning. My cell rang. Another blocked number. I answered it anyway.
“Hey. I thought you'd have called, or maybe sent flowers.”
“Ma'am…”
“It's Clare to you now, OK?”
“OK.”
“Anyway, now you've made me call you. Where are you? It's New Year's Eve, for Christ's sake, and I've got the night off.”
“New Year's? Jesus, when did that happen?”
“At least try to sound enthusiastic, Vin. You might give a girl a complex.”
“Sorry, Clare. Last night was amazing—you're amazing…”
“But something's wrong,” she said. “Yes, you've had an attack of the guilts—haven't you?—and now you don't want to see me because seeing me will remind you of your pathetic weakness for truly beautiful women.”
I laughed. I'd forgotten how to do that with a woman—laugh.
“So, what are you doing tonight? Mom and Dad have Manny. I've bought a bottle of vodka, the cutest underwear ensemble you've ever seen, and some whipped cream.”
“Whipped cream?”
“You'll never know unless you come over.”
“I'm still in Pensacola.”
“Really?”
“Actually, I'm parked a block away from the home of a woman by the name of McDonough.”
“Who's she?”
“She was Wright's girlfriend, and maybe Butler's too.”
“Did Wright know that?” Clare asked, turning instantly into a cop.
“I don't know. That's one of the things I want to ask her.”
“So what's going on at her house?”
“Nothing. She's not home. Went out this morning and hasn't come back. I'm going to sit in the SUV and wait for her to turn up.”
“Now there's a New Year's Eve to remember. How has the rest of the day gone? Dig up anything interesting?”
“Yeah—bits and pieces.” I gave her a rundown—she was still the DI on the case.
When I'd finished, Clare said, “And you're hoping Amy will provide the piece that makes it all fall into place?”
“That'd be convenient, wouldn't it?”
She agreed that it would. Having gone through everything with Clare, I realized I now had a pretty good picture of Ruben Wright on his last jump. To begin with, he was not the man I knew. He was sick, his face and hands possibly numb, his legs possibly spasming as MS attacked the nerve endings in his brain. He was also more than likely to have been clinically depressed, and jumping in the company of a man he despised, not least because he probably knew the guy was boning his girlfriend—something Wright was more than likely no longer capable of doing. That would have been hard for a man like Ruben—at least, the
man I knew—to take. In my first conversation with Clare on this case, her view, as well as my own, was that the circumstances surrounding Ruben Wright's death were, at the very least, suspicious. They still were, only now I was equally suspicious of Ruben Wright. He at least had the motive to take his own life. What was Butler's motive? He had the girl, didn't he? The guy might have been an asshole but he wasn't a psychopath—the type who killed just for the sake of killing. The picture didn't make a hell of a lot of sense. I had Butler's version of events, a little interesting forensic evidence, plus a few conflicting interviews. Was it possible the facts could be put together to form a different picture, one that made total sense?
I was aware of the silence, but it wasn't an uncomfortable one. It was almost as if the discussion about the case we'd just had was the small talk buffering the major issue still to be resolved—namely, were we somehow going to overcome the tyranny of distance between us and get together for some serious action with her bottle of whipped cream, or what?
“Where are you going to stay?” Clare asked, finally.
“Well, I currently have a room at the Ford Explorer, but the room service sucks.”
I heard her laugh. “What if McDonough doesn't show?”
“Then I'll try to find the complaints box and leave a note.”
“Why don't you just go to a hotel and make sure you're up early enough to catch the worm?”
It didn't take much to convince me that this would be a much better idea.
“I know a place just after you cross the bridge, coming into town. It's clean and the rooms don't smell of old sex,” Clare said.
“Okay, you've talked me into it.”
“Great. I'll see you there in an hour and a half. Wait up.” There was a pause. And then she added, “On second thought, have a quick nap. Might as well get some sleep while you can.”
* * *
I found the place Clare recommended. As promised, it was clean and fresh—more in the country bed-and-breakfast mode than hotel-style accommodation—and run by a tough little granny in orthopedic shoes whose thinning hair was dyed chestnut. As she handed over the key she informed me that I was lucky to be getting a room, it being New Year's Eve with folks down from the colder northern climes to enjoy the warmer weather. The old lady had apparently had a last-minute cancellation.
A Knife Edge Page 20
