That was okay that she didn’t know much English, because I spoke fluent Spanish. I lived in Mexico for several years in my youth, so I knew that I could communicate with her.
“I would like to speak with your wife at the same time,” I said. “I would like to arrange a time when Anita is going to be there at the same time that Christina is. What day and time would be good for that to happen?”
He shrugged. “My wife goes and visits mom twice a week. Wednesday evening and Sunday evening. She goes over there and has dinner and watches movies with her. That’s especially important now, because mom has had a hard time accepting dad’s death. She’s very lonely these days. If you go over there either of those evenings, you should catch my wife there and you can also talk to my mom. My mom had nothing to do with the poisoning, that much I can tell you.”
His answers still made me suspicious. He kept reassuring me that his mother couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the poisoning, but he didn’t seem to want to give me that same reassurance about his wife. Why?
“I will make an appointment with Anita,” I said. “For Wednesday evening. Hopefully I can talk to everyone that I need to talk to when I go and visit that evening.”
“I hope so too. You need to get to the bottom of this.” He shook his head. “Poisoned. Wow. I never would have thought that would be the case.”
“You never did? Seriously? The thought never crossed your mind? A healthy man who biked and golfed and ate fruits and vegetables gets deathly ill, and you never even considered why?”
“Not my job,” he said. “It was the job of the doctors who gave him his physicals. Why didn’t they find out that my dad was being poisoned? Seriously. They were the ones who dropped the ball.”
Why indeed? I was going to have to find out more about that. Either the doctors who examined him were incompetent, or there was something much more nefarious going on.
“Well, I hope to get to the bottom of all of it.”
LATER ON THAT DAY, I summoned Anna to come over and do some hacking for me. I had a hunch, and I was going to go with it.
She appeared at my office in all her tattooed gloriousness. Her hair was growing out, little by little, and she had taken to dying parts of a shade of bright purple that looked like it took hours to get right. Nevertheless, the purple in her hair made her look even more kick-ass sexy. I often thought that, if I ever decided to swing that way, Anna would be the woman who I would “swing” with.
“What do you need for me to do?”
“I need you to find out if you can find any kind of medical records on Christina Sanders,” I said. “She’s the daughter of Judge Sanders, so hopefully you can find the trail on her. I don’t have much more information on her, though.”
She nodded her head. “It’s helpful that her father was a federal judge,” she said. “I should be able to find her records. What are you looking for in particular?”
“Psychiatric records,” I said. “I need to know if she has had any kind of mental disorders.”
“On it.”
I loved that Anna never questioned me on why I made the requests that I made to her. I had a hunch that maybe Christina Sanders had a reason to have her father killed. That maybe Christina herself did it.
While she did that in the other room, I examined some of the cases that Pearl had culled for me. These were the cases that Pearl thought would be most likely to bear fruit. These were all cases where corporations had a lot to lose by being in front of Judge Sanders, as well as some criminal cases. My hunch, however, was that the corporations would be the most likely culprits in doing this.
One company was a prominent pharmaceutical company. They were involved in a patent dispute and were being sued for $50 million. I shook my head. That one sounded promising, but I was really looking for a case where there was a chance for punitive damages. One of Judge Sanders’ case that I had looked at involved punitive damages, and he awarded them to the tune of $1 billion. In the case of a patent dispute, the only possibility was for regular damages, not punitive ones, so that company wasn’t all that likely, in my eyes, to do something drastic like bumping off the judge.
Another company was involved in a class-action wage dispute. That one was more promising, because the suit called for $500 million in compensatory damages and over $1 billion in punitive damages. I put that one to the side. I was going to have to examine that one much more closely.
For the rest of the afternoon, I pored over pending lawsuits, looking for clues on who might have the motive to murder the judge. Besides the wage dispute lawsuit, there was a lawsuit against a power company whose warehouse exploded, killing 18 people. That company was being sued because it had 150 safety violations that they hadn’t corrected, so the punitive damages were going to be exorbitant in that one. That was a guarantee. Any judge would award punitive damages in that case, but Judge Sanders probably would have awarded more punitives than usual.
Around 3, Anna came into my office. “Knock knock,” she said with a smile. “I have the information that you’re looking for.”
“Come on in,” I said. “Hit me with what you got.”
She cleared her throat. “Christina Sanders appears to be somebody who has a lot of mental problems. To say the least.” She handed me some medical records. “Here’s where she was hospitalized for anorexia. Five times she was hospitalized for that. She also has a long record of psychiatric care. She has been in and out of psychiatric facilities since she was 15 years old.” She shook her head. “Poor girl.”
I looked at the records. They were only records of hospitalization and the basic reasons why Christina was admitted to the hospital each time. Which meant that I didn’t access to the reasons why she was admitted to psychiatric facilities, just that she was. I was intensely curious about this, and I made a mental note to scrutinize Christina much more when I went to see her. I needed to rule her out, as I needed to rule out those companies. I still wanted Michael Reynolds to be guilty, but I knew that, for my own psyche, I needed to do the necessary investigation to feel satisfied that he most likely did it.
I also thought that there was the possibility that Christina and Michael might have been in cahoots in killing the judge. Christina might have wanted him dead for personal reasons, while Michael might have wanted him dead for reasons of his own.
“I’m going to speak with Christina tomorrow,” I said. “And I’m also going to speak with Anita Gonzalez, who is the domestic servant for the Sanders’ household. I’m slightly suspicious that Michael is trying to throw Anita under the bus for this.”
“Only slightly suspicious?” Anna asked. “Didn’t you say that the judge had been poisoned? Who would do that? Who would have been able to do that?”
“Michael, Christina and Anita. Of the three, I admit, Anita seems to have had the best access to the judge and would have been able to monitor the poison consumption the best. That’s because she lived with them.” I sighed. “It makes sense that she might have done it, because she was in the best position to know what Judge Sanders ate or drank exclusively. That’s important – there had to have been something in Judge Sanders’ house that nobody else ate or drank but him, and Anita would have been able to figure that out.”
I also knew that there were things in his office that only he consumed. I couldn’t discount that. I would have to figure out who in his office had constant access to the judge and had the motive to kill him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next day, I went to see Christina and Anita at Judge Sanders’ home. Anita was a pretty Mexican woman, dark-skinned and raven-haired, with a quick smile and slightly curvy figure. She wore a typical maid’s uniform – a grey dress with a white apron, with comfortable white shoes. She spoke perfect English in a thick accent. If I had to guess, I would imagine that she was in her late 20s.
“Hello,” she said, “Ms. Ross. Come on in.” She waved her arms into the living room, and I walked in. The house was elegant and beautiful, locate
d in the Mission Hills area, which was a ritzy suburb of Kansas City. The houses on the block were mansions, and this house was no different. It was an enormous Tudor-style home, with pitched roofs and white walls, located on acres of land. The house was easily worth $1.5 million. I knew these homes and what they went for, and that was what I estimated this house’s worth.
“Thank you,” I said, walking into the enormous living room area with the vaulted ceilings that rose some fifty feet above my head. The judge and Mrs. Sanders apparently had traditional taste with regard to furnishings, as the living room was marked by Queen Ann antique furniture and oil paintings that appeared to be extremely good Degas and Renoir knockoffs. Degas was actually one of my favorite painters – I loved his portraits of ballerinas. I also loved Renoirs, especially his portraits of garden parties.
“You wanted to speak with me?” She asked, a smile on her beautiful face. “About Mr. Sanders?”
“I did.” I looked around. “Is Christina around? Or Mrs. Sanders?”
Anita shook her head. “No. They’re out tonight. Out to dinner. I wanted to speak with you with them not around. They will be back around 9 tonight, though, so you can speak with them then.”
“Are they expecting me?”
She shook her head. “I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Ross, but I didn’t tell them that you were coming.”
I raised my eyebrows, wondering what was going on. She wanted to speak with me in private and she didn’t tell Christina and Mrs. Sanders that I was coming. Somehow none of that sat right with me.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked.
“Please.”
She left and came back in ten minutes, a tray in her hand. On the tray was a tiny tea kettle with matching tea cups. The cups and kettle both had flowers embossed on them, with gold trim around the edges. It was as traditional as the rest of the surroundings.
I took a sip and Anita sat down next to me.
“Thanks,” I said, and then I brought out my pad of paper and pen. “I wanted to speak with you, because, well, the preliminary results are back from the autopsy of the judge and it showed that the judge tested positive for arsenic poisoning. The final results won’t be in for several weeks, but those were the preliminary findings. I would imagine that the final findings will be similar.”
She nodded her head. “That doesn’t surprise me.” She ducked her head and a single tear ran down her cheek. She shook her head. “Mr. Sanders was very sick, very sick. No doctor was able to find out what was wrong with him.” She took a sip of her tea. “No doctor could find out anything wrong with him. Nobody spoke with me about it, of course. They never really think about me being around. They don’t hardly notice me. I guess that they believe that I don’t listen to what they are saying, but I do. I never show it, of course, but I hear everything they say.”
I furrowed my brows and leaned back in the chair. I suddenly remembered that Michael had warned me that Anita didn’t speak very good English. However, here she was, speaking perfect English to me. I wondered if the Sanders family didn’t know how much English she really could speak and understand. If they truly thought that she didn’t know what they were saying, then Anita could be a very excellent asset to tell me what I needed to know.
And what I really needed to know, more than anything else, was something, anything, that could hang my client.
“I see.” I put my hand on my chin as I studied her. She was a wily one, that was for sure. She came off as a subservient woman, all smiles and submissive posture. But she had a great deal of intelligence, I could tell. I wondered if the Sanders family knew just how intelligent she was. “Anita,” I said. “Let me ask you a question.”
“Okay,” she said. “You can ask me anything. I can tell you most things that you want to know.”
“The first thing that I would like to know is whether or not the Sanders family knows that you speak very good English.”
She shook her head, but she had an amused look on her face. “No. I got this job through a referral, whose name is Alejandra Hernandez. She worked for the Sanders for fifteen years, but had to quit because she got married and started a family of her own at home. Before I applied, she told me to act like I could only speak broken English. Mrs. Sanders, Alejandra said, prefers authentic Mexican women to work in the home, and that would mean Mexican women who do not speak good English.” She smiled and shrugged. “Who knows why? I suspect that it has something to do with her showing off for her friends that she’s open to diversity. That’s very important for her – to be seen as somebody who has all different types of people around her.”
That was odd, but not that odd. Mrs. Sanders could very well have been just a little bit eccentric. I was going to have to speak with her to get a read on that.
“So, as far as the Sanders knew, you only speak limited amounts of English?”
“Right.” She smiled and laughed. “Silly. They’re very silly people.”
“Sounds like it. It also sounds like you probably heard a lot of dirt over the years coming from this house.”
She nodded her head. “Yes. That was what I was saying. I was always around – cleaning, cooking, serving. They spoke freely around me, because they didn’t know that I could understand what they were saying. And ay caramba. This is one rich family that has many skeletons in their closet.” She touched my forearm for emphasis. “They always say that the wealthy people are crazy, and this family is probably crazier than most.”
Crazier than most. That sounded interesting, to say the very least.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, let me see. Judge Sanders apparently has a different family. Had a different family. They live across town, in Parkville. Mrs. Sanders found this out several years ago. Mr. Sanders would leave the house for days at a time. He told Mrs. Sanders that he had to go to Washington DC three days a week, and Mrs. Sanders believed him for years. Christina knew better, but she never told Mrs. Sanders that Mr. Sanders didn’t actually have to go to Washington DC all that often.”
I wrote down what she was telling me, wondering how it was relevant. If it was relevant at all.
“A different family. By that you mean a parallel family, or it was a family that he had before he was married to Ava Sanders?”
“Parallel. It wouldn’t have been much of a scandal if it was simply a family that he had before he married Mrs. Sanders. But this was particularly scandalous when this came out. And Mrs. Sanders was furious, to say the very least.”
“Scandalous,” I said. “Tell me about this other family.”
“He has three kids with this other woman. Her name is Carmela Adams. She’s Latina, although she was married to a white man, which is why her first name is Latina and her second name is not. That made it that much worse, of course – that Mr. Sanders was having a long-term affair with a Latina woman, and he was having children with her as well.”
“Three children.” I sighed. “Michael never said a word about this to me. He never told me that there was another family that the Judge had across town.” I wondered about this. Maybe he never thought that I would find out about it, but why was he hiding this other family? That was peculiar, to say the very least.
Anita shook her head. “I don’t know, but that whole thing blew up several years back. They could never get a divorce, though, because Mr. Sanders likes to live here in this palace, and he never could if he divorced Mrs. Sanders.”
That struck me as odd. “You mean Mrs. Sanders was the person who has the money in this family? Not Mr. Sanders?”
She nodded her head. “Right. Mr. Sanders makes around $200,00 per year. That’s a good salary, of course, but it’s not enough of a salary to live here in this house in this neighborhood. He grew up poor, too, so he doesn’t have family money. Mrs. Sanders’ family is old money from the East Coast. She’s an heiress to a shipping company.”
I narrowed my eyes and wrote things down on my paper. “Mr. and Mrs. Sanders have been married for how long?” I
had access to that information, but not at my fingertips, and I was too preoccupied to look it up.
“Fifty years. They got married when they were both 17.”
I closed my eyes, suddenly realizing that there was yet another suspect to look at – Mrs. Sanders. “When did she come into the money? Do you have any knowledge about that?”
She shook her head, and I was going to have to look into that.
I could feel the case slipping away. With every revelation, it became more and more clear that Michael probably wasn’t guilty after all. That knowledge made me sick. I wanted so badly to be able to sink Michael, but I couldn’t do it if I knew that somebody else was guilty.
A part of me wanted to quit. Not to dig any further. To try to come up with some concrete evidence that Michael did it, any evidence at all, and ignore all the exculpating facts I found out. Yet I couldn’t do that. I ethically couldn’t do that. I morally couldn’t do that.
I was probably going to have to find closure some other way.
I made notes to find out more about the Sanders’ finances. I specifically needed to find out when Mrs. Sanders came into her inheritance, and if she somehow converted her inheritance money into joint assets. If she took the inheritance money and put it all into a separate account, with only her name on it, then she was entitled to keep all that money. It would be considered to be separate assets and Judge Sanders wouldn’t be entitled to any of the money in the event of a divorce. But if she got her inheritance and put it into a joint account, or joint stocks and bonds, or real estate that the two held jointly, or even if she took that money and put it into any kind of assets at all, the inheritance would have been converted into joint property. And that would mean that Judge Sanders would be entitled to half of that if they got divorced.
I knew enough about property division in dissolution of marriage cases to know that Mrs. Sanders had reason to kill Judge Sanders. I would imagine that she would have been angry enough to do it. I had to put myself into her shoes – she finds out that her husband, the man that she had loved since she was 17 years old, was having a long-term affair with another woman. He had three kids with this other woman, and he lied to Ava by telling her that he was going to DC three days a week. She finds out the truth, and feels not only betrayed but stupid and played. She believed his lies and apparently never bothered to check to see if he really had to go to DC each week.
Harper Ross Legal Thrillers vol. 1-3 Page 44
