Due Justice

by Diane Capri

  “Of course I remember, Willa. I’m old, but I’m not senile.” Just a little edgy. Uncharacteristic of her. Maybe O’Connell or the grandchildren were misbehaving lately and it was on her mind.

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything of the kind. It’s just that I forget things sometimes, and I thought maybe you did, too.” I tried to placate her. I resolved not to get old. Old people are so inflexible.

  “No, I remember the day perfectly well. What did you want to ask me about it?” To the point, as always.

  “Well,” I set down my tea cup and leaned forward, suggesting I’d keep the conversation confidential without saying so. “Tory said something about having an affair with Michael Morgan years ago and you seemed to know about it. I thought maybe you’d tell me what happened.”

  “You surprise me, Willa. I didn’t take you for a gossip monger.” She sat straighter in her chair, and cloaked herself in her grand dame persona. I could imagine many an intimidated child had been on the receiving end of the steely look down that long, patrician nose she was giving me now.

  “It’s not gossip I’m interested in, Cilla, but facts. You know Dr. Morgan is a witness in a number of cases on my docket. I’m concerned about letting him testify because of his background and I thought you might be able to help me.” It was a white lie, and the wife of a lawyer should know a judge doesn’t investigate a case. But maybe O’Connell doesn’t talk shop at home, because she answered my question, after a fashion.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “You’ve been around Tampa as long as anyone. I’ve heard some wild stories about Dr. Morgan. I thought you might be able to separate fact from fiction.”

  She considered the question and the explanation. She was wavering. I just kept looking earnest. Appealing to vanity usually works. On that score, Mrs. O’Connell Worthington was no different from anyone else.

  Finally, she said “Just because Tory had an affair with Mike Morgan doesn’t mean anything. That was a long time ago. There have been a lot of women in this town who’ve succumbed to his charms. And, I would bet, a lot of women in many other towns. If you want to talk to all the women he’s slept with, you’ll have to take a leave of absence to interview them all.” She poured herself another cup of tea, offered me a cookie and took three for her plate. I could only imagine the number of calories it took to support her size.

  “I don’t think I’m interested in all of them, just Victoria Warwick.” The cookie melted in my mouth as I mentally calculated how long I’d have to run to compensate.

  “Well, I suppose she’d tell you herself if you asked her. Everyone knows about it anyway. It was about ten years ago. She and Shel were having problems again. The way she deals with it is to find someone else to distract her. Mike was the distraction of the moment.”

  “So it wasn’t serious?” What the hell. I reached for another lady finger. Damn, those things are good. But why? Nothing to them, really.

  “I don’t think Tory Warwick has ever been serious about anything, except Sheldon. She’s always been seriously in love with him. He just doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care.”

  “Well, what happened to their affair? Tory and Morgan, I mean?”

  “She got tired of him, just a couple of minutes before he got tired of her. And it was over. As far as I know, it didn’t last long, and it wasn’t repeated. They both went on to other things.”

  “Other lovers?”

  She looked at me again, with disapproval and a serious frown in her broad forehead, both of her caterpillar eyebrows coming together over her nose. “Perhaps so.”

  Pushed my luck. “Does that mean yes?”

  She’d had enough. “It means Michael Morgan is a vile man who has no scruples and no character. I don’t know him well enough to know all he’s done in his life but enough of my friends have suffered at his hands that I know he’s always done whatever it took to get what he wanted.”

  It could have been just her southern lady disdain for his distasteful affairs, but it didn’t strike me that way when she said it. I noticed she spoke of him as if he was still alive. I asked her softly, “What did he do to your friends?”

  “You’ll have to ask them, and they’ll tell you if they want to. The only thing I’m going to say about it is that Michael Morgan has always lived a lot higher on the hog than any other Tampa doctor I know.”

  It was all she would say. She had some inside information, but she wasn’t sharing. And I knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t tell what she didn’t want to tell.

  Through Friday, the trial continued. Every day, I listened to the morning news and both editions of the evening news. I read both local papers cover to cover while waiting for the monotonous scientific evidence to be introduced. Nowhere did I see or hear a report identifying Dr. Morgan as the body in the Bay. By Saturday morning, I was convinced that George’s anonymous tip had never been passed on.

  Mark called twice during the week, but I missed his calls and we continued to play tag. I was tempted to ask Mitchell what was going on, but I was afraid it would be a breach of Mark’s confidence, so I didn’t. Neither did I hear from Carly, although I kept trying to reach her. Some days, I would get messages that she’d called, but every time Margaret denied talking to her and couldn’t find anyone else in the office who had. By the end of the week, I was exhausted and I fell into bed at 8:30 Friday night. George said if he’d known what being married to a judge was going to do to his sex life, he wouldn’t have encouraged me to take the job.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 7:00 a.m.

  January 16, 1999

  SINCE I WAS PLAYING golf Sunday with Dr. Aymes, I had canceled my Saturday game with Mitchell. I got up and snuck out while George was sleeping to take the dogs for their run.

  I tried to work through what I knew about Morgan and Carly. If it was Michael Morgan in the water, who killed him? And why? And why hadn’t the body been identified? I was hoping, with my fingers crossed almost the entire time, that it wasn’t him. Maybe it really was the lost tourist they had first believed. And if it was Morgan, I knew that both my ethical obligations as a judge and lawyer, and my concern for Carly and her family would keep me involved in this until it was resolved.

  I tried to think of all the angles, the reasons someone would want Morgan dead. Who had a motive? Opportunity? My legs started to tire because I was too focused. So I just let my mind soar free. Before I knew it, I had done the entire ten miles and was back at the house.

  I went out to the water and jumped in. Harry and Bess were already there. This is the part of our run they like the best because they get to submerge me and each other in the water ten or twenty times before I’m completely exhausted and give up. Then we got out, rinsed off outdoors and I put them in their screened sun porch to dry off while I ran up the back stairs.

  I was in the shower, letting the warm water cover my face, inhaling the soothing vanilla fragrance of the bath gel and trying again to think of a way to disclose Dr. Morgan’s identity that would actually make someone take notice, when George came into my bathroom.

  “Willa,” he said as gently as he could and still be heard over the running water, “Carly’s here. My God, she looks like she hasn’t slept in days. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she looked both exhausted and, at the same time, in a high state of anxiety. I gave her some hot tea and showed her to the bathroom where she could take a comforting soak. By the time she finished, she was yawning and standing in the kitchen with her eyes closed. So I put her in the guest room for a nap. She hasn’t regained consciousness.”

  I turned off the shower with trepidation. I’d wanted her to surface and she had. Maybe I should have been more careful what I wished for. Now what? “Let me get dressed, and we’ll see if we can wake her and find out what this is all about.” When I came into our small galley kitchen, George was finishing two cups of breve, one of my many indulgences. He carried them out to the veranda a
long with the Saturday Times, talking over his shoulder.

  “Come out and have a coffee before you wake her. I think we both need some fortification first.”

  In the end, we decided not to wake her and Carly slept for hours. I worked for a while in my study and waited. When I walked into the kitchen just after four o’clock, she, too, was making coffee and Cuban toast, wearing an old Key West T-shirt and nothing else.

  “Well you look a lot better. I hope you feel better,” I told her.

  She smiled, albeit slightly, more like a slice of acknowledgment. She didn’t act like the weight of the world was off her shoulders. “Do you have any idea what it’s like not to be perfect?”

  The way she said it, perfection was certainly not an admirable trait. She was snide, almost nasty about it, like being “perfect” was worse than being a child molester. Carly’s never been subtle. What you see is what you get.

  “Oh, I know you have that little gap between your front teeth and those red highlights in your hair have to be touched up every few weeks. I’ll bet it was just really trying to be six feet tall in seventh grade. And George’s constant devotion is probably just smothering.” She carried her toast to the small table and added skim milk to her coffee making it that sickly shade of green I imagine all waifs must admire. Otherwise, how can they drink the stuff?

  “You know, Carly, if I didn’t know better I might confuse you with one of my political enemies, not a guest to whom I’ve been extremely hospitable.” I said it lightly, but I was surprised how much her derision of what she viewed as my “perfect” self annoyed me, and I filed away for the moment the serious introspection I should be doing to find out why. I’d been worried to death about her and all she could do was chastise me for not having my life in as big a mess as hers was. Besides, whether one lives a beautiful and privileged life is often in the eye of the beholder, no? “Look, Willa, all I’m saying is that you don’t know what it’s like to be less than beautiful in American society. We grew up playing with Barbie dolls and thinking that our lives would be fabulous if we had perfect measurements, the right nose, and long blond hair. If we had all that, then we’d get Ken, the perfect mate. Most women I know still wear high heels, for God’s sake. Is it any wonder that the breast implant industry is booming and has been for almost forty years? Women have put all kinds of things in their bodies to get that ‘perfect’ look. Who are the real victims in all this, anyway?” She was working herself up into a fine snit, waving her arms around and pacing back and forth in the small kitchen.

  Enough. “Although I’m beginning to understand the point, I’m not getting the connection between this enlightened social commentary and your behavior of the last few weeks,” I told her.

  “Don’t act like a judge with me, Wilhelmina. Despite Gloria Steinem, who by the way is very attractive herself, most women in America just don’t feel very pretty. They’re constantly bombarded with images of women who are taller, sexier, thinner, more attractive and ‘built’,” she gestured the “hourglass” figure.

  “This is hardly a new or astounding social insight. What does it have to do with you turning up on my doorstep looking like you have neither eaten nor slept since I saw you a week ago?” In my head, I heard my mother admonishing “grace under pressure, Wilhelmina,” so I tried to smile at her as I said it, but it took some effort.

  She’d run out of steam, just as suddenly as she’d started. She bowed her head and cupped her coffee in both hands. I sat down across from her. After a long while, without looking up, she said, quietly, “Dr. Morgan is dead. If it wasn’t for this screwed up insistence on physical perfection, he’d be alive today.”

  “Tell me exactly how you know that,” I said as calmly as I could and in my best judicial voice. She was frayed around the edges, about to fall apart. I needed the information before she cracked completely. I hoped her courtroom training would keep her together until she got it out. She spoke so quietly, and her voice trembled so much, that I could barely hear her over the quiet humming noise of the rotating ceiling fan. She had her head buried in her arms so I couldn’t see her face.

  “On Friday, after you left me, I went to his house. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there for well over a month. The newspapers were stacked up on the porch and the cat’s litter box was overflowing. The cat looked starved. I took him to a vet.”

  I skipped the lie she’d told about not knowing where Dr. Morgan lived, but it confirmed my suspicions about how many other lies she’d told me. “How do you know the litter box was full and the cat hadn’t been fed?”

  “I went in, of course. I looked around. The place had been trashed.” She looked right at me, turned her lips up at the corners in a rueful smile; her hands were shaking, sloshing the sickly green coffee over the sides of the cup. “I don’t think the cat did it. Drawers were pulled out, papers scattered all over. Just like on television. Someone slashed all of the sofa pillows and the mattresses. There was no computer in the apartment at all and all the books were on the floor. I don’t know what they were looking for, but I don’t think they found it.”

  She set the cup down in the spreading puddle of green coffee, continuing to hold the cup. She lowered her head again. I didn’t know if I should wait to hear more or ask a question. After a long time, she looked up and there were tears streaming down her cheeks. Her lip was quivering, her nose red and running.

  “I found b-blood and b-brains all over the k-kitchen.” She broke down completely. She was hysterical, sobbing uncontrollably, keening as if Dr. Morgan was here in the kitchen with us and she’d just seen him. I went around to her and held her, but she was sobbing hard enough to shake both of us. George came to the doorway, arched one eyebrow at me and I nodded him in.

  “Help me get her into the bedroom please, and bring me a Valium from the medicine cabinet.” Calmly. Trying not to let her know I’d like to be falling apart, too. She had been such a bubbly child. How did she get like this?

  George went to get the Valium and water. I gave it to Carly and we helped her back to bed. She’d calmed down some and I sat with her while she either passed out or went to sleep, I’m not sure which. I closed the door to her room and went out on the veranda, where George was waiting. It was early for drinking, but he’d poured both of us a Sapphire and tonic. I took mine with a twist of lemon and without a twinge of remorse. Three gulps later, I got up for a refill.

  “Now, Willa, suppose you tell me exactly what’s going on here,” George said, “And I’m not kidding around.” It was perfectly okay with me. I’d never seen a murder scene and I was pretty sure Carly never had either. Just hearing Carly describe it shook me up. I have a very vivid imagination. I see movies in my head when I think and just her description was enough. Besides that, now she’d have to go to the police and I wasn’t sure exactly how to convince her to do it. If she wouldn’t, I’d have to do it myself and then there’d be all kinds of hell to pay, with Kate and the CJ for starters. Before, I only suspected a crime had been committed. Now I knew for sure. I’d taken an oath to uphold the law, and I had to do it or face the consequences. I hoped George would have some insight.

  We talked for a long time, about Carly and her predicament, and about mine. We poked and prodded the problem, looked at it from all the angles. There was just no way around it in the end. One of us would have to go to Chief Hathaway. I didn’t want it to be me, and Carly obviously didn’t want it to be her. I knew what my reasons were, but I wasn’t clear on hers. If we’d had a different relationship, I might have told the CJ. As it was, I was hoping he’d never find out I was involved. It would be just one more thing for him to ride me about. George and I agreed the only thing we could do was to try to persuade Carly to call Chief Hathaway when she woke up. If she wouldn’t, then I had some tough choices to make.

  After we finished our third gin, it seemed important to get more facts from another source before pressuring Carly, as I fully intended to do. She’d lied to me at least once that I knew of,
and I couldn’t trust the rest of her story. There was no way I was going to get any deeper into this; I was afraid of walking right into the middle of something worse that neither Carly nor I could control.

  It could be that Michael Morgan’s death, if he was dead, had nothing to do with this breast implant business, but the chances of that were really slim. When the largest breast implant manufacturer went into bankruptcy a couple of years ago, I remembered reading in the Tampa Today Business Journal that several of the law firms in town had financed the costs of breast implant litigation. One of them was my former firm, some of my former partners having gone over to the “other side” representing women with implants.

  I called Mitchell and asked him to meet me for a drink here at Minaret this afternoon. Although he said he was surprised to hear from me since I had canceled our weekly golf game, he agreed to come. If you’re a lawyer in a small town, it’s not wise to ignore the summons of a judge, even though it may be a purely social call. Knowing this, I try not to use the advantage too often. This was one of those times when it was necessary.

  I was waiting for Mitch in the Sunset Bar and when he arrived, I suggested that we take our drinks to a secluded table. The bar was deserted, so I didn’t expect any interruptions. The last thing I needed was to be overheard discussing the very cases I’m supposed to be presiding over. I had recused myself from all of my former firm’s cases, so it wasn’t technically a breach of ethics to talk to Mitch about it generally. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to have to explain myself to anyone on the issue, particularly the CJ, who is always looking for something to complain about where I’m concerned. Anyway, if I didn’t get this worked out, I was going to have a lot more to explain. Private conversations on privileged matters would be the least of my worries.

  “Mitch, didn’t I read that your firm is very involved in representing plaintiffs in breast implant cases?”

  “Why, Judge, do you want to file a claim?” He eyed my chest speculatively, but with a smile, hoping I wouldn’t be offended. He was wrong. I would never look at some man’s crotch and suggest anything about the size of the bulge, at least not to him.