Secret Justice

by Diane Capri

  It wasn’t that cold. Only about forty-five degrees, not minus forty-five. She wore the coat just like she did everything else—to show off who she was and what she had.

  If your husband owns the bank, you damn well better look the part, seemed to be her motto.

  “Don’t worry about it, Willa. It’s not the only thing you’ve ruined lately,” she said, sourly, as she tried to move past me, wiping my blood off her jewelry. But the crowd of runners, well wishers and fundraisers was too thick to let her go through. She was stuck next to me, unable to get away.

  “I have (puff puff ) no idea (puff puff ) what you’re (puff puff) talking about,” I huffed and puffed and mumbled in her general direction, around the hand in my mouth. Really, I couldn’t believe how out of breath I was. I had been running fifteen to sixteen miles a day for weeks. Could it possibly be just the cold? The stress? Too much food at dinner last night? What?

  “Your kind never does,” she snarled. “You go through life thinking you can just do whatever you want and damn the consequences.” She turned her back to me.

  This was just too much. I took her arm and pulled her around. Mustering all of my wind, I said in one complete sentence, “Exactly what the hell are you trying to say?”

  She looked down at my bleeding hand clutching a big hunk of the fur on her coat along with her arm. The look could have dropped a flying quail at fifty yards. She made me feel even colder than I already was. People aren’t often downright nasty to me. I’m not used to it.

  “Do you think exposing thefts at Gil’s bank is going to be a good thing for his depositors? For the city? Did you think for one minute that just the scandal of the investigation itself wouldn’t harm us?”

  I dropped her arm like it had singed my fingers.

  Why had I thought she looked anything like Margaret Wheaton? Margaret would never, ever say anything so vicious.

  Sandra looked feral. She frightened me. I’d never thought of Sandra as dangerous, but I’d underestimated her.

  “I’m not investigating Gil or his bank, Sandra. I don’t think anything about it.”

  “Did you think we’d just take that? From you?”

  Was she threatening me?

  “What are you saying?”

  “Watch yourself, Willa Carson. You’re not untouchable. I’d have thought you’d learned that by now.” She moved off and the crowd quickly filled in the void behind her.

  I was cold, sweating, tired, my hand was stinging, and I was more than a little shocked. I needed to go home, have a hot bath, a pot of hot tea and get out my journal.

  Now was definitely the time for some serious thinking.

  It seemed to me that all of South Tampa had completely taken leave of its senses.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tampa, Florida

  Saturday 1:30 p.m.

  February 24, 2001

  HOME ALONE, IN THE den, in my favorite chair with my feet up, in front of a fire with hot café con leche and my journal, the dogs laying at my feet, I felt calmer and more able to think through the events of the last few days. I picked up journaling where I had left off. I started to record everything that had happened in chronological order as I knew it.

  There were holes, things I wasn’t aware of, things I was sure I was forgetting. But all in all, it took me about two hours to write everything down, with the bandage on the outside of my right hand protecting the cut and, I hoped, keeping me from needing stitches. When I’d finished, I had a clearer picture of some things and more questions than answers.

  I made a plan, as I always do. I could hear my mother saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Why do these old tapes play in my head when I need guidance? I used to so rebel against this piece of advice when Mom was alive. It was unfair of her to haunt me with it now.

  In any event, I refilled my coffee cup and turned to a new page in my journal where I spent another hour. I wrote out my plan for helping Margaret Wheaton to avoid being arrested; Ben Hathaway to see that Ron Wheaton had either died by natural causes or Otter had killed him; Larry Davis to prove that Armstrong Otter either died accidentally or was killed by someone currently unknown to me; Dad to wrap up his investigation of Gil Kelley’s bank and either file charges or go back to New York.

  I paid little attention to the CJ, my continued testimony or his problems; George’s concern over Aunt Minnie’s jewelry or mine; Suzanne; or my work load. All of these issues dealt with my personal life. I rarely spent any time being concerned about my own problems. Which was a mistake, of course.

  Kate tells me I spend too little time inside my circle of control and too much out there tilting at windmills on issues over which I have no influence. The problem with her advice, I thought with a smile, is that she doesn’t realize just how influential I can be. For if there’s anything my experience has taught me, it’s how much one person with good will, positive effort, and the right attitude can do. Never mind that this approach doesn’t help win races.

  I closed my journal and put it aside. My stomach was rumbling to remind me that it was three o’clock and I hadn’t eaten today. We had nothing edible in the kitchen and I didn’t want microwaved popcorn, so I did a quick once-over of my appearance and went downstairs for lunch. The dining room was closed between lunch and dinner, but the Sunset Bar was always open and would serve me a sandwich or a salad or something.

  Expecting the Sunset Bar to be nearly empty, I was surprised to see that Dad was there. Deep in conversation with, of all people, Sandra Kelley. They seemed to be arguing and, at first, even though I thought the curiosity might kill me, I wasn’t going to join them. But Dad had seen me come in and motioned me over, without interrupting whatever Sandra was saying.

  I stopped off at the bar, ordered a tuna salad sandwich on white, picked up an iced tea and took it over to Dad’s table. Sandra sat on the bench across from him with a cup of hot tea.

  “Sit down, Willa,” Dad invited. “You know Sandra Kelley, of course, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course. Hello, Sandra.” I smiled weakly at the woman who would have killed me with her venom this morning. I was still considering a tetanus shot. Sandra gave me a curt and distinctly unfriendly nod.

  “Sandra and I were talking about Tampa Bay Bank. She was telling me the unfortunate history of her deceased father-in-law, weren’t you, Sandra?” Dad said, putting her on the spot and me into the conversation, despite Sandra’s obvious wishes to the contrary. She said nothing, so he went on. “It turns out, Willa, that the late Mr. Gilbert Kelley, Senior, was a thief. Isn’t that right, Sandra?”

  Sandra looked decidedly uncomfortable discussing this with me. She had a string of pearls around her neck that was in danger of becoming a noose if she twisted them any tighter. Her left hand was gripping the table as if she would fall down without the support, even though she was seated.

  “That’s not what I said, Mr. Harper,” she hissed.

  “Call me Jim,” he said, with all the concern of a Las Vegas Black Jack dealer watching a gambler bet the farm. “What did you say, then? I thought you were asking me not to investigate thefts from your husband’s bank. Because, you said, it was really his father who had stolen millions of dollars from the other shareholders, the depositors and, ultimately, the Federal Government when we had to pay those insured accounts back. Depositors like Willa and George, here. Isn’t that what you said?”

  This was a side of Jim Harper I hadn’t seen before. He was completely without compassion for her, even though Sandra Kelley was obviously in acute distress. She was dressed in a lavender wool St. John suit with a long-sleeved jacket. The temperatures had not warmed up outside, but Sandra was perspiring and fidgety. If she broke those pearls before they broke her neck, they’d scatter all over the floor, she was twisting them so ferociously now. Dad remained unmoved.

  “No,” she whispered, “that’s not what I said. What I said was that Senior, as everyone called him, treated the bank’s money as if it was his own b
ecause for many years, it was his. His wife had inherited the bank, but he became president when he married her. Senior ran the bank from then until he died. I said if there were any, um, improprieties, then, um, they must have happened when he was still, um, in charge.” She seemed to stumble a little on this last part, when she’d been reasonably articulate before she tried to slander Senior.

  “Let’s just say I believed you, Mrs. Kelley,” Dad started.

  “Sandra,” she said, automatically.

  “Let’s just say I believed you, Sandra,” he began again. “How does that change anything? You and your husband are both officers of the bank. You’re both responsible for what happens there. You didn’t come to me and offer to pay the money back. You’re only here because you’re worried that I’ll be able to prove that your husband is an embezzler and send him off to jail. Isn’t that true?” He said this with a frightening calm. If she was trying to make Dad feel sorry for her, dressed to the nines in an outfit that, including jewelry, would set him back more than two month’s salary, she’d come to the wrong place. Dad didn’t begrudge the Kelleys of the world their silver spoons. He had accumulated a nice portfolio himself over the years. But he did begrudge them the theft of cheap stainless from the rest of the “little people,” particularly little old people.

  Sandra was so incensed, she actually sprayed spittle all the way over to Dad’s face in the process of hissing her answer in four distinct words as if they were separated by exclamation points. “You Are A Horrid Man!”

  Dad said nothing while she gathered up her dignity and stalked out.

  “So much for Tampans never telling anyone exactly what they think of you,” he said, bringing his iced tea up to his mouth.

  “Yes,” I smiled at him, and we both laughed out loud. Not at Sandra’s distress, but at the irony of Dad’s wit.

  We talked a little while longer, and I became engrossed in Dad’s day and his investigation of Tampa Bay Bank. He brought me up to date as we ate lunch.

  “Are you planning to look into the father-in-law’s culpability?” I asked him. “Sandra seemed pretty certain about it.”

  “I did a lot more than look at bank records in Miami,” he said.

  “What sent you down there in the first place?”

  “It was that story your friend Marilee Aymes told you about Gil Kelley being banished to Miami in the fifties. It seemed like the money problems with the bank began about the time she said Gil Kelley was working in Miami. The story could have supported Sandra Kelley’s version, which I’d already heard before today, of course.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if the embezzlement started then, it could have been Senior who did it from Tampa, or it could have been Gil from Miami. I couldn’t just walk into the Tampa office and ask, without tipping my hand, so I went to the Miami branch and looked at the books myself.”

  “They let you do that?”

  “There’s a clause in their insurance policy that requires them to let me look at their books whenever I want to,” Dad said, a little wounded. “The bank has no choice but to let me investigate. I just wanted a little freedom from Kelley’s personal oversight while I did it.”

  “I’d think Gil Kelley would have learned about your snooping pretty quickly, either way. But what did you find out?”

  “That over three-hundred thousand dollars disappeared from the Miami branch office over a two-year period back in the late fifties—coinciding with Gil Kelley’s period of expulsion from the family nest.”

  “But you knew that before you went there, based on Marilee’s story.”

  “Ah, but what I didn’t know before I went there was what had happened to the money and how it got paid back.” Dad savored his own tuna sandwich as if he were dining on the finest smoked sturgeon, taking his time, forcing me to ask him the next question.

  “Okay. What happened to the money and how did it get paid back?” I can be stubborn myself, but this wasn’t one of those times. I was curious, and didn’t mind showing my curiosity.

  “Well, that’s quite an interesting story. The money disappeared in dribs and drabs. Just a few hundred at first, every couple of weeks. Then a few thousand. Then larger amounts. I was hoping to be able to pin that on Kelley, but it turned out to be a dead end. Literally.”

  I’d finished eating and we were now talking over freshened glasses of iced tea. “The thief was a low-level auditor named David Martin. Guess what happened to him?” Dad asked me.

  “I give up.”

  “He died. Killed himself. And that’s not all.”

  At this point, Dad looked a little like the remaining smile on the Cheshire cat. He waited for me to ask, but I didn’t this time.

  So he said, “It was the bonding company that paid off the debts after the guy died.”

  “So those early thefts didn’t have anything to do with Gil Kelley?” I asked.

  Dad sounded deeply disappointed. “Apparently not, unfortunately. It was a good lead. I’m just sorry it didn’t pan out. If I could have tied those early thefts to Gil Kelley, it would have been a lot easier to tie the later ones to him, too.”

  “What a coincidence that there was a bonding company to pay. In those days, three-hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money.”

  I needed a change of pace, somewhere else to go to think. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. When I left home Monday morning, instead of driving Greta toward downtown, I took Gandy to Westshore. Turning north, I reached Tampa International Airport in plenty of time for the nine o’clock flight to Miami.

  Everything about this case seemed to point to Miami. Gil Kelley, Margaret Wheaton and David Martin were in Miami from 1955 to 1957. What happened there? And how did it relate to what had gone on in Tampa the past few weeks? Was there a relationship between the three of them?

  The commuter flight was just under an hour and I was on the ground, in my rental car, by eleven. Studying the map that Hertz had provided, I found my way to Coconut Grove. I drove to the Tampa Bay Bank branch where Gil Kelley and David Martin had worked.

  The bank manager was a portly man, about sixty-five or so, who looked as if he’d never had a good hair day. I introduced myself, telling him I was the executor of Ron Wheaton’s estate and I had come to look into some accounts Ron had held at the bank. It only took a little flirting and I had him in my pocket.

  Once we had struck up a friendship, I said, “Mr. Wheaton asked me to look up a friend of his who works here. I think he left the man a little something in his will. I wonder if you could point me in the right direction to find him?” I broke my self-imposed rule against lying, but rationalized it as for a good cause. I promised myself a strong penance afterward.

  “I’ll surely try. What’s his name?”

  “David Martin,” I told him, and watched his friendliness dry up like a slug exposed to salt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Miami, Florida

  Monday 12:20 p.m.

  February 26, 2001

  “MR MARTIN DIED, QUITE some time ago. I’m afraid you won’t be able to talk to him,” he said curtly.

  “Did he leave any family? I could give the gift to his wife,” I coaxed.

  “No. He had a young girlfriend, but when he died she left here. I don’t know her name.” The bank manager’s easy manner was completely gone now, replaced by fidgeting with the papers on his desk to let me know he was ready to terminate this conversation. Now.

  “Well, where did he live? I can see you’re busy. Maybe I can trace the girlfriend through his last address.”

  “I’ll get that for you, ma’am, if you’ll wait just a minute,” he said, decidedly cool in his tone, making it clear that I’d be dismissed after this last courtesy.

  When he came back with the address, I asked him straight up, “Is something wrong? You seem like you’re not too happy that I’m asking about Mr. Martin.”

  “Not at all, ma’am,” he said, not convincing me or himself, but offering not
hing further. I put his reaction down to Martin’s thefts from the bank. Men from the old school would have taken a dim view of bank theft, just as most of us do today. But a forty-year-old theft, paid back through a surety bond when the thief died, shouldn’t engender such a long-held animosity. At least, I couldn’t have held a grudge that long.

  I stayed a while longer, talking to a couple of other employees who looked old enough to have been working at the bank while David Martin was there. Then I had to hustle to finish my investigation in time to catch my plane.

  When I left the bank branch, I drove through McDonald’s for a hamburger and fries on the run. I made my way over to the local library, gobbling the food out of the bag on the way, and rolling down the windows to get the smell out of the car. Once settled at the library machine with the microfilm of the local newspapers from 1956, I began to flip through the pages looking for references to David Martin. It didn’t take me long to find the story of Martin’s suicide by drowning in early 1957. Checking my watch and knowing I had one more stop to make, I copied the articles without reading them and paid for my copies at the desk. I jogged out to the rental car, remembering my vows after the distance classic to get in better shape. Of course, I should have remembered that before I ate a thousand-calorie, junk-food lunch.

  I traced Martin’s address to a dreary rooming house close to the bank branch, where Martin had worked as an internal auditor. I parked the car at the curb, walked up to the house, and leaned on the button for the doorbell.

  A woman as unkempt and unattractive as the house answered the door. She identified herself as “Joan.” Then she smiled, showing what was left of her teeth: cavities and broken pieces. Bad teeth are usually a sign of someone who fears dentists and, in my experience, has other irrational fears as well.

  “Hi, I’m Willa Carson. I’m looking for a man who used to live here. His name was David Martin. Did you know him?” Joan had started to nod before I finished the sentence.

  “Yep. I did know him, before he died. My momma used to own this place then. David was pretty quiet. Good lookin’, too. I was only about ten years old when he killed himself.” She had pronounced it “kilt his-self,” lisping through the “esses.”