Gone Again

by James Grippando

  CHAPTER 31

  Over the dinner hour, Jack put Debra’s words into a sworn affidavit. Debra signed it and it was notarized at the Freedom Institute. Hannah—the notary public—was seated at the kitchen table with them.

  “What happens next?” asked Debra, as she laid her pen aside.

  “We file your affidavit with the court,” said Hannah.

  “Not yet,” said Jack. “First, I want to sit down with Gavin, go over each of these assertions, and get his reaction.”

  “His reaction will be to punch you in the nose,” said Debra. “Why can’t you just let him see it after you file it, like everyone else? He’s already had his say in court, and he completely lied about me.”

  “That’s the problem,” said Jack. “I’m the one who put him on the witness stand. I can’t just file an affidavit from you and pretend like your ex-husband never testified. I’m discrediting my own witness.”

  “He should be discredited.”

  “Maybe. But before I do that, he deserves a chance to explain himself. Doesn’t that sound like the fair thing to do?”

  Debra considered it, then nodded weakly. “I suppose.”

  “Apart from your concern about rhinoplasty in my immediate future, is there any other reason I shouldn’t share this with Gavin before filing it with the court?”

  “No. Not if you feel like you need to.”

  “I need to,” said Jack.

  “Okay,” she said. “Then do it.”

  Jack drove to the south end of prestigious Brickell Avenue, where a breathtaking stretch of waterfront high-rises stood like a mile-long line of forty-story dominoes. Jack was probably the only guy in Miami who could visit Brickell and be reminded of the Anne Frank House, but there was a parallel. Like the old Amsterdam flats along the canals, the massive Brickell condo buildings had a sideways feel to them: the short sides of the rectangle faced the street in the front and the water in back; the much longer sides stretched for what seemed like the length of a soccer pitch.

  Jack valeted his car and took the elevator to the twenty-third floor, where Gavin had been leasing a two-bedroom unit since his divorce from Debra. Dressed in tennis whites, Gavin was still cooling down from a rooftop match when he greeted Jack at the door. He offered Jack a cocktail, but Jack declined, preferring to get in and out quickly. Gavin fixed a gin and tonic for himself, garnished it with a refreshing slice of cucumber, and then led Jack out to the wraparound balcony, where they settled into a pair of patio chairs. Jack took in the view, and the bay glistened in the moonlight as Gavin read his ex-wife’s affidavit.

  Finally, Gavin laid the document atop the glass-top table and looked at Jack.

  “You bought it hook, line, and sinker, didn’t you, Swyteck?” It wasn’t the punch in the nose that Debra had predicted. It was a sardonic smile.

  “Bought what?” asked Jack.

  “That’s the same bullshit that Debra accused me of in the divorce. It’s all a rehash of the ‘horrible dad’ allegations she made to try and keep me from seeing Alexander.”

  “If you want to point out any inaccuracies, now’s the time.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m not going to play her game, and I’m definitely not going to stoop to her level and trade insults and accusations in a courtroom. She can say all of these things if she wants—paint me as the bad parent who led the charge to rehome Sashi. But it’s a breach of the confidentiality agreement we signed as part of our divorce settlement. It’s going to cost her.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said Jack.

  “You will, if you file this affidavit,” said Gavin. “I strongly recommend that you speak to my attorney before you take Debra’s word at face value and make this a publicly filed document.”

  “That’s a fair suggestion,” said Jack. “How do I reach your attorney?”

  Gavin rose, opened the sliding glass door, and called into the condo. “Nicole, can you come here a minute?”

  An attractive brunette came out of the kitchen and joined them. She held a glass of white wine in one hand and laid the other affectionately on Gavin’s shoulder.

  “What’s up, babe?” she asked.

  She wasn’t the typical bimbo that Jack would have expected a financial hotshot to hook up with on the rebound. She looked more like someone Andie might have counted among her friends.

  “Nicole, say hello to Jack Swyteck,” said Gavin. “Jack, meet my lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Gavin Burgette stood at the floor-to-ceiling window and soaked in the view of sparkling Biscayne Bay, the Port of Miami, and sun-bathed South Beach beyond. It wasn’t yet nine a.m., Eastern Time, and he’d already finished two important calls, one with a sovereign-wealth-fund manager in London, and the other with a financial analyst in Berlin.

  The south Florida office of Garner Investments was a lavishly appointed penthouse in Miami’s Financial District. Not bad for a kid from West Miami who’d started out selling luxury automobiles. A keen eye for big spenders ready to part with their money was his gift. A little car knowledge and a lot of smooth talking had paid his way through business school at the University of Miami, where he’d graduated in the middle of the pack, nowhere near good enough to land a job at a top Wall Street firm. But Gavin was a hustler, and it wasn’t beneath him to pop in and visit all those satisfied customers who’d purchased Porsches, Audis, and BMWs from him over the years. In most cases, he didn’t get past the receptionist. A few came out to the lobby, shook his hand, and said they’d call him when the lease was up on their Lexus. One guy—an old Cuban-American who’d come to Miami on a raft made out of plastic bottles, and who’d started out selling cars in Hialeah—found an idle hundred thousand in his portfolio that Gavin could “play with.” Gavin turned it into half a mil. In five years, he was turning away clients. In ten, he’d built a book of business that had the blue chip firms courting him.

  “There’s a client here to see you, Mr. Burgette.”

  Gavin turned away from the window to see his assistant standing in the open doorway. “Do I have a nine o’clock appointment?”

  “It’s not on your calendar. He says his mother asked him to drop in and say hello to you. Ellen Ferguson. His name is Jeffrey.”

  The Ferguson family was old Palm Beach money. Two weeks had passed since Gavin had introduced himself to eighty-six-year-old Ellen at the annual gala for the Everglades Foundation, and he’d really turned on the charm. He’d even managed to work his way into a photograph with Ellen that the foundation had posted on its website and that the Palm Beach Post had run in its weekend society section. He’d followed up with a personal letter but heard nothing back. Until now.

  “Tell Jeffrey I’ll be right out.”

  Gavin straightened his necktie, popped a couple of “curiously strong” mints into his mouth to kill the coffee breath, and then headed down the hall to the lobby. A slender dark-haired man rose from the couch as Gavin entered.

  “Mr. Burgette?” he said, as he approached.

  “Jeffrey, I presume?”

  He offered an envelope. “This is for you,” he said. “From my mother.”

  Gavin smiled and took it.

  “Nice picture of you and Ellen on the Web, by the way,” said “Jeffrey,” his voice laden with sarcasm.

  And then he took off.

  Gavin closed his eyes slowly, then opened them, realizing what had just happened. This guy was no relative of Ellen Ferguson, and this staged encounter had nothing to do with the Ferguson family. Gavin had always regarded the pushy custom-tailored-suit salesmen as the undisputed pros at finagling their way into a penthouse office under false pretenses. They had nothing on process servers. He removed the summons from the envelope. A quick glance at the case caption confirmed that it related to the habeas petition of Dylan Reeves before Judge Frederick. The rest spoke for itself: YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED TO APPEAR IN COURTROOM 3, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT . . .

  “Shit,” he said a
s he reached for his cell phone. He quickly returned to his office, closed the door, and dialed his lawyer, which at this hour meant dialing his own landline at the Brickell condo.

  Gavin and Nicole had maintained a professional relationship throughout his divorce proceeding, and twenty years of nuptial-ending nuclear warfare had made her into a consummate trial lawyer. The Burgettes’ divorce wasn’t even close to “ugly” by Nicole’s standards, but Gavin had still paid his lawyer plenty—enough for her to have taken his call immediately, even if they weren’t sharing a bed every night that Alexander spent at his mother’s house.

  He quickly filled her in, then gave his order. “Nicole, you just gotta make this go away.”

  “Scan it and shoot it over to me,” she said.

  “I will. Frankly, I’m shocked by this. I thought Swyteck had gotten the message loud and clear last night that he needs to think twice before filing Debra’s affidavit. And now he’s slapping me with a subpoena? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Are you sure the court issued it at Swyteck’s request?”

  “I just assumed,” said Gavin.

  “Look at the signature line. Could be on the second page.”

  Gavin flipped ahead and found it. “Barbara fucking Carmichael,” he said. “Why would the prosecutor subpoena me?”

  “My guess is that the state is planning to put on live testimony in opposition to Dylan Reeves’ petition. And at least some of that testimony is coming from you.”

  “I’ve said all I need to say to this judge. What more do they want from me?”

  “I dunno. Let me call Carmichael and find out.”

  Gavin raised the mini-blinds behind his desk. From the north window of his corner office he had a clear view across the Miami River and all the way to the federal courthouse.

  “Better call her quick. This says I have to be there at noon—today.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Andie reached St. Hugh’s Cemetery just as the wrought-iron gates swung open at nine a.m. She’d driven alone. It was something she needed to do for herself, by herself.

  She parked near the main mausoleum and walked to the office entrance. An elderly couple was in the waiting room. They were speaking Spanish, but Andie understood enough to know that they had come to purchase side-by-side plots. They were holding hands like teenagers, making the sad task seem not so sad—even romantic.

  “Can I help you?” the saleswoman asked as she approached.

  “I’m here to visit, but I don’t know exactly where the gravesite is,” Andie said. “Do you have a directory by name?”

  She escorted Andie to the computer terminal on the other side of the waiting area. Andie typed in the information, and the location appeared on the screen: Section H, Plot 11. She jotted the coordinates on a printed map of the grounds and set out on her mission.

  The journey started on a wide path of pea gravel. Andie passed countless tombs, many adorned with angels, griffins, or cherubs. A few graves were brightened by fresh-cut flowers, but the most impressive splashes of pink, orange, and other flaming colors came from bougainvillea vines and hibiscus bushes that had been planted many years earlier, probably by mourners who had since found permanent rest here. Andie continued along a shaded path until she came to a small clearing where several paths intersected like the spokes of a wheel. She checked her map, but it wasn’t very helpful. She wasn’t sure which way to go.

  “Lost?” a man asked.

  Andie looked up. He was an older man, dressed in coveralls and a baseball cap. A thick mustache made it difficult to see his mouth, and crescents of sweat extended from the underarms of his T-shirt. From the dirt on the man’s knees Andie assumed that he was part of grounds maintenance.

  “Yes, I am,” said Andie. She gave him the coordinates.

  “I can take you there.” He led her down a path that stretched beneath the sprawling limbs of strong oaks. The stone markers were gradually becoming less impressive. They were newer than the ones Andie passed at the beginning of her journey, but they were hardly new. Most of the departed here had died before Andie was born.

  “Here it is,” said the groundskeeper.

  Andie stopped and looked down at the plain white headstone. It was about the size of a child’s pillow, with simple cherub carvings on either end. The engraved name told her that she had come to the right place:

  Ana Maria Fuentes-Swyteck.

  It was a sobering moment. Slowly, almost without thinking about it, she lowered herself down onto her knees. The coolness of green grass pressed through the hem of her maternity dress. She leaned forward and ran her finger along the grooves on the headstone, tracing the name and the dates.

  “Hello, Ana Maria,” she whispered.

  Andie tried to conjure up an image of Jack’s mother—she’d seen photographs—but nothing was in mental focus. She was powerless to envision this special person who had left Cuba as a teenager, left her own mother behind in Bejucál, come to Miami as a refugee, fallen in love with a cop who had big dreams, and given birth to a baby boy. Instead, complex feelings about her own child and condition consumed her, and at that particular moment there simply wasn’t room in her heart for anything or anyone else. In a moment of confused empathy, she imagined her own baby fully grown and coming someday to visit the grave of a mother she had never known. She wondered how Jack must have felt whenever he came here, seeing his date of birth carved into stone as his mother’s date of death.

  Perhaps Andie knew Ana Maria better for having visited this place. She knew Jack a little better, too. But she didn’t feel any better. She felt . . . scared.

  Andie climbed to her feet, but she didn’t step away from the gravesite. She dug her phone from her purse and dialed Jack. She was relieved to hear him answer, and she dispensed with the meaningless “Hi, how are you, honey?”

  “I need to hear you say it again,” she said into her phone.

  “Say what?” asked Jack.

  “That everything is going to be okay.”

  He hesitated, and Andie could almost hear him wondering what had brought this on. She was relieved that he didn’t go down that route and, instead, simply gave her the comfort she needed. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said. “Perfect, in fact.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, love. I promise.”

  She forced a little smile—a sad one nonetheless. “I believe you,” she said. Her gaze remained fixed on the headstone, and she rested her free hand atop her belly. “We all believe you.”

  Jack was in the office by nine thirty. He’d been awake since five, preparing at home for a mediation conference in a nice and bland breach-of-contract case in which his client was highly unlikely to die. Then it was back to the daily diet of the Freedom Institute and the world of Dylan Reeves.

  “Oh, Jack!” his secretary called out. Bonnie was known as “the Roadrunner,” and with her trademark burst of speed, she’d nearly raced right past him on his way into the kitchen for coffee. “This just came in by e-mail. You have a hearing before Judge Frederick at noon.”

  “Seriously?”

  She handed him the papers, which she’d printed for him. There were three: the notice of hearing at noon; a copy of a subpoena served on Gavin Burgette; and a notice of filing the affidavit of Debra Burgette. Each was signed by Barbara Carmichael.

  “Hannah?” Jack said in a loud voice. In three quick steps he was inside her office.

  She looked up from her desk. “What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?”

  Another phrase she’d borrowed from her father. Under the circumstances, Jack wasn’t amused. “We agreed last night that we were not going to file the affidavit of Debra Burgette until I sorted out the conflict between her testimony and her ex-husband’s.”

  “Right. So?”

  “Barbara Carmichael just filed a copy of Debra’s affidavit with the court, and there’s a hearing at noon. How did the prosecutor get hold of an affidavit that we drafted if we didn’t file it?”


  Hannah was suddenly pale. She checked her e-mail program, and she almost seemed to melt into her chair. “Oh, shit,” she said.

  Jack took another step inside and closed the door. “What happened?”

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Hannah, talk to me.”

  She looked up, and the worried expression on her face was unlike any he’d seen from her before. “After Debra signed her affidavit, I scheduled an automatic e-mail to serve a copy of it to Barbara Carmichael at eight a.m.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I thought we were going to file it with the court this morning.”

  “I told you we weren’t going to file it.”

  Hannah grimaced, as if in pain. “I know. You told me after I scheduled the automatic service.” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “I forgot to cancel it.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Jack, I’m so sorry. We’ve been busting Carmichael’s chops because the prosecution withheld crucial evidence from Dylan Reeves’ trial counsel. The last thing I thought we needed was to have her accuse us of sitting on crucial evidence as well. So I set up the automatic e-mail to make sure it was served as soon as we filed it. I am so sorry.”

  Jack drew a breath, trying not to be too obvious about the headache he could feel coming on. “It’s all right,” he said.

  “No, it’s not. I can’t believe I did that. Shit! I’m such an idiot!”

  “You made a mistake.”

  “Mistakes get people killed around here. That’s what my dad always said.”

  Jack paused, and as bad as this seemed, it made him realize what had been missing from his years as a sole practitioner: there was no being mentored; no chance to be a mentor. “No, that’s not what your dad always said, Hannah.”

  “What?”

  “Remind me to tell you the story of when Neil sent me all the way to Tallahassee to cover a hearing for him—and I went to the wrong courthouse.”

  She managed a semblance of a smile. “Thanks,” she said.