CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Tampa, Florida

Tuesday 5:25 p.m.

February 20, 2001

CJ’S FACE SUFFUSED RED with embarrassment and anger. But he knew he had to tell me before the entire situation got completely out of hand and he found himself on the front page of the paper. Not to mention out of a job and maybe in jail.

Perhaps my nightmare last week was a premonition. CJ really could end up behind bars in orange prison garb.

“I did buy quite a few pieces of jewelry from Armstrong Otter over the years, just like I told you. One year, I bought my wife a necklace that he said had belonged to Carole Lombard. He said it had been designed by Paulding Farnham. He showed me a book about Farnham and his creations, including a picture of Carole Lombard wearing the necklace at the Academy Awards. It was a beautiful thing. A large sapphire center surrounded by diamond baguettes. Mariam loved it. Just loved it. She wore it everywhere for a couple of years and told everyone she knew that I’d bought it and what its history was.”

The pride in his tone was unmistakable. It must be hard to be married to an heiress of Mariam McCarthy Richardson’s stature. Her family fortune was immense, her local celebrity unrivaled.

How did a husband impress such a woman on a civil servant’s salary?

I imagined CJ had been a “good catch” when Mariam McCarthy married him. Although his pedigree was good, it was nowhere near as good as hers.

But, if the stories of Mariam’s youthful indiscretions with Gil Kelley were true, when she married CJ, Mariam was already a woman with a past. If Mariam McCarthy Richardson “married down,” I doubted she ever let CJ forget it.

What it must have meant to him to have given her such a special gift as a piece of Paulding Farnham jewelry.

And what a colossal slap in the face it was when the gift was exposed as a fraud. People had killed for less.

“So what happened to enlighten you about the jewelry’s pedigree?” George asked him.

“We took the necklace with us to New York one year. Mariam wanted to take it in to Tiffany’s, to show it to them because it was a Paulding Farnham design,” he choked up. Really. I never thought I’d see the CJ show any honest emotion of any kind. I could almost hear the sharp-tongued Mariam, lashing CJ over her humiliation, making it his.

“And it was a fake,” I supplied, to help him out. He was a little pathetic, really. I wasn’t used to him being so vulnerable. I thought of the CJ as a twit, but a powerful and controlling twit. At this point, he was just a pathetic victim of another con. The role fit him uncomfortably. What would he have done to restore his pride? Murder?

“Right,” he said, morosely. “It was a fake. I was outraged, Mariam was mortified and Tiffany’s wanted to report Otter to the authorities right then. I probably should have let them but I thought I could handle it myself.” He took another large swallow of the scotch. “Dutch courage” they call it.

“What did you do?” George was interested in keeping this story moving along.

“I swore Mariam to silence, which she was only too willing to do. We came back to Tampa and confronted Otter. He acted surprised,” CJ almost spat. “Said he thought I knew the necklace wasn’t real. But he claimed it had still belonged to Carole Lombard and she’d worn it to the Academy Awards. That made it worth what I’d paid for it, he said. He offered to take it back and return my money. And he said if I took any action against him or told anyone, he’d sue me for defamation.”

I felt the small hairs rise on the back of my neck.

I’d heard this story before.

Had Otter believed he could run this scam indefinitely?

“So why not let him take it back and wash your hands of the whole matter? Except for looking foolish, which isn’t a crime and has never killed anyone that I know of, you wouldn’t have been any worse off for the experience.” I’d been right. CJ was a twit after all. Pride before the fall and all. Such an old story.

“I should have. Of course, I know that now. At the time, all Mariam and I could think of was what other people would think. Everybody we knew was aware of that necklace. We just couldn’t act like we’d never owned it. We certainly didn’t want to be named in a defamation suit.” CJ said Mariam wore the necklace less frequently until, in the last few years, she hadn’t even had it on. People seemed to have forgotten. And CJ got a good deal from Otter on anything else he ever bought. All of which CJ had appraised before paying, by the way.

“I think, over the years, he’d made it up to me in discounts on other pieces. And we just let it be our little secret.” He finished his drink and set the glass down between us on the table.

“Why do I get the feeling we haven’t heard the whole story?” I said, even though George kicked me under the table.

CJ grimaced as if he’d swallowed a sour lime. “It was the whole story. Until last week. Otter called me at home and told me about the Fitzgerald House case. He said it was just like my situation.”

CJ sounded parched again, and I shook my head at the waitress to keep her from offering him another round.

“And he suggested he’d let people know about it unless you could make the Fitzgerald House case go away, is that it?” I suggested, as CJ nodded miserably.

“You didn’t kill Otter over this, did you?” George asked CJ, straight out.

“No!” he blurted, then added more quietly, “But we argued about it. More than once. People might have heard us.”

My heart sank, because I knew what was coming next. “When did you see him last, CJ?” I asked him.

“Saturday night. Late. In Ybor City after the Knight Parade.”

“What happened?”

“We argued. I pushed him. And I left him there. Alive. I swear.” CJ was trembling now, wanting another drink.

Now, I had the upper hand with the CJ and I didn’t want it. It was one thing to play my little power games with him when I knew they weren’t hurting anyone. But in this case, his wife’s pride and his own ego got him way more than he bargained for.

“CJ, you really should tell all of this to your lawyer and see what you can work out with the Judicial Counsel. Because I won’t complain, your call to me isn’t something that should get you impeached. You’ll get a slap on the wrist over it. That’s all. You’ll never be appointed to the Court of Appeals. But, no one needs to know. Resolve it confidentially. Do it now,” I urged him, as sympathetically as I could, but he remained seated, not willing to give up yet.

He still thought he could persuade me to lie for him. Given his track record with trying to control me, his confidence was sorely misplaced. “Do it before they put me back on the witness stand and ask me about this entire conversation, which you know they will do,” I told him.

That seemed to galvanize him to action. He said he needed to call his lawyer. Knowing who was defending him, I hoped the CJ would offer to let the lawyer keep his retainer to resolve the case. Otherwise, the lawyer wouldn’t let the matter drop. None of us needed to let this get out of hand any more than it already was.

Before he left, I had one more question. “How did the Judicial Counsel find out about this, anyway?”

CJ seemed genuinely puzzled by this. “I don’t know. Anonymous tip, I was told. Neither Mariam nor I told anyone, you can be sure of that. It makes no sense that Otter would have tipped them. But someone did.”

The next morning, I was waiting on the couch in the lobby at the AmSouth building at 100 North Tampa Street for the bank to open. I didn’t want to make the mistake of going to my office and being delayed again so that I missed the opportunity to get into Ron Wheaton’s safety deposit box.

The grey marble gothic building graced Tampa’s skyline with sufficient grandeur to win an award for Building of the Year not long ago. Its interior lobby soars four stories and larger-than-life murals painted on the walls soften the stark echo of the unforgiving granite. Some days, a string quartet or a classical flamenco guitarist play here during the lunch hour. This morning, the lobby was filled with office workers traveling from the parking garage on the north side of the building to the elevator banks in each wing, beginning their work day.

The building’s tenants included a more than ample supply of lawyers and bankers, so I’d had to talk to quite a few people as they arrived for work, even though I’d had my nose buried in the Wall Street Journal, hoping that it would keep my privacy. Instead, all it did was to give peo-ple a conversational opening.

“Morning, Judge. Anything good going on in the market?”

“Hello, Judge Carson. How about that NASDAQ?”

“Judge Carson, good to see you again. Hard to believe Microsoft is merging, isn’t it?”

In truth, I hadn’t read a word in the paper. I was too preoccupied. That didn’t seem to matter to my colleagues as they greeted me with enthusiasm and chattered on without regard to my minimal responses.

A few minutes after ten o’clock, a woman opened the glass door to the AmSouth branch office and I followed her inside, asking where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I provided my name and my key to the guardian, signed the register, and was shown to a row of silver boxes along a narrow corridor inside a locked gate.

The guardian, a burly security guard with a gun, put his key in box number 372 and turned it. Then, he put my key in the other keyhole and turned it. This caused a small door to pop open, giving him a view of the black metal box inside. He slid the long, narrow black box from its slot and showed me to a small room, placing the box on the plain metal table in front of a metal folding chair. With a nod, he closed the door and left me alone with the box that Ron Wheaton had wanted me to have.

I pulled a regulation length, eleven-inch legal pad and a blue Flair pen, my writing instrument of choice, out of my briefcase, laid them on the table and opened the box. Inside, I saw two regular, white number-ten business envelopes. Both were sealed. One had my name written on it. The other was addressed to Margaret.

I opened the envelope addressed to me and removed three sheets of letter-sized paper. One page was a list of assets. The other two contained a hand-written letter signed by Ron Wheaton. I glanced at the list of assets and was both surprised and chagrined at the value of Ron’s estate. He left more than enough money to support a motive for murder, if the multi-million dollar life insurance policy was paid out.

I was happy and concerned for Margaret at the same time. Ben Hathaway would surely feel seven million dollars was an ample motive for murder, if Margaret knew about the money, which she probably did. I shook my head at the over-protectiveness Ron had demonstrated for Margaret, even in contemplation of death.

Ron Wheaton had earned a modest living, and both he and Margaret were comfortable with their chosen lifestyle. Ron had far over-insured himself long before he was diagnosed with ALS. Perhaps the insurance was cheaper because he bought it through the school system where he worked. Who knows? I just never figured Ron Wheaton for a guy with a desire to be wealthy. Yet, he apparently wanted Margaret to be well-heeled after he died. He surely never believed his attempted largess might cause Margaret more harm than good.

One of my former law partners, who was on his sixth wife, once told me that men don’t leave a marriage unless they have somewhere to go. Chief Hathaway’s theory must be the same for women, too. He believed Margaret was having an affair with Otter and killed her husband to be free of Ron so she and Otter could be together. Hathaway thought Otter had money, though. When he found out Margaret was the wealthy one, would Hathaway be more convinced that Margaret had killed her husband? Or less?

I set the asset list aside for the time being, and read the letter addressed to me.

“Dear Willa, Please forgive me for not discussing this with you personally,” it began, in a way that made tears well up in my eyes. This was just like something Ron Wheaton would have said to me before he died. He was always polite and kind. He thought of everyone before himself.

Even in death, he was still Ron.