Courting Death Page 11

  Good question, she thought. Maybe she just wanted to solve a mystery and impress the Judge. No memo she wrote was going to distinguish her from the seventy or so brilliant clerks who had preceded her, but solving a five-year-old riddle might.

  “I don’t know … I do love to read mystery novels.”

  Phil looked unconvinced.

  “And I do feel protective of the Judge. There’s a crazy lady out there slandering him, and that bugs me. He’s the one public figure in this state whose career hasn’t been hit with a scandal—even Martin Luther King was slurred by the FBI sex tapes. I don’t want to see the same thing happen with him.”

  “So, it’s altruism.”

  “That”—she laughed at her own self-deception—“and the sheer entertainment value.”

  “And speaking of entertainment value, Titus Grover might show up too.” He smiled at her. “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.”

  “Really?” She pantomimed putting her finger down her throat and gagging. “I met him when I interviewed. I like them slightly less sleazy, thank you!”

  * * *

  On the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Suzanne and Maria picked up Arthur and Phil at the courthouse in her aging Chrysler station wagon. Phil sat in the front, and Arthur sat with Maria in the back. Shortly after their departure, he handed Phil an Elvis Costello cassette and abdicated his third of the driving chores by popping the top of a can of beer. He handed Maria a juice box, banged it against his can, and they rubbernecked happily together to the music as the south side of town faded into hay fields and piney woodland.

  Three beers, two juice boxes, and six bladder-expanding hours later, they crunched onto the clamshell driveway of a massive gray cedar house on St. George Island. Maria leaped out of the car, and Arthur followed her westward into the rapidly setting sun, ignoring Suzanne’s questions about where Ramsey hid the keys or acknowledging Phil’s desperate pleas for a bathroom. He kicked off his shoes and walked directly to the beach, transfixed by the brilliant oranges, reds, and purples mushrooming their way across the evening sky. Maria pursued zigzagging sandpipers across the sand and played tag with the surf while he stared out over the first truly open horizon he had seen since arriving in woodsy and hilly Clarkeston.

  Suzanne sidled behind him and nibbled his ear, her first overt show of affection in front of Phil, who stood relieving himself against a stunted oak tree about fifty yards down the beach. She slipped her arms around him and communicated without speaking that the sight of Maria scampering on the beach had already made the long trip worth it.

  “Where’s the key?” she finally whispered. “Phil’s oak tree is not wide enough to hide my big butt while I pee.”

  “It’s supposed to be underneath a brick next to the outdoor shower pipe.” As she turned to go back to the house, Arthur heard an enthusiastic shout.

  “Ahoy, maties!” A tall, tan ginger-haired man strode down the weathered walkway that led from the back deck of the house over a small sand dune to the beach.

  “There’s gin and tonic inside. The others went to town to get some snacks and beer.” He extended his hand. “I’m Titus Grover, and you must be Phil or Art.”

  “Arthur, actually. This is Suzanne Garfield.”

  “Hello, Suzanne.” He kissed her cheek and then added with a smile, “We met last year when I was clerking.” Arthur sneaked a peek to catch her expression, but she betrayed no emotion as she excused herself to go up to the house.

  Grover had flown to Tallahassee from Washington, DC, where he was in his first year at a well-known corporate firm. He had arrived earlier in the day with April Duncan, who had been Carolyn Bastaigne’s co-clerk, and Glenn Hatcher, another former clerk who had spent each Thanksgiving on Saint George since leaving Clarkeston eight years earlier.

  As Phil introduced himself, Arthur walked to the house and unloaded the car. He claimed two adjacent bedrooms on the second story for Suzanne, Maria, and himself, in the hope that Suzanne would sneak over for a visit when Maria was asleep.

  “Good old Jack isn’t arriving until lunchtime tomorrow,” Grover announced as the other ex-clerks arrived with one ice chest full of fresh shrimp and another full of beer, “so I’m gonna be chef tonight and get the girls working on a roux for shrimp gumbo while I cut up some garlic for scampi.” He nodded at Glenn and Arthur. “Why don’t you boys go under the house and devein the shrimp.”

  Grover’s hoarding of the women was not lost on anyone, but Glenn and Arthur were content to set up a portable stereo in the enormous carport created by the ten-foot concrete pillars supporting the house. They drank beer and talked as they pulled sticky black entrails from the mountain of seafood in the battered ice chest.

  “Where do you work, Glenn?” Arthur asked.

  “I do preclearance work on mergers in the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department,” Glenn explained enthusiastically.

  He was single, a slight young man who constantly fiddled with his glasses and lank dark hair. The rapid and abundant growth of his facial hair lent a bluish tint to his skin even though he had undoubtedly shaved that morning and maybe after lunch too. He shelled the shrimp and spoke rapidly at the same time. “Have you decided what you’re doing once the clerkship is over?”

  “I’m pretty focused on environmental enforcement, right now.” Arthur didn’t mention that he was most interested in a job at the Office of Legal Counsel. OLC comprised an elite group of two dozen lawyers who advised the executive branch of the federal government, and since jobs there were harder to get than Supreme Court clerkships, he did not want to sound naively optimistic.

  “I’m going to interview with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Environmental Enforcement Division at Justice the first week in December,” he added. These, too, would be difficult jobs to obtain, but working for the Judge almost assured him of a position.

  The group dined late in a screened portion of the top deck. The meal was jovial and childless, Maria having been sent to bed after devouring two dozen boiled shrimp. The lawyers were sensitive enough to the presence of a layperson to keep the law talk on the level of personalities and away from tedious discussions of cases. Even Grover, when he was not casting maddeningly indiscrete glances at Suzanne’s chest, played a charming host. He was armed with an inexhaustible supply of jokes about the Judge and had his gentle drawl down perfectly.

  “Confidentiality is critical,” he mimicked with both his voice and his hands, “I expect my clerks to keep absolutely silent about whatever happens in chambers. If you eat a burrito in your office, I don’t want to hear you fart in public!”

  When they finished cleaning up, they drank coffee and watched the lights of the shrimp boats bob like fallen stars on top of the inky water. The breeze was brisk enough to keep away the sand flies, but not cold enough to call for sweaters. The group talked sporadically, heeding the amniotic call of the gentle surf during pauses in the conversation. When Grover, April, and Glenn got up to fetch more drinks, Arthur suggested quietly to Suzanne that they go for a walk alone on the beach.

  “I’d love to,” she whispered, “but I don’t feel right about leaving Maria alone with strangers.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to bother her, sweetie,” he slurred slightly, the beer finally taking its toll.

  “No, you moron.” She looked around to see if anyone could overhear the conversation. “What if she wakes up and finds that neither you nor I are here? This is a new place. I don’t want her to freak out.”

  Arthur knew that this was a perfectly reasonable excuse to give, but the alcohol accentuated his disappointment and he headed moodily off to bed. Although he was all smiles as he made his excuses to the group, the look he gave Suzanne let her know he was pouting and was expecting her to hurry upstairs and comfort him. He lay awake waiting for a while and then quickly slipped over the edge of consciousness into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  Phil and April could not bring themselves to leave
the balmy serenity of the back deck. The Californian had grown up close to the rocky coast south of San Francisco, but he could not think of anywhere close to his home where he could sit outside in a T-shirt in the wee hours of a November morning without freezing. April was good company too, and they abided easily the long breaks in conversation as dawn approached and the tide rolled in. The sense of family he felt in the chambers crossed time and space.

  “How do you like working for the Judge so far?” April asked.

  “It’s cool … just about everything I expected.”

  “You love writing those bench memos, huh?”

  Phil laughed. “I don’t mind, especially when the Judge sits down and hashes through all the issues. He doesn’t do it often, but when he does it’s a pretty amazing.”

  “I know what you mean.” She took out a cigarette and blew a puff of smoke toward the mist coming in off the Gulf. “It’s a lot more interesting than the public defender work I’m doing now.”

  “And your year was pretty eventful, wasn’t it?” Phil probed. Although he didn’t share Melanie’s obsession with the death of Carolyn Bastaigne, he got a charge out of being her co-conspirator. “Didn’t one of your co-clerks die?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Carolyn’s Bastaigne’s mother called the chambers about two weeks ago and started ranting about the Judge, and Ms. Stillwater, and a big courthouse conspiracy.”

  “I can’t believe she’s still doing that!” She turned sideways in the deck chair and faced him.

  “Oh, yeah. And she was pretty nasty too. Melanie took the call, but I could hear her screaming from the other side of the library.” He paused for a moment and took a sip from a glass of water. “Melanie was pretty shook up, so we asked Ms. Stillwater for the whole story.”

  “I doubt that she knows the whole story, but what did she say?”

  “Just that Carolyn was a terrible clerk and that she had fallen down the stairs. She also told Melanie that Carolyn was famous for leaving her shoes in her office and walking around barefoot.” April nodded but offered nothing further in response. “We pulled the old stories from the Clarkeston Chronicle too.”

  April stood up and walked to the edge of the deck. She leaned against the railing for a moment and looked out over the Gulf. “The newspaper stories didn’t say much, if I remember right.”

  “Not really.” He searched for a question to prompt her and decided to ask one that he already knew the answer to. “There’s one thing we don’t know: Who was the last person to see her alive? The paper mentions someone but doesn’t say who.”

  “One of the Marshals who interviewed me let slip that the Judge was the last person to see her leave the chambers.” She stubbed her cigarette out and flicked the butt into an empty planter on the deck.

  Phil nodded. “That might explain why the paper doesn’t say that he was the last to see her alive … out of respect and all.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Say what?”

  “That he was the last person to see her alive.” She turned and faced him, leaning against the weathered wood railing. “I’m only telling you this because you’re a clerk too. You understand that certain things never leave the chambers.” She paused for a moment and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve never been as convinced as Ms. Stillwater that she slipped on her way to fetch a candy bar.”

  “Why not?” He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice. Maybe Melanie’s instincts were better than he gave them credit for.

  “Well, first of all, she always took the elevator. Always. Even if it was just down one floor. And then there’s the no-shoes business. There’s only one place outside of the office where she went without them: Judge Meyers’ chambers at the other end of the floor.”

  “The District Court Judge who passed away last year? Why would she go down there?” Phil got up and walked over to the railing next to April. A series of waves crashed onto the beach.

  “She had a classmate from law school who clerked for Meyers. They were tight as ticks. She never did anything with me or Bob, the other clerk. It seemed like she spent half her time down there.” She laughed suddenly and shook her head. “Boy, the Judge really hated that. You know how he likes to keep the chambers hermetically sealed.”

  “Yeah.” Phil digested the news and then tested the depth of April’s suspicions. “Do you think that someone from Meyers’ chambers might have pushed her?”

  “I’m not saying anyone pushed anybody! I have no idea what happened. I’ve just never made any sense out of it, that’s all.”

  “You mean, why was she in the stairwell with her shoes off?”

  “Exactly. And I can’t come up with any good reason why she would be in too much of a hurry to take the elevator.” She shrugged and, pleading tiredness, pushed open the sliding glass doors and disappeared into the house.

  XV.

  TEQUILA SUNRISE

  Arthur woke up alone and stumbled downstairs at nine o’clock with a bottle of aspirin. The house was so still that he could hear the gentle pounding of the surf through the closed windows. He swallowed three pills with a tumbler of orange juice, made a twelve-cup pot of coffee, washed a pile of dishes, set the breakfast table, and prepared a huge bowl of pancake batter. If anyone remembered his early exit the night before, a fresh breakfast would erase any bad impression. But apart from Maria, who awoke soon after him, he had no customers until April emerged around ten thirty and sleepily requested two eggs over easy with her stack of pancakes.

  “You’re the first one down!” He handed her a cup of coffee and pushed the cream and sugar toward her. “How late did y’all stay up last night anyway?”

  “Pretty late. Glenn went to bed a little after you did, but Phil and I lasted ’til about 6:00 a.m. I don’t remember what time Grover and Suzanne went to bed.” Cringing a little at April’s choice of words, Arthur sent Maria upstairs to wake up her mom and tell her breakfast was ready.

  Before she returned, Glenn came through the front door and reported that he had spent a lovely morning in the Apalachicola Waffle House reading the morning newspaper. As Arthur talked to him, Maria returned alone, and his heart skipped a beat, irrationally fearing a report of: “Mommy’s not in her room.”

  Instead, Maria explained in a serious voice that Mommy had a headache and wanted to sleep a little while longer. Arthur breathed a sigh of relief and left a note on the counter for latecomers that there was pancake batter in the fridge. He invited Maria to walk down to the beach where he mulled over his ridiculous reaction to the imagined tryst between Grover and Suzanne. Suzanne was not his ex-wife, Julia, and there was no reason ever to indulge his sense of jealousy. Despite his resolve, his stomach churned as he remembered stumbling across love notes that one of Julia’s admirers had written to her. He shook the dark memories of her indiscretions out of his head. He needed to see Suzanne; one kiss would suffice to reconnect them.

  Arthur and Maria built sand castles and splashed in the surf for about an hour before Suzanne came down with two mugs of coffee and a box of fruit juice. He thanked her and leaned over to kiss her good morning, but her face tilted slightly so that he caught only cheek and no lips. His resolution to make no reference to her late-night tête-à-tête with Titus Grover dissolved like sugar in hot water.

  “Are you afraid someone’s going to see us?” He remembered Grover’s cryptic comment the other day about having “met” Suzanne the year before. “April said you and Grover were up late last night.” He gave her a querying look, but she saw right through him.

  She stared hard and then spoke deliberately. “Jealousy is a very ugly thing, Arthur.” She turned, looked at the ocean, and sipped her coffee. “Please get over it.”

  “Get over what? What is there for me to get over?”

  “Well, your attitude for one.” She raised her eyebrows and turned to help Maria work on the moat for her sand castle. When he didn’t sit down and join them, she looked up. “Why d
on’t you take a walk down the beach and chill out a bit.”

  His face burned and he sputtered a bit, but he managed to make no more silly statements before walking off down the beach. He hiked in the surf to the border of the state park at the south end of the island and started back having come to the obvious conclusion that he needed to apologize.

  The need for contrition was fairly obvious, but sorting out the whole of his feelings for Suzanne required serious thought. The Socratic method proved inconclusive: Did he love her? Yes. Then why hadn’t he told her during the dozen or so times that they had slept together? Good question. He had told Julia a dozen times a day, so he knew he could say it. But Julia was the only woman he had ever uttered the words to, so I love you sounded inevitably like a marriage proposal. Did he want to marry her? Well, he was definitely going to Washington while Suzanne made it crystal clear that Clarkeston was the only place she wanted to raise Maria. Neither of them were naïve enough to believe in long-distance romance.

  Suzanne deserved a white knight, he concluded, not someone with nothing long-term to offer. On the other hand, she was hardly unaware of the situation, and she had the advantage of being more mature than him. Rapidly tiring of himself, he abandoned self-examination, wishing desperately that he had a friend to talk to, someone who understood the feminine perspective.

  He found a piece of driftwood, and after a few minutes of sitting and contemplating the surf, he finally decided that the best approach would be to ask Suzanne herself for help in sorting out his feelings. He would tell her that he loved her, but remind her that he was leaving town in seven months. He would confess to being an irrationally jealous person who could only survive in a monogamous relationship. To avoid more stupidity, he needed her counsel. She was his best friend in Clarkeston, and her response to his soul-baring would tell him what to do.

  Suzanne was digging a shoulder-deep hole in the sand with Maria when he returned from his walk.

  “I’m so sorry! I’m totally chill now.”

  “It’s okay.”