Ring of Truth Read online

  Susanna

  2

  “THE END,” I type, and lean back in my chair, feeling breathless with relief.

  What started with two girls stumbling across a body in a spooky mansion is finished. The guilty convicted, sentenced to die. The supposedly innocent set free. As of this moment, even my book about the crime is done. I’ve written all about it, beginning with the discovery of the body, and moving on through the investigation, the trial and startling mixed verdicts, and the incredible irony of it all. I hadn’t intended to write another “Florida book” so soon after my last one, but what can you do when you’re a true crime book writer and you live in a state that hands you sensational crime on a platter?

  True crime in Florida resembles what fishermen up in the panhandle call a “jubilee.” That’s when sea creatures and fish of various kinds come swarming—for no reason anybody has ever figured out—into the shallows and get stranded there. I’ve heard of jubilees so thick with fish you could walk across them.

  It’s kind of like that with Florida and criminals.

  I could write nothing but Florida books for the rest of my life, and never run out of bizarre and original crime. You could almost accuse me of liking our felons. I wouldn’t want to meet any of them in a dark alley, you understand, but I do appreciate how they help me earn my living. If I sound flippant about a serious subject, blame it on finishing my book. Other writers will understand. Now in the spirit of one of the many clichés of my trade, “it’s left to the survivors to try to carry on as best they can.” And all that’s left for me to do is to print this out, pack it up, and call FedEx to pick up this manuscript.

  Without giving myself too much time to think about it—sometimes it’s hard to let go of a book—I start that process by switching on my laser printer. Then, with nobody there to see me in my office at home, I smile as I squint out my windows. Well, I’ll be damned, will you look at that? It’s a beautiful day in Florida! Is it March already? I do believe it is. Still winter up north. But here, the sun is shining like summer, boats are bobbing, and the Bahia Boulevard Bridge is sparkling as if it’s made of tinsel instead of steel. How long has this been going on? Must be ninety degrees out there in that world beyond my air conditioning. Why, there’s a whole universe out there, people are moving about their lives, going to jobs, making love, eating swearing laughing crying killing swimming running playing.

  Who knew?

  Not I; I’ve been shut up in this house for three weeks racing toward THE END. The research for this book started a year ago, the actual writing began six months after that, with the title, Anything to Be Together, and my pen name, Marie Lightfoot.

  It is five hundred and fifty-six pages later.

  Those pages are starting to roll out of my printer now.

  Whenever I’ve been deep in the writer’s trance and I come up for air again, it’s as if all of my senses have been shut off and now they come flooding back in on me. Like now, as the sun coming through my wraparound windows hurts my eyes. I hear boats on the Intracoastal Waterway as if they had only this minute all started their motors. And what’s that cherry-almond smell? Did I rub on lotion this morning? I don’t recall. Suddenly, I’m hungry. Thirsty. Stiff. My left hip feels sore, as if I haven’t moved in this chair for hours.

  “Robot writer woman,” I say, testing my voice.

  There’s a buzzing sensation behind my forehead, as if my frontal lobe is quivering from so much sustained concentration.

  “Done at last, thank God, I’m done at last.”

  It’s finished, this sixth of my true crime books. Will it be a bestseller, like all the rest? One hopes. One does, indeed, hope. Will my track record be enough to attract that many readers again, or will this crime do the trick all by its violent self? “Gruesome murder. Superb detection. Brilliant lawyers. Lives shattered,” as the book jacket will probably say, “families torn asunder.” The flap copy on true crime books tends to revel in clichés, and I should know, because I’ve written my share.

  I think I’ll just sit here and savor the moment.

  I should call someone, and let them congratulate me, but I wonder if I have any friends left. Wait a minute, it’s really March? Well, damn. March brings the dreaded, desired Spring Break. At this very minute high school seniors and college freshmen all over America are climbing the wave that will crest in our high tide, our tsunami of tourism. Well, shoot! I’ve surfaced just in time for the one period of the year when ten percent of the population leaves town, the retirees bitch about the traffic, everybody else works too hard, and it’s impossible for anybody to go anywhere.

  Not that I don’t have anything to do at home.

  So many phone calls left unanswered. So many letters unopened, bills unpaid, so much E-mail ignored. I wonder if I missed any appointments. Probably. I think I paid the mortgage for this month, but I’m not sure. Books are ravenous gods that eat the rest of life. All goes into their greedy maw, while the writer sacrifices her friends, her credit, her lover, her sanity.

  “Congratulations,” I tell myself.

  “Thank you,” I reply.

  “Writers can get pretty strange by the end of a book,” I observe.

  “You’re telling me?” I retort.

  A lonely business, it is said of writing, but I don’t feel alone. After all, I’ve just spent weeks with my “characters”—killer, victim, police, survivors.

  “Yeah, but they’re only in your computer. You’ve hardly spoken to a living soul in weeks,” I remind myself. “And look at you, look at your house. It’s a mess. You’re a mess. Maybe now you can become a human being again.”

  I have a writer friend, a novelist, whose husband once said to her, “No offense, but I can tell where you are in a book by your appearance.” I laughed when I heard that, as did she; it’s so painfully true. If I were to glance in a mirror right now I’d see a woman who hasn’t changed her clothes in three days, whose hair is pulled back by a barrette but not combed, and who has barely been able to remember to slip on sandals to go to the grocery store for essentials.

  For reassurance, I glance at a wall where I have framed mementos of my career. I want to know that it is possible for me to look better than this. In one of the frames there is a photograph of me that appeared in Newsweek. Now that woman, the one with a pen in her hand, that woman looks downright glamorous, with her combed, blond, streaked hair, and her flattering dress. We’re in our thirties, she and I, but she could pass for younger. Me, I could pass for a bag lady. In my office, staring at the “other” me, I sigh. That’s the author, the one who brushes her hair and goes out in public; this is the writer me. If my readers could see me now, they’d chip in to buy me a makeover.

  I look around my office, as if seeing it for the first time since I launched this final push to the end of the book, and what I see through critical eyes is a disaster area. Books and papers piled everywhere. Old food crusting on plates. Coffee cups with milky sludge. And what’s my brassiere doing over there, draped across that footstool? I must have taken it off on my way to the shower one night and never noticed it again until this moment.

  And people ask me why I’ve never married?

  There’s usually a feeling of relief and satisfaction like no other I’ve ever known that comes with typing those two words in capital letters. THE END. At the beginning of a book, I think I’ll never get there. There’s too much to do, too much to write; there’s too much research, too much information to synthesize. It’s all too hard, too big, and even if I did it five—or even ten—times before, that doesn’t guarantee I can ever do it again.

  But now I’ve actually done it again, one more time.

  I have only to gather up the pages. Post them to my editor in New York. Wait for her editorial comments. Make the revisions she requests, check the line-editing, then the galleys. And then I will forget this book and go on vacation before I start researching the next one.

  I want it finished. I want to take a break. I want to st
art a new book.

  There’s only one small problem.

  I shift uneasily in my swivel chair as the pile of pages grows.

  The wee little problem, hardly even worth mentioning, is that I feel desperately unsure about this book.

  “Who asked you?” I shoot back, resentfully.

  “Maybe I’ll want to see the movie?”

  “Oh, that’s very funny.”

  I’m hoping my editor, my wise, tough New York editor who knows more about my work and my audience than I do, will disagree with me. Maybe she’ll call me and say, “Great work, Marie. This is your best book yet. I couldn’t put it down. Loved every word of it. You’ve really outdone yourself with this one.”

  The way that conversation goes in my imagination, you’d think I wrote fiction. It’s wishful thinking. What I’m afraid she’s going to say is, “Great beginning, Marie. Loved the first few chapters. But after that, there’s something missing. I don’t know what it is, but I feel as if you haven’t quite gotten to the heart of this story. Do you think you can do that for us?”

  To which my answer will be, “No.”

  “And your point is?” I ask myself, bitterly. “Is that a problem for you? I finished the damn book on time, what else do you want?”

  Silence from inside me.

  My stomach clenches and a sour taste rises.

  My first giddy, trivializing relief at writing THE END is in direct proportion to the profound anxiety that lies beneath it.

  Damn, where’s denial when I really need it?

  “You’re scared,” accuses the prosecutor in my soul.

  “Am not,” protests the defendant, but nobody on the jury in my psyche believes her. “What have I got to be scared of?”

  Determinedly, I fill out a FedEx shipping form and call their 800 number for a home pickup. When I place the telephone receiver back in its cradle, my hand and wrist feel weak, and I know it’s not carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s worry, flooding into me, turning into fear before my very eyes, which I now hide for a moment behind my hands. There’s a clutching feeling around my heart. I hate this. I know what it is. It’s been waking me up at three in the morning for a few nights now. What we have here is a true crime writer who’s afraid that she hasn’t revealed the innermost truth. This should have been a sexy book, but it isn’t. I’ve got no lustful facts, not even fantasy,- all I’ve got between the first and last pages of this book is the hint of their murderous affair, but none of the actual details of it. He won’t talk about it; she won’t talk about it. Nobody saw them do it. I’ve got a preacher who took a lover. They killed his wife. Or, at least one of them did; a jury wasn’t convinced they were both guilty. But still, shouldn’t their illicit lust for each other fairly shout from my pages?

  It doesn’t; it doesn’t even whisper seductively.

  In my book, they and their affair are as cold as Florida air conditioning when they should come across as hot as August. This should be a tale of passion, of sweaty, slippery bodies,- there should be a smell of sex, a taste of salty sweat, but there isn’t. Oh, there’s passion, all right, but it’s the clean, neat fervor of a passion for truth and justice.

  Before I slip the manuscript into a box, I pick up the next chapter to reread. It has a big problem—another one—that I can’t fix. I always try to pick cases with great detective work and likable cops, and I thought I had one here. On the word of the state attorney for Howard County, I believed I had one. But I underestimated how much slack prosecutors give to cops. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to turn the cop in this case into a hero. It’s not fiction, so I’m stuck with him, and I don’t like him very much.

  I dread the reaction to him—and to the other cops—from my readers.

  Wait’ll they get a load of the contempt in the voices of the cops toward the poor dead woman in the mansion. I want my cops to care, dammit. And these don’t seem to care about anything except getting even with a “perp” they personally can’t stand. It’s ironic justice they voice here, not a thirst for real justice for a murdered woman. Great, just perfect. A true crime book with no sex and an unappealing hero. What was I thinking?

  Anything to Be Together

  By Marie Lightfoot

  CHAPTER 2

  Even Detective Carl Chamblin winced at first sight of the decomposing body in the mansion, though he was a man who’d seen enough violent death in his long career to fill every morgue in Florida.

  “Christ,” he muttered under his breath, and then he mopped the sweat off the back of his neck with a handkerchief. It was too damned hot for homicide. Why couldn’t he live in Minnesota where bodies froze and cops didn’t sweat? In spite of the expletive, he didn’t give the appearance of a man who’d flinch in the face of blood. At six-foot-five, Carl was 240 pounds of detective, with the big-jowled, scary face of a pit bull. At forty-six years of age, he was seven years away from the average life expectancy of the American cop. He thought about that more often lately, that risky gamble, the wager cops lay down on death or pension.

  This victim, whoever she was, had lost her gamble early.

  There was no purse, apparently, no identification.

  Prostitute? Homeless? Addict? Those were some of his initial surmises about the identity of this dead woman who lay hunched on the filthy floor of an abandoned mansion, clothed only in her own blood and other bodily emissions. He eliminated those, however, when it dawned on him that her body was too lush, too smoothly well-fed to belong to a junkie or a whore. There was another possibility—a particular missing person—but he didn’t seriously entertain that idea, not at this point, anyway. His mind simply rebelled at the notion that this corpse was in any way related to that case.

  She looked as if she had curled up to try to protect herself from the blows that rained upon her here. “Here” was Bahia Beach, Florida, a seaside metropolis of approximately 100,000 people, sandwiched between Fort Lauderdale to the south and Pompano to the north, in Howard County. From January through March, tourists swelled the population of the city to many times that number. A few of those tourists never went home again, and some of their homicides fell to Carl Chamblin to identify and investigate. Was this woman a tourist who’d gone slumming in the wrong bar?

  Had she been raped, too? Carl’s guess was yes.

  In the stifling heat of the ruined room, he watched the crime-scene photographer snap his pictures and film his videos. With those initial tasks finished, the techs could move in to start gathering evidence. One of them had the job of compiling all of the evidence that the others collected and of making sure it was bagged, boxed, or placed in preservative jars and then painstakingly labeled as to where it was found at the scene and who found it. At a crime scene such as this one, that could mean individually packaging hundreds of items ranging from the victim’s clothing—if they found any—to sections of wood flooring or patches of peeling, bloodstained wallpaper.

  For a few moments, Carl watched the techs as they placed dry items in plastic bags, and wet ones in paper bags, as per procedure, so that the wet things wouldn’t rot. Hell, in this heat everything was wet, including his shirt where the sweat was running down, and inside his undershorts, and the soles of his feet. It was hard to think in this heat, but he tried to concentrate. It looked like the killer kept on slamming her with something after she fell. But with what? Where was the weapon? What would do this? He glanced up at a wrought-iron curtain rod hanging by a hole in its design. Something like that? That might do it, but he was guessing something thicker, something easier to grasp and swing than a thin, rusting rod. It wasn’t going to take a medical examiner to tell Carl she’d been beaten to death. Pulped was more like it, he thought, sardonically. By the time her killer had gotten through with her, they could have run her through a mill and made paper out of her. He stared at her right wrist. It was flung, palm up, against the wooden slats of the scarred floor. Her left arm and hand were hidden under her body.

  Despite the exotic setting and extreme viol
ence, so far this was just another homicide to the veteran detective, merely the latest of hundreds he had investigated in his twenty-year career, most of that in homicide. Unlike Carl, however, one of the crime scene technicians in the room was anything but blasé, because it was the first crime scene she’d ever worked.

  “Look what I found!” she exclaimed to him, in a high, excited voice.

  Carl glanced first at what lay in her plastic glove: a bloody ring. It was gold, with a large central diamond surrounded by smaller ones. Looked like a woman’s engagement ring to Carl. Without touching it, he observed that it had notches in it, as if it was designed to fit into a matching wedding band. Only then did he look at the photo ID badge pinned to the tech’s shirt: Martina Levin. He eyed her up and down. He’d never seen her before.

  “You new?”

  “Yes, sir”

  She looked like an overgrown tomboy, he thought: short but sturdy in her navy-blue uniform, with a round face and short dark hair. Like Carl, she wore paper booties over her shoes; unlike him, she had dangling around her neck a type of gas mask meant to filter out smells. Carl hated the things and preferred mentholated jelly rubbed in his nostrils to cover the stench, although most cops claimed that worked about as well as coating your nose with water. He was surprised this girl was tough enough to remain in the room for so long without filtering the air.

  She had to tilt her head to look up into his face.

  “Find the other ring,” he directed her.

  “What other ring? I didn’t see another one.”

  “Keep looking. If this is an engagement ring, there ought to be a wedding band. Have somebody turn her over and see if she’s wearing it.” After Martina Levin departed, he returned his attention to the corpse, but in his mind he was speculating about the ring she’d found. Why would there be a loose ring? It suggested to Carl the possibility of a lover’s quarrel, and of somebody furiously throwing a ring at somebody else. Or, maybe this was a kidnap, rape, robbery, murder, and the perp had dropped some of his prizes.