Clubbed to Death (8 page)

“Where is he, ma’am?” The cop spent a lot of time in a gym. His upper arms bulged.

“I don’t know,” Helen said. “The last time I saw him, he was walking toward his home.” Then she remembered something that filled her with relief. “Wait! May I see that shirt again?”

Officer Ruley held up the shirt, just out of Helen’s reach. She couldn’t touch it, but she was close enough to see it.

“It rained last night,” she said. “That shirt is dry. I don’t know who tore it or how it got so bloody, but the damage happened after I left and after the storm. It was just starting to rain when I pulled out of the parking lot. By the time I got to I-95 it was a deluge. The shirt would have been soaking wet.”

“We got a couple of drops here at the beach, ma’am. The heavy rain was to the west, by the highway.”

Florida weather was perverse. There could be a downpour in one neighborhood, and a few blocks away the sky would be clear.

“Look around the parking lot if you don’t believe me,” Ruley said.

“Do you see any puddles of water?”

Helen just saw one puddle—of blood.

“You don’t know if that’s Rob’s blood on the shirt,” she said.

“No, ma’am. We’ll run tests for that. We’re also going to check and see if there’s any other blood. Like yours. May I see your hands, ma’am?

Hold out your hands, palms down.”

It looked worse than this morning. The knuckles were red, swollen and streaked with purple and green. The scabs were the size of dimes.

“Unfortunately, you’re under arrest,” the young cop said.

“Arrest? What for?”

“For the domestic abuse of your husband.”

“Ex-husband,” Helen said.

“We have witnesses that there was an altercation resulting in trauma,” Ruley said. “You were the aggressor in the situation.”

“Domestic abuse! I’m not married to him. We haven’t lived together for years.”

“Florida law states if family members who once lived together batter each other, they can go to jail for domestic abuse.”

“I didn’t abuse him,” Helen said. “I punched him in the mouth. He deserved it.”

“That’s what they all say,” the cop said.

Helen’s heart sank. She did sound like one of those hateful wife beaters.

“What were you fighting about? Alimony?”

“He doesn’t pay alimony,” Helen said.

“Your children?”

“We don’t have any,” Helen said.

“Your sex life?”

“We don’t have any of that, either,” Helen said.

“You had to be talking about something,” Ruley said.

“His current wife,” Helen said.

“That would be related to your prior relationship,” the officer said.

“No,” Helen said. “She can have him. I’m glad he married Marcella.”

“So glad, you had a fight with your ex. Witnesses saw you hit him.

He was bleeding. Your knuckles are bruised and scabbed, so you hit him hard. Now he’s missing.”

“Witnesses also heard him say that there was nothing wrong,” Helen said. “Rob asked the witnesses to forget the whole episode. He said it wasn’t my fault.”

“That was the last thing he said right before he disappeared,” Ruley said. “We have witnesses to the altercation. We have blood and physical evidence, including your own hands. I’m taking you into custody, Ms. Hawthorne. Put your hands behind you.”

He began reciting the Miranda warning, “You have the right to remain silent—”

As Helen was handcuffed, she saw Jessica running up to the entrance of the lot, calling her name. The officer on guard stopped her.

Jessica clung to the chain-link fence, eyes wide, hair wild, looking like a scene in a movie Helen couldn’t remember.

“Helen,” Jessica shouted. “What can I do?”

“Call Margery, the name on my employee contact sheet,” Helen said. “My landlady, Margery Flax. Tell her I need a lawyer.”

That was about the last thing Helen said for the next five hours.

CHAPTER 7

“I’m not talking until my attorney arrives,” Helen said.

“That is your right,” Officer Ruley said, sitting across from her in the bleak Golden Palms police interrogation room. “But silence makes you look guilty. Why not have a little chat and straighten things out?

I could take off that handcuff and get you a decent cup of coffee. Or better yet, a cold bottle of water. It’s hot in this room. You don’t want to sit here and sweat. It could be hours before your lawyer shows up.”

He looked so boyishly earnest, Helen knew he was lying.

Three years ago, she would have told the nice officer everything. He might have even let her go. But not now. The system didn’t work for Helen anymore.

“I’m not talking until my lawyer arrives,” she said. “This is my third request for my attorney.”

“Okay, okay,” Ruley said, and held up his hands.

Helen considered breaking her silence to tell him the mustache was a mistake, but he’d already left the room. It was two o’clock. She’d been here an hour already. Her stomach growled and reminded her she hadn’t had lunch.

The Golden Palms police station was a small pink cube hidden behind the elaborate fire house. The city was proud of its fire house and the state-of-the-art equipment. Crime was something it tried to keep out of sight.

Helen had been fingerprinted and her damaged hand was photographed. Officer Ruley had asked for a DNA sample and she’d let him swab the inside of her cheek with a Q-tip. She figured he could get that with a warrant, anyway. Might as well seem cooperative. She guessed the police were looking for her blood either on the Tommy Bahama shirt or in the parking lot. She had the awful feeling they would find it.

Now she sat alone in the hot, windowless room, her left hand cuffed to a ring on the metal table. That hand chafed. The other itched from the scabs on her knuckles. The air stank of fear-sweat and despair.

She hoped her own terror wasn’t part of the smelly atmosphere.

Helen had been set up, and she knew it. Ruley, the young cop, knew too much about Helen’s fight with Rob and Brenda’s statement to security. That was Marshall Noote’s doing. The club’s security chief was way too cozy with the Golden Palms police. Noote had given that little nod and Ruley had waved the bloody shirt at her, hoping to shock Helen into some kind of admission.

Ruley also knew about Rob’s disappearance.

It was too soon for the police to be concerned. The cops usually didn’t care about missing adults for at least twenty-four hours—any Court TV buff knew that. The Black Widow reported Rob missing to club security at nine this morning. Her errant husband hadn’t been gone half a day yet.

Why wasn’t the eager young cop asking the Black Widow some serious questions? Marcella had more missing husbands than Helen did.

Helen knew the answer to that question: The Black Widow was a Superior Club member. It was Noote’s job to protect and serve those members. Helen was a minor clerk and nonresident of Golden Palms. She was easy to sacrifice. That was how the system worked in the world of the rich.

Helen used to believe in the system. Its rules had worked for her.

She’d dressed for success—and succeeded. She bought the right home in a safe suburb. Her granite kitchen counters and Pella windows said the right things about her: She was ambitious but no risk taker. Let the crazy folks in advertising buy Victorian mansions in dicey city neighborhoods. Helen lived sensibly.

She never wanted children. She embraced her career instead. Everyone knew Helen always worked late. Especially her husband. That’s why Rob was stunned when Helen came home from work early and found him with another woman. But he was not as surprised as Helen.

Helen had expected the system to right this wrong. Instead, the divorce judge awarded half of Helen’s income to her unfaithful ex. That’s when something broke inside Helen. She couldn’t believe anymore.

Once Helen didn’t believe in the system, it didn’t believe in her.

Her ex-husband was the cosmic monkey wrench tossed into her life. Rob knew how to work the system and he knew how to work her.

Rob had cheated on her and destroyed their marriage, yet the judge rewarded him and punished her.

Rob had chased her across the country, trying to get that miserable money. When he finally tracked her down, the cosmos rewarded him with a fabulously rich wife. The Black Widow was probably a serial spouse killer, but Helen knew Rob would cheat death the same way he cheated on his wives.

Her new life handed her one more surprise: Helen liked living outside the rules. She actually enjoyed her new world. She no longer ate rubber chicken dinners with balding bigwigs to advance her career.

Now she sat by the Coronado pool with her blue-eyed lover. Instead of breakfast meetings, she had sunrise picnics on the beach. She traded in her business suits and sensible heels for sandals and T-shirts. She no longer clawed her way up the ladder to make a hundred thousand a year. Instead, she took home minimum wages and toasted the sunset with cheap wine.

Her new job at the Superior Club had been a partial return to respectability. Margery had urged her to make some decent money. Now Helen was confined in a tailored uniform and panty hose. She also had a car, a credit card, a cell phone and a debt load that kept her awake at night.

Look where it landed her: broke, busted and in jail.

By her old standards, Helen was ruined. Even now, she felt shame and anger. She wanted to blame Rob, but it was her fault. If she’d left him alone, she wouldn’t be sitting in jail. She shouldn’t have hit her ex, no matter how good it felt.

And Phil—what would he think of her? She wished she’d asked Jessica to call him, but there wasn’t time. She’d barely managed to shout Margery’s name before she was shoved into the cop car.

Helen checked her watch for the hundredth time that afternoon.

Four o’clock. Where was Margery? What was taking so long? The lawyer should have been here hours ago. Jessica had delivered the message. She wouldn’t desert Helen.

Maybe Margery wasn’t home. Maybe Colby, the criminal lawyer Margery called when there were emergencies, was in court or out of town.

Maybe Margery was sick of Helen and her self-inflicted problems. Margery had warned her that Rob wasn’t her business. He belonged to Marcella. The man wasn’t worth worrying about. He was pampered as a pet poodle.

Until he disappeared.

Where was Rob? Where had that blood come from? And the torn shirt? Did Marcella follow her husband last night and kill him? Rob knew how to bring out the rage in a wife. But why attack him in the parking lot? It would have made more sense to lure him onto the yacht and shove him overboard.

Helen remembered the bruises and the ugly wound on Rob’s chest.

Did those really come from Marcella? Rob hinted he’d made some very bad people angry. There were plenty of them around, including more than a few club members. Did he make some sort of dirty deal with the mobster, Angelo Casabella? His thugs could have easily beaten Rob to death, then hauled off the body.

If her ex was dead, Helen didn’t know how she felt about that. She’d wished him dead so often. But if he really was gone, would she be free?

Free wasn’t the right word to describe her current circumstances.

Her growling stomach let her know she’d been hours without food. Her tongue was dry and cottony. Her imagination ran wild. She saw herself in a courtroom, on trial for Rob’s murder with only a bumbling public defender. Then the door to her room was opened.

Helen stared. This must be a hunger hallucination.

A lawyer was standing in the doorway. It wasn’t Colby Cox. This lawyer didn’t have to introduce himself. Helen had seen him a hundred times on Court TV.

She recognized that bulldog walk, the outsized head with the leonine hair, the hand-tailored suit. It wasn’t shiny, like Angelo Casabella’s suits. It had a burnished glow. The lawyer was shorter than Helen expected, the way famous Hollywood actors are short.

But he was definitely a big man.

He was Honest Gabe Accomac, the most famous trial lawyer in America.

“Officer,” Honest Gabe called out. “Could you uncuff my client?

And bring her some water, while you’re at it.”

A subdued Officer Ruley entered, looking even younger. He also seemed to have shrunk. He unlocked Helen’s cuff without looking at her. He put down a bottle of water on the table carefully, as if Honest Gabe were armed and dangerous.

When you had Gabe Accomac for a lawyer, the nation assumed two things:

You were guilty.

Gabe would get you off.

You might never be received in polite society again, but you also wouldn’t sit on death row. Honest Gabe got the Sutton Place Needle Artist, the socialite accused of injecting his rich druggie wife with an overdose of heroin, off on a technicality. He convinced a jury that Handsome Harry Balfour would never have sex with three underage girls, then beat them to death. He successfully defended a number of East Coast crime families.

There was a third assumption: You had to be incredibly rich to afford Honest Gabe. Helen knew Margery had pulled some fast ones in her life, but sending in Gabe was a miracle.

Helen took a drink of water, then started to gush. “I know you. I mean, I’ve seen you. You’re Gabe Accomac.”

“I am,” he said, as he took a seat at the table. He opened a briefcase made of some soft, strange leather, possibly the skin of losing lawyers.

“I would have been here sooner, but the plane couldn’t take off because of bad weather. Took an hour for the storm to clear.”

“Plane?” Helen said. The gush was over. She could barely manage that one word.

“My office is in New York, but I came as soon as I got the call. Now, let’s not waste time. The misunderstanding about the domestic abuse has been cleared up. I spoke with the attorney general of Florida.”

“You did?”

“Well, an assistant attorney general. You should have never been arrested. No experienced police officer would have arrested you because the alleged victim wasn’t there. The key word here is
experienced.

Officer Ruley is two months out of the police academy. In return for a written apology, we promised not to sue.”