Cross Justice (11 page)

We had the crime scene files and photographs with us as we approached the church again. The groundskeeper was finished and loading his mower onto a trailer. I looked for the chained-off and overgrown road that Naomi had shown us on the way out.

“Nana Mama’s right,” Bree said. “That is a beautiful cemetery.”

I looked up the rolling hill beyond the church, saw rows of tombstones and monuments. I remembered something my uncle Clifford had said two nights ago and something else my grandmother had said earlier this morning.

I pulled over, threw the Explorer in park, and said, “Wait here a second.”

I went to the groundskeeper, introduced myself, and asked him a few questions. His answers gave me chills up and down my spine.

Back in the car, I said, “Short detour before we go to the quarry.”

“Where are we going?”

“The cemetery,” I said, swallowing my emotions and putting the car in gear. “I think my parents are buried up there.”

Bree thought that over quietly for a few beats and then said, “You think?”

“The other night, Hattie’s husband said, ‘Christina’s next to Brock.’ Brock’s my mom’s brother, Aunt Connie’s late husband, and Nana Mama said he’s buried up there. My mom’s got to be buried beside her brother. And the groundskeeper said there’s also a Cross family plot up there.”

I drove through the gate and up the gently rolling hill, looking for the monuments that the groundskeeper had described.

“Alex,” Bree said softly. “You’ve never been to your parents’ graves?”

I shook my head. “People thought I was too young to go to my mother’s funeral, and we were sent to Nana Mama’s right after my father died. Given all that we’d been through, she wanted to spare us the pain of a funeral.”

Bree thought about that, said, “So your parents died close together?”

“Within a year of each other,” I said. “After my mother passed, my father was so heartbroken, he started drinking a lot more, using drugs.”

“That’s horrible, Alex,” she said, her brow knitting. “How come you’ve never told me that?”

I shrugged. “By the time I met you, my past was … my past.”

“And who took care of you and your brothers while all this was happening?”

I thought about that, driving slow, still scanning the hillside. “I don’t remember,” I said. “Probably Aunt Hattie. We always went to her house when things got—”

The monument was gray granite and far down a row of similar tombstones. The name cross was carved across the face of it.

I stopped the car, left it running for the air conditioner, and looked at my wife. Her features were full of pain and sympathy.

“You go see,” she said softly. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

I kissed her before climbing out into the heat and the clamor of insects coming from the woods. I went around the front of the Explorer and down the row of graves, my attention on the one that said Cross.

A general numbness settled in me when I reached the monument, which was barely tended. Grass grew up at the base. I
had to crouch and spread it to find three small granite stones carved with initials. Left to right, they read:

I dug in the grass to the right of r.c. and found nothing but thatch and soil. There was no fourth stone. No
J.C.

I stood and went around the back of the monument, finding more on the people buried there. The first name and the particulars startled me.

The second and third inscriptions read:

Puzzled, I climbed back into the car.

“What’s wrong?” Bree asked.

“My father’s not there. Nana Mama’s ex-husband, my
grandfather, is, and his parents. I must have been named for my great-grandfather Alexander, who was a blacksmith.”

“You never knew that?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe there’s another Cross plot up here,” Bree said.

“Maybe,” I said, and I put the car in gear.

Nine rows up I spotted the pale white monument that said parks below a carved American flag. It was closer to the cemetery lane, four graves in, and well tended, with fresh flowers in a vase. Like the Cross plot lower on the hill, there were smaller stones, two of them, separated by a gap of several feet. They were inscribed
B.W.P.
and
C.P.C.

Brock William Parks and Christina Parks Cross.

The grief swept over me like a chill fog thick with regret and loss. Tears began to dribble down my cheeks as I whispered, “I’m sorry I’ve never been here before, Mom. I’m sorry about … everything.”

I stood there trying to remember the last time I’d seen my mother, and I couldn’t. She’d been dying in the house. I was sure of that because my aunts were there a lot, caring for her. But I couldn’t conjure her up.

Disturbed by that, I wiped at my tears, walked around the back, and looked at the inscriptions.

I was flooded with emotions and images of my mother on her best days, when she was loving, caring, and so much fun to be around. I could have sworn I heard her singing then, and it took everything I had to make it back to the car.

Bree watched me with tear-filled eyes. “She’s there?”

I nodded, and then broke down sobbing. “She’s been there for all these years, Bree. And I’ve … never … been here. Not once. In all this time, I never even wondered where she was buried. I mean, my God, who does that? What kind of son am I?”

AT NOON THAT
same Saturday, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office Detectives Peter Drummond and Richard S. Johnson were dispatched to a mansion on North Ocean Boulevard.

Detective Johnson was in his early thirties, a big athletic guy, ex-Marine, and a recent hire from Dade County. Detective Sergeant Drummond was in his sixties, a big, robust black man with a face almost devoid of expression due to nerve damage associated with a large burn scar that began beneath his right eye and spread over much of his cheek to his jaw.

Johnson knew he was lucky to have Drummond as his partner. The sergeant was a legend in the department, one of those men who had a knack for figuring out how criminals, especially murderers, thought.

Sergeant Drummond took a left off North Ocean Boulevard and pulled through open gates into an Italianate manor’s
courtyard where two cruisers, a medical examiner’s van, and a midnight-blue Rolls-Royce were parked.

“Who the hell can afford to live like this?” Johnson asked.

“Around here,” Drummond said, “lots of folks. And definitely Dr. Stanley Abrams. He owns a big plastic-surgery clinic. They call him the Boob King.”

They climbed out of the unmarked cruiser into heat that was ungodly despite the proximity to the ocean.

“I thought most of the super-rich along Ocean Boulevard headed north for the summer,” the younger detective said.

“Most do,” the sergeant replied. “But guys like Abrams stay around no matter how hot it gets.”

One of the uniformed deputies showed them into the house—a castle, really, with so many hallways and rooms that Detective Johnson was soon lost. They climbed a grand staircase, passing an oil painting of a pretty woman in a ball gown, and heard the sound of a man crying.

They entered a bedroom suite and found a slight man in a hall off the bedroom sitting on a padded bench, head down.

“Dr. Abrams?” Drummond said.

The plastic surgeon looked up, revealing a smooth-featured face and a full head of hair that spoke to Johnson of multiple procedures, including hair plugs.

Drummond identified himself, told Abrams he was sorry for his loss.

“I don’t get it,” Abrams said, composing himself. “Ruth was the happiest person I know. Why would she do this to herself?”

“No inkling that she might have been thinking of suicide?” Drummond asked.

“None,” the doctor said.

“Nothing that had upset her lately?” Johnson asked.

The plastic surgeon started to shake his head, but then stopped. “Well, Lisa Martin’s death last week. They were close, ran in the same circles.”

Both detectives nodded. They’d caught that case too. But the death of Lisa Martin, another Ocean Boulevard resident, had been ruled accidental. She’d knocked a plugged-in Bose radio into the tub while she was taking a bath.

“So your wife was sad about Mrs. Martin’s death?” Drummond said.

“Yes, sad and upset,” Abrams said. “But not enough to … Ruth had everything to live for, and she loved life. My God, she’s the only person in this town, including me, who’s never been on antidepressants!”

“You found her, sir?” Johnson asked.

The surgeon’s eyes watered, and he nodded. “Ruth had given the staff the weekend off. I flew in overnight from Zurich.”

“We’re going to take a look,” Drummond said. “You touch anything?”

“I wanted to cut her down,” Abrams said, looking into his hands. “But I didn’t. I just … called you.”

He sounded lost and alone. Johnson said, “You got family, sir?”

Abrams nodded. “My daughters. Sara’s in London, and Judy’s in New York. They’re going to be …” He sighed and started to cry again.

Drummond went into the bedroom, Johnson trailing him. The detective sergeant stopped, studying the corpse in situ.

Ruth Abrams hung by a drapery cord that was suspended from a chandelier above the bed and cinched tight around her neck. She was a small-framed woman, no more than one
hundred and ten pounds, and wore a black nightgown. Her face was swollen and mottled purple. Her legs and feet were a darker maroon because of the blood that had settled.

“You have a time of death?” Drummond asked the medical examiner, a young Asian woman who was making notes.

“Eighteen to twenty hours is the best I can do for now,” the ME said. “The air-conditioning throws things a bit, but it looks straightforward to me. She hung herself.”

Drummond nodded without comment, eyes on the body. He walked over to the bed and stopped about a foot away from it. Johnson did the same on the opposite side.

It looked straightforward to Johnson too. She’d apparently put an upside-down wastebasket on the bed to stand on while she got the noose around her neck and then she’d kicked it away. There it was, on the rug to the right of the bed. She’d hung herself. End of story.

But the sergeant had put on reading glasses and was studying the bedspread, which was bunched to the left side of the bed. He peered at the woman’s neck, livid and abraded from the cord, and then removed his glasses to study the knots that held the cord to the chandelier.

“Seal the house, Johnson,” Drummond said at last. “This was no suicide.”

“What?” the young detective said. “How can you tell that?”

The sergeant gestured to the bedspread and around the bed. “This looks like a struggle to me.”

“People struggle when they hang themselves.”

“True, but the sheets are all dragged to the left, meaning that the body was dragged up the right side, and the wastebasket was then placed on the right to suggest suicide,” Drummond said.

Johnson saw what the sergeant was talking about but wasn’t convinced. Drummond pointed to her hands.

“Broken and torn fingernails,” he said. “There’s a chip of the polish in the braids of the drapery cord. That and the vertical scratches above the neck suggests she was tearing at the cord during the initial struggle, which took place at ground level. And see how the livid lines are crisscrossed above and below the cord?”

Johnson frowned. “Yes.”

“They shouldn’t be there,” the sergeant said. “If she’d kicked the wastebasket, the cord would have caught all her weight almost immediately. There’d be one line behind and along the cord, and we might see some evidence of the cord abrading the skin as it slid into position.

“But these two clear lines suggest that the killer flipped the cord over Mrs. Abrams’s head from behind and throttled her. She fought, tore at her throat with her fingers, and maybe kicked at her killer. In any case, she created slack in the noose. The cord slipped, and the killer had to set it tight again, here. She was dead before she was hung up there. See the grooves along the cord where it’s tied to the chandelier? That’s from the killer hauling the body up.”