Florida Is Murder (Due Justice and Surface Tension Mystery Double Feature) (Florida Mystery Double Feature) (21 page)

Kate eventually looked up from her cooking and saw me sitting in the car in the driveway. She waved me inside. I walked up to the back door and she came to let me in. At least we’d been able to talk her into locking the door when she was home alone.

“Willa!  What a nice surprise,” she said as she hugged me with one arm while the other held her paring knife. “Will you stay for dinner?  Nothing as fancy as you could have at Minaret, but I still make a pretty good veal loaf.”  I was following her into the kitchen, and she just kept talking without waiting for my reply. I don’t remember her doing that when we all used to be around. Maybe living alone was getting to her. I decided to speak my thoughts when I finally had a chance to get a word in.

“Kate, what really happened to your husband?”  I hid my face in the refrigerator, ostensibly looking for a bottle of beer, avoiding her gaze. We’d never talked about this, and I wasn’t sure she’d think it was any of my business. But she didn’t seem to mind.

“He just left one day and never came back. He didn’t even have enough originality to come up with a good story. He said he was going out for cigarettes.”  She had pulled out three potatoes to peel after she put the veal loaf in the oven.

“When he didn’t come back from the store, you must have been frantic.” I took up the green beans, washing them at the sink and cutting off the ends so they could be steamed.

“Oh, sure. Crime in our neighborhood was as bad as anywhere for 1975. I called all the hospitals, the police department. No one had seen him.”

“How do you know he wasn’t injured or killed or something?” I asked her, putting the beans in the sauce pan with a little water, salt and the steamer.

“Here, let me season those. I put rosemary in them. Gives them a nice flavor.”  She took the pot out of my hand and emptied the water in the sink. She refilled the pot, added rosemary instead of salt, and put the beans back in the steamer. She turned the burner on under it, and moved back to the potatoes.

“He wrote to me, about ten years after he left. He’d found another woman he wanted to marry, and he asked for a divorce, which I gave him, of course. He never asked about the boys.”  She was putting the potatoes on to boil, adding whole garlic cloves to the water, and then moved to the refrigerator to get out salad greens.

“That must have been enough to sour you on men for a while,” I said, sitting down at the table. It was apparent she didn’t want any help, so I moved out of the way.

She nodded. “For a long time, I didn’t understand it. I thought there was something wrong with me. Since I never told the boys I’d divorced their father, I couldn’t very well tell them I planned to date. And for a long time, I just wasn’t interested.”

“Well, at some point, that must have changed.”

“Because of Carly, you mean?  Yes, but that was years later, and quite unexpected, really. Would you open that red wine, Dear, I think I’ll have a glass with you while you have your beer.”  I opened the bottle as she got a wine glass out of the cupboard for each of us and began to set the table for two, even though I never said I’d stay. She lit tall green candles in pewter candlesticks that I knew, from long familiarity, she’d inherited from her mother. I went to call George and tell him I wouldn’t be home for dinner.

When I came back into the kitchen, the potatoes were done and Kate was mashing them, drinking her wine and adding large dollops of butter. Tomorrow, headache or no, back to my running or I’d soon weigh as much as Pricilla Worthington.  When the veal loaf was done, and Kate had made the burgundy gravy to go with the garlic potatoes, green beans and salad, we sat down to eat with another full glass of wine each. The intimacy, and the wine, gave me the courage to take up our conversation again.

“How did you meet Carly’s father, anyway?”  I tried to make it sound casual, as if I knew, but had just forgotten. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kate had never told any of us anything about him. In fact, this was the first time I’d ever had the nerve to suggest we all knew Carly’s father was not the same man who had fathered the boys. With Kate, somehow, we’d known the topic was taboo.

I’m not sure if Kate was more surprised that I’d asked, or that she answered, but eventually she said, “Your mother was responsible for that, actually. She had a party and she invited him. We met. We danced. I let myself go. I woke up in his hotel room. We had a lovely breakfast, and I never saw him again. Except for every time I look in Carly’s eyes.”

She was trying to keep it light, but her voice became very soft and I could tell that, whatever she thought now, she had loved him then. I sensed she wanted to talk about it, finally, this thing that had made her so happy, but had caused her daughter so much pain.

“Carly looks just like him, you know. His hair was curly and red like hers. And her flashing, deep blue eyes. People think she got those from me, but she didn’t.”  She paused, remembering.

“When I found out I was pregnant with Carly, my first reaction was pure fright. Single mothers were not anything like accepted the way they are today. And it may have taken Carly ten years to do the math, but my family and my neighbors figured it out right away.”  She was recalling bitter words, now, I was sure.

“But what could I do?  I had two sons at home and I was divorced and pregnant. That was the reality of it. There was no choice. I could be pregnant and unhappy or pregnant and make the best of it. Your mom was great. She’d wanted another child after she married your dad, but she just couldn’t get pregnant. She was so happy she’d be Carly’s godmother. Your mom really helped me through those days.”  She emptied the Merlot bottle into our glasses and we sat quietly while she remembered that far away time and tried to decide how much to share with me.

“And then something curious happened. I started to be really happy. I was smiling all the time, looking forward to the baby coming. I don’t think I’d ever been quite as happy before that time, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been that happy since.”  Her face lit up now with the memory.

“Just the pregnancy hormones, you think?” I was staring at the flickering candle flame, almost hypnotized.

“It was partly that, but something else, too. You see, Wilhelmina, I believe in the affluence of the universe. I believe you make your own life. You decide what it is that you want, and then the universe gives it to you. It’s not that you don’t have to work for it, but the law of least effort applies more often than not. If it’s too much trouble, it’s usually not worth it. Happiness is first, seeking happiness is the most important quest, and achieving it is life’s best goal.”  Philosophy often comes in a bottle of wine, I’ve found, and it was no different with Kate.

“I don’t mean happiness from a pill or a syringe. I mean real happiness that comes from obtaining your life’s desires. It’s hard to achieve happiness because real happiness is so often confused with things. You look for a new house or a new job or a new relationship, because you think those things will make you happy. Really, the opposite is true. If you’re happy, you’ll enjoy your job or your house or your relationship, and all good things will flow to you.”  She took a deep breath. I waited, afraid to break the spell.

“And when I was pregnant with Carly, I finally accepted that I had wanted another baby, and I had gone to that party looking for just such an available man as I met, and I got what I wanted. For all Carly’s angst over her paternity, she was the most wanted baby ever conceived and certainly one of the most loved.”

I went over and gave Kate a big hug. I blinked my tears away, but Kate wasn’t crying. To her, this was an old story and she remembered it with obvious, almost ethereal joy.

We were having such a wonderful evening that I didn’t want to spoil it by telling her what I’d come to say. But I couldn’t let her hear about it from one of the town wags, either. Fortunately, Kate never read the newspapers or watched television news. She said they only reported bad news, and she wasn’t interested. So, after we put the dishes in the dishwasher and sat down with our coffee, I gave her a very abbreviated version of Carly’s situation. I omitted my own troubles. I felt I had gone into this deal with my eyes open. No point in blaming it on Carly or putting the burden of my decision on Kate.

She didn’t seem at all dismayed, and I couldn’t quite understand why. After everything she’d told me tonight, I knew she loved Carly as her chosen child, maybe even more than the rest of us (although before tonight, I’d always thought that particular honor belonged to Jason, her first born).

“Kate, you don’t seem very worried. Carly is in serious trouble. You understand that, don’t you?”  I was beginning to think she’d had more wine than she could handle, but I’d underestimated her again.

“Willa, there’s no chance that Carly killed Michael Morgan, or anyone else for that matter. As to where she is at the moment, I’m sure she’ll turn up with some reasonable explanation. There’s nothing I can do for her until she comes to me with the same questions you’ve asked tonight. Carly has to get over being angry with me for keeping her father from her, and start being grateful she’s had such a wonderful family. Until then, there’s nothing I can do for her except love her, and trust that she’ll be all right. The same thing I do for all of you.”

So, in the end, I gave her a hug, told her I loved her and left, uneasy in the knowledge that I’d underestimated her again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tampa, Florida

Thursday 10:00 p.m.

January 21, 1999

My conversation with Kate left me with a lot to think about. Finding Carly before she got hurt and solving the relationship problems she had with Kate shouldn’t have been my mission.

But somehow it was.

The connection between Carly, Dr. Morgan’s murder, Grover and Johnson had to be related to the breast implant cases; nothing else made sense.

Hathaway had said to follow the money, so I tried piecing the puzzle together with the money in mind.

Carly said Dr. Morgan had been conducting research and believed he’d found the scientific explanation for the occurrence of symptoms in some women with breast implants.  Something like that would have to be worth a lot of money on the legitimate market, not just to the interested parties to the litigation.

The most obvious place to start looking for Dr. Morgan’s theories were the two places that had already been searched, his home and Carly’s, but only if you knew the two of them had been talking about it.

Who knew that besides Carly?

Grover? Probably. Who else?

No names popped into my head. Changed course.

Those failed searches had been excessive. Whatever the guy hoped to find must be either a paper document or computer data. Otherwise, each search was way too through.

And whatever he was searching for hadn’t been found.

He’d kill Carly, but until he found what he wanted. I hoped.

I needed a fresh approach.

Spent the evening pouring over the court file in the
Jones v. General Medics
case. Complaint, answer and other papers yielded nothing. Expert deposition transcripts were dry as flour.

One surprise: Dr. Morgan was listed as a witness for Grover’s side.

Scoured the file, but Dr. Morgan’s deposition transcript wasn’t there. We don’t lose things once they’re placed in our court files. So where was it?

There were several notices scheduling his testimony, but no proof that the deposition had taken place or the transcript filed. Odd.

Dr. Morgan had been named as an expert early in the case. The notices for his deposition were repeatedly filed as the case continued plodding forward on the docket. Decidedly odd. Too much paper for too little result.

The last notice scheduled his deposition two days before he died. Odder still.

“Okay, Willa,” I said aloud. “Think this through.”

My grandmother taught me that talking to oneself was not a sign of insanity, as long as we don’t answer. So I guess I’m insane.

I replied, “Only two choices, right? Either Morgan testified two days before he died and explained his theories, in which case why kill him? Or, he was never deposed. And, in that case, how did Grover explain the failure to produce him? Why didn’t O’Connell filed a motion to strike his name from the list if he couldn’t be produced for deposition?”

This time, I had no answers. Just questions. As well as a sore back and tired eyes.

I stood and stretched like Harry and Bess do every time they get up. Tried the downward dog, which I’ve never been as good at as they are, but it gets the kinks out. They do a whole-body-shake afterward, but there I draw the line.

Needed to move.

Trotted to the courthouse library to get the kinks out of my legs.

Using the online computer services so kindly supported by our tax dollars, I pulled up all of the newspaper articles relating to breast implants in the past five years. The computer listed 1,765 articles. Too many to read quickly.

Narrowed the date range. Articles published after the largest manufacturer’s bankruptcy and before Dr. Morgan died. 432. Still, too many to read closely.

Excluded articles about the bankruptcy. Risky. Produced 142 articles. Better.

Reprinted in the local papers were stories from
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post
and the major wire services. Printed the list.

After eliminating the duplicates, sixty-eight recent newspaper articles remained.

Sent all of them to the printer, leaned back, propped my feet on the desk, and read each one as they rolled slow and hot off the laser.

Some articles simply weren’t helpful. They covered individual cases or ongoing medical studies. I scanned them quickly and moved them to one side.

None dealt with MedPro. Somewhat surprising since it was a small but significant player in the local and national market.

Only a few concerned Dr. Morgan and his death. Three were obituaries.

I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at my watch. It was 11:30. No wonder I was exhausted. I signed off the computer, gathered my research, returned to chambers and called my husband.