Florida Is Murder (Due Justice and Surface Tension Mystery Double Feature) (Florida Mystery Double Feature) (25 page)

Parked Greta near the blue elevators, grabbed the photographs from her glove box, rode down to the third floor and hustled to slide between the tram’s closing doors. No way to speed up the tram ride, but when it stopped at Airside D I dashed to the Northwest Airlines gate. The gate agent barely looked up when she accepted my first-class boarding pass.  Walked aboard, plopped down in 2A, snugged my seatbelt, and checked my watch.

Elapsed time: twelve minutes. Not a personal best, but not bad. So far, the trip was working out as well as I’d planned.

A little extravagant to travel first class for my two hour and fifteen minute nap to Detroit, but worth it to skip chatty vacationers, screaming and seat-back kicking kids, and cranky businessmen crammed into coach. During my years in private practice constant travel had generated a limitless supply of frequent flier miles close to expiring anyway. In those days I seemed never to sleep anywhere except on airplanes. Back then I’d nod off before my plane left the gate. No more.

Today, I watched the departure show unfold as it normally did until takeoff. Twenty-five seconds after lift-off I’d completed my prayers and for the first time since August 16, 1987, failed to drop into immediate REM sleep for the duration of my flight.

The normal nap schedule had been stamped into my brain by the crash of Northwest Flight 255, the deadliest sole-survivor crash in U.S. aviation history and the first airline disaster I’d personally witnessed.

An unforgettable disaster and equally indelible miracle.

On Sunday night, August 16, 1987, flight 255 was bound for Phoenix. My flight was scheduled to depart thirty minutes later.

I’d changed my travel plans the day before. A second deposition had been added to our docket. Instead of a quick trip out to Phoenix and back on 255, our team now planned to start in California and then hit Phoenix on the way home to Detroit. I’d watched 255 load passengers at the gate, still angry that I wasn’t one of them because my opposing counsel had forced a second day of travel into my jam-packed schedule.

Flight 255 pushed back at 8:32 p.m., right on time.

Light rain drizzled outside, but storms were moving our way. Everybody needed to get out before the storms delayed everything to a snarled mess.

The DC-9’s engines started easily enough and 255 taxied to runway 3C, my runway, awaiting clearance for takeoff. The plane ran an abnormally long takeoff roll, almost all the way to the end of the runway, before it lifted off.

But thirteen minutes after push-back, at exactly 8:45 p.m., 255 rotated skyward for takeoff. And something went horribly wrong.

The plane never gained altitude.

Never soared.

It lifted less than fifty feet off the ground. A series of quick disasters followed.

Flight 255 rolled left and hit a light pole, severing a portion of its left wing.

Rolled right, hit another light pole, another, and the top of a building.

Belly-flopped into flames.

Bounced and skidded a wide fiery ball along Middlebelt Road dropping burning sections and killing two motorists on the ground in its wake.

After twenty seconds, Flight 255 slammed into the I-94 expressway’s eastbound overpass and exploded like a giant bomb flooding heat and smoke, destroying by impact forces and fire.

Only one passenger survived. A four-year-old girl seated in 8-F, traveling with her brother and parents. She was found still belted into the seat, 35 yards from her mother. She suffered broken bones and burns, but pictures featured a big pink hair-bow and purple nail polish and a beloved brown teddy snugged under her left arm.
The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News
and countless national media described every conceivable detail about the “miracle child of Flight 255.”

Twenty seconds can be a lifetime. For 156 people one hot August Sunday evening, it was. But for the miracle child and me, twenty seconds defined our lives.

The girl was reunited with relatives and lived a devout life, I’d heard. I often thought about her and everyone who died that night.

After pushback I watched my fellow passengers and imagined 255’s travelers spent those last thirteen minutes getting settled, organizing blankets and pillows, opening books and magazines. On my flight, mothers comforted children and nervous fliers relaxed grips on the seat’s arms when the plane safely left the tarmac and continued to climb. On 255, passengers must have done much the same, too briefly.

For the first twenty-one seconds after takeoff on every flight, I pray.

Once airborne this day, my fellow passengers relaxed. Babies no longer cried with earaches, conversations resumed, couples squeezed loved ones, opened their books, closed their eyes. Window-side passengers admired the view.

Flight 255 went down twenty seconds after liftoff; normally, after twenty-one seconds, I do, too.

But not today.

Today, sleep was pushed aside by the riddle I couldn’t seem to solve:  Who killed Michael Morgan?

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Tampa, Florida

Sunday 7:20 a.m.

January 24, 1999

At this point, the possibilities seemed endless, even if I discounted all my personal acquaintances. I ran though the list.

Any lawyer involved in the breast implant litigation, on either side, would certainly have a motive to keep Morgan’s threatened great solution to the health issues from ever being published, if Carly’s theory of the litigation were true.

Ditto, the “victims,” manufacturers and the doctors making bundles on expert fees.

Somehow, though, I thought the murder a little too vicious, too devious for a purely professional motive. The killer took extraordinary steps to keep his work secret. Only luck and the low tide caused Morgan’s body to be discovered.

Morgan was reported missing. The police would eventually have inspected Morgan’s home and found the obvious evidence of murder, but with no physical body a charge and conviction was unlikely.

No, simply killing Morgan was not the goal.

The killer meant to make Morgan disappear. Forever.

Bad luck, not stupidity, had thwarted the killer’s achievement.

Not a detached professional motive, then, but a personal one.

Methodically, I considered each person I knew to have an axe to grind with Michael Morgan. I took out my yellow legal pad, filled now with notes, facts, thoughts on the case. I wrote down each of the possible suspects on two pages, leaving room for notes after each name.

Forced myself to consider each one in turn.

Eliminated Carly immediately.

Carly didn’t kill Morgan; I wouldn’t consider the possibility. She had no motive. If she’d discovered her company’s products were faulty, she could have resigned. She didn’t own MedPro, after all.

Nor did she have the capacity to kill.

Carly had always been difficult and often impossible, and I do subscribe to the nature theory of childhood development. Even so, I wouldn’t believe any of Kate’s children capable of murder. Never.

Which led me to consider MedPro’s two remaining founders:  Dr. Zimmer and Dr. Young.

Zimmer was least likely.  Too old and frail to kill Morgan in his home and spirit his body off to the gulf.

An accomplice?  Possible.

But Zimmer worried excessively about death by heart attack. He quit golf because he feared the stress might kill him. He wouldn’t risk the physical and emotional stress of murder on his weakened ticker. Certainly not simply to avoid
potential
financial ruin when he held only a
partial
interest in MedPro.

Sadly, no. Not Zimmer. I crossed him off my list.

The next name seemed to come alive on the page, tapping its feet, dashing to the finish line, shoving everyone aside, declaring itself the winner.

Carolyn Young.

Yes. Definitely a killer candidate.

By all accounts except hers, Morgan had used her. And discarded her like so many others. She admitted she never got over him. That sounded like a good motive for murder, but it wasn’t the only one she had.

 Carolyn Young was an owner of MedPro. Marilee Aymes claimed Carolyn was willing to commit theft to obtain that ownership. She also sought to protect her very lucrative explant scam and expert witness fees. The end of the litigation would make a sizeable dent in her earning power.  For Carolyn Young, killing Morgan would have been both personal and professional.

 I wanted to believe it, but I didn’t quite.

 Maybe if she hadn’t made such a public spectacle of herself at his funeral?  That day, it seemed to me, she really did love him still.

Not crossing her off, but I kept going down my list.

Considering the strengths and weaknesses of each suspect in the same way, I covered Marilee Aymes (very angry, capable of lifting the body, a good shot?), Victoria Warwick (woman scorned?), Sheldon Warwick (reelection bid tainted by wife’s affair with Morgan?).

Paused. Sheldon Warwick is a proud man. He wouldn’t be pleased by Tory’s affair. But murder? Everybody knows Tory’s a flake. If it never affected him before, no evidence the knowledge pushed him to kill this time.

Christian Grover (a definite possibility), Fred Johnson (the same motive as every other plaintiffs’ lawyer on the planet), O’Connell Worthington (ditto on the defense side), even Cilla Worthington (you’ve got to be kidding), Kate (now you’re really getting silly).

I still had several names to cover, but the flight attendant tapped my shoulder and asked me to put my seatback in its full upright position for landing, and the captain slowly lowered the L1011 onto the runway at Detroit Wayne Airport.  Passengers did not applaud, but we should have.

One major advantage to flying first class, besides interesting flying companions and comfortable seats, is that first class is always at the front of the plane.  While my fellow passengers accumulated overstuffed bags and waddled up the aisle, I dashed out into the frigid jet way and immediately realized I’d forgotten my parka.

January above the Mason Dixon line. How absurd.

Instead of renting a car, I turned my pink tropical wool blazer’s lapels up, hustled to the taxi stand and stomped around to generate warmth in the sunless damp while I waited for the first available heated cab.

“The Renaissance Center, please,” I said between chattering teeth, naming the city within a city now synonymous with the best of Detroit.

He looked at me like I’d have to repeat myself in Arabic before he’d comprehend, but after a while the taxi headed east onto the rebuilt I-94 entrance ramp toward Detroit. The only trace of Flight 255 was the black marble memorial surrounded by blue spruce trees on Middlebelt Road.

About twenty-five minutes later, I winced at Joe Lewis’s oversized black fist positioned at the entrance to downtown Detroit. Joe Lewis was a great native son, but why the artist couldn’t have presented a more flattering and welcoming sculpture of the man was a mystery.

The temperature sign at Comerica Bank declared fifteen degrees without the wind-chill factor, which would bring the “feels like” temperature down another ten to twenty.
Shit.

The taxi driver pulled into the driveway between the chiller berms, stopped in front of the RenCen’s main entrance, collected his forty-five-dollar-plus-tip ransom, and released me.

Briefly, I looked up. The Renaissance Center, brainchild of Henry Ford II, was built to revitalize Detroit’s economy. Designed by an Atlanta architect and opened in 1976, it resembled a collection of five giant silver cans separated from the rest of the city by a concrete bunker. The center cylinder, at seventy-three stories, housed the claimed tallest all-hotel skyscraper in the western hemisphere.

Lingering to admire was impossible. No matter. I knew every inch of the place.

Frigid cold chased me inside the icy architecture where the indoor temperatures were marginally higher. Chillers inside the berms used Detroit River water to heat and cool the building. Slight miscalculation. River water, like the atmosphere inside and out, was near frozen in winter.

By 1980, completed and occupied, the RenCen was memorable for three truths: Gleaming buildings reflected Detroit’s decline too brightly. The cylindrical labyrinth was impossible to navigate even with a blueprint and a guide. And the post-construction fight was the first lawsuit of my career. I defended the case for eight years before we moved to Tampa.

Now Detroit was more decrepit than ever. Locating restrooms inside the cornerless RenCen buildings remained impossible and the construction lawsuit continues without me.

I rode the glass elevator facing the Detroit River and Canada up forty-five floors to The Renaissance Club at the top of Tower 400. Breathtaking view. Made me almost nostalgic for the city where I’d practiced law for eight years.

Almost, but not quite.

I shivered again in the cold elevator; wrapped my arms around myself. How had I ever survived here?

Robin Jakes waited in the club’s lobby, fashionably attired in a heavy wool pantsuit, closed shoes, and a turtleneck. She was a bit shorter and wider than I am, but when she greeted me with a warm hug, I bent and too enthusiastically embraced, clinging for body heat.

Seated at a window table, hot coffee poured, caught up on family matters, I held the cup in both palms like a warmer and prompted, “So tell me what your articles didn’t say about Michael Morgan.”

Robin’s crooked chagrin seemed genuine. “He was a curious guy. Brimming contradictions.”

Cold waves emitted from the glass walls raising gooseflesh over every inch of my skin.  Was there no heat in this entire building? I jiggled my legs under the table.

I asked, “How so?”

“Brilliant, arrogant, but charmingly charismatic. A parade of lovers, but serially monogamous, he said.”

“All female? The lovers?”

She tilted her head, as if the question hadn’t occurred to her. “I never asked, but I’d guess he was two-thousand percent hetro.”

I nodded. “What did you talk about?”

“He used to ask me why women latch onto every screwy idea that comes along for improving their physical appearance.”