Ring of Truth (15 page)

“Count on it.”

“And my man Tony's got other cases to work on now.”

Even though this is the first time I've spent with him in three weeks, even though we don't have much time to talk this morning, even though I'm really happy to be with him, there's something that's got to be said between us. It's the reason I have diverted any talk of a shared vacation; there won't be one if this isn't solved. I didn't want to say it last night and spoil our delicious reunion. But now I take a breath, and force the words out: “Franklin, it feels awkward to sit there pretending that you and I barely know each other.” The Howard County State Attorney and I have been “involved,” as they say, for some time now, and we've kept it a secret from the start, for reasons that seemed like good ideas back then. They don't seem as good to me now. “What if your staff already knows about us? What if they're pointing and giggling behind your back, and all the time you think they're looking at you in awe because you're such a great boss.”

“Would they still be giggling then?”

“Yes,” I say, deadpan. “In nervous awe.”

“This didn't bother you when you were interviewing cops and lawyers for this book of yours.”

“Yes, it did, Franklin.”

“But I like our little secret, Marie.” The sly smile returns and he waggles his eyebrows at me. “I thought you still enjoyed it, no?”

“No.”

Franklin almost manages to hide his surprise at my tone. The owner of the face that gives nothing away to juries—unless he
plans it—cannot quite hide from me that I am taking him by surprise.

“No? You're the one who said secrecy is sexy.”

“You must have me confused with another girlfriend.”

“Yeah, that must be it. But admit it, it's more fun this way, Marie.”

“Okay, I'll admit it turned me on for a long time. But it doesn't now, Franklin. We're grown-ups, we ought to be able to do things that grown-ups do, like go to movies and restaurants, and not just hide out in my bedroom.”

“Your bedroom is my favorite place.”

“What's the real reason, Franklin?”

He lowers his lids and gives me a penetrating look from under them. I watch him decide whether or not to level with me, and while he's taking his time doing that, I am deciding that quite a lot rides on the honesty of his answer.

“Are you trying to pick a fight?” he asks, a question that I take for avoidance. “Are you mad about something else and you're taking it out on me?”

“Yes. No. What's the real reason, Franklin?”

“The real reason, Marie, is that I'm still not ready to tell my kids about you.”

That hurts, and I can tell that he sees that it does.

He didn't even say “about us.” He said “about you.”

He could add “I'm sorry,” but he doesn't.

There was a time when we first fell into this affair that we told ourselves that secrecy would protect us when it ended; nobody would know, so nobody would gossip, or take sides. We must not have expected it to last very long. But here we are, much later, and what started out thrilling has become kind of sad and exhausting to me.

“I'm not talking about meeting them,” I say, with a bite to my words. “I'm talking about going to a movie. You and me. In public. Do you have to tell your kids about that?”

“No, but if somebody saw us out together . . .”

“They're going to call your six-year-old and tell her?”

He makes an exasperated face, which probably mirrors my own. I hate feeling put on the defensive about something that seems so simple to me. Why is he making this so difficult?

“The divorce is still too fresh, Marie. For one thing, they might think it had something to do with you.”

“But it didn't, and you can tell them I came later.”

“Right, a whole month later, but they're three and six, and math isn't their strong point, nor is it their mother's.”

“You're afraid of what Truly will say? Gee”—I can't help but fall back on sarcasm—“I could have sworn you divorced her.”

“She can poison the kids against me, Marie.”

“No wonder you divorced her, a woman like that.”

“If you had kids, you'd understand better.”

“That's such a cop-out. I really hate that particular argument.”

“Too bad. Kids need time to adjust, and seeing Daddy with a new woman is more than I want them to have to adjust to right now, while they're still getting used to living alone with Mommy. Hell, they only see me on weekends, Marie, and that's not enough time to prepare the ground for meeting you, at least not this soon.”

“Soon? Franklin you've been divorced almost a year!” I feel mortified to think I've been putting up with this for so long. But it didn't start to bother me until the initial romance wore off and the feelings of a real-life relationship started to settle in. The problem was, they couldn't settle in, because of our game of seek-each-other-and-hide-from-everybody-else.

“It's so unfair when you pit your kids' feelings against mine, and I know that probably makes me sound like a selfish jerk, but there you have it. Maybe you're right, Franklin. Maybe if I had kids, I would be more understanding. And maybe not, because maybe this isn't about them, but about whether or not I can continue to tolerate this behavior of ours. And you know what? I can't. It's too damn much work to maintain and it feels a little silly to me now.”

Suddenly, he's flinging himself out of bed.

“Let's talk about this later, Marie.”

I hate that officious tone he gets.

“I know what it is,” I say, trying to joke, “you're just embarrassed to be seen with a white woman.”

He feigns dismay and shock. “You're
white?”

“Only on my mother's and my father's side.”

“That settles it, I'm never taking you home to meet the kids.” He's joking, too, but I'm thinking:
That's probably true, you probably never will. There goes Cancun, or Paris, or Katmandu.

On the way through my living room to the garage, we pass the canvas boat bag and Franklin asks me what I'm going to do with it.

“You sure you don't want it, either?” I inquire.

He shakes his head. “Can't try her twice for the same crime.”

“Well, I think I'll hold on to it, see if anybody calls
me.”

He has already told me there's nothing his office or the cops can do about the person who called Jenny and then tried to grab the bag off their front porch. Even if they traced a phone call, no crime was committed. As I scoop up the handles to carry the bag with me, he warns, “Don't be taking any chances, all right? Just because I can't charge anybody with a crime doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.”

“Who do you think wants this stuff?”

He shrugs as we enter my garage, his mind already on his work. All up and down the line, the official attitude toward the Susanna Wing homicide case seems to be: solved, finished, over, don't bother me about it anymore.

“How long do you think your kids will need, Franklin?”

Taken by surprise, he stops in front of his SUV and looks back at me. “There's no set timetable for these things, Marie.”

There's that officiousness again. I grit my teeth, then say, “All right. Then all I can say is that I know what I need. This has become too much like dating a married man. If you're not willing
to be seen in public with me by the end of this month, I'm out of here, Franklin. I mean no disrespect to you and your kids, but I have to think of my self-respect, too.”

“You're making way too much of this.”

“No, you are.”

“Okay, I hear you,” he says, unexpectedly.

“One month. All right?”

He says nothing, but he looks frustrated, angry.

Finally, I get a grudging “All right.”

“As plea bargains go, that was not a very satisfactory answer from the state attorney's office.”

“It's the best I can do at the moment.”

“That's good enough for me.”

But when he walks back over to kiss me goodbye, I can see it in his eyes, the fear of telling his children, his trepidation about his ex-wife's reaction.

I hope it's a good month, if it's going to be our last.

In my car, I test my emotions to see what hurts. Maybe I'm lucky; maybe I haven't actually fallen in love with the man yet and I can still get out of this without getting badly burned. If that's the case, I intend to treat this month as if we're the last two people on earth, and this is our last time together. He wants sexy, I'll give him sexy. He wants secret, I'll give him secret. I'll give the man something to miss, by God. By the time I've pulled out of my driveway I've almost managed to talk myself into feeling good about the prospect of losing my lover.

I'm still following his car down the road when my cell phone rings.

“That's great about your book,” he says. “I'm not surprised, and I'm glad she likes it so much.”

“She thinks I need to work on Artemis some more, though. When you read it, did you feel as if you got to know her very well?”

“Why would I want to? You did her fine, Marie.”

He really is a very nice man sometimes.

“Thank you,” I say, and manage not to cry over the phone. What's a mere book—or a lost romance—in the larger scheme of things? Everybody else seems to like my book. So what if I'm unhappy with it? I'm just the writer, so who cares what I think? And, anyway, I like some of it just fine.

And he loved me just enough, until now.

On my way out, I pause by the gate to have a conversation with Bennie, who's on duty this morning. With his help, I'm going to set a trap today, and maybe we'll see who gets caught in it.

After all, Franklin DeWeese isn't my only secret.

Susanna
9

Another thing that nobody but Franklin knows about me is that I've never actually met Artemis McGregor, the infamous Artie, the notorious “other woman.” Not that I haven't tried, repeatedly, and by every hook and crook I know. Mail and E-mail, intermediaries, lawyers, fax, and phone, I've tried them all, even showing up on her doorstep, just to get the door closed in my face, even loitering in an inconspicuous car across the street from her house—like a cheap private eye—in the vain hope that I might follow her out and waylay her in the grocery store.

Apparently, her husband, Stuart, does all the shopping.

She
has consistently refused to have anything to do with me or any other member of “the media.” Mr. McGregor has been only slightly less shy. He and I had one strange, stilted dialogue in a hallway at the courthouse—I hesitate to call it an interview, still less a conversation. It consisted of me asking questions about her and him answering politely to each one of them, “I really can't speak for her. I'm afraid you'd have to check with Artie about that.”

As if anybody could, I pointed out to him, to no avail.

He is unfailingly courteous; she is unremittingly silent.

Most of what I think I know—and have written—about Bob
Wing's codefendant has come to me secondhand, or from the courtroom. Ask me what other people say about her and I can fill you in. Ask me about her credit rating, her history of real estate transactions, her arrest record (nothing before this), even her genealogy, and I'm a veritable databank. I've even had E-mail conversations with her ex-husband on his sailboat in the South Pacific. He seems a nice guy, loyally, even indignantly, supportive of her, and you'd think it spoke well of a woman when her ex-husband had nothing but nice things to say about her, wouldn't you?

All of that is in the book, but it's camouflage for my dirty little secret, which is that I don't really know the woman at all. I've never run into this problem before; eventually everybody talks to me. Oh, I've known murderers who were gun-shy, so to speak, but I can almost always count on their egos to pull their trigger eventually, although what comes shooting out may not be anything you'd want to know. And some survivors—or surviving victims—find it difficult to let it all out, for a while. But most people want—need—to talk to somebody. I'm accustomed to being that person. But not this time, not with this woman.

Her codefendant, Bob Wing, has talked to me several times. But I know
her
voice only from hearing it in court, recognize her face only from there, too, and from photos her mother showed me. I know her personality not at all, really, because the reports vary so dramatically depending upon who is explaining her to me, her friends or foes.

Saint or sinner—

That's all I've ever heard about her. I've relied far too much on other people's opinions of her. It makes me feel uneasily like an historian, because when it comes to Artie McGregor I have relied entirely on secondary sources for my information. Would secondhand reports give an accurate picture of me, or of anyone? Personally, I don't think so. I need to see faces, body language, responses; I want to hear tones of voice and the exact words that people use.

But now maybe I have some bait to lure her.

I use my car phone to try her number one more time, and get their message machine. Of course. “Mrs. McGregor, this is Marie Lightfoot,” I tell the machine. In a carefully neutral tone, I continue: “I have a canvas boat bag that belongs to you. This afternoon, I'm going to take it back where it was found, snap some pictures of it for my book, and then I'm going to leave it there. Nobody else has any use for it. So if you want it back, that's where it will be.”

There. Now let
her
wonder about
me,
for a change.

I pull into a “visitor” parking space at the rear of the Bahia Beach Police Department. As I walk up to the metal detector at the back door, I am still thinking about the mysterious, elusive Artemis McGregor. Surely it was for women like her that the phrase “appearances can be deceiving” was coined.

“Is this the missing wedding ring?” I ask Carl Chamblin. “Does this match the engagement ring that you guys found at the scene?”

We're in the Homicide Investigative Division of the Bahia Beach Police Headquarters on Twenty-Third; I'm at the side of his desk, in a chair so uncomfortable that I would confess to a crime just to get out of it; Carl's leaning back precariously in his own black plastic chair that looks two sizes too small for him. Under the glass top of his desk there are photographs of his family: himself, his wife, two daughters, sons-in-law, four grandchildren, all of them smiling.
They
appear to love him, regardless of what I or my readers may think of him.