Wildcat Wine (30 page)

Bonita stopped walking for a moment, so I did too, which had the immediate effect of causing a black mist of gnats to glom on to us. All of this information was almost too much to absorb.

“We must never speak of this again, you and I,” Bonita said. “Or to anyone.”

“Yes, yes, I understand. But how did Kenneth know?”

“I am not sure he really did. My belief is that he thought that I had the first children out of wedlock, or had been unfaithful, so that Felipe was not their father. Otherwise, I believe he would have threatened me with immigration, not with a lawsuit. One time I caught him studying that photo of us on my desk. Another time, he asked me why Benicio wasn't named after Felipe. Our Hispanic tradition calls for naming the firstborn son after the father, not the third son.”

Well, okay, after all, that day I had studied the same photograph, I'd wondered myself why Armando looked so different from the rest of them.

“We must not speak again—”

“Yeah, I know. But you aren't done yet. That night Kenneth was killed. My car. What happened?”

Bonita sighed and pushed a three-leaf vine out of the way, while I shuddered at the thought of the poison-ivy itch to come. Then she said, “Our office computer security is very . . . loose. The afternoon you loaned me your car, I broke into the bookkeeping files on the hard drive. We have all heard rumors of Kenneth's billing excesses.”

“Yes. The thirty-hour days.”

“I found documented evidence of his fraudulent billing. That night, Benny drove your car to Kenneth's house with me so that we might convince him to leave us alone. Like a trade, I would not show the bills to his clients and Benny would not ever tell anyone about seeing him that night. But Kenneth had to promise to leave us alone.”

Good for Bonita, I thought. If those thirty-hour-a-day bills had come to light, Kenneth would have lost his clients, been investigated by the ethics division of The Florida Bar, and possibly been prosecuted by the state attorney's office.

“Only,” Bonita said, “Kenneth was . . . the door was unlocked. He was already dead. I had pressed the doorbell, but when no one answered, Benny pushed open the door and saw him first. He took hold of me and we ran off.”

Mierda
, but Benny had been through a lot. My own childhood suddenly looked ideal. At least there had been no murdered bodies in it.

“So it
was
you in my car the neighbor saw? You and Benny?”

“It was wrong. We should not have run. But we were afraid. Afraid no one would believe us, or that even if they did, an investigation might come back to those forged papers.”

“And Henry, later that night, at your house? You called Henry in for the alibi,” I said, asking and answering my own question.

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you call me? I'd've alibied you.”

“Yes. I thought of that. But you might have lost your law license if it ever came out. And Henry, Henry was so eager to . . . prove himself. It made him feel very masculine to help us.”

Wow. Even under the pressure of finding a dead man and the fear of immigration, Bonita had been considerate. But at what cost? I wondered. “Are you all right?” I asked her.

She nodded. “We will find our way out of this
pantano
and not speak of any of this again.”

We both had a lot to think about. But first we had to get to safety. We were lost in the wet, buggy, scary world of a wild Florida cypress swamp. I realized this was a new variation of the dragon and the whirlpool. Lost in snake heaven, with deepening swamp in front and with a gun-toting hippie killer and her forger-schemer girlfriend possibly behind us.

As we stood there, lost in the thicket and contemplating our limited options, Bonita said, “Lilly.” Her voice was soft and very sad. “It is our cat.”

Following the line of Bonita's hand as she pointed, I stared into the marbled shadows in the underbrush. Like letting my eyes adjust to darkness, it took me a moment to make out the transplanted South American cat. First I saw a dappled, coppery shape in the shade of the deep scrub, then I registered its movement, then I focused on the jaguarundi.

When I finally saw it, I could not look away from the wildcat. Sleek, low to the ground, definitely feline, and with a very long tail and big panther eyes, the animal stood there in front of us, not more than twenty feet away.

“He'll help us,” Bonita said.

Yeah, right, like we were in a Disney movie.

As the gnats thickened, I waited for the cat to run off. But it didn't.

“Gandhi told Benny that Felipe's spirit lives in a jaguarundi, here in Myakka.”

“That's why Benny did that paper and kept trying to find the jaguarundi, isn't it? Skipping school and all?”

“He's waiting for us to follow him,” Bonita said, her eyes wistful as she stared at the cat and ignored my question.

So, okay, it wasn't any weirder than anything else that day. Without speaking further, we walked toward the wildcat, which turned and prowled through the scrub, slow and easy, while we followed it.

We walked as quietly as we could, lagging behind the jaguarundi and occasionally losing sight of it. But every time we lost the cat, Bonita seemed to know what track to take until we saw it again. Once the jaguarundi growled at us when we got too close, and we had to back off. But finally, with the faint trace of a cat barely in our vision, we came to a gutted, muddy road. Ghostlike, the jaguarundi disappeared back into the swamp: a long, low wildcat, then a shadow, then poof!, nothing.

Exhausted and hot and itchy from the descending mosquitoes feasting on us, Bonita and I followed the dirt road to a bigger road and finally to a park-ranger station in the state park.

After the initial babble of officiousness, the ranger was Johnny Helpful and shoved a phone toward me and I called Tired at the sheriff's office. Tired was out, some woman said. “Okay, let me speak to Stan.” I didn't like Stan, but at least he already knew who I was.

“Stan's out too,” she said.

“Who's in that I could speak with about the person who shot Kenneth Mallory, the lawyer.”

“Just a minute, please.”

Muzak assaulted me along with my rising itch and irritation, and I was about to hang up when a man came on the line and introduced himself as chief deputy so and so. I explained who I was, but suddenly mindful of the fact that I might actually have created an attorney-client privilege with Cat Sue, I edited my summary of events at the Stallings barn and winery.

After telling Mr. Chief Deputy that activities which invited official scrutiny had occurred at the vineyard today, I asked that he relay this information to Tired.

“Don't go back to that Stallings place,” he said. “I'll send a deputy to pick you up. Stay put, you hear?”

Yeah, I heard. But there is just something about a male voice issuing a direct order that has, like, this totally negative impact on me. Plus, Bonita and I needed to find Benny and tell him this madness would soon be over. After Bonita and I washed our hands and faces and slurped some ice-cold bottled water, I sweet-talked the ranger into taking us back to the barn.

By the time we got there, the place was alive with sheriff's deputies and I spotted Tired's black Chevy. Good, the posse had arrived in time.

Tired trotted over to me and hugged me while the other deputies stared. After he and Bonita shook hands, I turned to watch two deputies pushing down Cat Sue's and Cristal's heads as they loaded them into a patrol car.

“Got them just about a mile away, running through the woods. Crashed through, leaving a clear trail.”

“Probably trying to chase Bonita and me,” I said.

“We've got lots to talk about,” Tired said. “First, though, ma'am, I figured that was your purse in the barn. Your cell phone was ringing, so I finally had to answer it.”

I looked at Tired with both fatigue and curiosity.

“Dave saw all the cop cars and sirens when he was coming back here. I reckon he got scared, left, and went up to a store and called you,” Tired said. “First I had to tell him a hundred times you were fine, that you were at a ranger station in the park. Then I told him he wasn't wanted for anything as far as I knew but that he needed to come in for questions. But he said no, he figured he'd pass on that, that Cat Sue had broke his heart, but he wasn't going to testify against her. Said something about a red-headed stranger that I didn't get.”

“It's a Willie Nelson song about this man who missed his little, lost darling and wandered around, living in the hills with her horse.”

Tired nodded. “Anyway, ma'am, Dave said to tell you he'd catch up with you later, somewhere down the road.”

Damn, I thought, I never did get him back that sack of the dead man's money.

Epilogue

As vexing
as being Lilly Cleary can be, I wouldn't want to trade places with Philip Cohen.

Philip had hired himself on to defend Cat Sue against first-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Kenneth Mallory, the murderous and greedy lawyer with the butterfly obsession.

And having hired on to defend Cat Sue, nothing would do but that he had to defend Cristal against charges of conspiracy to murder Kenneth and forgery in making Kenneth's fake will. While technically Cat and Cristal could have been charged with the attempted murder of me, at Philip's urging I had convinced the state attorney's office to settle for criminal-mischief charges, a charge that might cost them a fine if it didn't get dropped altogether by the time of their trial.

In contrast to poor Philip, all I had to do, at least in the foreseeable future, was defend my client, one Gandhi Singh, against charges of malpractice brought by the rich woman from Longboat Key who claimed to have been kidnapped by space aliens.

Yeah, the appellate court kicked back Gandhi's summary judgment with a tersely worded legal opinion that roughly translated into: Let a jury figure it out.

After Angela and I had researched to death about a dozen legal theories for Gandhi's defense, I had decided to go with the obvious—just pick a straight-laced, conservative jury, which is about the only kind of jury you can get in Sarasota anyway—and paint the Rich Nut Lady Plaintiff as crazier than Gandhi.

I mean, how hard could that be?

So here we all were, back in the litigation lottery world of tort law, stuffed into Judge Goddard's courtroom, waiting for him to finish chewing out the plaintiff's attorney for a witness-list snafu and then Angela was going to cross-examine one of Rich Nut Lady's expert witnesses, the one who was hired to testify that the plaintiff might actually have been kidnapped by Martians.

While preparing for trial, I had figured Angela could handle that cross-examination, though I had written and rewritten the exact questions for her to ask the ET expert, made her practice her body language and facial expressions a hundred different ways and times, and then reconciled myself to the idea that she would cross the guy any way she wanted to.

After all, Angela was all grown up. She'd been a lawyer for three years. And a mother for a few months. A fine baby girl, born with a minimum of fuss, right on time, and with a head full of mahogany hair, Newly's chocolate-colored eyes, and Angela's pert, little nose and rosebud mouth. Already we could tell that Ada Mae Harper Moneta, named after her maternal great-grandmothers, would stop traffic all of her life.

From our counsel table, I watched Judge Goddard, then nervously poked Angela to tell her to get ready. The judge seemed about done fussing at the plaintiff's attorney. Angela nodded back at me, turned to look at Newly in the bench behind us, holding on to Ada Mae and smiling as if he was the only man in the entire universe to ever father a child. As everybody smiled at everybody, Angela held out a finger to Ada Mae, who grabbed it and squealed in little-girl joy. Glancing at the jury, I noted the positive effect of this and leaned back into my counsel chair, trying to keep my generalized anxiety at bay. Gandhi patted my arm. “It will be all right,” he said.

It would be. Angela, once delivered of her child, had returned in no time at all to lawyer loquaciousness. Brock had fixed her hair back to a glorious auburn. I had trained her well. And she had innate talent. Time to her let go and cross the witness, I thought, and forced myself to stop fidgeting and folded my hands in my lap.

And then, while Angela introduced herself to the witness and reeled him in with some trust-me-I'm-the-nice-girl-next-door questions, I turned back for a moment to smile at Philip, who had come to the courtroom to cheer for me.

Philip, though he should be, was not disturbed over his case of the two girlfriend criminals, Cat Sue and Cristal, who were still in jail, waiting for Philip's magic to find them a way out. He was confident he could twist the law into a defense that would get them out of prison with some of their lives left to live. According to Philip, beating Cat Sue's first-degree murder and Cristal's conspiracy to commit murder charges was as simple as keeping out the fake alibi, the only thing that established a premeditated aspect to Kenneth's shooting death on Cat's part or pulled Cristal into his shooting.

Even as I prepared to defend Gandhi against malpractice, Philip pruned the case law to support his motion to suppress any evidence of Cristal in a dark wig in Winter Park creating a false trail of Cat Sue shopping a full three hours away from Kenneth at his end. If Philip pulled this off, it would be at the expense of Tired Rufus Johnson, who had been hot on the trail of the two girlfriend offenders after all.

For all my vanity that Bonita and I had solved Tired's case for him, he had figured it out a step or two ahead of us. Turned out the reason Tired wasn't in the office when I called him from the Myakka ranger's station was because he was already on his way to the vineyard with arrest warrants. What had started Tired on this path was his trip to Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, armed with a search warrant looking for evidence of Kenneth's cocaine use on the remote possibility that this had some bearing on his murder. While Tired found no cocaine-related evidence, he had discovered and taken some of Cristal's Winter Park Visa receipts. He hadn't told Cristal because he didn't want to spook anyone. The Winter Park Visa receipts Tired snuck out of Cristal's files were on her own credit card, but they were dated the same Tuesday that Cat Sue had been in Orlando and Winter Park selling wine, the same day that Earl had been killed. In Tired's mind, that connected Cat Sue and Cristal, and once he'd made that link, he dug out enough of the story in bits and pieces. As the persistent Tired had learned, Cat Sue and Cristal had been keeping company on the sly, and a woman matching Cat Sue's description had hired a man from Chokoloskee, a renegade town at the southern edge of the Everglades, to put a live rattlesnake in my car. And the day before Tired got his warrants, a handwriting expert the sheriff's office had great confidence in had declared Kenneth's signature on the will a forgery.

But those receipts that Tired had taken out of Cristal's personal files had started it. And therein lay the centerpiece of Philip's motion to suppress. Tired did not have probable cause for the search warrant—all he'd had was an anonymous tipster and a constitutionally unschooled judge. And if the receipts were illegally obtained without a proper warrant, then all the rest of the evidence that was based on those receipts was as inadmissible as the receipts.

It could be that easy.

Or not.

The faked will didn't look good, Philip admitted, though he hoped it could be explained as a desperate afterthought; that is, after a purely self-defense and panicked shooting of Kenneth by the hysterical-with-grief widow of the man Kenneth had already killed, the spunky widow tried to save her endangered vineyard with the help of a certified paralegal who had a remarkable ability to forge her boss's signature. At most, Philip feared, the forged will would look too opportunistic and might convince a jury to step over self-defense and into second degree for Cat. And, of course, there was little escape on the forgery charge against Cristal, but the Florida criminal-justice system didn't execute forgers, and barely imprisoned them, as that was merely a white-collar crime.

So, yeah, the faked will was a problem for Philip's girlfriend clients. And for me. The probate-court judge figured that since he had already appointed me as the personal representative of Kenneth's faked will, I might as well stay on to probate his estate after that will was cast out. Hence, as Kenneth's PR, a result that no doubt has him spitting fire in hell, I was still digging around in the aftermath of Kenneth's poorly lived life.

Thanks to Cristal's search-and-destroy mission, no one ever found a real will. Without a written will, Kenneth's worldly goods would pass according to the intestate statutes. Much to his surprise, Joseph the lavender farmer from Washington found himself sole heir to Kenneth's estate. When Joseph had materialized out of the great Northwest, Henry set in on him about the butterfly garden, so that the first official act of Joseph the heir was to arrange for Sarasota Jungle Gardens to take it over.

Then Joseph called up the Hummer dealership and told them he wasn't paying another dime on what Kenneth owed on the damn thing and that they should come take it away.

While Philip and I applauded his acts, Joseph endeared himself further by liquidating enough of Kenneth's estate, with my official approval, to pay off a balloon mortgage on Earl's vineyard, and with everyone's blessings, he moved in. Other mortgages hovered, but didn't press, and with Cat Sue offering advice from her jail cell, Joseph set out to become an organic vintner. And he was paying for Cat Sue's and Cristal's defense. Maybe he hadn't seen Cat since high school, but she was family. And if she was family, he explained to me, then so was Cristal.

Given Joseph's example, I returned the silver and the rings and other things I had taken from Kenneth's house the night Henry and I broke in searching for evidence, and in a fit of contrition reduced my legal fees to the estate by half.

Nobody ever told Tired about Kenneth threatening Bonita or the sack of cash Mad had with him, so Tired never knew. In fact, there was a lot Tired never knew, as I honored my pledge to Cat Sue and our hastily created attorney-client privilege and I kept my mouth shut. True to my word, I took my half of Mad's money that Henry was safeguarding to Mary Angel, who had the good grace not to pester me about the other half. Benny donated his part to the Nature Conservancy and asked that it be earmarked to buy habitat for the Florida panther.

Benny was more convinced than ever that Felipe's spirit lived in the jaguarundi at Myakka after Bonita and I told him we had followed it to our safety. He kept going back into the wilds of the park looking for the cat. In a truly weird cross-cultural male-bonding experiment, Jackson, Gandhi, and Henry started going with him—Jackson as the alpha-male tracker-woodsman, Gandhi as the spiritual guide, and Henry as the aspiring stepfather. Not surprisingly, with the four of them thrashing about, they've never seen the reclusive cat. But Benny keeps them going out there as regular as the first Saturday of the month comes around.

With his wildcat obsession unabated, though at least accompanied now, Benny remains under the watchful eye of Bonita. Tuned to Benny's emotional health, Bonita and I had gone back to work, trying to make up for lost time and billing and we never again spoke of what she had told me in the swamp. After all, I was good at keeping secrets. But I wasn't the only one. Truth is, none of us ever told Tired about the collective obstructions of justice that Dave, Bonita, Benny, and I had all engaged in with our misguided notions of protecting those we loved.

While we were all protecting our secrets, Gandhi had married Keisha two weeks before his trial. An ardently attentive Philip and I had sat with Tired Rufus Johnson and Susie at the wedding, with Grandmom Dolly from Tulip Street holding Redfish and eyeing Susie like a future granddaughter-in-law who wasn't quite good enough.

And now, here we all were, in a courtroom on an autumn day, watching Angela make her debut as Angela, Woman Trial Attorney. After three years of hearings, depositions, and all the pretrial posing and paperwork of lawsuits, she was primed for the real action.

But even as I watched Angela twist the plaintiff's expert around her finger without using a single question I had written for her, somewhere out on the road, a fifty-year-old man with pigtails and a Georgia accent was trying to travel off his broken heart.