Dying Declaration (31 page)

50

BY EARLY AFTERNOON
Tiger was feeling his oats. Nobody had tweeted at him all day. And Joey seemed to be absolutely avoiding him. Maybe his reputation was getting around. Maybe they knew he was working on his yellow belt.

He prowled the playground looking for trouble. Sure, he started the day a little nervous, but as time wore on, he started gaining some confidence. A couple of fun games of tag, a turn or two on the monkey bars, and now they were choosing up teams for soccer. Tiger usually didn’t play. It was hard to get around in the cowboy boots, but he really felt pretty good about himself today. He decided to give it a shot.

The captains apparently hadn’t yet heard about his new karate prowess, and they began choosing up sides while ignoring Tiger. He didn’t expect to go in the first round; there were kids older and bigger and faster. But he hoped he wouldn’t go last. It was always embarrassing to be the only kid left standing on the side, waiting to hear your name called. The last guy never really got picked. The captains never said, “Okay, we’ll take Tiger,” when you’re the only one left. It’s more like nobody would say anything. It was just understood that when the next-to-last guy was picked, and you were still left, you headed to the opposing team as fast as possible, so you didn’t have to stand alone for long.

As it narrowed down to the final four undrafted players, Tiger glanced with relief at Anthony on his left. Anthony was a notorious sissy—twice as slow as Tiger even if Tiger wore his cowboy boots—and it was pretty much a given that Anthony would go last. Tiger hated that for Anthony but figured it was better Anthony than him.

Surprisingly, Tiger was chosen third to last, beating out both Anthony and Anthony’s little sister, Amanda. This was no small feat. Even though Amanda was a year younger than Tiger and wore pigtails, she was generally regarded as one of the boys and unafraid of anyone even twice her size. Tiger considered it quite an honor to beat her out.

He took the field with his chest puffed out and his head held high. Life was good.

Tiger was back.

His exhilaration lasted exactly five minutes. That’s how long it took Joey, whose team was losing, to start picking on Anthony,
one of Tiger’s teammates. In the old days, before his karate lessons, Tiger wouldn’t have worried much about Anthony. After all, if Anthony wasn’t being picked on, then Tiger himself would be a likely candidate. But with his newly developed powers, Tiger felt a certain responsibility to stick up for the underdogs of the world, guys like Anthony, guys who didn’t know the first thing about karate.

Tiger tried to be patient. He let Anthony get knocked down once by Doughy Joey. A few minutes later it happened a second time. The third time, the ball was at the other end of the field, and Joey did it just for spite. And while Anthony lay on the ground,
holding his shoulder and whining, Doughy Joey stood over him and called him a crybaby.

Tiger looked around and saw that Miss Parsons was a hundred feet away and talking to some other kids. Little Amanda, who was actually on Joey’s team, came running over and turned on her teammate.

“You leave him alone,” she yelled at big Joey.

“Make me,” the tough guy said to the little girl in pigtails.

And that’s when something inside Tiger snapped. As if driven by some outside force, some karate master from the past, he jumped into action. He ran in front of Joey, leaped into a picture-perfect karate stance—bent at the knees, one leg in front of the other, hands balled into tight fists, one arm stretched toward his foe—and wailed out a high-pitched karate yelp that pierced the entire playground.

“Aiiiiiyaaaaah!”

Joey tilted his head and gave Tiger a look of curiosity, as if Tiger had sprouted a third eye or something. But Tiger held his ground, and Joey took a step back, then two, carefully watching the intense-looking little maniac standing before him. As Miss Parsons and Stinky came running toward them, Tiger unleashed another yelp and an accompanying kick move that whiffed through the air, causing Joey to nearly fall over backward as he scrambled to get out of the way.

There were no blows landed in those few seconds, but then again, there didn’t need to be. Tiger had backed down the bully of the day care. David had defeated Goliath. The reign of terror was over.

For his part, Doughy Joey was smart enough to save face by telling his friends that he could have beat up Tiger; he just didn’t want to get placed on time-out again. But he wasn’t fooling anybody. The other kids had seen it with their own eyes. And they noticed that Joey pretty much steered clear of Tiger for the rest of the day. That one little incident—the humiliation of Doughy Joey—might not help Tiger get picked sooner in soccer. But as for fighting, he had established a reputation as a man not to be messed with.

Sure, Tiger endured a good chewing out from Miss Parsons. But he sauntered off the soccer field with his lethal weapons, those deceptively small and bony little hands, tucked safely in his pockets. He knew there would be no more tweeting. After all,
you don’t usually tweet at a legend.

51

NIKKI FOUND THE ADDRESS
for Latasha Sewell and immediately felt guilty. Latasha lived in a dingy apartment complex that undoubtedly qualified as public housing. The brick structure looked tired and worn, with knee-high weeds in the common areas and trash strewn around the dark parking lot. At three in the morning, the lot crawled with long shadows caused by the dim light of the few outside bulbs that had survived gang activity. Nikki found a remote parking spot, cut her lights, and stepped nervously from her car.

It was quiet except for the hum of some window air-conditioning units and the occasional car driving by the front of the complex. Nikki took a quick breath of the stale and musty air and decided to make this as quick as possible. She walked quietly through the parking area, occasionally flicking on her small penlight to check out a car or illuminate a license plate. She hated to think what would happen if she got caught.

It took about five minutes to find the beat-up Chrysler New Yorker that had probably rolled off the assembly line during Reagan’s presidency. The banged-in left rear fender, the missing back bumper, and the discolored paint were dead giveaways. Still, Nikki checked the license plate to make sure she had the right car, the same one she had watched Latasha get into after her shift at Eagle Cleaners the day before.

Nikki returned to her car and drove it up behind and perpendicular to Latasha’s, between Latasha’s car and the apartment complex. She slipped out of her car and left it running, glanced quickly around, and saw no movements in the shadows. She knelt down next to the back tires on Latasha’s car, her body completely shielded from the apartment complex by her own vehicle.
Perfect.

Nikki popped open a switchblade, took a deep breath, then went to work—first one rear tire, then the other. The air hissed out, and the old car hunkered down on the rear wheel rims. Then she quietly grabbed a brick from the front seat of her car and checked the envelope to make sure it was securely taped to the brick. Another look around, then she threw the brick through the back passenger-side window of the automobile. The shattering glass sounded like an explosion. Nikki knew she had to get out of there, but first she flashed her penlight in the broken window, her hands shaking a little now, to confirm that the brick had landed safely on the backseat. It had. In fact, it had landed squarely between the two infant car seats.

She flicked off the light, jumped in her car, and drove quickly out of the parking lot. She felt enormous relief as she put some distance between herself and the apartments, but none of the satisfaction that should have accompanied a job well done. Short of a miracle, Latasha would not be at work tomorrow. And her job of cleaning the Armistead house would fall to the new girl on the Eagle cleaning team. The eight, fifty-dollar bills that Nikki had left in the envelope would almost certainly pay for a couple of new tires and a new back-door window for Latasha’s car. The tires were almost bald anyway.

But still, Nikki couldn’t get the picture of those two dirty car seats out of her mind. Nor could she shake the despair that seemed to hover around that apartment complex, even at 3:00 a.m. What was it like raising a couple of kids as a single mom in a housing project? Did you worry constantly about the drugs, the drive-bys, the sex-for-cash that probably went down in that parking lot every night? What chance did those little kids really have?
How does Latasha deal with it?
Nikki wondered. Her own experience with Tiger and Stinky was proving nearly impossible. And they didn’t have the odds stacked against them the way Latasha did.

At 4:00 a.m., after driving all the way back to her own condo and checking on her charges—they were sound asleep—Nikki headed back to Latasha Sewell’s vandalized car with another envelope in hand. First, she stopped at an ATM, then stuffed the envelope with ten twenties.
New tires are expensive these days,
she told herself.

Four hours later, resplendent in her blue jeans, white blouse, and Eagle Cleaners logo, Nikki closed the front door of the Armistead estate behind her and gawked at all the marble in the cavernous front foyer. This place was worth a fortune.

There was, of course, nobody at home. Armistead was working, or so Nikki assumed. The house was empty and sterile. It was hard to believe that anyone actually lived here. She couldn’t understand why Armistead hired someone to clean this place;
it already seemed spotless.

She gave herself a quick tour of the downstairs. She walked through the huge formal sitting room to the left of the foyer. Antique furniture, Persian rugs, expensive paintings. Then she crossed the foyer and entered Armistead’s study. The plantation shutters were drawn, and the maroon walls and mahogany wood seemed to absorb whatever sunshine bravely snuck through.

Across the back of the house was a massive family room with a catwalk above it and a wall full of windows looking out on the back deck and pool, complete with a waterfall splashing into the deep end. A large kitchen occupied the other side of the back and led to a beautiful formal dining room, where the walls were lined with expensive china cabinets and floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

Nikki also glanced around the upstairs, memorizing the floor plan as much as possible. She paused for a moment in the spacious master bedroom, overwhelmed by its luxurious fireplace, vaulted ceiling, immense walk-in closet, and adjoining master bathroom. The master suite was larger than many starter homes she had seen.

She would have to run the vacuum cleaner in each of these rooms and do a few other small things to make it look like she had cleaned. She would make that token effort later, after she had fulfilled her mission. She decided to start in the study.

The computer would be a gold mine. But Armistead had shut it down, and she could not log on without a password. She checked some of Armistead’s paper files, carefully leafing through the tax returns and bank statements, to see if she could get a clue about the password. She tried his birthday, Erica’s birthday, social security numbers, and address numbers. Nothing worked. Then she got creative and tried anything and everything she could think of.

E-R-D-O-C.
Invalid. She noticed a picture on a bookshelf of the Armisteads in a motorboat. She typed in the name of the boat:
F-A-S-TA-N-D-E-A-S-Y.
Invalid. Maybe it was obvious, something right under her nose.
E-R-I-C-A.
Invalid.
D-R-S-E-A-N.
Invalid.

Then a thought hit her. If he really had something going with the Barracuda, would he have the audacity to use her name as a password?
R-E-B-E-C-C-A.
Invalid.
C-R-A-W-F-O-R-D.
Invalid.
B-E-C-C-A.
Sorry, invalid password.
B-A-R-R-A
. . .

She stopped tapping the keyboard. A noise from the driveway, the distant and faint sound of an engine, wheels on cement. It quickly got louder and startled her, shook her to the bone. She jerked her head up and turned her ear toward the door. Someone had arrived. She heard the slamming of car doors outside.

She hit the power switch, shutting the computer down, and sprinted for her cleaning supplies in the foyer. Her heart pounded against her chest, the rush of adrenaline clouding her thoughts.
If it’s Armistead, will he recognize me? Should I take my cleaning supplies and run upstairs or try to make a getaway out the back? Whose dumb idea was this, anyway?

She grabbed her supplies and glanced through a French window on the side of the front door. She felt herself exhale and her muscles relax. She watched the lawn crew unload their mowers and Weed Eaters.

“You guys about gave me a heart attack,” she muttered to the windows. Though she was relieved to see the lawn crew, she also realized that this would only make it harder, make it more imperative that she keep a close watch out the windows. The noise of any car coming down the driveway would now be masked by the noise of lawn mowers and other power tools.

Nikki immediately went back into the study, but she decided not to fool with the computer anymore. She was wasting valuable time. She would thumb through all the paper files first and see what she could learn.

The first half hour proved fruitless, but the financial files contained pay dirt. She learned that Erica was the beneficiary of a trust set up by her parents with a corpus of more than one million dollars. She learned that Erica’s will specified that all of her assets, including her rights under the trust, would vest in her husband upon her death. She noted that Erica’s will had not yet been probated. Not unusual, given the short amount of time since her death. But when it was probated, Sean Armistead would benefit handsomely.

There was also a life insurance policy on Erica worth a quarter of a million. But Nikki assumed that if Erica’s death was ruled a suicide, the policy would not apply. She didn’t have time to read the fine print, but she thought that was the way most policies worked.

Nikki also rifled through the credit card receipts, making furious notes of any restaurants or bars patronized by Armistead in the last six months. If she had to, she would go bartender by bartender to see if anybody could recall seeing the doctor and the Barracuda together. She was disappointed to find no local hotel bills on the credit cards. If there was something going on, then Armistead had been extremely careful to cover his tracks.

Nikki next wrote down the long-distance phone numbers from Armistead’s telephone bill. She would call every one of them, no telling where that might lead.

But it was the bank records that produced the largest surprise. There were receipts for two large transfers of money that had each occurred within the last week. The first one, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar transfer from Armistead’s investment account to another bank account, identified only by number, had taken place the day of the preliminary hearing in the Hammond case.

The second transfer, another two-hundred-thousand-dollar transfer, was a little more complex. It appeared that Armistead had applied for and received a line of credit secured by his expectancy interest in Erica’s trust account. He had then exercised the line of credit to the tune of two hundred thousand dollars and transferred that sum to the same bank account as the first transfer. This second transfer had taken place just yesterday.

Although the face of the transfer receipts did not contain any identifying information about the owner of the recipient account, Armistead had scribbled a notation on both transfer receipts, indicating the payee as Virginia Insurance Reciprocal and indicating the purpose as “payment for malpractice settlement.”

Both entries seemed suspicious to Nikki. She was no stranger to medical malpractice cases, and she had never heard of a company named Virginia Insurance Reciprocal. Further, she had researched all local cases pending against Armistead. To her knowledge,
there were no unresolved cases, much less a recently settled case that would justify this kind of payout. Of course, Armistead might have settled out of court for a claim that was never officially filed, but why would he personally be paying that amount rather than his insurance company? Could his deductible be that high?

To Nikki’s way of thinking, there were just too many implausible variables stacking up against Armistead. She would have to do some more digging, but she had plenty to think about as she climbed the stairs to clean the bathroom of a man she despised with a passion. She found his toothbrush in a pull-out drawer just under his bathroom sink. It would come in handy for cleaning the toilet.