High Country Fall (17 page)

“She said, ‘Who do you think they’re going to believe? A convicted thief or an attorney with a platinum American Express card?’”

Despite many objections from Mrs. Tuzzolino, who was acting as attorney for herself and her husband, Watson testified that he’d been told that if he’d bring her the nicely weathered teak bench that sat in the garden at the Mountain Laurel Restaurant, a bench that originally retailed for over a thousand dollars, she would pay him in full and they’d call it quits.

“That’s when I decided to talk to my parole officer, and she took me to talk to Mr. Burke and Captain Underwood.”

“That’s Captain George Underwood from the sheriff’s department here?” asked Deeck.

“Yessir.”

With the Mountain Laurel’s cooperation, they had loaded the bench into Watson’s pickup and the Tuzzolinos were arrested when they paid for the bench after Watson gleefully described to them how he and his good buddy George here had managed to get it out of the Mountain Laurel’s garden without being seen.

“And I was right,” Watson said, the empty spaces between his teeth flashing triumphantly. “They didn’t give me but half what was owing.”

“Your Honor,” said the assistant DA, “it was my intention to call Captain George Underwood at this point, but I’ve been told—”

At that moment, Underwood entered the side door, so he was immediately called to the stand, sworn in, and his testimony confirmed Watson’s. Underwood further testified that upon his securing a search warrant, the quilt, the vase, and the statuette had been identified as stolen goods by their respective owners, who had all filed reports earlier. “There were other suspicious items of value in the house that the Tuzzolinos couldn’t provide receipts for, but since we couldn’t identify the original owners, we had to leave them.”

“Objection!” cried Mrs. Tuzzolino. “That’s an unwarranted allegation.”

“Sustained,” I agreed.

She dragged out the cross-examination for ten more minutes, then, when the State rested its case, she took the stand herself and asserted that she hadn’t known the goods were stolen. She had bought them in good faith and in utter trust, and no, she had no idea that Watson had ever served time for felony theft. As for the teak bench, Underwood’s actions amounted to entrapment.

I had heard enough.

I found the Tuzzolinos guilty as charged. “What is the State asking, Mr. Deeck?”

Deeck stood and looked at me over the top of those rimless glasses. In his dry monotone, he said, “Your Honor, these are people who could afford to buy everything that they asked Mr. Watson to steal for them. As Mrs. Tuzzolino herself was so quick to say, she carries platinum charge cards in her wallet. Given the ongoing nature of their criminal enterprise, the State would like to see a fine commensurate to the crime, over and above restitution, and it would not be overkill to require supervision beyond the presumptive period of incarceration.”

Mrs. Tuzzolino was clearly appalled. “Your Honor—!”

I motioned for her to stand. “Before I pass sentence, Mrs. Tuzzolino, do you or your husband have anything you would like to say to this court?”

Throughout the entire proceedings, Dr. Tuzzolino had sat at the defense table looking interested but not terribly involved, so I was not surprised that he just gazed at me blankly and that it was his wife who rose to speak for both of them.

With tears in her eyes, she explained that her husband was suffering from Parkinson’s, which is why he had been forced to take early retirement. “A dentist has to have steady hands.”

I glanced over at Dr. Tuzzolino, and now that I looked more closely at his hands as they lay on the table in front of him, I could see that he did indeed seem to have a slight tremor.

“Medication is keeping it under control for now, but when he was diagnosed last year he went into a deep depression.” Earnestly she explained that after buying a second home up here in these cool and beautiful hills, away from the heat and bustle of Miami, he was almost his old self.

“He’ll never get better, but his downhill progress has slowed,” she said. “I discovered that nice things lift his spirit, help him not feel so depressed. That’s why I was so ready to buy from Mr. Watson without asking a lot of questions. Since my husband’s retirement, it’s gotten harder and harder to make ends meet, and Mr. Watson seemed to offer a solution.”

“You have a home in Miami?”

She nodded.

“Palm Beach?” I hazarded.

“No.” A suggestion of disdain passed across her face. “The Gables.”

“The Gables?”

“Coral Gables,” she admitted reluctantly. “That’s where my practice is.”

Images of wide, winding streets, royal palms, pools, and oak-shaded tennis courts floated through my mind. “That’s quite a wealthy area, too, isn’t it?”

“I guess. It’s not Star Island, but it’s much more historical. Our house isn’t directly on the water, though.” She could see where this was going and was clearly torn between begging poverty and enlightening the ignorant about life in “the Gables.”

“When your husband retired, did he sell his dental practice?”

She nodded. “But he got nothing close to what it was worth. He was in a partnership with a younger dentist, who couldn’t afford to buy him out. His key-man insurance—”

“His what?” I interrupted, not catching the term since she’d run the words together.

“Key, man,” she repeated, enunciating each word separately.

Instantly, I thought of the insurance my cousin Reid and I had carried on my older cousin John Claude when we first restructured our law firm after Reid’s dad retired. A “key-man” policy covers the death of someone who is key to the success of a business enterprise or professional partnership, as John Claude was to two young attorneys like Reid and me.

“It paid out to the partnership only if my husband died, not if he got sick.”

Mrs. Tuzzolino’s voice turned bitter as she described how his partner claimed that without that insurance money he couldn’t afford to buy her husband’s percentage of the business. He’d threatened to declare bankruptcy if they tried to hold him to the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, another familiar term from my own partnership.

Even though he was our rainmaker at the start, John Claude had declared his faith in our potential by splitting the partnership into three equal shares. If he’d died, the key-man insurance would have paid us a third of the firm’s worth, which wouldn’t have made up for his loss. On the plus side however, if he’d become sick or incapacitated, Reid and I would only have had to come up with a third to buy him out under the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, not the half John Claude was probably worth at the time.

“We had to dissolve the partnership and sell out,” said Mrs. Tuzzolino, “but it was a bloody fire sale.”

My heart bled. Poor lady. Two expensive homes to keep up? Having to scrape along on whatever few pennies they’d managed to save from two high-yield careers?

“I’m willing to pay restitution and a fine, Your Honor, but I’m begging you, woman to woman, to suspend any active sentence you were thinking of imposing.” A tear trickled slowly down her smooth cheek. (Botox or plastic surgery?) “My husband needs me. If you separate us, he could sink back into depression. Maybe even harm himself.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but life is full of choices and you made yours when you chose Mr. Watson to be your personal shopper.”

I ordered a mental health evaluation for Dr. Tuzzolino and sentenced them both to a total of eight months, six of it suspended to five years of supervised probation. In addition to restitution, I added up the value of the stolen goods—three thousand dollars if I counted the teak bench as worth nine hundred—and fined them nine thousand dollars.

Her tears disappeared as quickly as they had come. She coolly gave notice of appeal, and I set their bond at a hundred thousand.

After that, I needed a break and one of May’s cinnamon rolls to get the taste of Mrs. Tuzzolino out of my mouth.

CHAPTER 17

Within moments of recessing, I heard some of the rumors swirling through the halls back of the courtroom. They said Norman Osborne had been found somewhere below Joyce and Bobby Ashe’s house. He had tripped over the railing on the lower terrace and banged his head. He had been beaten to death. He had been knifed. He had collapsed from a heart attack. Take your pick. The only thing everyone agreed on was that he was dead.

Dead?

That big easygoing man who’d stood on the terrace beside me last night and teased me for being a bootlegger’s daughter?

That successful, hard-nosed businessman, who hadn’t been at all shy about singing his love for his wife in front of a crowd?

Even though I’d only met him last night, I felt a touch of the shock and dismay that must be running through the people who’d known him better.

Poor Sunny. I had enjoyed making music with her and Joyce last night. What could she be feeling now? Still so much in love with her husband, so dependent on him for emotional support. She must be shattered.

And the Ashes. So pleased with the prospects of their brand-new partnership, a partnership now abruptly ended.

Mary Kay declined my offer of a cinnamon roll— “I’m doing the no-carbs thing this week”—and went off to see what she could find out.

In the end, I wound up sharing with George Underwood. We nodded to each other as he moved through the hall amid attorneys, parole officers, and assorted law personnel, and when he stopped inside my door, I saw him looking hungrily at the rolls.

“Have one,” I said. “I’ll bet you missed lunch.”

He didn’t have to be asked a second time.

There was an extra cup sitting on Rawlings’s bookcase, and I gestured for Underwood to help himself from the coffee carafe as well.

“I didn’t realize you were head of the detective squad.”

“It’s not a very big one,” he said. “Probably half the men your Major Bryant supervises.”

“But it’s true what they’re saying about Norman Osborne? That he died from a fall off the Ashes’ terrace last night?”

“’Fraid so. I heard you were there?”

“Well, I didn’t actually see him fall, but yes, I was there when he went missing.”

“The way they described it, you would’ve been facing the room, playing the guitar?”

“Yes, but if you’re asking me who came and went before his wife missed him, I can’t help you. Most of the faces were unfamiliar. The only ones I could say for sure were in the room the whole time before he disappeared were Mrs. Osborne and Mrs. Ashe.”

“What about before the music started? Did he have any words with anybody?”

“Like a fight? No. It was all very pleasant. They were celebrating the new partnership. I guess you heard about that?”

He nodded.

“The only thing halfway argumentative was when someone called Dr. Ledwig a bigot and Osborne defended him and—oh my God!” I said. “It’s the same as Ledwig! He took a fall just like Osborne. Was Osborne hit over the head, too? They were friends. Are the two deaths related?”

“Whoa, slow down,” he said, sounding for a moment just like Dwight. “It’s early days for that. Yes, he was hit on the head, and yes, he seems to’ve been thrown over, but it could be a complete coincidence. We’re still looking for the weapon. We found blood on the railing of the bottom terrace and along the edge of the tiles. Looks like someone hit him so hard, he fell across the railing, and then they probably grabbed his legs and swung them over and let gravity do the rest.”

He had finished the bun in three bites, so I tore a small piece off mine and passed the rest of it over to him.

“You sure you don’t want it?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” I lied.

“Thanks. The others were going to pick up some hot dogs at the Trading Post, but I was afraid I’d miss court if I stopped to eat. Anyhow, the EMT who looked at his head said it was probably loss of blood that actually killed him, not the blow and not the fall. If he’d landed with his head up, he might have lived. We’ll have to wait and see what the autopsy shows. The blow was to the back of the head, not front like Ledwig, and it was only one laceration.” He held his thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “But the EMT thinks it was a full-thickness tear and being on the head and him hanging head down . . .”

“You don’t have to elaborate,” I said. “A medical examiner once told me that under the right circumstances you could bleed to death from a relatively small scalp wound in fifteen or twenty minutes, that the scalp is nothing but a mass of tiny blood vessels.”

“Be good if we could find the weapon,” said Underwood.

I had been visualizing the lower level of the Ashe home, the pottery, the photographs of their children and grandchildren, the long ledge crowded with candlesticks, the— Wait a minute! Candlesticks?

“Could it have been one of those candleholders?” I asked, describing the oak shelf where they stood.

He knew it and nodded. “We thought of that, but there must be forty-five or fifty on that shelf, and just eyeballing with a magnifying glass, we didn’t see blood on any of them.”

“Because it’s not there anymore.”

“Huh?”

“Last night, when everyone was looking for Norman Osborne, I noticed that some of the candlesticks had been knocked over. I straightened them, but there was one extra candle left. I stood it up at the back, so maybe you didn’t notice?”

“We didn’t,” he admitted. “
I
didn’t.”

“That many candles, why would you? But the missing holder has to be fairly massive because the leftover candle’s one of those tall fat ones and I noticed that Joyce varied them in proportion to the holder. The base is probably six or eight inches in diameter. At least.”

“That would certainly cut a two-inch gash,” he said. He drained his coffee cup and stood to go. “I’ll get the guys back out there. Whoever did this probably heaved the thing as far as they could. God knows where it could have rolled to. Maybe you could adjourn early this afternoon? Ride up with me and show me where the candlesticks were when you noticed them?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That might trigger Mrs. Ashe’s memory. She didn’t think any were missing.”