Ring of Truth (27 page)

“My God,” their lawyer says, looking as appalled as she sounds. “But what about you? You may have been acquitted, but everybody thinks you're guilty. Your reputation, your name is completely ruined.”

“My name was ruined by the rumors and the arrest,” she retorts. “I had nothing left to lose. I'd lost my friends, my church, my good name. Whatever I said, there would always be people who thought the worst of me. Even people who don't think I'm a murderer think I was having an affair with him, and they probably always will think that. You know how it is, how it
still
is: when it comes to sexual misconduct, people are still inclined to blame the woman more than the man.”

“But still—” Tammi says.

“Why did I go along with his martyrdom? Because my minister, my spiritual counselor, asked me to, Tammi. I could have said no, of course. But I didn't, because some things are bigger and more important than my reputation or any individual life.”

“And yet,” I say to her, “when we showed the receipt from the gas station—”

“I burst into tears and said thank God.” With a single nod she acknowledges the contradiction. “The longer it has gone on, the longer he's been on death row, the closer he gets to actual execution,
the more doubt I have about this plan of ours. I think this is a wrong thing for him—for me—to do. I can't help to murder him. And that's what it would be. It's absurd. It may even be wicked. It's all built on a lie—that we can't prove our innocence. But we can. If you hadn't come to me with this receipt, I was about to come to you, Tammi.”

I see her clearly now—her beauty, her own great personal charisma—and I see why people once adored her on sight, why even her ex-husband had only praise for her. Once again, it was all hidden in plain sight in my own research and manuscript, but like the police, I was too blinded by my assumptions to see it. Except, except, the telephone conversation and the blue and orange towels . . .

“You'll get him off now, won't you, Tammi?” she pleads.

“Let's hope that I can.”

Artie and I both stare at the lawyer.

“Hope?” Artie repeats. “But surely with the proof of that receipt—”

“Ladies,” Tammi says, looking somber, “many a man has remained in prison his whole life long in spite of better exonerating evidence than that. Some have even gone to the death chamber in spite of somebody else confessing to the crime, in spite of new witnesses coming forward, in spite of everything short of DNA. Can I get Bob off? I'll tell you the truth, Artie. Marie. I don't know.”

In the stern, Artie's face goes pale, while I feel a little sick myself.

It's obvious that this dreadful possibility never occurred to Artie, but I wonder if Bob has been so naïve. Far from being the exonerating evidence it looks like, that gas receipt could be his “fail-safe” mechanism for demonstrating in a horrible way that the system failed to protect an innocent man. If Tammi can't get him freed on the basis of it, if he dies in spite of it, that will prove his point, most tragically.

“There has to be something else,” I blurt.

They turn to stare at me, but Tammi catches on instantly, and snaps her fingers. “Of course,” she says. “Bob knows the law of capital punishment cases better than I do. If he has set things up so that he will be proved innocent only after his death, then there has to be something absolutely incontrovertible that we haven't found yet. The problem is, he's so damned smart, he may have hidden it in a way that guarantees that we
can't
find it until he's dead. Artie, what is it?”

“I don't know of anything else! I'd tell you if I did, Tammi.”

“We have to find it,” Tammi says intensely. “Can you talk him into telling us?”

“Are you kidding?” Artie looks at her lawyer as if Tammi still hasn't quite gotten it yet. “This is a holy crusade to him, as it was to me.”

On the way back in to Artie's home, Tammi asks her about her husband's role in all this: “How much does Stuart know?”

“Everything.”

“My God, Artie, he let you—”

“Let?”
I see another hint of the successful businesswoman in the fiery look that Artie gives to her lawyer. “That wasn't his choice to make. Oh, he could have stopped us, for his own sake. I would have agreed to that in a minute. It isn't pleasant to be married to a woman who goes on trial for adultery and murder, let me tell you. He knows that people think he's a fool to stay with me and to believe in me. Stuart has been a saint about all this. But you've got to understand, he's a man of high principle, too. We all chose freely to make our own sacrifices for this cause.”

It's the most amazing pact that I have ever heard of. And the frightening thing of it is, it still might work. If the receipt alone, and Artie's testimony, don't suffice to get Bob off, and if we never find any other exonerating evidence, he
will
die for his cause.

* * *

Stuart McGregor meets us at the dock and helps us tie up.

I have a feeling that Tammi and I both are looking at this tall blond man with the youthful face with much greater feelings of respect than we ever did before. We may personally think that the pact the three friends made is lunacy, that it's a horrible sacrifice of several lives, but there's no denying the high conscience of it, or the courage of these people.

Tammi strikes just the right tone as Stuart gives her a hand up out of the boat. With utter casualness, she says to him, “Did you get my letter about reversing the power of attorney? Now that we know for sure that Artie's not going to prison for the rest of her life, you won't be needing that.” She looks back over her shoulder at his wife. “Just sign the papers and mail them back to me.”

“I didn't see them, Tammi.”

“I've got them, honey,” Stuart tells her, and then he explains to me, “When we were afraid that Artie might be convicted, Tammi suggested that I get power of attorney so I could handle Artie's affairs in her absence. Thank God we won't be needing that.”

“Who's got Bob's power of attorney?” I ask them.

“I do,” Tammi tells me. “Stuart, let's go in the house. We have something to tell you. And we need to enlist your help in searching for something.”

When I run all of this past Franklin, he rather surprises me by being willing to consider that it might be the truth. But he's pessimistic that the receipt alone will do the trick.

“It still looks as if they were having an affair, no matter what she says.”

“I know,” I agree, feeling anxious about that myself.

“And,” the prosecutor adds, “if they didn't do it, who did?”

I have Tammi Golding's go-ahead to be telling this story; if we can get prosecutorial or police cooperation, we'll take it, gratefully. But Franklin warns me not to expect much sympathy from
Tony Delano, and he turns out to be right about that. “It's all her word,” Tony complains to me, over the phone. “And you already know how I feel about
that
lady.”

Detective Carl Chamblin does not surprise me with his reaction to the same story.

“I don't buy this for a fucking minute.”

“So I guess we can't count on the cops to help us look for new evidence?”

“You can count on me to hold the stopwatch till his time runs down.”

“But, Carl, you were wrong about Steven Orbach.”

There's a long pause, and then he says, true to character, “Maybe he didn't kill Lyle's niece, but he was still a killer and he deserved to die.” But then Carl says something that does surprise me: “You actually saw her? Artie? She look depressed to you? Her husband told me she tried to kill herself after we questioned her about George Pullen's murder. He said she drove out to the old mansion and was going to throw herself out of the tower, but he stopped her. I wanted to ask him why the fuck he bothered. I say, next time let her jump.”

Part of me can't believe this, because it seems so at odds with the intensely alive woman who took us out in the boat today. But that was after we told her we'd found the gas receipt. Before that, the woman who met us at the door was guarded, quiet, withdrawn. God knows, it would be understandable if she had been depressed to a point approaching suicidal despair, especially if she felt she was conspiring in an act that was tantamount to killing Bob Wing.

“You're all heart, Carl,” I tell him.

He laughs and hangs up.

Susanna
18

Two weeks have gone by and although Spring Break is cresting, nothing else has broken through. When Tammi Golding tries to talk to Bob Wing about his plot to save the country's soul, she gets nowhere. He pretends to be astonished she would even suspect him of attempting such a thing. Nor has our search for any other evidence proved fruitful, and Tammi's attempts to get him a new trial—much less get him set free—on the basis of the gas receipt and Artemis's new testimony are falling on deaf ears in the justice system.

“It doesn't help that my client won't cooperate,” she says with wry anger. “If he weren't already sentenced to death, I think I might strangle him myself.”

Nor has any bear stepped into my trap with its shiny bait of rings.

The edited manuscript comes back to me, however, and I set to work to add the new ending on the Allison Tobias murder. Trying to figure out what to say now about Susanna's death is more problematic. I don't know what to do—what to write—about the turns in the story.

One thing I can do is correct simple things like her place of birth.

And so on a gorgeous day on which I have no intention of moving from my own sunny patio, I open the folder labeled “ Susanna.” There's the birth certificate. And there's the photo of a teenage Susanna on a front porch with a blond boy and a white cat. And there's the list I didn't pay much attention to when Tammi and I were going through Bob Wing's belongings. The only thing I remember noticing about the list is that it seemed to be a list of names and addresses.

And that's what it is, all right.

But when I turn it over, I see handwriting that looks immature, unskilled. The words “My home sweet homes” are scrawled across it in pencil and underlined. Underneath there is a poorly executed sketch of a fist, but its meaning is very clear: the third finger is raised, pointing angrily up at the word “home.” It appears to me that I have in my hands a list of the various foster and group homes where Susanna lived when she was young. She didn't live in California at all, it seems, but always in Denver. And who can blame her for not wanting anybody to be able to track her sad history. If she wanted to say she was from California, if she wanted to pretend that all of the records of her pitiable childhood were destroyed in a flood, then let her.

Suddenly, the researcher in me kicks in. I cannot just reprint this list, I need to actually see some of these houses, take some photos, see if I can interview anybody still alive who will talk to me about her.

Almost before I know it, I'm on a plane heading to Denver. In the luggage rack I've stashed an overnight case that's big enough for boots, coat, gloves, and hat.

My first stop is at the house in the photograph, which is easy to match to Susanna's list because I can see the numbers of the street address in the picture. It looks much the same as in the photograph: a medium-sized brick house with a front porch made of field stone; two second-story gables; and painted wood
everywhere there isn't brick or stone. There is a small front yard with a slight incline and cement steps leading up to the porch. It's all under fresh snow. The steps have not been cleared, so I leave the first footprints going up to the house. I don't even see mailman footprints. What doesn't show from the photograph— and may not even have been there then—is a chain-link-fenced backyard and a detached garage.

The woman who answers the doorbell is elderly.

“Yes?” she asks, guardedly through a locked screen door, wrapping a housecoat around her for warmth from the cold air my visit is letting into her house.

I hold up the photograph for her to see. “I'm looking for information about this girl who may have lived here at one time.”

The old lady unlatches the door and reaches out a hand for it.

I place the photo into her palm, which she draws back inside again, though she doesn't relatch the screen.

“Who are you?” she demands, as she holds the picture up to examine it. But before I can tell her my name, she exclaims in an emotional voice, “Oh, where did you get this picture? I don't even have a picture of her myself. It's been so long since I've seen her—”

When she looks at me, her eyes are wet.

“You know the girl?” I ask her.

“The girl? Oh, yes, I knew the girl, but it's the cat I'm talking about. My precious Snowy. Sweetest cat I ever had. She was poisoned not long after this picture was taken.” With obvious reluctance she handed the photo back to me. “I could cry just thinking about her again. But I wouldn't want
that
picture of her, not with who else is in it. That child was not one of my favorites.”

“You knew her?”

“Of course. She lived here for a good year and a half. Wouldn't have been so long, except that midway through her parents died. Awful thing. Must have been drunk. One of them, probably him, left the car running in their garage one night. Asphyxiated them
sure as somebody'd put a pillow over their faces and smothered them.” She gives me a hard look. “What became of the girl?”

“She's dead.”

“I'm not surprised, she was bound to go young.”

“Murdered,” I say brutally to this hard old bat.

“I'm not surprised by that, either. Most people get what they have coming to them. Some people think they don't, they think there's no justice in the universe, but I know there is, because I've seen it go to work time and again. Who killed her?”

“Her husband's on death row for it.”

“Really. Now that's a surprise. He was wild for Carly.”

“Carly? Did you call her Carly? Her name's Susanna.”

“Well, maybe it was when you knew her, but when she lived here, it was Carly.”

“Why was she staying with you when her parents were still living?”