James Grippando - Beyond Suspicion

Silence fell between them. Cindy reached for the switch on the lamp, then stopped, as if something had just come to mind. “When did Jessie make her will?”

Jack paused, wondering where this was headed. “About a year ago.”

“That was before she came to you and asked you to be her lawyer, right?”

“Yeah, it’s when she supposedly was diagnosed with ALS.”

“Why do you think she did that?”

“Did what?”

“Wrote her will just then.”

“It was part of the scam. She had to make it believable that she was diagnosed with a terminal disease, so she ran out and made a will.”

“Do you think it’s possible that she really did think she was going to die?”

He thought for a second, almost found himself entertaining the possibility. “No. She told me it was a scam.”

“Did she tell you it was her scam or Dr. Marsh’s scam?”

“It doesn’t matter. They were in it together at the end.”

“If they were in it together, then why wasn’t his name on the joint bank account?”

“Because they were smart. Only the stupidest of coconspirators would put their names together on a joint bank account.”

Silence returned. After a few moments, Cindy reached for the light switch, then stopped herself once again. “In your heart, you truly believe that Jessie ended up dead because she scammed those viatical investors, right?”

“One way or the other, yeah. Either they killed her or she killed herself because they were about to get her good.”

“Down the road, if you have to prove to someone-to a jury, God forbid-that Jessie scammed the investors, how are you going to do it?”

“I saw her and Dr. Marsh holding hands in the elevator after the verdict. And then she admitted to me that it was a scam.”

“So, really, your only proof of a scam is what you claim you saw in the elevator and what you claim she said to you afterward?”

He felt a pang in his stomach. It was the toughest cross-examination he’d ever faced, and he was staring at the back of his wife’s head. “I guess that’s what it boils down to.”

“That’s my concern,” she said quietly.

“You shouldn’t be concerned.”

“But maybe you should be.”

“Maybe so.”

Finally she rolled over, looked him in the eye, and gently touched his hand. “You and Jessie weren’t having an affair. You didn’t know about the child. You didn’t know about the joint bank account in the Bahamas. You didn’t know that she’d left you all that money in her will. She turns up dead, naked, in our bathtub, and the only evidence that someone else might have killed her is your own self-serving testimony. You claim that she admitted the whole thing was a scam, even though you, as her lawyer, knew nothing about it until after the trial was over. I would never tell you and Rosa how to do your jobs, but I’ve gained enough insights from you over the years to know that it’s looking harder and harder for you to avoid an indictment.”

“Don’t you think I realize that?”

“I’m not saying it to make you mad. My only point is that unless there are twelve Cindy Swytecks sitting on the jury, how do you expect them to believe you? How could anyone believe you, unless they wanted to believe you?”

He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, but even though she’d been the one to initiate physical contact a minute earlier, she felt somewhat stiff and unreceptive. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Me too.” She rolled over and switched off the lamp. They lay side by side in the darkness. Jack didn’t want to end it on that note, but he couldn’t conjure up the words to make things better.

“Jack?” she said in the darkness.

“Yes?”

“What does it feel like to kill someone?”

He assumed she meant Esteban, not Jessie. Even so, it wasn’t something he liked to talk about, that battle to the death with his wife’s attacker five years earlier. “It feels horrible.”

“They say it’s easier to kill again after you’ve killed once. Do you think that’s true?”

“No.”

“Honestly?”

“If you’re a normal human being with a conscience, taking a human life under any circumstances is never easy.”

“I didn’t ask if it was easy. I asked if you thought it was easi er .”

“I don’t think so. Not unless you’re miswired in the first place.”

She didn’t answer right away. It was as if she were evaluating his response. Or perhaps evaluating him.

She reached for the lamp, and with a turn of the switch the room brightened. “Good night, Jack.”

“Good night,” he said, trying not to think too much of her decision to sleep with the light on. And then there was silence.

•

Yuri was chasing flies. They were all over Gulfstream Park. Not the kind that race horses swatted away with their tails. These were flies with money to wash.

Yuri loved thoroughbred racing, and in Florida’s winter months the name of the game was Gulfstream Park. The main track was a mile-long oval wrapped around an inviting blue lake that even on blistering-hot days made you feel cooler just to look at it. Gulfstream was a picturesque course with over sixty years of racing tradition, host to premier events like the Breeders Cup and Florida Derby. It sat within fifty miles of at least ten casinos that were more than happy to take back your winnings, everything from bingo with the Seminole Indians to blackjack and slot machines on any number of gaming cruises that left daily from Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami. This was as good as gambling got in Florida, and Yuri was in heaven.

But he hated to be ripped off. Especially by his own flies.

“Pedro, got a minute?”

Pedro was a new guy, early twenties, pretty smart, not nearly as smart as he thought he was. He was standing at the urinal in the men’s room beneath the grandstands. Hundreds of losing tickets littered the bare concrete floor at his feet, but at the moment the two men were alone in the restroom.

He looked at Yuri and said, “You talking to me?”

“Yeah. Come here. I got a big winner for you.”

Pedro flushed the urinal, zipped up, and smiled. It was his job to buy winning tickets, all with dirty money. It was one of the oldest games in the money-laundering world. Take the dirty proceeds from a drug deal, go buy a ticket from a recent winner at the track, cash it in and, voilà, your money’s legit. You had to pay taxes on it, but that was better than having to explain suitcases full of cash to the federal government. Pedro might wash ten thousand dollars a day this way. He was a fly, always hanging around race tracks the way insects of the same name buzzed around a horse’s ass.

“I hit the trifecta in the second race,” said Yuri. “Twenty-two hundred bucks.”

Pedro washed his hands in the basin, speaking to Yuri’s reflection in the mirror. “I’ll give you two thousand for it.”

“You charge commission?”

“Sure. You still come out ahead. You turn that ticket in to the cashier, you end up paying the IRS five, six hundred bucks in income taxes. You sell it to me, you get fast cash for a measly two-hundred-dollar transaction fee.”

“I gotta tell you, Pedro. Every time I’ve done this in the past, it’s been at face value. A twenty-two hundred dollar purse gets me twenty-two hundred bucks from a fly.”

“Must be a long time since you won anything. I been doing it this way for at least two months.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah.”

“Business good?”

“Excellent.”

“What does your boss say about that?”

“Nothing I can tell you.”

“I think he’d be pissed. Because you haven’t been telling him about your ten-percent commission, have you?”