Defiled Page 15

Fred interrupted us. “Look back there to the north. That boat’s been following us.”

  I swiveled in my chair and looked across the Bay at an array of boats. “Which one? There are a million boats.”

  “The one that’s moving along with us, going slow,” Fred said. “About a mile back.”

  All I could tell was that it was a small fishing boat. “Is it a Boston Whaler, Fred?”

  Looking through the binoculars, Fred said, “Could be. Definitely a center console boat.”

  “Who owns a Boston Whaler?” Tony said.

  “Carrie’s daddy.” To Fred I said, “Can you see who’s on board?”

  “Two men and a woman.”

  “Yellow bikini?”

  “No. White top.” Carrie must have covered herself in deference to her daddy.

  “Hold on.” I advanced the throttles and steered to the south, toward the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, careful to stay out of the shipping lanes.

  “Are they coming?” I yelled to Fred.

  “Yeah, they’ve picked up speed. Tracking us but not getting any closer.”

  “This is creepy,” Marty said.

  “Hold on again, everybody.” I turned the Wahine II back to the north in as tight a circle as the big boat could handle and then opened the throttles as far as they would go. I was making twenty-two knots, heading straight for the fishing boat.

  “Ha ha!” Fred said. “They’ve turned around, and they’re moving fast. Away from us, heading toward the Gandy causeway.”

  I cut the throttles. No way we could catch a Boston Whaler.

  “What was that all about?” Marty said.

  “Carrie and her daddy, keeping a watch on me,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s crazy,” Tony said.

  What did they think they could do? Board us like pirates and kill us all?

  “I’m hungry,” Fred said. “Anyone else hungry?”

  The men shouted a chorus of affirmatives, so I headed toward Apollo Beach and Tony climbed down to the galley. He was the grill master.

  As I cruised slowly toward the beach, I again picked up the conversation with Marty. “You were saying that psychopaths and sociopaths are not the same thing.”

  “Two sides of the same coin,” Marty said, glad to be back on familiar conversational turf. “They are both antisocial, but their behavior is different.”

  “How so?”

  Marty crossed his legs and spread his arms across the back of the loveseat. He enjoyed the opportunity to pontificate. “The hallmark of the antisocial personality is a lack of empathy, an inability to see things from other people’s perspective. It’s all about them.”

  “Sounds like Carrie.”

  “Sure. They act in their own self-interest without any pangs of conscience. What’s good for them is always justifiable. But how they achieve their goals is different.”

  The little psychiatrist waited to see if I was following. On the foredeck, Fred scanned the horizon, but he was listening as well.

  I said, “Yeah, go on.”

  “The psychopath is impulsive, quick to anger, doesn’t plan well, isn’t able to weigh consequences. They are usually extroverts.”

  “That’s Carrie.”

  “You need a formal diagnosis by a psychiatrist to be sure,” Marty said.

  “Yeah, of course,” I said, not wanting to offend my friend.

  “The sociopath is in control of his emotions, plans his behavior meticulously, weighs possible outcomes. They are often introverts, loners. The psychopath is dangerous; the sociopath is extremely dangerous.”

  “Well, thank God for small favors. Carrie is only a psychopath.”

  Fred guffawed on the foredeck. Tony emerged from the galley with a tray of steaks swimming in marinade and corn on the cob wrapped in tin foil and headed down the stairs to the swim platform where my grill was mounted. Fred came up to the aft cabin, went to the ice chest, and distributed another round of beers. I coasted to within five hundred yards of the beach and cut the engines. In the still air, the smell of burning charcoal and roasting meat now rose from the stern to the bridge. Fred climbed down to the swim platform to keep Tony company.

  I turned toward Marty and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, poised for an intimate conversation. “I’ve tried to convince her to get better help, but she says I’m the one who’s crazy, not her.”

  Marty smiled, pleased to be of value in this masculine social setting. “That’s not surprising. Personality disorders are ego-syntonic.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she doesn’t have the self-awareness or objectivity to know there’s anything wrong with her. In fact, she thinks her behavior is perfectly reasonable and logical as a response to your behavior. You’re the problem, not her.”

  “You’ve nailed her.”

  “I’m just parroting the textbooks. What you need to understand is that she isn’t faking it when she blames you for something that was her fault. She’s describing the circumstances as she honestly perceives them. She would be shocked to find that you have an opinion that’s different from hers.”

  “What does society do about these people? If the disorders are ego-syntonic, the sickos don’t know to get help for themselves so they slip through the cracks.”

  “Societywide, it’s insoluble, but relative to your wife, the Baker Act petition is the best way to go. Let the professionals decide what should be done with her.”

  “Will she end up in an institution?”

  “There aren’t enough beds to lock all the sickos away, Randle. If she’s borderline but not psychotic, she’ll be treated as an outpatient.”

  “That’s another gap in the mental health system: Until they commit a mass murder, the sickos are free to ruin our lives. And when they do commit a murder, we lock them in a penitentiary instead of an insane asylum. If the Baker Act examination doesn’t work, maybe I can get Carrie to do something criminal. That would solve the problem.”

  The three men smiled indulgently, sure I was being facetious. The steaks were ready, so Tony handed them to me through the window and we all sat in the aft cabin to eat.

  After he sampled his steak, Tony said, “At mediation we’ll try for a deal that minimizes your ongoing involvement with Carrie, so you can avoid contact with the sicko.”

  “Why would I be involved with her? What happened to ‘settle and go your merry way’?”

  He smiled at me. “That just applies to the legal proceedings.” Leaning forward into the circular group of men, he said, “You’re lucky you don’t have kids. You won’t have to worry about custody, but you’ll still be attached by property rights and alimony, credit histories, and debts and investments. The law doesn’t cut those ties.” Leaning back again, he delivered the punch line: “The only good news is that when you wake up in the morning, the head on the pillow next to yours won’t be hers.”

  I lost my appetite. I set my plate on the coffee table, walked to the ice chest, and grabbed another beer. Leaning on the wet bar, I said, “I need a trial to prove I’m innocent and she’s guilty.”

  Fred perked up. “Let me dig up some dirt on her so you can nail her in court.”

  Before I could discourage Fred, Tony climbed on his soapbox.

  “Innocence and guilt are just concepts they teach in civics class. All the Constitution guarantees is due process. It makes no promise that every innocent person will be acquitted or that every guilty person will be convicted. Juries acquit people they like and convict people they dislike. It’s that simple.”

  “The O.J. trial proved that,” Fred said.

  I snorted. “That makes it a game. Each side hires a proxy to climb in the ring and duke it out, and the winner is declared innocent and the loser is declared guilty. The proxies and the referee are motivated to determine a winner, but they aren’t motivated to find the truth.”

  “Why are you getting hostile?” Tony said. “This is the way it works.”

&n
bsp; I couldn’t allow it to work that way for me. After we ate, we dumped our scraps, paper plates, and beer bottles in the trash, then I started the engines and we cruised slowly westward, toward St. Petersburg. Fred and Tony stood at the bow with the binoculars, like lookouts on a warship, but only fishermen were out in the Bay. Harlan had disappeared.

  After ensuring the boat was tied off and secure, I walked with my buddies to the parking lot and said my goodbyes. For a long time, I leaned against the fence that separated the walkway from the marina and watched the normal people in the park go about their normal lives, oblivious to the possibility that my wife had planned to kill me today. In the eighty-degree heat, I shivered. Mediation had to work or this situation was going to get out of hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  My cell phone woke me from a disturbing dream as it vibrated off the bulkhead ledge and dropped into the bedclothes. I had trouble finding it, and, not sure if the call was business or personal—my eyes weren’t focused enough to see the caller ID—I answered by saying, “Hello, this is Randle Marks.”

  “You lied to me again!” Connie shouted.

  I pushed myself into a sitting position, my head touching the ceiling of the cramped stateroom. Weak daylight seeped through the Plexiglas hatch above my head. I had slept in the forward guest cabin so I would have a sight line to the entrance to the interior of the boat and would not be where an intruder would expect me to be. If anyone had entered the boat during the night, I could have watched as they came down three steps from the aft cabin and turned to port, toward the master stateroom in the stern, where the intruder would expect me to be sleeping. I could then have gotten the “drop” on the intruder from behind. Theoretically, under prevailing piracy laws, I could have shot the intruder with impunity.

  Shaking my brain into working order, I said, “About what?”

  “You said you would talk to Carrie, but then you didn’t let her on the boat.”

  “I had people aboard, Connie.” I rubbed my eyes, yawned, and tried to become alert enough to deal with her anger.

  She huffed down the phone line. “Do you know how hard it was to convince her to go all the way down there and humble herself? She can’t stand to appear submissive.”

  “She should have called first. She just turned up out of the blue at a bad time.”

  “Make up your mind, Randle. Are you willing to talk to her or not?”

  I took a shot in the dark, pun intended. “If she came to talk, why was your daddy following me around on the Bay?”

  Silence. Five long seconds of it. “He was there to rescue Carrie if anything went wrong with the negotiations.”

  Was Harlan her safety net, or were they stalking me to set up the kill? “Why follow me when Carrie wasn’t on board?”

  “To see if you met up with your ex-wife or some other girlfriend.”

  “I thought she had all the pictures she needed.”

  “They’re not all that, ah, conclusive.”

  Scott-the-screw-up-PI didn’t catch Glenda naked! “Was Travis with them?”

  “Yes, he helped Daddy with the boat.”

  “Were they armed?”

  Another hesitation from Connie. “Daddy always has a shotgun on the boat. He doesn’t own a pistol.”

  Someone had my pistol, and it crossed my mind that it could be used to stage a suicide scene. On the other hand, a shotgun left no traceable ballistic evidence.

  “Tell Carrie if she wants to meet she’s got to give me advance notice.”

  Connie was silent for a long time. “I don’t think she will now. Her lawyer is going to ambush you at mediation.”

  “I’m ready for her. Tell your sister I have more surprises as well.”

  After coming fully awake, I dialed Jane Whitehead, the Realtor who had helped me buy the beach house and was now nominally the listing agent for it. Selling the beach house was now a priority. The neighborhood was nearly deserted since the snowbirds had migrated to Canada or New Jersey to escape the heat of the Florida summer. When my home had been broken into the first time, no one reported my alarm sounding in the middle of the night. Friday night, the break-in had aroused no suspicions, and yesterday no one came to investigate even though a squad car was parked in my driveway with its lights flashing. I needed to be in a place that was harder to attack without detection, a place that was easier to defend. I needed to be on my boat, not in the beach house.

  Whitehead answered after just two rings, working on a Sunday to match naïve buyers with desperate sellers. “Randle! What a surprise. Why are you calling me?”

  “I’m fine. Thank you for asking. And you? Are you well?”

  Whitehead didn’t answer immediately. I waited, and eventually she said, “Yes, I’m fine. You caught me off guard. Are you going to tell me to delist the house, come get my sign?”

  “Exactly the opposite. I need to sell my house fast.”

  “That will make my broker happy. He keeps saying, ‘Move it or lose it.’ Did you lose your job or something?” After a pause, as though she’d had a flash of insight, she said, “No wait, it’s a divorce, right?”

  Is my life that pathetic? “It is a divorce, Jane. Good guess. Can you help me?”

  With just a touch of sympathy, she said, “Oh, Randle, it’s not a seller’s market. What’s your payoff balance?”

  I told her.

  “You’re not going to make any money on it. You know that, right?”

  “I know, but in the short term I can’t afford it and in the long term I’ll want to do something different. Give you some more business.”

  “I always appreciate the business. We can sell it, but to break even will take six to nine months.”

  That won’t work. “Can’t we do it any faster?”

  “I could dump it on a speculator. They’re everywhere now, gobbling up cheap property. When the market turns, they’ll bulldoze your place and build a multistory mansion for a profit.”

  “How long would that take? To dump it?”

  “Do you have fifty thousand dollars to put into the deal?”

  “I do, actually,” I said, thinking of the CD in my name.

  “Two or three weeks. Maybe sooner.”

  I quickly calculated the timing relative to the scheduled mediation. It seemed the only solution and it could just work, so I said, “Okay, dump it.”

  Intending to soften Carrie up before mediation, I wrote Tony another email that would get forwarded to Carrie’s shadylady44 account.

  Tony,

  I’ve canvassed the boat owners on my dock and several confirmed they had seen Carrie at the boat with a man. I’ve created a list of the people we can depose. The list is attached.

  Randle

  There was no such list of witnesses, so the mail was sent “naked.” I imagined Carrie checking my account hourly to find the next email that would transmit the missing list of witnesses. I imagined her phoning our boat dock neighbors to find the traitors who were willing to testify against her. The ruse cheered me up.

  Sunday afternoon, instead of taking Glenda out on the boat, I drove all the way to Lakeland, to Glenda’s mother’s house, for an afternoon of chitchat and an early dinner. I didn’t want to expose Glenda to any highjinks on the water.

  Glenda’s mother, Ruth, made me feel like the prodigal son returning home. Together with my accomplice, enjoying the company of family, it felt like we were Bonnie and Clyde, on the lamb, and excitedly in love. Glenda was in a good mood because Wesley had agreed to settlement terms. She’d be single within thirty days. The best part of the day, however, was dinner. Ruth served fried oysters, fried okra, fried corn, black-eyed peas, and jalapeño cornbread. That’s the way I wanted to eat, right up until a fat-induced heart attack ended my blissful life.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I slid out of bed, padded into the galley, and used the Keurig to make a cup of coffee. With the coffee in hand, I climbed up to the aft cabin and watched the gulls and the kingfishers hunt their breakfa
st. After three days in the small spaces of the boat, claustrophobia had burrowed into my skull like a rat gnawing through a tenement wall. Loneliness intensified the sensation. Although our time together at the country house had been spent evading each other or spying on each other or claiming defensive positions in case of an attack, we were not lonely. Our mutual antipathy fueled our lives and filled them with purpose. Disgust and revulsion honed my senses and sharpened my concentration. Now, I couldn’t work. For hours on end I gazed at the Bay, stared at the boats, replayed the events that led to a disastrous marriage and a traumatic divorce.

  Finally, in the middle of the afternoon, Tony called. “Judge Smithson approved our Baker Act petition and ordered a show cause hearing on the 25th of September.”

  Three days before mediation. “Fantastic, Tony. Will the examination happen before mediation?”

  “No way, Randle, but if an examination is ordered, your wife will come to the negotiating table with her arm in a hammerlock. That ought to please you. Just wanted to let you know that de Castro has been informed of the hearing and your wife will know soon enough.”

  I did my happy dance all around the confined spaces of the aft cabin and realized that in addition to enjoying the sparring match, I was elated over the prospect of the divorce. I had wanted a divorce all along, but I had lacked the courage to admit defeat and take action.

  That evening, with a cigar and glass of port in hand, I checked my cloud account to see if there was any chatter about the Baker Act exam or if Carrie had found my last email about dock witnesses. Negative. She had spent considerable time on Facebook, posting messages on other people’s walls and uploading photos of her dog, but there was no communication with her lawyer or with any boyfriends. Odd.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  As the young parent of a precocious and headstrong girl, I had asked my father how I should judge my parenting skills. Parenthood, he told me, is a job with modest goals. If Jamie reached the age of eighteen without going to jail, getting pregnant, or becoming a drug addict, he said I could congratulate myself for a job well done. The truth is that her mother and I had had little to do with how Jamie turned out. We fed her, loved her, protected her from the worst dangers of childhood, but we did little to shape her character. The highly moral, disciplined, college-educated Tampa cop she became was all her own doing.