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“Well, this is a fine time to tell me, Lucille. I'm only talking to you on the phone right now because my book is done.”
    “And so you don't care if it's wrong?”
    That stings, so I bite back. “And maybe you're a sore loser, Tony.”
    “Touché. I'm asking you to come see me, Marie.”

    “Tony, I described you as a giant among men.”
    “Yeah, but that's just an intellectual giant.”
    “No, no. I left it to the readers to assess your height relative to the ground and your intelligence relative to the defense.”
    Over the phone, he snorts. “So since I got one conviction and lost the other, that means I come off as half-witted and midsized, is that what you're trying to tell me?”
    I laugh. “I believe you called me first?”
    “Repeatedly! Where the hell you been, girl?”
    Tony's got a husky voice that I love to listen to in trials. It gives everything he says a slightly flirtatious edge, which is no handicap in a courtroom. I've told him that I think it makes him sound like law is only his day job, and singing blues in a smoky bar is his real profession, but he claims he can't carry a tune. As usual, he sounds both friendly and businesslike, an overworked lawyer with too many trials to conduct at one time. As far as the practice of law goes, Florida is no state for the lazy.
    “I go into a cave when I'm finishing a book. T'sup?”
    “It stinks, Marie.”
    I figure he's not talking about my work habits. I'm guessing he means the surprise outcome of the double trial he just prosecuted. A single jury convicted one defendant in the Susanna Wing murder trial—the preacher—but it set the courtroom and the media atwitter by acquitting the other one—his lover. It always infuriates prosecutors to lose at trial, but Tony was truly incensed in the hallways after this one. It appears he has not cooled off very much since then.
    “Well, Tony, if they didn't both do it—”
    “Are you saying you doubt it?”
    “Who cares what I think, Tony? Or what you think, either, now.” I won't insult him by soft-pedaling what I see as the truth. “In the end, you only had circumstantial evidence and hearsay on Artemis, and your codefendant refused to rat her out. The jury didn't buy it, and if I'd been on that jury I wouldn't have bought it, either.”

    “Always a pleasure. But you lost, Tony. Why can't you give it up?”
    “Oh, for chrissake, this isn't about me! It's about justice! It's about warning other people about a murderer who got out of jail free. It's about—” Suddenly he laughs, a short, sharp, cynical bark. “Public safety.”
    In the end, of course, I give him the appointment he wants.
    We agree to meet in his office at the county courthouse tomorrow morning. In the casual tone of a mere afterthought, I inquire, “You going to ask Franklin to sit in?” I mean Franklin DeWeese, his boss, the state's attorney. There's a pause that I can't interpret before Tony says, “No, why should I? I hadn't considered it. Is there some reason you want him to be here?”
    “No, no, I just wondered.”
    I hang up quickly. Before I can hang myself.
    Then I return calls to the diehard supporters of the Reverend Bob Wing. They're as unhappy as Tony, and as unwilling to let this thing die, albeit for a different reason. They want publicity, too, but for their cause of saving their preacher from the death penalty. Don't these people understand that after a jury says guilty or not guilty it's supposed to be over? But that's disingenuous of me, isn't it? I have written about enough homicides to know that murder is a rock thrown into the pool of life. For some people, it disrupts the current forever, creating ripples that only seem to get bigger and wider as the years go by—as it probably did for the friends and family of a young woman in Lauderdale Pines whose murder was oddly and loosely connected to the death of Susanna Wing.

Anything to Be Together
    By Marie Lightfoot
     
    CHAPTER 3
     
     
     
     
    It was only