Page 56 of Hello, Summer
Conley spent another ten minutes sitting in the front seat of the Subaru, trying to calm down after the confrontation with Charlie Robinette.
She was still sitting there when he emerged from the bank building and locked the door behind him. She slid down in the seat, hoping he wouldn’t spot her, but he went straight to a car parked at the curb, got in, revved the engine, and quickly backed up and drove off. He was driving a black Porsche Cayenne. When they’d dated all those summers ago, he’d driven a candy-apple-red Porsche 911. Same old Little Prince.
When the Porsche was out of sight, she drove away with more questions swirling around in her brain. Her innocuous questions about the congressman’s death had struck a raw nerve with Charlie. She’d been stupid to bring up their past, but after the searing pain and humiliation of the way he’d treated her all those years ago, the confrontation was inevitable, if unwise. He’d practically thrown her out of his law office. And she hadn’t even gotten around to asking the thing she was most curious about: Why had the family’s official obituary omitted any mention of Symmes Robinette’s other survivors, including his first wife and their children?
She had a lot of research to do, but there was no way she could go back to theBeaconoffice and the (very) temporary work space Graysonhad allocated her. Grateful that she’d brought her laptop along, she drove back to Felicity Street and let herself into G’mama’s house.
While she was setting up her work space on the dining room table, she googled the name of the Panhandle district’s chief medical examiner.
Theodore Moriatakis, she learned, had been appointed to his position by Governor Lawton Chiles in 1995. It was Saturday, but she reasoned that since death doesn’t take weekends off, perhaps the medical examiner’s office didn’t either. She tapped the number listed on the county’s website and wasn’t surprised when her call was routed to voice mail.
The pleasant recorded voice directed her through a series of prompts for all the reasons a caller might need to reach the medical examiner’s office. The last prompt allowed her to leave her name and phone number and the reason she was requesting a callback.
“Hello. My name is Conley Hawkins. I’m a reporter forThe Silver Bay Beacon,and I’m calling to inquire about the cause of death for Symmes Robinette. Please return my call as soon as possible.”
She disconnected and went back to the browser bar, mainly to satisfy her own curiosity.
It didn’t take long to find Symmes’s marriage and divorce records online. In 1962, in Varnedoe, Florida, at the age of nineteen, he’d married Emma Todd Sanderson, age eighteen. Their divorce decree was issued in May 1986. No surprise, Rowena Meigs’s account had been wrong. It had actually taken two days for Charles Symmes Robinette, age forty-three, to marry Vanessa Renee Monck, age twenty-five, in Washington, D.C.
As she’d suspected, there was no way to access Charlie’s birth record. When she checked the District of Columbia’s vital records page, she was informed that birth records could only be accessed by the person in question, a parent, or a legal representative.
On a hunch, she pulled up Charlie’s Facebook page. His profile photo was a professionally done headshot, showing Charlie dressed in a conservative coat and tie.
The Little Prince bore an uncanny resemblance to his father. He had the same slight, receding chin, flat cheekbones, and high forehead. They even shared the same nose.
Charlie wasn’t what she’d call active on the social media site. There were a couple of old postings—Charlie being sworn in to the Florida Bar with his proud father looking on; Charlie at a Tallahassee tailgate party, dressed in a fraternity jersey, clinking a beer bottle with similarly dressed guys; and Charlie, dressed in hunter’s camo, kneeling beside a huge buck he’d killed three years earlier. He hadn’t posted anything new in two years.
On a whim, she typed Vanessa Robinette’s name into the Facebook search bar and was mildly disappointed to see that Vanessa’s account was private.
What now? She drummed her fingertips on the mahogany dining room table and stared absentmindedly at the floral-patterned wallpaper.
What about Symmes Robinette’s house? Skelly, who’d delivered prescriptions there, had described his waterfront mansion in an exclusive gated golf and tennis community as gigantic, worth probably more than $2 million. Again, she was curious about how a country lawyer turned career politician, whose official congressional salary was $174,000, could afford such lavish digs.
Conley navigated to the website for the county’s tax assessor to see if she could look up the value of the congressman’s property. She typed Robinette’s name into the search bar only to be rewarded withNO RESULTS FOUND.
Now what? She really needed Robinette’s address. It wasn’t likely she’d find an elected official’s home address online. She considered calling Skelly but quickly discarded the idea.
She couldn’t even get a plat number to estimate the appraised value of the other homes at Sugar Key without the address of somebody who lived there.
What she needed was what she didn’t have anymore, which was an expensive, expansive database—the kind maintained by a big-city newspaper—much like the one where she’d been most recently employed.
Conley picked up her phone and dialed her former office husband, Butch Culpepper, whose number she knew by heart.
When he answered on the fourth ring, he was out of breath, and sheheard echoing footsteps and muffled shouts and grunts in the background.
“Sare Bear!” he exclaimed. “What’s up?”
“Where are you?” she asked. “It sounds like you’re in a gym or something.”
“I am in a gym.”
“No way,” she said flatly. Butch was the most proudly sedentary human she knew, someone whose idea of a workout was a trip to the refrigerator for another pint of Cherry Garcia.
“Way. Benny’s team is in the NAGVA finals. We’re out in Seattle.”
“What the hell is NAGVA?”
“Sare Bear, we’ve been over this. It’s the North American Gay Volleyball Association. Benny is the star outside hitter.”
