High Country Fall

CHAPTER 16

Afternoon court gave me a type of case I’d never had before when Gerald Tuzzolino, a retired Miami dentist, and his wife, Elizabeth, a tax attorney in a private Miami practice, took their seats at the defense table. Both wore beautifully tailored suits. I don’t know Armani from Anderson, but his didn’t look as if it’d been found on a rack at Sears, and hers was definitely high-end, too—a bronze raw silk that flattered her brunette coloring. They were charged with four separate counts of receiving stolen property. The actual thief was currently serving a sentence in the county jail, a short sentence because the Tuzzolinos might never have been caught had he not voluntarily come forward and informed on them.

Although the four counts could have been combined and tried in superior court, I was guessing that Lucius Burke wanted to avoid letting a jury decide whether to believe a known felon or the respectable-looking Tuzzolinos.

As laid out by the prosecution, Mr. and Mrs. Tuzzolino, who were fifty-one and forty-four, respectively, had bought a $900,000 house last year in High Windy, one of the first gated communities built in Lafayette County when it was still legal to put houses on the very top of ridges. I remembered that it was one of the Osborne properties that Joyce Ashe had spoken of with awe, so I looked at the Tuzzolinos with renewed interest. Nine hundred thousand for a summer home?

As alleged by the State, Mrs. Tuzzolino had met Ross Watson, a convicted thief, when he was doing his community service at the public library in Howards Ford this past May. She had stopped to ask him about the flowers he was tending and, impressed by his knowledge of local horticulture, had hired him to jazz up the borders at her place in Windy Ridge.

“Did you tell her about your criminal record?” asked William Deeck, who was prosecuting that afternoon.

“Yes, sir,” said the unsavory-looking Watson. His nose appeared to have been broken several times and two of his front teeth were missing. “She said it didn’t matter. She just wanted nicer flowers than the management company provided.”

Unfortunately, Mrs. Tuzzolino’s taste for nicer things did not stop with summer flowers. She had seen a six-hundred-dollar raku vase at an art gallery here in Cedar Gap that would look wonderful on the hearth in her bedroom. There was an eight-hundred-dollar handstitched quilt in a crafts store over in Justin that would be the perfect accent to hang from the railing of an upper landing overlooking their great room. And on one of their bargain hunting forays, Dr. Tuzzolino’s fancy had been caught by a bronze statuette of a black bear fishing for trout in a mountain stream. The antiques store called it a steal at seven hundred.

So Watson stole it for him.

He also stole the quilt and vase she wanted.

According to Watson, their falling-out had come when Mrs. Tuzzolino tried to jerk him around on paying him what they’d agreed to. When he balked, she threatened to put the items in her garage and tell the police that he’d stashed them there without her knowledge.

“She said, ‘Who do you think they’re going to believe? A convicted thief or an attorney with a platinum American Express card?’”

Despite many objections from Mrs. Tuzzolino, who was acting as attorney for herself and her husband, Watson testified that he’d been told that if he’d bring her the nicely weathered teak bench that sat in the garden at the Mountain Laurel Restaurant, a bench that originally retailed for over a thousand dollars, she would pay him in full and they’d call it quits.

“That’s when I decided to talk to my parole officer, and she took me to talk to Mr. Burke and Captain Underwood.”

“That’s Captain George Underwood from the sheriff’s department here?” asked Deeck.

“Yessir.”

With the Mountain Laurel’s cooperation, they had loaded the bench into Watson’s pickup and the Tuzzolinos were arrested when they paid for the bench after Watson gleefully described to them how he and his good buddy George here had managed to get it out of the Mountain Laurel’s garden without being seen.

“And I was right,” Watson said, the empty spaces between his teeth flashing triumphantly. “They didn’t give me but half what was owing.”

“Your Honor,” said the assistant DA, “it was my intention to call Captain George Underwood at this point, but I’ve been told—”

At that moment, Underwood entered the side door, so he was immediately called to the stand, sworn in, and his testimony confirmed Watson’s. Underwood further testified that upon his securing a search warrant, the quilt, the vase, and the statuette had been identified as stolen goods by their respective owners, who had all filed reports earlier. “There were other suspicious items of value in the house that the Tuzzolinos couldn’t provide receipts for, but since we couldn’t identify the original owners, we had to leave them.”

“Objection!” cried Mrs. Tuzzolino. “That’s an unwarranted allegation.”

“Sustained,” I agreed.

She dragged out the cross-examination for ten more minutes, then, when the State rested its case, she took the stand herself and asserted that she hadn’t known the goods were stolen. She had bought them in good faith and in utter trust, and no, she had no idea that Watson had ever served time for felony theft. As for the teak bench, Underwood’s actions amounted to entrapment.

I had heard enough.

I found the Tuzzolinos guilty as charged. “What is the State asking, Mr. Deeck?”

Deeck stood and looked at me over the top of those rimless glasses. In his dry monotone, he said, “Your Honor, these are people who could afford to buy everything that they asked Mr. Watson to steal for them. As Mrs. Tuzzolino herself was so quick to say, she carries platinum charge cards in her wallet. Given the ongoing nature of their criminal enterprise, the State would like to see a fine commensurate to the crime, over and above restitution, and it would not be overkill to require supervision beyond the presumptive period of incarceration.”

Mrs. Tuzzolino was clearly appalled. “Your Honor—!”

I motioned for her to stand. “Before I pass sentence, Mrs. Tuzzolino, do you or your husband have anything you would like to say to this court?”

Throughout the entire proceedings, Dr. Tuzzolino had sat at the defense table looking interested but not terribly involved, so I was not surprised that he just gazed at me blankly and that it was his wife who rose to speak for both of them.

With tears in her eyes, she explained that her husband was suffering from Parkinson’s, which is why he had been forced to take early retirement. “A dentist has to have steady hands.”

I glanced over at Dr. Tuzzolino, and now that I looked more closely at his hands as they lay on the table in front of him, I could see that he did indeed seem to have a slight tremor.

“Medication is keeping it under control for now, but when he was diagnosed last year he went into a deep depression.” Earnestly she explained that after buying a second home up here in these cool and beautiful hills, away from the heat and bustle of Miami, he was almost his old self.

“He’ll never get better, but his downhill progress has slowed,” she said. “I discovered that nice things lift his spirit, help him not feel so depressed. That’s why I was so ready to buy from Mr. Watson without asking a lot of questions. Since my husband’s retirement, it’s gotten harder and harder to make ends meet, and Mr. Watson seemed to offer a solution.”

“You have a home in Miami?”

She nodded.

“Palm Beach?” I hazarded.

“No.” A suggestion of disdain passed across her face. “The Gables.”

“The Gables?”

“Coral Gables,” she admitted reluctantly. “That’s where my practice is.”

Images of wide, winding streets, royal palms, pools, and oak-shaded tennis courts floated through my mind. “That’s quite a wealthy area, too, isn’t it?”

“I guess. It’s not Star Island, but it’s much more historical. Our house isn’t directly on the water, though.” She could see where this was going and was clearly torn between begging poverty and enlightening the ignorant about life in “the Gables.”

“When your husband retired, did he sell his dental practice?”

She nodded. “But he got nothing close to what it was worth. He was in a partnership with a younger dentist, who couldn’t afford to buy him out. His key-man insurance—”

“His what?” I interrupted, not catching the term since she’d run the words together.

“Key, man,” she repeated, enunciating each word separately.

Instantly, I thought of the insurance my cousin Reid and I had carried on my older cousin John Claude when we first restructured our law firm after Reid’s dad retired. A “key-man” policy covers the death of someone who is key to the success of a business enterprise or professional partnership, as John Claude was to two young attorneys like Reid and me.

“It paid out to the partnership only if my husband died, not if he got sick.”

Mrs. Tuzzolino’s voice turned bitter as she described how his partner claimed that without that insurance money he couldn’t afford to buy her husband’s percentage of the business. He’d threatened to declare bankruptcy if they tried to hold him to the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, another familiar term from my own partnership.

Even though he was our rainmaker at the start, John Claude had declared his faith in our potential by splitting the partnership into three equal shares. If he’d died, the key-man insurance would have paid us a third of the firm’s worth, which wouldn’t have made up for his loss. On the plus side however, if he’d become sick or incapacitated, Reid and I would only have had to come up with a third to buy him out under the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, not the half John Claude was probably worth at the time.

“We had to dissolve the partnership and sell out,” said Mrs. Tuzzolino, “but it was a bloody fire sale.”

My heart bled. Poor lady. Two expensive homes to keep up? Having to scrape along on whatever few pennies they’d managed to save from two high-yield careers?

“I’m willing to pay restitution and a fine, Your Honor, but I’m begging you, woman to woman, to suspend any active sentence you were thinking of imposing.” A tear trickled slowly down her smooth cheek. (Botox or plastic surgery?) “My husband needs me. If you separate us, he could sink back into depression. Maybe even harm himself.”

“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but life is full of choices and you made yours when you chose Mr. Watson to be your personal shopper.”

I ordered a mental health evaluation for Dr. Tuzzolino and sentenced them both to a total of eight months, six of it suspended to five years of supervised probation. In addition to restitution, I added up the value of the stolen goods—three thousand dollars if I counted the teak bench as worth nine hundred—and fined them nine thousand dollars.

Her tears disappeared as quickly as they had come. She coolly gave notice of appeal, and I set their bond at a hundred thousand.

After that, I needed a break and one of May’s cinnamon rolls to get the taste of Mrs. Tuzzolino out of my mouth.