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.
CHAPTER 17
Within moments of recessing, I heard some of the rumors swirling through the halls back of the courtroom. They said Norman Osborne had been found somewhere below Joyce and Bobby Ashe’s house. He had tripped over the railing on the lower terrace and banged his head. He had been beaten to death. He had been knifed. He had collapsed from a heart attack. Take your pick. The only thing everyone agreed on was that he was dead.
