Bad Bitch (11 page)

“You never really answered my question. Why do you call me that?” I lay still, content in his arms.

“First, it’s part of your name, so it’s a legit nickname.”

“Sure,” I agreed, already drowsing a bit.

“Second, the moment I saw you in that bar, I knew you were a fallen angel, sent to tempt me.”

I turned over and nestled into the hollow of his neck, breathing him in. He was a sweet talker, all right.

“Total bullshit,” I whispered.

“No, I’m serious.”

“You can’t tell a girl something like that and ever expect to get rid of her.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for, angel.”

I left Vinnie alone the next morning. He’d work faster if I was a nebulous threat, skirting around his periphery. Besides, I’d rolled into work two hours late, so I couldn’t exactly jump his ass with a straight face.

I’d slept so well the night before, even with the worry of betrayal hanging over my head. Maybe Lincoln had chloroformed me with that scent of his. Like a secret weapon he used against overwrought, wobbly-kneed women who cried all over him while accusing him of first-degree douchebaggery. Whatever it was, I liked it and wanted more.

Jena greeted me with a slew of papers in one hand and copious notes about missed calls. As per her usual, she tripped on the edge of a rug on her way in and sent the sheaves of paper flying. I tapped my toe as I watched her pick it all up. Sheet by sheet, reordering everything. Tap, tap, tap. This was fun.

Finally she rose and straightened her bright summer blouse—worn in the spring, of course. She read off a litany of calls I needed to return. I enjoyed correcting her on each mispronunciation, like a primary school teacher with a chronically slow student.

But the last name on the list made me stop imagining new ways to make Jena cry. Leon DiSalvo.

I waved her out of my office.

“But I have all these filings,” she protested.

“I don’t give a fuck. Out. Now!”

She scampered away.

What the fuck did
DiSalvo
want from me?

DiSalvo had been the client who’d established my white-collar practice. His money built the walls of my firm, paid for the first couple of years of rent, and made me one of the most sought-after fixers for powerful men with dirty money.

Through his influence, I’d become the go-to attorney for white-collar criminals in this city. DiSalvo’s money and influence formed the bedrock of my bank accounts. Of my original cache of clients, only Nettles and Tottorio were still in play, though they were moving toward more lawful ventures and needed me less and less. DiSalvo hadn’t needed me in years. He lived in Cuba now, a guest of the state, courtesy of my efforts. He’d passed his “business” down to a son who had lawyered up with his husband. Keeping it in the family.

When I met Leon Disalvo, he’d been under indictment for racketeering, money laundering, securities fraud—you name it, he was indicted for it. But I wasn’t representing him. Not yet.

Instead, I was counsel for one of his underlings, an enforcer who’d caught a murder charge for a particularly violent affair in a New York City sex dungeon. Clarence Sherman had killed a hooker and painted the walls with her blood. He was arrested like that, sitting in a pool of blood and rubbing it into his skin like lotion. I shivered just remembering the slight smile that played on his twisted lips when he told me about what he’d done to his victim during our first attorney-client meeting. Sick fuck.

DiSalvo didn’t give two shits about Sherman and didn’t care if he went down for the crime. I got appointed in the game of public-defender roulette that passed for justice. Back then, I was fresh out of law school. I was an optimist. I was a public defender who would defend the defenseless against the crushing wheel of the state, give indigents a proper defense, use my legal degree to help those that needed me the most—in other words, lawyer the ever-loving fuck out the deserving downtrodden.

Sherman wasn’t the client I imagined when I arrived, dewy-eyed, on the New York legal scene. He wasn’t down on his luck. He was a psychopath with mommy issues.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, being appointed his attorney was the first step in my rise to power, or maybe my downfall, depending on how I looked at it. Pre-Sherman me? Downfall. Post-Sherman me? Sky’s the fucking limit.

The killer threatened me at every opportunity and made it clear that if I told anyone or tried to stop being his attorney, he’d make me pay. I took him at his word. I was afraid. Beyond afraid, I was living in mortal terror of the hulking beast that sat across from me in the county lockup. He could have sprung across the table and snapped my neck before the guard finished flicking the booger from his fingertip. Sherman was a straight-up killer, one with no mercy or regret.

Based on the fact that Sherman was found playing in the hooker’s blood the way a kid plays with sprinkler water, the county prosecutor felt like he could try the first-degree murder case in his sleep. He offered several deals—none of them good, none of which I took. I had to take my chances with a jury. I needed Sherman free or locked up for life without parole. Anything in between and I ran the risk of my insides becoming his next finger-painting.

Thank God “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a devious bitch. She will undermine even an ironclad case. I had dealt with the beauty of reasonable doubt before I defended Sherman, but I made it my religion when I realized what would happen to me if I didn’t get the job done for him. I silently worshipped at the altar of reasonable doubt for four whole days while the State put on its case.

The prosecutor gave a colorful show, mostly done in swaths of crimson. Photos on the drop-down big screen of the hooker, her eyes dead and staring. Sherman’s booking photo, dried blood on his mouth. Of course, the forensics geeks were able to positively match the blood he’d drunk to the pond on the floor and what was left in her veins. He’d slit her wrists and let her bleed out. The cuts were to the bone, deep enough to get the biggest payload.

DiSalvo sat through the whole thing, one of a few people in the gallery. He was just another interested citizen, or maybe an escapee from an assisted living facility out to get some true-crime inspiration for his great American novel. I didn’t pay him any real attention. He seemed harmless, like a grampa. His white hair fluffed around his head in a friendly manner. He smiled on cue, acted like a normal human being would. I bet he even tried on a horrified look as the coroner went through how the victim died, how much pain she was in, what she would have felt, how cold she would have been from blood loss. You would never guess that DiSalvo, the little old man in the back row, had blood colder than any corpse.

He was only there to ensure nothing was said about him or his many enterprises. He was there for the same reason I was. Self-preservation. But he had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t going to let Sherman say a word about anything, much less his work history as a mob enforcer.

After the four days of gore and accusations and evidence, it was my turn to defend the inhuman motherfucker with the swastika tattooed on his arm and a pistol on his neck with
death to bitches
beneath the barrel. He should have been a goner. But I couldn’t let that happen. Self-preservation is the most basic instinct of all. Not sex, not love, not jealousy, not even hate. Keeping your neck out of the noose—or, in my case, out of the hands of a murderer—is a far better motivator than anything else.

It took me one day. One full day of poking holes in the entirety of the State’s case. There were no witnesses. The State couldn’t produce a single person from the scene. The sex club’s other “patrons” scattered the moment they heard the cops were on their way. No one heard her scream—or at least, no one could have differentiated her scream from the myriad others in the adjoining rooms. No one saw him actually take the knife to her. The knife was found next to her body. Only her prints were on it. There was no forensic evidence that he ever touched her. No semen, no skin under her nails, nothing.

I didn’t call any new witnesses, just recalled several of the State’s and made them look like bumbling fools who enjoyed jumping to conclusions.

“Could she have slit her own wrists?”

“Yes.”
Reasonable doubt.

“You don’t know what happened because you weren’t actually there, were you?”

“No.”
Reasonable doubt.

“You didn’t interview anyone at the scene?”

“No.”
Reasonable doubt.

“You have no direct evidence to indicate that my client ever harmed that woman, do you?”

“No.”
Reasonable doubt.

All they had was testimony that he was in her room, sitting in a pool of her blood. That sounds like a lot. That sounds like a case that’s a sure winner. It isn’t. Reasonable doubt is a Harsh. Fucking. Mistress.

The five-day trial turned into twelve days of jury deliberation. Every moment the jury was out was a win for me. It wouldn’t save my life, of course. Sherman’s hairy knuckles would still choke the life from me if they came back with a guilty verdict. But the wait was a good sign. If there was even one stickler, one moron on the jury who’d bought my impassioned arguments about lack of evidence and shoddy police work, I was golden. A hung jury was a win.

I lived in constant fear. Seventeen days of nightmares, little food, and no peace. Sherman came to embody that fear. I couldn’t look at him without shuddering. So I didn’t. I kept my eyes ahead. If the jury realized I loathed him, it was over. I internalized it all. Kept the fear hidden away where it ate at me slowly, dissolving my insides like a hungry spider. I waited those twelve days, dreading every second more than the last, for my reprieve or my death sentence.

When the jury finally came back, my day of reckoning had arrived. We stood as the foreman rendered the verdict.

Not guilty.

Sherman only nodded at me. I didn’t care. I was going to live for another day, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to touch me. He was free to go on his vicious way, and I was free to keep breathing.

The prosecutor wouldn’t even shake my hand. I didn’t blame him. All the same, though, I didn’t make the rules. I didn’t set up the altar of reasonable doubt. I just worshipped her along with everyone else. But my stakes were even higher. I was the one who would be offered to her as a sacrifice if I couldn’t free the demon sitting next to me.

DiSalvo stopped me on the way out of the courtroom. He
congratulated
me. He said he saw something in me. In hindsight, I knew that he saw something he thought he could use. That’s what people like him were at their core, users.

“Your card, Ms. Pallida?” he asked.

I gave it to him. I didn’t know who he was or what he did. But a client was a client. I had to keep my lights on. I had to eat.

“I’ll keep Sherman on a leash from now on. You won’t ever see him again.”

This little grampa was telling me that he could control the murdering psycho who’d promised my death on several occasions. In the holding cell, walking to the courtroom, under his breath during jury breaks. This old man had no chance of controlling that mad dog.

I wanted to vomit. The fear was no longer in its cage. It had walked free, just like Sherman.

“Forgive me if that doesn’t really give me the warm fuzzies,” I said.

“I assure you. I can manage him.” He took my card. He looked more closely at my face, no doubt noticing the dark circles under my eyes. “Has he done something to you? Threatened you?”

I threw a glance back to Sherman. He was standing at the counsel table, looking at me with murder in his eyes. I almost pissed myself.

I hurried out, ignoring the reporters and photographers taking my photograph and asking me for comment on the case. Instead of giving them the tale of triumph they wanted, I paid for a cab to my shithole of an apartment, ran upstairs, and locked myself inside. I collapsed against the door. The shudders racked me as I cried. I cried for so long that I began dry heaving. I hadn’t eaten in days. The fear wouldn’t let me.

I hid for a week. The terror didn’t abate, even though I knew I’d done what I had to do. Every footstep in the hallway, every yell on the street below—I just knew it was Sherman. He was coming for me. He was going to do to me what he’d done to that poor woman, the same bloodletting, the same desecration. I had no one to turn to. I was utterly alone.

A knock at my door was like a gunshot to my ears. I wanted to hide under my bed or jump from the fire escape.

“Ms. Pallida, it’s Leon DiSalvo, from the courthouse.”

It was the voice of an old man—the white-haired grampa.
How did he find me?

“I called your office, but your voice mail is full. I stopped by, but the man who owns the building said he hasn’t seen you in a week. I’m sorry to say he plans to kick you out on Friday.”

“Shit.” I rose and went to the door. The old man wasn’t a threat. I didn’t open up, though. Even if the pope was on the other side of the door, I wouldn’t have opened. Sherman could have been hiding in His Holiness’s skirt for all I knew, waiting to get me. “I’m here. What do you want?”

“I want you to know that Sherman will no longer be bothering you or anyone.”

I guffawed, though it sounded more like a shriek. “Okay.”
Sure.

“No, I mean it, Ms. Pallida. He’s been dealt with. I don’t take kindly to my staff making threats against officers of the court.” His voice was cold, hard, no longer the friendly grampa.

“What do you mean by ‘dealt with’?”

“Let’s just say he’s taking a long vacation in Jersey. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

It sounded like music to my ears. If that motherfucker was in a shallow grave in the Pine Barrens, then all was right with the world.

“I won’t ask to come in, but I would like to invite you to visit me at my office. Say, next week, Wednesday around one?” An envelope slid under the door, making a whispering sound against the cheap linoleum.

“I don’t know . . .”

“Well, don’t decide now. I look forward to seeing you Wednesday. But if not, then it just wasn’t meant to be, was it?”

Sound logic.

I heard him moving away from the door, his steps creaking on the landing and then tapping down the steps.

I picked up the envelope with shaking hands. Inside was $10,000 and a note.
Pay your rent. Get cleaned up. See you Wednesday. ~ D

I knew now what that money meant. I watched the rays of morning light that cut through the floor-to-ceiling windows of my corner office. The amber warmth hit my mahogany desk, the hardwood floors, the art along the walls, the cushy couches. All paid for in cash. All bankrolled by the work I’d done for DiSalvo, starting with Sherman.