Bitter Truth (9 page)

I mean, why would anyone bother to threaten someone off a case? Why not just put up a neon sign that flashed, “LOOK HERE FOR GOLD?” If I had still had doubts that there was something of interest to be found in Jacqueline Shaw’s death before my run-in with the apostles of the Church of the New Life, I had none anymore. And as I thought about the meeting and about my two new friends, the suspicion that had been hounding me, the suspicion that there was my very own way into the Reddman fortune, suddenly burst into the open and snatched my attention out of the air in its teeth and wrestled it to the ground. The route had been so obvious, so clear, that I hadn’t seen it. And now that I did I felt something ethereal flow through me. I grew light, almost light enough to float. I could barely remain seated in the chair as I felt myself suffused until bursting with the giddy sensation of pure pure possibility.

12

W
HEN I HAD told Gaylord I took a keen professional interest in other people’s tragedy, it hadn’t been just banter. I am a lawyer and so tragedy is my business. Riches lurk for me in the least likely of places, in that dropped package of explosives at the railway depot, in that cup of drive-through coffee that scalds the thighs, in the airplane engine that bursts into a ball of flame mid-flight. Think of your worst nightmare, your most dreaded calamity, think of injury and anguish and death and know that for me it represents only so much profit, for I am your lawyer, the alchemist of your tragedy.

I had seemingly forgotten this, forgotten that one case can make a lawyer wealthy, one client, one fact pattern, one complaint. In delving into the death of Jacqueline Shaw I had belted myself too tightly inside the trench coat of Philip Marlowe and had forgotten that I was a lawyer first and foremost and that a lawyer, first and foremost, looks after the bottom line. You can make money charging $185 an hour, as long as you work like a dog and keep your expenses low, good money, but that’s not how lawyers get stinkingly rich. Lawyers get stinkingly rich by taking a percentage of a huge lawsuit based on somebody else’s tragedy, and that’s exactly what I meant to do.

Caroline Shaw thought someone had murdered her sister, Jacqueline, and had hired me to find out who. After looking it over it seemed to me that she might just be right, and if Jacqueline was murdered I could figure out the motive right off — money, and lots of it. Why ever would you kill an heiress if it wasn’t for the money? Caroline Shaw had only hired me to find the murderer, but I had other ideas. A wrongful death action against the killer would take back whatever had been gained by the killing and whatever else the killer owned, with a third going to the lawyers. All I needed was for Jacqueline Shaw to have been murdered for her money and for me to find the killer and for me to get Caroline to sign a fee agreement and for me to dig up enough evidence to win my case and take my third of the killer’s fortune, which in itself would be a fortune. Long shots all, to be sure, but that never stopped me from returning my Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entry twice a year.

I was on my knees picking up tiny shards of glass and placing them on a piece of cardboard, thinking it all through, when Beth showed up.

“Redecorating?” she asked.

“Just some friendly visitors from the Twilight Zone trying to scare me off the Jacqueline Shaw case.”

“Are you scared off?”

“Hardly.”

I stood up and dumped the glass fragments into the trash can where they tinkled against the sides like fairy dust.

“Think on this, Beth. Eddie Shaw’s money situation seems to have eased right after his sister’s death. And Jacqueline herself told her fiancé that she was afraid one of her brothers was trying to kill her. And somewhere there was a load of insurance money, so said Detective McDeiss. And when I had suggested to Caroline that maybe a family member had killed her sister she had snapped that her family had nothing to do with the death, protesting far too much. I’m not sure how the two losers who threatened me are involved, but what if Eddie killed his sister to increase his income and his ultimate inheritance? And what if we could bring a wrongful death action against the bastard and prove it all?”

“A lot of ifs.”

“Well, what if all those ifs?”

“You’d wipe him out with compensatory and punitive damages,” she said.

“With a third for us. McDeiss estimated the total Reddman fortune at about half a billion dollars. The brother’s share would be well over a hundred million. Let’s say we prove it and win our case and get everything in damages. We’d earn ourselves a third of over a hundred million. That would be about twenty for you and twenty for me.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Yes I am. I’m dreaming the American dream.”

“It probably was a suicide.”

“Of course it was.”

“And if it was a murder, it probably wasn’t the brother who did it.”

“Of course not.”

“It was probably some judgment-proof derelict.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“There’s nothing there. You’re just chasing a fool’s dream.”

“And yet when the pot was sixty-six million you bought ten lottery tickets.”

“So I did,” she said, nodding her head. “Twenty million. It’s too gaudy a number to even consider.”

“I’ve dreamed bigger,” I said, and I had. That was one of the curses of wanting so much, whatever you get can never top your dreams. “How are you on the meaning of life?”

“Pretty weak.”

“Are you willing to learn?”

“Like you have the answers,” she snorted. “Don’t you think karmic questions about life and meaning are a little beyond your depth?”

“You’re calling me shallow?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, sure, yes, but there’s no need to rub it in.”

“Oh, Victor, one thing I always admired about you was your cheerful shallowness. Nothing’s more boring than Mr. Sincere droning on about his life’s search for spiritual meaning in that ashram in Connecticut. Just shut up and get me a beer.”

“Well, maybe I don’t have any answers, but the Church of the New Life says it does. Novice meetings are held every Wednesday night in the basement of some house in Mount Airy. From what her fiancé told me, this was the same place where Jacqueline Shaw meditated the day she died. Somehow, it seems, their connection to her didn’t end with her death. They wanted me to come, but I think I’ll stay away for obvious health reasons. Maybe you can learn something.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris give them a look?”

“I don’t think this is quite right for Morris, do you?” I said, handing her the card.

She studied it. “Maybe not. Who’s Oleanna?”

I shrugged my ignorance.

“Sounds like a margarine. Maybe that’s the secret, low cholesterol as the way to spiritual salvation.”

“You never know, Beth. That something you’ve been looking for your whole life, maybe it’s been hiding out all this time in a rat-infested basement in Mount Airy.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, and then she looked at the card some more. She flicked it twice on her chin before saying, “Sure. Anything for a few laughs.”

Good, that was taken care of, and now I had something even more important to do. What I had was a hope and plan and the sweet lift of pure possibility. What I still needed was Caroline Shaw’s signature on a contingency fee agreement before I could begin the delicate process of spinning the tragedy of Jacqueline Shaw’s death into gold.

13

I
CLEARED OFF my desk before she came, threw out the trash, filed the loose papers whose files I could find, shoved the rest into an already too full desk drawer. Only one manila folder sat neatly upon the desktop. I straightened the photographs on my office wall, arranged the client chairs at perfect obtuse angles one to another, took a plant from Beth’s office and placed it atop my crippled filing cabinet. I had on my finest suit, a little blue worsted wool number from Today’s Man, and a non-Woolworth real silk tie. I had spent a few moments that morning in my apartment, globbing polish onto my shoes and then buffing them to a sharp pasty black. I buttoned my jacket and stood formally at the door and then unbuttoned it and sat on the edge of my desk and then buttoned it again and stood behind my desk, leaning over with one hand outstretched, saying out loud, in rounded oval tones, “Pleased to see you again, Ms. Shaw.”

It was so important to get this right, to make the exactly correct impression. There is a moment in every grand venture when the enterprise teeters on the brink, and I was at that moment. I needed Caroline’s signature, and I needed it today, I believed. With it I had a chance, without it I held as much hope as a lottery ticket flushed down the toilet. That was why I was practicing my greeting like a high school freshman gearing himself to ask the pretty new girl from California to the hop.

“Thank you for coming, Ms. Shaw.”

“I hope this wasn’t too inconvenient, Ms. Shaw.”

“Have a seat, Ms. Shaw.”

“I’m glad you could make it this morning, Ms. Shaw.”

“God, I need a cigarette,” she said, giving me a wry look as she sat, no doubt commenting on my tone of voice, which sounded artificial even to me. She drew a pack from her bag and tapped out a cigarette and lit up without asking if I minded, but I didn’t mind. Anything she wanted. From out of my drawer I pulled an ashtray I had picked up from a bric-a-brac shop on Pine Street specifically for the occasion. Welcome to Kentucky, it read. She flicked a line of ashes atop the red of the state bird.

She was wearing her leather jacket and tight black pants and combat boots. On the side of her neck was the tattoo of a butterfly I hadn’t noticed before. She looked more formidable than I remembered from that morning outside the Roundhouse when she pulled her gun on me and then collapsed to the ground. Even the stud piercing her nose seemed no longer a mark of desperation but instead an insignia of power and brutal self-possession. I felt, despite my finest suit and newly polished shoes, at a distinct disadvantage. It was interesting how things between us had changed. When she first came to me she was the one begging for help, but I guess a hundred million dollars or so can shift the power in any conversation.

“Couldn’t we have done this over the phone?” she asked, exhaling her words in stream of white smoke. “It’s a little early for me.”

“Well then, I appreciate your punctuality. I thought it best we meet in person.” I didn’t explain that it was impossible to get a signature over the phone. “You’ve disposed of your gun, I hope.”

She gave me her sly smile. “I flushed it down the toilet. Some alligator’s probably shooting rats in the sewers as we speak.” She took a long drag and looked around nervously.

“That butterfly on your neck,” I said. “Is that new? I didn’t notice it before.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, suddenly brightening. “It’s from a designer collection, available only at the finest parlors. DK Tattoo. Do you like it?”

I nodded and looked at her more carefully. She said in our prior meeting that she was in fear of her life and so the first thing she did after hiring me was to go out and get herself tattooed. If not exactly an appropriate response it was certainly telling, though I couldn’t quite figure telling of what. As I was looking at her she took out another cigarette.

“Do you always smoke like this?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like a New Jersey refinery.”

“Just in the morning. By the afternoon I’m hacking too much. So what have you learned about my sister’s death, Mr. Carl?”

“I learned that you haven’t been entirely candid with me.”

“Oh, haven’t I?”

I stared at her for a moment, waiting for her to squirm a bit under the power of my gaze, but it didn’t seem to affect her. She stared back calmly. So what I did then was reach into my desk drawer and pull out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills and slap them onto the desktop with a most satisfying thwack. Caroline flinched at the sound. Ben Franklin stared up at me with surprise on his face.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “The full amount of your retainer check. Take it.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, flustered and suddenly devoid of her slyness.

“I’m returning your money.”

She stood up. “But you can’t do that. I bought you. I wrote the check and you cashed it.”

“And now I’m giving it all back,” I said calmly. “You’re going to have to find someone else to play your games. I don’t represent clients who lie to me.” This itself was a lie, actually. All my clients lie to me, it is part of the natural order of the legal profession: clients lie, lawyers overcharge, judges get it wrong.

“But I didn’t lie,” she said, her voice rich with whine. “I didn’t. What I told you about my sister was true. Every word of it. She didn’t kill herself, I know it.” There were tears of shock in her eyes as she pleaded with me. It was going rather well, I thought.

“I believe you’re right, Caroline. I believe your sister was murdered.”

“You do?” she said. “Really?” She fell back into her chair, crossing her legs and hugging herself tightly. “Then what’s the problem?”

“Didn’t you think it significant that I know your sister was a Reddman? Didn’t you think that would have impacted my investigation?”

“My family had nothing to do with her death.”

“That’s what you hired me to determine.”

She looked at me, her eyes still wet. “I hired you to find out which mob bastard killed my sister and to convince him not to kill me too. That’s all. I don’t need anyone digging up my family graveyard.”

“If I’m going to find a murderer I have to know everything. I have to know about your family, about the family fortune, about this Church of the New Life that sent its goons into my office threatening me off the case.”

Her head lifted at that and she smiled. “So that’s it. The chant-heads frightened you.”

“Why would they threaten me?”

“You want to have a blast? Throw a brown paper bag in the middle of one of their meditation sessions and yell, ‘Meat!’ ”

“Why would they threaten me, Caroline?”

Pause, and then in the most matter-of-fact voice: “Maybe because their church was the beneficiary of Jackie’s insurance policy.”

I looked at her and waited. The room was already dense with smoke, but she took out another Camel Light.

“We all have insurance policies, to help pay our estate taxes should we die. The trust covers the premiums and the family members are named beneficiaries, unless we decide otherwise. Jacqueline decided to name the church.”

“How much?”

“God, not much, I don’t think, not enough to cover even half the tax. Five.”

“Thousand?”

She laughed, a short burst of laughter.

“Million,” I said flatly.

She stared at me for a bit and then her mouth wiggled at the corners. “Are you married, Mr. Carl?”

“No.”

“Engaged or engaged to be engaged or gay?”

“I was once.”

“Gay?”

“Engaged.”

“So what happened?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“They never do, Vic. Can I call you Vic?”

“Call me Victor,” I said. “Vic makes me sound like a lounge singer.”

“All right, Victor.” She leaned forward and gave me a smile saucy and innocent all at once. The effect of this smile was so disarming that I had to shake my head to get my mind back to the vital business at hand.

“Didn’t you think, Caroline, that a five-million-dollar life insurance policy was important enough to tell me about? I can’t work in the dark.”

“Well, now you know everything, so take your money back.”

“No.”

“Take it.”

“I won’t.”

It was almost ludicrous, arguing like that over a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Any other situation I would have knocked her to the floor while grabbing for it, but this wasn’t any other situation. She stared at me and I stared at her and we were locked in a contest of wills I would win because I wanted something ever so much more than she. It was time to lay it out for her. I fought to keep my nerves from snapping.

“I’m not willing to continue under the old arrangement,” I said, “not with the way you withheld crucial information from me. If we’re to go forward together it will have to be different.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There is a type of legal action that is perfectly designed to cover this situation. It is a civil proceeding and it is called wrongful death. If I’m going to continue to work on your behalf I will only do it as your partner in the prosecution of such a suit on a contingency fee basis.”

“Ahh,” she said, crossing her arms, leaning back, taking a long inhale from her cigarette. “Now I understand,” she said and I could tell that she did. I suppose the very rich see the look I had just then more often than is seemly, the baleful gleam of want in the eyes of those they do business with. I wonder if it wearies them with its inevitability or thrills them with reassurance of their power and privilege.

“One third for our firm if it settles before trial,” I explained. “Forty percent if I have to try it, which goes into effect once we impanel a jury. But money’s not the issue,” I lied. “Finding the truth is the issue. If you level with me, I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of your sister’s death.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said with an edge in her voice, as if she were talking to a somewhat unpleasant servant. “You already have.”

It was an awkward moment, but that is inevitable, really, when one’s business is tragedy. She was looking for help, I was looking for a gross profit, how could it be otherwise?

“I have the appropriate documents right here,” I said, indicating the manila folder on my desktop. “If you’ll just read them carefully and sign, we can continue our relationship as I’ve outlined.”

I pushed the file toward her and watched as she opened it and read the fee agreements. I had already signed where I was required to sign; all that was wanting was her signature. As she read, nodding here and there, I barely stifled a desire to get down on my knees and polish her boots. I was certain it was all taken care of when she suddenly closed the folder and dropped it back onto my desk.

“No,” she said.

My stomach fell like a gold bar sinking in the sea.

“Sorry, Victor,” she said. “No.”

“But why not? It’s a standard agreement. Why not? Why not?”

She stood and slipped me that sly smile of hers. “Because you want it too much.”

Out of watering eyes I stared at her with horror as she picked the wad of hundred-dollar bills off my desk and shoved it into a pocket of her leather jacket. The lottery ticket swirled round the toilet bowl to the drain.

“All I wanted you to do,” she said, “was to prove that Jimmy Vigs killed my sister. Was that too hard?”

“But Jimmy didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked him.”

“Nice work, Victor,” she said as she turned to leave.

Panic. Say something, Victor, anything.

“But what if I’m right and it wasn’t the mob? What if it was something much closer? I’ve been asking around, Caroline. The Reddmans, I’ve been told, are a family dark with secrets.”

She stopped, her back still to me, and said, “My family had nothing to do with it.”

“So you’ve said. Every time I mention the possibility that your family is involved in your sister’s death you simply deny it and try to change the topic of conversation. Why is that, Caroline?”

She turned and looked at me. “I get enough of that question from my therapist. I don’t need it from my lawyer, too.”

Her lawyer. There was still hope. “But what if one of those dark family secrets is behind your sister’s death?”

As she stared at me something at once both ugly and wistful slipped onto her face, a mix of emotions far beyond her range as an actress. Then she walked right up to my desk and started unbuttoning her shirt.

I was taken aback until she reached inside her shirt and pulled out some sort of a medallion hanging on a chain from her neck. She slipped the chain over her head and threw the medallion on my blotter. It was a cross, ancient-looking, green and encrusted, disfigured by time and the elements. In the upper corners of the cross, sharp-pointed wings jutted out, as if a bird had been crucified there.

“That is the Distinguished Service Cross,” she said. “It was awarded to my grandfather, Christian Shaw, for gallantry in World War I. He led an attack over the trenches in the first American battle of the war and routed the Germans almost single-handedly. My grandmother dredged it from the pond on our family estate after his death. She gave this medal to me one afternoon as we sat together in her garden and said she wanted me to have it.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“My grandmother told me that this medal symbolized more than mere heroism. Whatever crimes in our family’s past, she said, whatever hurts inflicted or sins committed, whatever, this medal was evidence, she said, that the past was dead and the future full of promise. Conciliation, she said, expiation, redemption, they were all in that medal.”

Those were the same three words the old lady had used with Grimes. I couldn’t help but wonder: conciliation to whom, expiation for what, redemption how?

“So all those rumors and dark secrets and gossip, I don’t care,” she continued. “They have nothing to do with Jacqueline and nothing to do with me. The past is dead.”

“If you believe that, then why do you still wear this medal around your neck?”

“A memento?” she said, her voice suddenly filled with uncertainty.

I shook my head.

She sat down and took her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross back from me. She stared at it for a while, examining it as if for the first time. “My therapist says my ailurophobia comes from deep-seated fears about my family. She says my family is cold and manipulative and uncaring and until I am able to face the truth I will continue to sublimate my true feelings into irrational fears.”