Defense for the Devil (4 page)

“I said as early as I could,” she murmured, setting her briefcase down, letting her shoulder bag slide to the floor.

4

When she closed
the bedroom door without a sound the next morning, she saw the clutter that she had overlooked the night before. It was worse than ever. At her office door she stopped, rigid with rage. He had moved her desktop computer to the side and put two of his file drawers on her desk. She went to shower and took a long time, willing her anger to ebb and flow out with the water.

He had to work, he had said days ago. It had been months since he had done any serious work. He would get to the stuff as soon as he could; every day he would get more of it stowed away, but he had to work.

Every day he unearthed more junk, and nothing vanished.

The shower had helped some, she thought, wrestling the card table out from behind a box. She set up the table in the kitchen space, started a pot of coffee, and retrieved her laptop from the floor where she had placed it the day before. In spite of herself, she had to smile at the briefcase and purse just inside the door.
All right,
she told herself,
just go with it for now.

She had finished her notes and was working on a plan of action when John came from the bedroom, naked.

“How can it be? You look as good at eight in the morning as at midnight.” He kissed the top of her head and was in the process of turning her chair toward him when she pushed him back.

“Working,” she said as lightly as she could. “Can’t it wait?”

“No. Go take a shower.”

“In a minute. You know that Staley mine I told you about? The assholes are challenging my findings! I spent hours trying to find my original notes and pictures.”

She looked at her monitor. Her hand had been on the keyboard; nearly a whole page of
Fs
filled the screen. “Shit!”

“My thought exactly,” he said, pouring coffee. He carried it out with him through the little hallway to the bathroom. She heard the shower.

After cleaning up the
Fs,
she sat staring at the last work she had keyed in,
Trassi,
then had to backtrack in an attempt to recover her train of thought. Where was his office? Who were his clients?

John returned with a towel around him. Water dripped on her arm as he passed her. Very carefully, she saved her work and closed the laptop.

“Don’t go,” he said. “You’re not in the way. Want some scrambled eggs?”

Standing up, keeping her voice calm with great effort, she said, “What’s all that stuff on my desk?”

“What stuff?” He went to look, then said, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I was looking for that Staley file. I’ll get it off today.”

“But you thought it was perfectly all right to put it there. I can’t go in my own office and use my own desk, close my own door. And you say I’m not in the way.”

“Hey,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. Can’t you use the downtown office today? Or your father’s place?”

Still unnaturally quiet, she said, “I’ve tried hard to keep my private business out of the office. Today I
have
to go there because I don’t have anywhere else.” Her voice rose and she stood up. “And I hardly think it’s my father’s responsibility to provide me with working space.”

“Barbara, Christ, what else can I say except I’m sorry. Can’t you put off working until we get things better organized?”

“My office
was
organized, but I can’t use it.” She picked up her briefcase and purse. “I have to go.”

She started for the door, then stopped and spun around to face him. “Oh, my God,” she said. “We’re fighting.”

He nodded miserably, and this time when he tried to hold her, she did not resist. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Frustration, I guess.”

“My fault. I just kept thinking of that damn Staley file. I’m really sorry.”

“Okay.” His arms tightened around her. “I really do have to go.” Drawing back from him, she touched his lips with her fingertip. “Not much of a fight, slugger. We’ll do better next time.”

He shook his head. “No next time. Back early?”

“As early as I can.”

She sat in her car for a minute or two. Go, but where? Eventually she had to go to the courthouse and do a little research, and she had to get to a phone and call Ruthie at Frank’s downtown firm, and she had to call her father, and…
Oh, cut it out,
she told herself then. She headed for her father’s house.

When he met her at the door, a huge smile crossed his face instantly. “Bobby! Just in time for some breakfast.”

Not
How are you? Is anything wrong?
Just
Come on in and eat.

She smiled back gratefully.

In the kitchen a few minutes later, she eyed him suspiciously. “Is that oatmeal?”

“You betcha. Good, too. Maple syrup on it. Cyrus tells me I eat too much high-cholesterol food.” Cyrus was his doctor.

She felt a pang at the reminder that her father was considered elderly, was elderly, and a possible candidate for a heart attack or plaque-clogged arteries or something else. Frank was seventy-four, seventy-five? Somewhere around there.

“Where are the monsters?” she asked, watching him spoon oatmeal into a bowl for her.

“Backyard. They can’t come in. Fleas. Later on I intend to walk over to the garden shop and see if they have any of those nematodes you can use on the lawn. Just spray it on and the little buggers knock off all kinds of pests. Then I’ll give the cats a bath. And hope for the best.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

The oatmeal was good. They ate in silence. Then she asked if she could use his downtown office sometime during the day for about an hour or two.

“Honey,” he said reproachfully, “that’s your office, too. You know you can, anytime you want. What’s up?”

“Another lawyer, maybe from California, maybe not. I want to make him believe I’m for real.”

Frank laughed. “You going to look him up in the ABA reference? Quote his own lies to him?” He felt about Los Angeles attorneys the way most people felt about all lawyers.

“Something like that. And would you mind if I park in the upstairs office for a time? Our place is still uninhabitable.”

She was well aware of his shrewd appraisal, but he made no comment, asked nothing, just said sure.

One of the golden coon cats started to scratch on the screen door. She no longer could tell them apart, just Thing One and Thing Two. The other one pounced on the first one and they both rolled across the porch and tumbled down the few steps to the ground.

She told Frank in vague terms about a “he said, she said” case she had taken on; he told her about Mrs. Gillespie’s new will. She called Ruthie at the office and told her to set up an appointment with Trassi anytime after two, and to call back here. When she hung up, she caught Frank’s gaze on her. He was smiling.

“It’s good to have you here like this, shooting the breeze,” he said. “Yeah, it is. I’ll wash up. You can go about your business,” she said.

“Just don’t let those fool cats in.” He went to his den to collect his own briefcase and notes.

Barbara worked awhile, paced, worked some more. Ruthie called, and Barbara called Bailey’s number and left the message on his machine: “He’s coming at two. I’ll get there at one. See you.”

By the time she entered the offices of Bixby, Holloway, and a couple dozen others, she had done all her chores: laptop work, courthouse records, notes, a game plan for “he said, she said”…

One o’clock was slack time at the office; nearly everyone was off to lunch. One of the stenographers was filling in at the reception desk; Barbara asked her to send Bailey on back when he got there, and went down the corridor to Frank’s office.

It was spacious with high and wide windows, a lot of fine paneling, glass-fronted bookcases, forest-green leather-covered chairs and couch, a very nice coffee table—the kind of room where you could tell your lawyer your deepest, darkest secret without fear.

Bailey arrived ten minutes later. “Hi,” he said. He glanced toward the bookshelves that concealed a bar.

“Help yourself,” she said, and watched him go straight to the shelf with the
T’
s
,
open it, and stand considering the choices. “You could start talking,” she suggested sarcastically.

“Oh, yeah. Forget Gary Belmont. Dead. Mugged, killed with the good old blunt instrument down in New Orleans during the night of July twenty-three. Found on the twenty-fourth by a biologist pursuing the mating habits of alligators.” He poured bourbon, then seated himself in one of the client’s chairs. “That one was easy, New Orleans newspaper, on the Web. Nothing on Arno. Clean, or he uses some other alias. The telephone numbers. Two restaurants and a pharmacy in Zurich, Switzerland. A restaurant and a hotel in Paris. A deli and a bookstore in Seattle. A hotel in San Francisco.” He shrugged. “There are a couple of others, but you get the drift. All places like that—bookstores, restaurants, nothing personal, no individual.” He sipped the bourbon straight and eyed her over the glass.

‘’I’m afraid your guy might be wanted for murder.”

“Tell me about it,” she said, frowning. “Anything else about Belmont?”

“Born and raised in the area, live-in girlfriend. Worked the docks, hit the bars and nightspots, gambled. Last seen in a bar in the Quarter. Arno might have cruised looking for a good-enough resemblance, then hit. Or maybe he knew the guy. However that goes, he ended up with the ID.”

And added a whole other dimension to the case, she thought glumly. She couldn’t conceal evidence of a felony crime. She remembered a saying a friend of hers had quoted once: “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” She said, “Back burner. At least for now.”

Bailey shrugged and finished the drink. He rummaged in his bag and brought out some folded papers, his reports. “The flight number is United out of Miami, a daily nonstop to San Francisco.”

She watched absently as he regarded the glass for a moment, as if considering. He set the glass down and waited.

“Look,” she said, “Trassi’s due in a few minutes. Can you hang around to get a peek at him? And I might have something after he’s gone. Can do?”

“Barbara,” he said reasonably, “it’s my job, what I get paid for. I’ll mosey back in when he’s gone. See ya.”

“Take that with you,” she said, pointing to the glass.

By the time Ruthie called her to say Trassi was there, she had put Bailey’s report in her briefcase and spread some yellow pads on the desk, one of them opened with her notes. She left them and walked out to meet Trassi.

“Barbara Holloway,” she said at the reception desk. “Mr. Trassi?”

“Yes.” He was slightly built, fiftyish, with sparse hair carefully combed over a bald spot, and he was very pale and gray—hair, eyes, expensive suit, all gray. His handshake was perfunctory, hardly more than a touching of her hand.

“The office is this way,” Barbara said. He was looking around at everything; people had returned from lunch, some were still trickling in; there was a murmur of voices, a laugh from the stenographer’s room.

In the office, with him in the chair Bailey had used, and her behind the desk, she asked pleasantly, “Would you like a cup of coffee? Tea, perhaps?”

“No.”

He had examined the office with the same careful scrutiny he had shown in the corridor. Now he sat primly with his feet together, his hands on the arms of the chair in what looked like a very uncomfortable position.

“I don’t know why your client thought it necessary to employ legal counsel for what is a very simple request,” he said.

Barbara glanced down at the open legal pad and closed it. “As you see, however, she did seek counsel,” she said.

“Mitch Arno is basically a messenger,” he said, “a courier, no more than that, but a highly trusted courier until this incident.” He told the same story she had heard from Maggie. When Barbara did not comment, he said coldly, “Arno left our material at his ex-wife’s inn. We need to recover it.”

Barbara nodded. “So they sent you. Why you?”

“Because I can identify the bags, and I can open them. I can identify the contents. We assumed I could reason with Ms. Folsum, explain the situation to her, and compensate her for any trouble this has caused.”

“Have you requested police help in locating Mitch Arno?”

“No! Absolutely not! We are constrained by the nature of the papers he was carrying. It must not be known that such sensitive material was out of our hands for even a second. This must be kept confidential.”

He leaned forward. “What we propose, Ms. Holloway, is a meeting with Ms. Folsum, long enough for me to demonstrate that I have the combination to both of those locks. I shall show her enough of the papers to prove my point. In your presence, of course. We are willing to pay her five thousand dollars, and to cover any uninsured losses to her inn.”

Barbara shook her head kindly. “I’m afraid that won’t work,” she said. “Ms. Folsum doesn’t have anything of Mitch Arno’s lying about, nothing less than eighteen years old, from the time he abandoned her. Of course, you could get a court order to force anyone who might have happened across your material to release it. With the proper identification, verification of employment of Arno, a statement from him, certified authorization from your company, you know, all those petty details, you might gain possession. No doubt everything would have to be opened in a judge’s chambers to verify the contents of the bags, in such an event.”

“What do you want?”

He had not shown any anger and showed none now. Ah, she thought, he had been kissed by the Snow Queen. He could neither laugh nor cry.

“I was working on that earlier,” she said, and opened her legal pad. “At five hundred a month for child support for the older child, for eighteen years, I arrived at one hundred and eight thousand dollars. For the younger daughter, the figure is one-hundred-and-two thousand. Seventeen years,” she said, looking up pleasantly. “The damage to the inn has yet to be determined, as has the cost of the loss of business.”

His eyes narrowed, his only reaction.