Indefensible (39 page)

“What the hell?” I say.

“I have provided limited representation on their behalf,” Leslie says.

“Tina,” I say, “come snuggle with me on the bed?”

TMU chuckles, and Lizzy says, “Daddy, you're not normal yet, you know. As if you ever were.”

The senator continues, “And that Coral Sand hired you as part of their public relations and legal effort to overcome a consumer boycott of their products.”

“I can't speak to those issues,” Leslie says with a pleasant tilt of her head. “I was merely working on import compliance regulations.”

“Just another friggin' lawyer,” Tina says. She is beside me with her feet on the bed, holding my hand.

“And that Coral Sand is mentioned in a State Department report about the slavelike employment conditions among some overseas clothing manufacturers.”

“Well,” Tina says in a squeaky imitation of Leslie, “don't believe everything you read, Senator.”

“And even
The Wall Street Journal
has called Coral Sand, quote, ‘the putrid scum at the bottom of the noxious barrel that is overseas outsourcing.' ”

“But, Senator,” Tina squeaks, “I'm just their
lawyer,
I'm not getting paid to
judge
them.”

TMU chuckles.

“And that up until a couple of weeks ago, you were listed as chief counsel for Fashions International, Inc., which is the sole U.S. importer of Coral Sand products?”

“Daddy,” Lizzy says, “you actually worked for this woman?”

“Senator, a lot of this is out of context,” Leslie says.

“She wasn't as bad as all that,” I say.

Upton clears his throat.

“Bullshit,” Tina says, turning to glower at me. “If you didn't have those holes in your skull, I'd swat you.”

“My skull?”

“Daddy, I already told you,” Lizzy says. “They drilled holes in your head to let the fluid out, and you're on drugs to reduce brain swelling. As if you didn't have a fat enough head already.”

“Heehee.”

“As corporate counsel, I had a fiduciary obligation to see that . . .”

“Corporate hack is more like it,” Tina says to Leslie on the television screen.

TMU gently punches my leg. “Hold on tight to that tail, boy,” he says. “You've got a tiger.”

“Tiger,” I say, but it comes out garbled, and the television blurs.

When I wake up, the television is off and the room is dark and I'm alone, but I have the dreamy memory of Upton coming in and speaking to me long after the others left. And more than that, he keeps popping up in my disjointed memories of the past few days.

T
here is a buzz. Maxy is back. This is what I couldn't remember last week in the hospital: Maxy's fingerprints in Scud's car. Maybe it wasn't Upton.

Not that it proves anything, because with Upton's underworld connections, he could have hired Maxy for the job. Or maybe Upton somehow planted the evidence. The important thing is that even if it was Upton, at least he wasn't trying to frame me.

I'm back at work. It feels good to be here. People are nice to me. My office has lots of cards and flowers. This morning Pleasant Holly, my equivalent in the civil division, came down and brought some cheesecake, which was considerate, because it doesn't need chewing. We talked for an hour, and it made me wonder if I've made a mistake, focusing on criminal law all these years. There are interesting things about civil law: disability rights, tenants' rights, economic equality, environmental regulation, land use; it goes on and on. It helps that Pleasant is so damn pleasant. She has a smile you can see a mile, and she has that rosy-cheeked exuberance. Stand her up beside Leslie Herstgood, and what do you have? Ambition without integrity in one, and integrity without ambition (at least not venal ambition) in the other. They should have tapped Pleasant for the circuit court.

Midafternoon: I have a meeting with Dorsey at the Rain Tree. Kenny, my chauffeur until I'm driving again, meets me in the parking garage. Just looking at him—sideways cock of the head, boyish grin—I know he's itching to tell me about some new excitement in his life. His eyes are bright and lively today. If I didn't know him so well, I might think he's in love. But he's not; if he were in love, he'd show it differently. He'd be evasive, embarrassed, or fearful. Whatever he has up his sleeve, it's something less terrifying to him.

Kenny opens the door of his Toyota pickup for me. “How long till you can drive again?”

“Probably drive now, except I don't have a car.”

“So what happened to your friggin' car?” This is Kenny's affectionate jab. I smile, and smiling makes me sad because I love Kenny and I love his pretend grouchiness. He always teased me about the Volvo, which, to his thinking, is as boring as a car can be.

What happened to the Volvo is that the Bureau searched it for the transponder. Sparky drove me to the garage outside of town yesterday in case I wanted to claim anything. The dissected Volvo reminded me of Seth Coen in his freezer. There was a chassis sitting on the concrete. Its doors and upholstery were removed and the frame cut into pieces. “It was a well-built car,” said the man standing there with welding goggles on his forehead and an acetylene torch in his hand.

“The Bureau kept it,” I tell Kenny.

“I finally bought my Jet Ski,” he says.

“You bought a truck. You bought a Jet Ski. Where the hell . . . ?”

“Been saving.”

“Apparently.” We pull up in front of Rokeby Mills.

“Really nice,” he says. “It's got a-hundred-and-thirty horse, four-cylinder, four-stroke—”

I never got the chance to confront Kenny about his amorous interest in Lizzy before my injury. Now, blocking traffic in front of the Rain Tree, I can't wait any longer. “Shut up, Kenny,” I blurt.

He stops and looks over at me. He's stunned.

“You know how old Lizzy is?” I ask.

“Well, she's—”

“—a minor,” I say. “And make no mistake: If anybody messes with her—any adult at all, whether it's consensual or otherwise—I won't hesitate a second to put his ass in jail and keep it there as long as possible.”

“Well, I—”

“And let me educate you a little about the law, Kenny, since you're too lazy to do it yourself. We have enhanced sentences for
statutory rapists who are in a position of influence over their victims, like teachers, clergy, or family members.”

“But Nick, I—”

“Shut up, Kenny. The only thing I want to hear from you about this is ‘I'm sorry.' And right now I don't even want to hear that. I'll have Dorsey take me back to the office. I'm getting out. You're driving away.”

I step out of the truck. Kenny sits there pale and speechless. Cars behind us are blasting horns. I take out my badge and hold it up, showing it to honking drivers as I walk around behind Kenny's truck. “Shut the hell up!” I scream at them, surprising myself with the fury of my voice. Then I take a few minutes, collecting myself before going inside.

•  •  •

The Rain Tree is thick with its usual smell of steamed clams and beer. I notice some of the guys at the veterans' table eyeing me as I cross the room. I give them a sloppy salute, and one salutes back. Dorsey is already here, and when I see him, I remember how bandaged and bruised I look.

“Look at you,” Dorsey says, grabbing my hand for an affectionate two-handed shake. Then he's pulling out a chair for me and grabbing a menu. We order clams.

Steve glides over in his wheelchair, and we're doing the thumb-grip handshake and he's studying my head with unapologetic curiosity. “Reminds me of 'Nam,” he says. “All kinds of fucked-uppedness there.”

My head is almost entirely bandaged except for the left eye and cheek and my mouth. Those exposed parts are blue and purple. Steve and I punch fists, and he leaves.

“So. About Maxy,” Dorsey says.

“Yes, about Maxy,” I say. “He's the missing link. He connects the street hoods to the big boys.”

“That's my thinking,” Dorsey says. “Maxy is the big enchilada. Scud Illman was just doing Maxy's bidding. Then Scud became a
liability. This is huge, Nick. We track this bastard down, it'll be huge. Dollars to doughnuts, we've got him dead to rights on the Illman murder, and I'm betting we can trace him to Phippin. But that's nothing, because a guy like Maxy, he isn't afraid of the big boys.
He
is a big boy. He's on the inside. He knows where the bodies are buried. He calls the shots, and mark my words, this is a guy who'd sell his granny to take off a single day of prison time. He'll tell us everything.”

“Do you have any leads on where to find him?”

“We'll get some, believe you me. This boy has played it cool for ten years, but he's finally shown his hand.”

“About Cassandra Randall . . .”

“I'm sure he was involved in that one, too,” Dorsey says. “Of course we don't know . . .”

“I have a theory,” I say. “You might want to ask the nefarious Mr. Milan about the cars that Seth Coen drove. Particularly a white rental-looking job like the one reportedly seen on Cassandra's street that night.”

“You think Seth—”

“It was a difficult shot that killed Cassandra. But someone did it cleanly. One shot through the window. I read Seth Coen's service file. He was a sniper in the Gulf. Scud had the balls-to-the-wall audacity, and Seth had the talent and composure to pull it off without leaving calling cards.”

Dorsey eyes me with his head cocked. “It looks like we have perps for four out of four murders, plus an airtight theory of who the puppet master is. We just have to find him.”

“That's the hard part.”

“You think Kendall Vance really knows anything? Someone was awfully eager to keep him quiet.”

I shrug. “If he does, we'll never get it out of him. He takes his client confidentiality a bit too seriously.”

“Is he in hiding?”

“Kendall? Hiding out isn't his style. The Bureau thinks the danger is over because he's too hot a property and they wouldn't dare make
another go at him. If he was going to squawk, he'd have done it by now. The reward isn't worth the risk.”

“I guess that's about it,” Dorsey says. His big black mustache is in motion as he masticates one clam after another. Just swallow, I want to tell him. The clams are perfect for me, because they're small and slide down without chewing.

“We'll go national for info on locating Maxy.” Dorsey adds, “I bet we can get him on the Bureau's ten most wanted. Then we sit back and let the Bureau reel him in, right?”

“I guess,” I say. But I'm not ready to sit back. This new evidence of Maxy's involvement could be even more damning to Upton. He needed Scud dead; Scud wound up dead, and it looks like Maxy played a part. So maybe Upton is connected to Maxy, which could connect him to the murders of Zander and Cassandra, and to all the associated crimes brought upon this city by those purveyors of misery. Upton's urban utopia: what a grotesque joke. I've decided to summarize my suspicions in a confidential memo to TMU. Let him decide Upton's fate. I can't handle it.

Dorsey grabs the bill. “My treat today.”

He drives me back to my office. It takes a few minutes, and I wish it would take an hour, a week, a month. I'm enjoying his company, though we haven't said a word since leaving the Rain Tree. More significantly, I dread everything waiting for me up in the criminal division of the U.S. attorney's office. I don't like that I'll spend the afternoon polishing a memo to TMU that could end the career, and maybe the freedom, of my former friend Upton. I don't like that the Circuit Court of Appeals nomination was handed to the less deserving Leslie Herstgood (forcing me to find the wherewithal to continue in this job for the rest of my career), and I don't like that Lizzy is camped out in my office and refuses to go back to school.

“I hear Cicely is doing well,” Dorsey says.

This makes no sense. I look at him, confused.

“Upton's younger daughter.”

I shake my head.

“She OD'd. Crystal meth. Almost died. She was in the hospital same time you were. Upton never left her side except to visit you sometimes. She pulled through fine, but they're unsure if she's affected.”

“Affected?”

“Mentally.”

So Upton was at the hospital. This explains his appearance in my shadowy memory.

•  •  •

The Upton memo isn't letting me write it. I outlined it earlier, so it's just a matter of putting it into whole sentences, writing an introduction, writing a conclusion, writing regrets. But I can't get it written.

Lizzy lies on the couch. Looking at her, I remember something. No. It's not a memory, it's a feeling. I feel something, the same something I felt that night. It should be horrible and terrifying, but it's not. It's thrilling, and it leaves this sensation jingling in my chest, in my arms and legs, my fingers. The primal thrill when your mind slips beyond the reach of fear and rationality. Beyond governance and reason. I feel the slipperiness of his blood and his sweat and the tremors of his dying resistance as I kneel astride him. I was the predator and he the prey, and I ran him to the ground. I grew claws and fangs. I tore and slashed with animal rage, and when Chip turned the spotlight on us and I saw the opened flesh and ruined eye and twisted neck, I pressed dripping hands to my face and roared again in what might have been anguish or might have been conquest. And now, thinking of this again, I have my hands against my cheeks—one palm on cool and whiskered flesh, the other on bandages. I do this subconsciously, painting my face in the blood of my enemy, which seems to coat my hands in its wet warmness. He was a threat to my Lizzy, and I killed him. I'd do it again. I'd do it every day for eternity.