The Missing Piece (14 page)

“Hey,” said Gary.

Ursula said nothing.

McQueen had let himself in as he always did, and he could sense Ursula's disapproval that he had a set of keys to the apartment. In his mind, this was a sure sign that she planned to move in. Soon.

He went into the kitchen and grabbed a beer from the fridge. He could feel Ursula's eyes follow him as he crossed behind Gary and settled onto the recliner. He could sense more disapproval about that, too.

“Hey, anybody mind if I watch TV?” he said.

“Only if you keep the sound down,” said Ursula.

McQueen thought he saw Gary wink, telling him to play along. He zapped the TV with the remote and quickly lowered the volume to zero. The baseball playoffs were on. McQueen had been a better-than-average high school player, gave up the game in college, then returned as a star shortstop on a short-lived courthouse softball team. Baseball meant nothing to him now, and these two west coast teams meant even less. He ran through the channels, found nothing to hold his interest, and turned off the TV. Ursula seemed to relax. She was dressed in nursing scrubs and sneakers, her hair pulled back and her face fresh. McQueen agreed with Foxx that Ursula looked great in scrubs and probably even better out of them. He actually had dated her once long ago, a double fix-up along with Gary and another nurse. Ursula took an immediate liking to Gary, and the two talked over and around McQueen until he switched seats to get out of their way. He didn't mind. Fix-ups never worked out for him, so what was one more wasted night? But then Gary and Ursula started seeing each other seriously, and McQueen felt a twinge of envy because Ursula now carried his best friend's imprimatur.

“Hey,” he said, “remember those cheap old cardboard checkerboards that folded in half? Remember how the other side always had backgammon? Well, I used to think that ‘backgammon' was German for ‘game on the back.'”

Gary laughed. Ursula rolled the dice.

“Get it, Ursula?” said McQueen.

“Yeah,” she said. “Funny.”

McQueen leveled the recliner and closed his eyes. He didn't really know all that much about women, certainly not as much as Foxx. But he did know that a shared sense of humor was an important part of any relationship. He hoped Gary and Ursula laughed at the same things because she sure never laughed at anything he said.

McQueen concentrated on the fan. The white noise was soothing, the breeze just strong enough to send a pleasant chill up his spine. He listened to the dice and the quiet, comfortable chatter that passed between Gary and Ursula. He gathered that she was working the midnight shift, but would leave soon to meet some of her friends for a bite at their local near the hospital.

“Damn, how'd you do that?” said Gary.

“A mix of luck and skill,” said Ursula.

McQueen heard the shuffle and click of the game being put away. He opened his eyes enough to see Ursula standing and stretching, her arms raised and fingers laced over her head. He closed his eyes again, not because he didn't want to look, but because each time Ursula caught him staring he sensed another uptick in her animosity.

“See you, Mike.”

McQueen kicked forward and blinked his eyes as if he had been dozing.

“Yeah, Urse,” he said. “See ya.”

“Don't keep him up too late,” she said, and leaned down to kiss Gary.

“I won't,” said McQueen. “I'm half asleep already myself.”

Gary trailed Ursula out into the foyer, said a second good-bye, then closed the door behind her and threw the deadbolt. McQueen got out of the recliner.

“What's this?” he said as Gary rolled back in. “You being punished? I mean, no TV, no radio. The computer ain't even on.”

“Ursula wanted me to spend the entire day with her without any distraction. We went to the park, had lunch, tooled along Fifth Avenue, had dinner. Then, well, you saw backgammon.”

“And you played along?”

“It's called compromise,” said Gary. “Sometimes you need to compromise. Not that you'd know anything about that.”

“I never needed to, and now I don't want to,” said McQueen.

“You'll see when you get a girl.”

“Right, the girl I'll get when I have a wad in my pocket. But when I have a wad in my pocket, I won't need to compromise. Foxx would call that circular reasoning.”

“Foxx,” said Gary, shaking his head. He pushed the throttle on the battle chair and rolled to the computer table.

McQueen watched as the computer booted up.

“First time all day?” he said. “Truly?”

“Yep,” said Gary.

“Then I guess you don't know.”

“Don't know what?”

“The trial is back.”

“When did that happen?”

“Today,” said McQueen.

“And you don't call me?”

“Well, first of all,” said McQueen, “I didn't find out till late this afternoon because I'm not exactly on the memo distribution list. And when I did find out, I didn't call because I thought you already would have seen something about it on the web. I didn't know that you'd actually spent a whole day offline.”

Gary took a breath as if he could erupt, but then the courthouse web page splashed onto the left-hand monitor. He clicked the mouse and tapped the keys. More web pages popped, shuffled, and scrolled until he found what he wanted.

“Holy shit,” he said.

He spun the battle chair to face McQueen.

“You have any idea who's assigned the retrial?”

McQueen shook his head.

“Linda.”

“Really?” said McQueen. “Ain't that a kick.”

“A kick?” said Gary. “You think this is a coincidence? You think they put this case in the wheel and her name popped up?”

“Didn't think about it. Not in the five seconds since you told me.”

“Well, think about it. Judge Johnstone's retired. Linda was his law clerk when he had the case. No other judge in the building knows squat about it. What do you think?”

“Someone wanted her to get it,” said McQueen.

“Exactly.”

“But who?”

“Belcher, maybe. The AD probably. That doesn't matter. What matters is how it affects us.”

“How it affects us? You're here. I'm there. I doubt that treasure piece will come in as an exhibit.”

“Linda knows the case,” said Gary, “which will affect how fast the trial will start and finish, which affects how much time we have to do what we gotta do.”

“You know how long trials take,” said McQueen. “We'll have a year, maybe more.”

“Uh-uh. Look at this. Pretrial conference tomorrow at ten o'clock.”

“Geez,” said McQueen.

“Geez is right. This trial is on a fast track. You need to get into that courtroom tomorrow and find out exactly how fast.”

“Just walk in?”

“You got a problem walking into a courtroom?”

“Not if I have a reason.”

“You don't need a reason. You're a court officer. You can go anywhere you damn well please.”

“I suppose I can go in and talk to the officer,” said McQueen.

“Whatever makes you feel better,” sighed Gary. “But you need to get into the courtroom and find out everything you can. When the trial will start, how long it will last. Because this is it, Mike. The clock is running and we need to find that missing piece before it runs out.”

“Gary, do you really think—”

“No!” Gary slammed his fist onto the armrest. “Don't you dare start fading on me now.”

“I'm not, Gary, it's just—”

“Just what, Mike? Your fear? Your laziness? I need you to put your paperback novels away and get off your ass and act like you're with me. Because I'm right, Mike. I know I'm right. That piece is in the courthouse, and we're going to find it. And you know why we're going to find it? Because we deserve it. We put our lives on the line that day. We deserve every goddam penny we can make off that piece. So are you with me or not?”

McQueen took a deep breath. “I'm with you, Gary.”

“Good. Get us a couple of beers. We gotta get to work.”

*   *   *

The cell phone buzzed next to Ivan's ear. He lifted his head off the cradle of his arms and blinked his eyes. The small table was dappled with wet circles. He tipped the bottle, splashing vodka over the rim of a shot glass with “I
♥
NY” stamped in red and black. The cell phone went silent. He had not looked at the screen, another small victory on a night when small victories were the best he could hope for.

Across the table, the curtains sucked against the open window, then billowed back inside. The building was breathing, he told himself. From outside came the rumble of a truck passing on the street, random voices, snatches of music. The sounds had stitched themselves together when he first sat down to his bottle, but now they flew apart in his head.

He knocked back the shot, slammed the glass onto the table. He looked at the phone, which showed another missed called from Jessima.

“Ha,” he muttered as if stage-whispering for an invisible audience. “Nice try.”

He had avoided her for the rest of the day, swiping out fifteen minutes early so they would not meet at the time clock, taking a different subway line so they would not cross paths on the platform, turning off his phone so he would not receive her calls. When he got home and turned on the phone, the messages rained down on him. Voicemails, texts. He heated two Jamaican patties in his toaster oven, ate them only to have solid food in his stomach before he turned to the bottle. Darkness fell, along with the level of vodka in the bottle, along with his ability to think coherent thoughts.

The cell phone buzzed again. This time, a text message came through: C
ALL ME.
I
NEED TO TALK.
J

“Fat chance.” His stage-whisper seemed to come from somewhere outside of himself. He shut off the phone, crossed the small room, flung himself on the wrinkled sheets of his narrow bed. He felt a visceral need to deny himself to her and he tried to summon his defiant, I'll-show-you attitude that had helped him through so many lonely nights. But those thoughts would not come. Instead, he heard her say that he was a good and decent man, that she never had met anyone quite like him, that she reserved a special place for him in her heart. He always had feared that his own disbelief or lack of confidence would undo him. Now he wondered if his constant need for reassurance was just too tiring for her.

He drifted off to sleep and found himself in that dream once again. This time it started in the courthouse. He was walking the fifth-floor corridor, approaching Jessima's supply closet with a sense of trepidation. He wanted to turn around, but his feet kept moving. The door loomed closer, and behind it he could hear grunting and panting. He tried to run, but the feet that had brought him where he did not want to tread now refused to carry him away. The closet door unlatched and slowly swung open. The noises inside grew louder and more guttural. He pushed the door closed, but it would not latch and swung open again, as if the closet were too small to contain what was happening inside.

Finally, he unstuck his feet. He began to run as the corridor changed to that same familiar field from long ago. He ran up the hill, batting aside the tall grass. He could feel the man behind him, the one with the cold blue eyes and thin hawk nose. At the top of the hill, a gust of wind stopped him dead. Behind him, the man moved easily through the tall grass. Ivan started to run again, but another man rose up in front of him and smacked him to the ground.

Ivan woke with a start. He swung his feet off the bed, bent double with his head in his hands. His heart fluttered like a dying bird.

 

CHAPTER 16

Linda waited till well into the evening before she called Hugh. He was an hour behind in Texas, and she imagined him being in court till five, fighting rush-hour traffic back to his hotel, showering the day off his body, and then having dinner. This last item was the shaky one, given Hugh's habit of ignoring basic bodily functions like eating and sleeping when he was on trial. The call kicked directly into voicemail. She left a message, then unpacked the light dinner she had picked up at the deli: grilled chicken breast, brown rice, and an iceberg wedge salad with only the barest hint of balsamic vinaigrette. She would have loved a glass of wine, but she stuck with her seltzer.

Hugh called back an hour later.

“The Appellate Division issued its decision at nine thirty this morning,” said Linda. “By ten o'clock, the case was assigned to me for trial, and by ten fifteen the lawyers were calling. I'm holding a conference tomorrow.”

“Fast work,” said Hugh. “What did the AD do?”

“Reversed all of Judge Johnstone's rulings.”

“You expected that.”

“Yes, but it's different to see it in writing. And some of what the AD said could have come right out of my decision.”

“Except no one ever saw that.”

“True.”

“Do you feel vindicated?” said Hugh.

“It's more satisfaction. No, maybe you're right. I do feel vindicated.”

“I still don't understand what happened between you.”

“It's a chambers thing. If you haven't worked in one, you never would understand.”

“Then I never will.”

The conversation descended into banalities. Linda interrogated him on the flight, the hotel, the associates, the trial. Everything was fine, Hugh said, except for the jet lag. Linda laughed at that one, equating a flight from New York to Houston with setting the clocks back in the fall. But Hugh explained that his circadian rhythms were finely tuned, and without the precise amount of sleep at precisely the right time, he fell seriously out of rhythm.

The line beeped.

“That you?” said Linda.

“Local counsel,” said Hugh. “I need to take this.”