Unlucky in Law (26 page)

“Right. In court.”

“The circumstances weren't conducive to developing a friendly relationship.”

“Do you need to?”

“I guess not. In fact, I didn't like her one bit.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Too pretty. What's she doing tonight, by the way?”

“I don't know.”

“Well. Let me have another shot of that stuff. It'll break down the hoisin sauce in my stomach so thoroughly I won't absorb a single calorie.”

Paul laughed. He leaned over the table to give her another one.

“You, too,” she said.

“But that would be excessive.”

“Isn't that the point?”

“Good point.”

“Drink up, then,” Susan said. “Very good. I like the way you throw your head back when you drink. Don't ever cut your hair. May I ask you a question?” She took his hand lightly. “Remember the picnic at Point Lobos? I guess it was in August last year. And afterward? At my place?”

“You have red curtains,” Paul said. “When the light comes through them, the bedroom feels like a nightclub. I do remember.”

“We were getting to be good friends,” Susan went on. “I don't have many friends here. I work odd hours, I don't have family around, and I don't go to church. If it wasn't for e-mail I'd pass a lot of evenings feeling pretty lonely.”

Paul looked at her, really looked, and saw a woman, a sweet woman with a sense of humor, brought up well, straight A's in med school, her parents' darling. All alone in America. Her parents hadn't liked California and had gone home to Japan. Her mother probably wrote her once a week: “Come back.” But Susan was forty-one and liked the U.S. “You're very pretty,” Paul said. “Very nice. Not like . . .”

“Not like your idea of a pathologist who cuts up corpses for a living?” Susan said. “It can put people off, if you know what I mean. Just ever so slightly. I suppose if I worked the line at the slaughterhouse I might be less popular.”

“Well, why are you in this town, then?” Paul said. This string of beach towns surrounded by lettuce fields, a hundred thirty miles from San Francisco, not exactly a hotbed of intellectual vigor or cutting edges, although you could probably find them if you searched. “Why do you stay?”

“Fair question. I came for the excellent job after my divorce, but I do wonder if I should stay. Some nights I walk around my place, Paul, and there isn't a sound. Everything is just where I left it. There's no disturbance, no action, no life. I won't be going on much longer like this. So now I get to my question.”

“You want to know why I stopped calling,” Paul said. “Just when we were getting on so well. I'll tell you. Nina called and I answered, then recently, she moved down here to be with me.”

Susan looked thoughtful. Ignoring the pile of food Paul offered, she poured them both shots. The kitchen, post-Nina, looked as it had looked pre-Nina. Raising her eyebrows, she got up and stood at the doorway to the living room and studied the scene. Paul knew she was searching for the woman who was supposed to live there. She downed her drink, standing at the doorway, and said nothing.

“She moved out,” Paul said.

“Left you flat.”

“No. We still see each other.”

Susan came over to Paul, seeming to slip and tumble softly into his lap. She put her arms around his neck and her lips close to his ear and whispered, “I miss you. Can we listen to some music? Let's just relax. It's so great being here.” She took the bottle.

Paul had just bought a digitally remastered recording of Coltrane's
A Love Supreme
. He knew every note of the music. He hadn't had the heart to play it yet, he realized now. Music wasn't right if two people weren't listening. He inserted a disk into the little Bose and let the first seven notes open his soul, saying, “Did you ask your question yet?”

“Soon. You know, Paul, it feels so good just to have someone to lean against. Just your physicality next to me. I liked being friends with you. That's why I called.” The heat popped on, and Paul's living room, with the prized old Tibetan rugs and the beat-up leather chair, the books piled on the dining room table he never used, all seemed to wake up, come alive.

How lonely he had become. He felt an acute sadness, understanding suddenly that he had begun to give up on Nina. God, he was sad. Not confused, not drunk, just damn sad. The sax flowed out of the Bose straight at him, the tone one of longing and desire.

“I'm with her, Susan,” he said, sitting down, leaning back and closing his eyes. “I'm . . .”

“And here comes my question,” Susan said. Softly, her fingers touched his hair and began to stroke his forehead. The alcohol, the music, and this tender stroking let Paul slump into complete relaxation for the first time in a very long time.

“What I'm wondering is, well, could I stay here tonight? Just as a friend, a lonely friend. Would you do me that favor?”

Paul turned and held her. She smelled like roses and her body steamed with heat. “Don't talk that way,” he mumbled. “Like I'd be doing you a favor. It's the opposite, in fact.”

“It's just that I feel so good right now.”

Turning out the light, he carried her into the bedroom and placed her on the bed, listening to Coltrane playing his joyful and tender sax. She took off her clothes; he could see her in the half-light, sitting up, naked now and slipping under the comforter. Outside the half-open balcony door, foggy wisps drifted on a wind. He pulled his shirt over his head, sat down with his back to her, and let her fingers caress and appreciate him. He lay down, overwhelmed, overtaken, overjoyed. Damn sad.

Then Susan pressed her body to his, and she had her own loveliness, her own ways. He could give her everything she needed and take from her all he needed.

He kissed every inch of her, caressing her body until she moaned, murmuring “please,” and “more,” and when he finally let her have relief, the pleasure was so intense they both cried out. The old bugaboo, loneliness, skulked out the balcony doors to blow away on the wind, while they held each other that whole long, life-changing night.

22

Sunday 9/28

S
UNDAY.
S
USAN HAD SLIPPED OUT EARLY.
N
EITHER OF THEM HAD
wanted to talk. Paul showered, ate three fried eggs and most of a package of bacon, and drove to his office.

He worked hard that Sunday morning, not in any hurry to think about the extraordinary shift in the universe that had occurred. One minute Susan wasn't there, and then she was. Should he keep her secret? He sure didn't feel like talking about her, or trying to define things for anyone.

He decided that until he had sorted things out, he didn't have to say anything. He would see Susan now and then. He wasn't really engaged. He wasn't married. He didn't even live with anybody. He had no commitment. With Susan, he felt like his old self, in control, central. He also felt—vivid, yeah, vivid, like he had brightened up, been given a shot of pure life.

He wasn't going to think about Nina right now, except as his employer. She remained the Boss, around whom the schedule revolved. He got on the phone.

Phone company employees weren't paid enough to secure their honor along with their daily toil, Paul concluded, having successfully bribed one who had put up no more than token protest. Old records? Price tag: fifty dollars. Several old records? Double that. The hardest part had been figuring out who to direct the money toward. About eleven, the e-mail came with the phone messages as a Word attachment.

He had to laugh. Dean Trumbo could have done the same thing many months before. The connection Nina had been looking for was right there in the April statement. Paul made meticulous logs on his computer. One could say he was playing at the serious professional, making sure his documentation was both accurate and thorough. Or one might assert that he was not ready yet to call Nina with the information, because the thought of calling Nina made his face twitch. And because he didn't want her theory of the case to be correct.

He went downstairs to the parking lot in back, got in the Mustang, and drove down Highway 1 to Carmel Highlands. Paul parked on Fern Canyon Road across the street from Alex Zhukovsky's house and called him.

Nina would say, See if you can get a confirmation. “I'm just looking at a few notes and wanted to check to make sure I'm not going astray here,” he said when Zhukovsky answered his phone.

“Listen,” Zhukovsky said, “the only thing I care about at the moment is that my father's remains are still floating around somewhere. I told you people I'd be speaking to counsel. I meant it. You'll be hearing from us.”

“But we no longer have them,” Paul said, not being true to the letter of truth, since they still had bits of them, but doing the spirit thing. “I thought Ms. Reilly called you. They were stolen from our lab.”

“She didn't tell me that. She did call me about Father Giorgi, though. I appreciated that.”

“Yeah, well, it happened on Thursday night. Our pathologist was assaulted and robbed.” He didn't expect sympathy from Zhukovsky and he didn't get it.

“Robbed?” Zhukovsky said. “Of my father's bones?” The word “scandalized” didn't do justice to his already savage-sounding mood. “What are you talking about? Someone broke into your expert's lab and took my father's bones?”

“Right.”

“Who?”

“The Sacramento police are looking into it,” Paul said, glad to have fall guys in case Zhukovsky needed to lodge formal complaints or something. “But I know who did it.” He watched through a massive plate-glass window in the redwood house that probably had a superior view of the ocean and saw the professor pace to the window, holding the phone to his ear. He seemed to be wearing an old bathrobe.

“What's your idea?”

“Sergey Krilov. That guy you keep telling me you don't know.”

Over the phone, you could not really hear a silence the way you could hear it in real life, but Paul felt certain that this time he knew what he was hearing in Zhukovsky's quick, and quickly arrested, intake of air. “You do know him, Professor. I wish you'd stop lying about it.”

“No.”

“You know him. He's been following you. He hurt Father Giorgi because of you.”

“Don't blame me for that.”

“How is he connected to you? Why is he after your father's bones?”

Zhukovsky didn't hem or haw. He merely held his place on the phone, each breath as carefully calibrated as a ventilator. He seemed to be pulling himself together, and he had decided to keep quiet while he was at it.

“Okay,” Paul said, “you're a bystander. You don't have a clue who would kill your sister.”

“Stefan Wyatt killed my sister. The police found his blood. My sister knew him.”

“Well, if he did kill her, it was after a long talk with you. I happen to have here a record of your calls during the month of April.”

“I'm sure your method of obtaining such a thing was illegal,” came back the restored busy, brisk voice of academia. “I have a right to privacy.”

“You called Stefan Wyatt.”

“Never.”

What pseudo self-assurance! But he was forgetting computers knew all, and sometimes people found out a few things, too. “You called him twice, and one of the calls was on the day after your sister died. The phone company says so, and what they say goes. Anyone who ever tried to dispute a monthly bill agrees with me, by the way.” When the professor didn't say anything, Paul added, “It's a toll call, you know, Carmel Highlands to Monterey. Only a few miles. Doesn't seem right, but that's American business for you. They'll stone you and then they'll say ‘good luck.'”

“It's a mistake,” Zhukovsky now said in a sagging-shoulders sort of way.

“Thirty-two minutes on this statement say otherwise. You hired Mr. Wyatt, and you've never admitted it. Well, now we have proof.” Paul almost felt sorry for him. Four months had gone by without the defense doing anything. Zhukovsky must find all this last-minute fact-finding most unfair. Besides, Paul didn't think Zhukovsky had the guts to kill his sister. He wanted the killer to be Sergey Krilov.

“Others besides me have access to this phone.”

“Like who?”

“Anyone who has been into my home.”

“The chimney sweep didn't call from your home, because Wyatt doesn't have a fireplace,” Paul said. “We can pretty much check him off the list. Who else might call?”

“I have no idea.”

Paul let out an aggravated sigh. He got out of the car and walked to the foot of Zhukovsky's stairway, still holding the phone. “Tell me where Krilov is, and all is forgiven, even your protecting the asshole who really did kill your sister.”

“Don't say that. Don't—ever—say that.”

Paul mounted the stairs and rang the doorbell. Zhukovsky flung it open, glasses askew, robe open enough to exhibit a sable farm's worth of hair on his chest, long feet bare, mouth open in amazement. Paul handed him the subpoena. “Avon calling,” he said.

After this phone call and meeting, which Paul felt ended on a fairly bitter note, he drove back to Carmel and began another search on his computer. He plugged into the main Monterey County sites, then some genealogical sites like Family Tree Finder and ancestor. com, and pulled up a few city records. After a good two hours of false leads and endless list-browsing, he came upon a good source for the information he was seeking.

Giving up on the site's search engine, he scrolled through the years he thought might be relevant. Meantime, the radio yakked in the background. Another professor, this one of biology, was promoting his new book. He theorized about why man, of all the animals, had a sex drive that operated all day, all night, and all the time. Well, well, well! Justification, always very welcome, Paul thought. “The beasts,” the professor said, “do not engage in bestiality. Only man is driven to have sex with pubescent boys, little girls, dead women, dead men, horses, sheep, donkeys . . .” It all came down, according to this expert, to a fundamental, beyond-all-reason craving for immortality.

Wasn't that a nice rationale for his transgression? Transgression—that word would have to be thought about. Had he transgressed? What had he transgressed?

And male attempts at monogamy had to do with the same inexorable compulsion, the voice went on. A man needed a long-term connection to a woman and by extension his children, or who else would remember him? It was a symbolic complaint, Paul realized, since the longevity of his genes was the ultimate goal, but in that case, why had Paul never felt the urge to procreate, merely to inseminate? On the other hand, he had indulged himself in the urge to merge a few times, married twice, and tried for three with that baffling boss of his.

The scrolling stopped as Paul hit a couple of names from the case, tied together in some county records from the seventies. Whoa!

He shook his head at what he was seeing on the computer screen, got up and ate a banana, spun in his chair for a minute, and said to himself, Why, Constantin, you old dog.

A few blocks away, Nina toiled at her desk, the dull orange late afternoon sun out the window hovering on the periphery of her own inner fog, unable to penetrate. She liked the familiarity of Sandy tapping away in the outer office, but she would be deaf not to hear the phone calls that came more and more frequently over the past week, upsetting them both. Sandy, who had never brought her personal life into the office before, seemed unable to avoid it this time.

“He can't do that to you,” Sandy said into the phone now, sounding as firm and in control as ever. She listened for a moment. “Poor idea. Uh-uh. Even worse one. Okay, listen, that's it. I'm sending Joseph back. He'll straighten that boy out.” She replaced the phone in its cradle with a solid thunk, then appeared in Nina's doorway. She was wearing a corduroy skirt and jacket with a lot of turquoise today, her long shiny black hair pulled back into a beaded clasp. Her broad face looked as impassive as usual, but she pulled on her lower lip, a sign of massive inner turmoil.

“Everything okay?” Nina said.

“No.”

“I'm sorry, Sandy. Is there anything I can do?”

“Move back to Tahoe.”

“What?”

“You asked; there's your answer.”

“Is—you said your daughter's family was staying up at your ranch. Is everything all right up there?”

Sandy nodded, then, contrarily said, “Not unless you consider a divorce in the family all right.”

“Oh, no.”

“Joseph can go up for now. I'll go up next weekend. We'll straighten them out.”

“I'm sure you will.”

“Let's hope the trial's over by next weekend, because we don't want to come back. The animals need us. I want to take Wish home with me, but van Wagoner's got his mitts on him, too, so he'll be staying. For the moment.”

“Can't your daughter's family take care of the animals for you?”

“Not the mare. She's got the vet scratching his head. Not the geese. My daughter's afraid of them. She can't take care of her own husband, much less the animals.”

Earth fell away from Nina's desk. She placed both hands palm down to steady herself, and said, “Sandy, I know you're upset, but I need you here! You said you'd stay through the trial.”

“I'll stay through the trial, but the minute it winds up, I'm gone.” Sandy then did something rare. She sat down in the chair in Nina's office across from her desk. “Is there a chance you'll come back to Tahoe? Because ring or no, I'm wondering.”

Nina scratched her head, trying to think of how she could persuade Sandy to stay on. “Paul and I haven't planned that far into the future.” She twisted her romantic, twinkling ring. The pragmatic issues stuck to the edges of those many-colored facets were not only murky, they were piercing. “Would a raise help?” she asked. “I realize this is stressful for you, not being at home.”

“A raise is always good, but I don't live here. I need a real job in Tahoe that's going to be around next week. I have the ranch, and Joseph is basically retired, you know. Besides, the air isn't right down here. It's thick. Congests everything.” She sniffed. “Can't think straight.”

“I was born here, Sandy. It feels good to me.”

She nodded. “You're adapting to this altitude, and that's right and good, if you're staying. But up there, the sky is closer. You can see farther. Down here, it's soft. Everything's fuzzy. You can't even see the Milky Way at night.”

“You're right about that much.”

“I have to go back.”

“I don't want you to go.”

“Even my daughter admits that sometimes I know something. We were doing good up at Tahoe. We had our own setup. You picked your own cases and saw 'em all the way through. You had a career. Now look what's going on. You're babysittin'. The case is a mess 'cause we got here too late.”

Nina had never heard Sandy sound so severe. Sandy was unhappy, and without her, Nina was going to be even more unhappy. She looked at the files on her desk. “Sandy, let me get through this trial. Then we'll talk about all this. Promise me you won't make any other commitments.”

“I have a life, too. I have to move on.” Folded arms. They stared at each other for a moment, and Nina realized how important Sandy was to her. How could she keep her?

Hauling herself to her feet, Sandy adjusted her jacket. “If you love him, you're just going to have to get with the program. He's here; you're here. Deal with it.”

The phone rang in the other room. Sandy closed the door on her way out. But it wasn't her daughter again, it was Nina's family getting into the picture now.

“It's your sister-in-law,” the firm's obsolete intercom stated flatly.

“We miss you and Bob,” Andrea said, after greeting her. “People with three kids never go anywhere. You were our social life. Even Matt's complaining.”

Nina told her about the ring.

“Well, isn't that wonderful!” Andrea said, only it sounded more like a question than a statement. “Does this mean you aren't coming back? Because the woman who was using your place is gone. Your house is empty again.”

“Thank God.”

“But—will you and Paul be keeping it? I could help you find someone to rent, if you want.”

“Oh, Andrea.” Nina felt choked up, and put her hand up to her face to press her cheek, holding in the emotion.