It’s almost four o’clock, so my options are to go to the office or go home. Edna and Kevin are in the office, and Laurie is at home. It’s not exactly a decision to agonize over, so I ask Edna to have a messenger bring copies of the documents to my house.
“So I have to copy them?” she asks. I can feel her cringing through the phone. It’s standard procedure for her to have copied them when they arrived, but Edna evidently is trying a new approach.
“Not by hand,” I say. “You can use the copying machine.”
She reluctantly agrees to perform this heroic task, and I head home. When I get there, Laurie is cooking dinner, Tara is lying on the living room couch, and Waggy is jumping on her head. Laurie tells me that this particular head-jumping exercise has been going on for about an hour and a half, and if anything it has gained in intensity.
“It’s amazing how much patience Tara has with him,” I say.
Laurie smiles. “Saint Tara of Paterson.”
“Waggy,” I say, “give it a rest.”
“He’s just excited that they were talking about him on television today.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“It was on the news. They were talking about the Timmerman case, and they mentioned that you had custody of him. His father was apparently a legend in the dog show world.”
I’m surprised and a little annoyed that the word has gotten out; I hope people don’t start coming around trying to get a look at him. I glance over at Waggy, who has jumped off Tara and is now smacking a tennis ball with his paw and then chasing it around the room. “I’m not so sure he’d be proud of his son.”
We have dinner and then settle down to drink wine and watch a movie. It’s nights like these that give me a weird, certainly unwarranted feeling of continuity. As soon as Laurie arrives it’s as if she never left, and my remembering that she’ll soon be leaving again is both surprising and jarring.
The movie we watch is called Peggy Sue Got Married, a Francis Ford Coppola film made in the 1980s about Kathleen Turner magically going back to high school and reliving those difficult years, with the benefit of knowing what life has in store for her.
It’s something I occasionally think about. What would I do if I could start over, knowing everything that has happened since? I don’t really know, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t involve law school. And I’d make a fortune betting on sporting events of which I already know the outcome.
When it’s over I ask Laurie what she would do differently now that she knows how things have worked out. My hope is that maybe she’ll say she wouldn’t have moved to Wisconsin.
“Nothing,” she says. “Because I don’t want to know how things will work out. That’s not what the real world is about.”
“I understand that. I’m just presenting a fake-world hypothetical. What if you could go back, knowing what was going to happen in your life? How would you change it? What would you do differently?”
“I’d eat less chocolate.”
“You’re not taking this seriously,” I say.
She nods. “Correct. Because if I knew what was going to happen in my life, it wouldn’t be living. I take each day as it comes.”
I shake my head in frustration, though I’m not sure why I keep pushing this. “Of course you take each day as it comes. Everybody does; there’s no choice. What I’m trying to do is get you to imagine knowing about the days before they come.”
“Andy, would you like to know what is going to happen before it does?”
“Of course.”
“And it would change your behavior?” she asks.
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, let’s try it. If you keep talking about this, we’re not going to make love tonight, and I’m going to sleep in the guest bedroom.”
“Can we drop this whole thing?” I ask. “I mean, it’s just a stupid movie.”
“Maybe it works after all,” she says.
I SET AN EARLY MEETING with Sam Willis to bring him on board.
Sam has been my accountant for as long as I can remember, and has an office down the hall. In the last couple of years he has also taken on assignments as a key investigator for me, a task that he accomplishes without even leaving his desk.
Sam has mastered cyberspace and can navigate it to find out pretty much anything. He is simply a genius at hacking into government agencies, corporations, or any other entity naive enough to think it is secure. If I need a phone record, or a bank statement, or a witness’s background, all I need to do is put Sam on the case. The fact that it’s not always strictly legal is not something that has kept either of us awake nights.
I set the meeting at nine o’clock, because I’m due in Hatchet’s chambers at ten thirty to give him an update on what is happening with Waggy. It’s a meeting that was arranged before I took Steven on as a client, and I’m hoping the new situation will at least get me off the Waggy hook.
I’m in the office at nine sharp, and Sam arrives ten minutes later. Sam always has a disheveled look about him, and it’s exaggerated in the summer, when he’s hot and sweaty. Today is a particularly stifling day, and he comes in looking much the worse for wear. Sam has often said he would rather the temperature were ten than eighty.
“Hot out there,” I say after he has grabbed a cold soda.
He nods. “You ain’t kidding. Summer in the city. Back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty.”
Sam and I are practitioners of a juvenile hobby we call “song-talking,” during which we try to work song lyrics into our conversations. Sam is a master at it; if they gave out rankings in song-talking he would be a black belt.
He’s opened with a Lovin’ Spoonful gambit. Fortunately, I am somewhat familiar with it, so hopefully I can compete. I nod sympathetically. “Isn’t it a pity. There doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city.”
He doesn’t miss a beat, walking over to the window and looking down on the street. He shakes his head sadly. “All around the people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.”
“You’re too good for me,” I say. “You ready to start the meeting?”
“If we have to,” he says, with some resignation.
“I need some help on a case.”
He brightens immediately. “You do? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I just did. That’s how you found out about it.”
“I mean when you called me. I figured you wanted me to do some boring accountant stuff.”
“Sam, you’re an accountant.”
“And you’re a lawyer, but I don’t see you jumping for joy on the judge’s table.”
“Bench,” I say. “The judge sits behind a bench.”
“Whatever. What do you need me to do?”
“Find out whatever you can about Walter Timmerman.”