The behavior of fundamental particles is essentially random.
– HEISENBERG
NINA REILLY LAY ON HER STOMACH, her eyes closed, a white washcloth draped over her backside. The endless mental lists had fled from her head, lulled by Chelsi’s electronic ambient music and her soothing hands on Nina’s back. Now Nina kept slipping into a snooze, the kind where you disappear and then snap back your head as your senses return.
Let’s see, she had dreamed a little dream about an old woman approaching, babbling something. This apparition had a dreadful aspect, as though if Nina ran away she would become gigantic and even more frightening. She kept coming closer, the hideous old witch, whispering so low Nina couldn’t quite-then she understood, and deep dream relief came over her.
All the old lady wanted was a piggyback ride, then she’d go away. Nina crouched and the old lady hopped on-
“Lots of my clients take naps,” Chelsi said as the snap thing happened and Nina’s eyes jerked open.
“And miss the whole massage? No way,” Nina said.
“Your body will remember.”
“Big deal. This is too good to spend asleep.”
“We could talk a little if you want. Some people just like to relax.” She was stroking Nina’s sides, almost lifting her up from the table, her hands strong and the points of her fingernails digging in now and then. Chelsi was a tall ponytailed girl in her early twenties, and the smile she always wore seemed to be for real.
“You talk,” Nina said. “I’ll just moan here and there.”
“All right. Let’s see. Well, last week when I worked on you for the first time, I thought, She’s somebody. I even thought you might have used a fake name. That would have been fine, by the way. LeAnn Rimes came here when she was appearing at Caesars last year and wrote down that she was somebody named Ms. Exter. It’s not an insurance situation, so who cares what you want to call yourself?”
Chelsi waited, but her hands kept working and Nina didn’t respond.
“Dr. Whittaker sends me all his headaches. He says ninety percent of the time it’s tension and he says I have good hands. He comes to me himself. Oops, I’m not supposed to say that. Anyway, my dad says I got the curious gene. He says I ought to be a detective. Wow, you are so tight around the neck.”
“Mmm.”
“For instance,” Chelsi said, then pressed hard, her hands making tiny squeezing motions on the back of Nina’s neck. She was using kukui-nut oil to baste her. One could die at the beginning of the hour and Chelsi would never know it until her chime went off. “I’m gonna say you’re a swimmer.”
“Whenever I can,” Nina managed to say.
Chelsi laughed in delight. “I knew because you have these excellent muscles in your shoulders, square shoulders and a tiny waist. A swimmer’s back. I am so good. Now, your neck, I’ve seen that a lot with people with big pressures at work. Last week when I did that scalp massage you practically melted. It’s definitely the cause of your headaches. That or your eyes. I’ll work on them in a minute.
“And then there’s this.” Chelsi’s finger delicately traced the scar along Nina’s side, still sore after almost three years. “You don’t have to tell me or anything. I’m putting oil on it because you may not have incorporated that place back into your body and you need to have it witnessed. It’s part of you and it’s nice and neat-”
“It’s ugly, come on.” Nina’s voice came out harsh.
“Never mind, I’ll move on, just let me touch it again next week, okay?”
“It’s an exit-wound scar,” Nina said. “From a thirty-two-caliber pistol fired by a woman in a courtroom.”
“I knew. I just knew it. You’re a policewoman!”
“What if I said I’m a bank robber?”
Chelsi’s hands paused. “I don’t believe that. It wouldn’t bother me if it was true, though, I have to admit. I had a guy from Vegas in here who told me about how he embezzled from his boss at a credit agency. Even hustlers suffer from stress and hold it in their muscles. But you’re not a bank robber. Your haircut is too primo. Long layers, really nice, no spray. And you don’t wear much makeup. Your style is all wrong for a bank robber.”
Nina didn’t answer. She imagined Chelsi’s big-haired mama of a bank robber.
“Let’s work on your neck some more.” She dug her fingers under Nina’s skull at the back. It should have hurt. Instead, it was a catharsis, a stream of accumulated tension breaking up and flowing away. “You are kidding me, right? Although you don’t work at Tahoe long before you realize we’re all running some kind of hustle. Look at all the rich people who rent a garage on the Nevada side and claim they’re Nevada residents so they won’t have to pay state income tax in California. I hustle a little myself. You’re paying me on the cash-discount basis, right? It’s a tax-free zone up here. The showgirls make so much money outside the shows doing entertaining, you wouldn’t believe it. No offense, but I also know you’re not a showgirl.”
“Because?”
“Too petite. And, you know, not in your twenties anymore. So what do you really do?”
“Law. I’m a lawyer.” The hands stopped, and Nina wondered if Chelsi would slide out of her cheerful mood. Confessing her profession at a cocktail party often resulted in a step back and eyes averted from hers, as though she’d admitted she was a hooker.
Both necessary evils, she said to herself.
But Chelsi took no offense. “Right! Nina Reilly. I read about you in the paper. You do murder trials. Keep your head down. Relax.”
“I do all kinds of law work. Whatever comes through the door. Not just murder trials.”
“Well, that might explain your neck. Is that where the headaches start?”
“Actually, they start right in my temples, even when I haven’t been reading,” Nina said.
“Let me try something,” Chelsi told her. She rolled Nina over and began massaging her face, starting with her forehead and temples, circling the eye sockets with expert fingers, prodding under her jaw. “It’s a Tibetan technique. Kum Nye.” Again, the relief was both subtle and intense. Nina felt her jaw go slack for maybe the first time since childhood.
“You poor thing. You need to come in at least once a week for a couple of months. I can do more for you than those pills you were prescribed. You have stored-up tension everywhere.”
“It’s a deal,” Nina muttered.
There was a long silence while Chelsi did some acupressure on Nina’s cheekbones and around her sinuses, then did that dainty pressing around her eyes again. “I’m sorry you got shot,” she volunteered finally.
Nobody had ever said that to Nina at the hospital or afterward. Her brother, Matt, had been furious with her for taking the murder case in the first place. Her son, Bob, had been inarticulate with shock. She had been given flowers, kudos for catching a killer, but not a lot of sympathy. In fact, looking back, there had been a tinge of “you asked for it” in the reactions of the courtroom personnel. You take murder cases, you take your chances, was the attitude.
Nina realized that she still felt resentful about that, but even as the realization came, the resentment was going away, in waves accompanying the long strokes of Chelsi’s hands.
So it was true, you did hold emotions in your muscles.
Chelsi was as healing in her speech as in her hands. She was working Nina’s jaw hinges again. “Whenever you start to feel tense, yawn. Do you like what you do?”
“When I win. When I do good work.”
They lapsed back into silence for some time while Nina’s shoulders and biceps got a final workout, Chelsi leaning over Nina from above like an angel of mercy.
“Let’s give you a foot rub. Are you good at it?”
“At what?”
“Your work.”
“Yes.”
“Now, see, I ask women that, and hardly ever do they say yes. The guys never hesitate. They say, ‘Sure.’ You’re awesome to have that kind of confidence. What is it really like? I mean, really?” She oiled Nina’s foot and started tweaking and pulling on her toes, as if they had muscles too.
“Practicing law? Well, a case starts with an immediate problem. Your client is in jail, or your client’s about to be evicted, or your client’s marriage is falling apart. You try to organize this real-life chaos into a theory or story that calms things down and will resolve the problem in a fair and orderly way. You get all the information and you try to work the system so your client has the outcome he or she deserves.”
“How do you come up with this theory?”
“You read other legal cases and try to organize the facts so that your client comes out the hero, not the villain. Then you try to convince the judge that your version is the best version. Because the other guy always has a good story, too.”
“You don’t try to get the client what they want?”
“Sometimes they don’t know. Sometimes they are unrealistic. Sometimes the system can’t give them what they deserve. All the system can really do is lock people up or transfer money around. It can’t bring back a loved one, for instance, and sometimes that’s all the client wants. What’s the matter?” Chelsi’s hands had faltered, and she sighed.
“You make me think of a loved one I lost,” she said.
The chime rang.
“That darn thing,” Chelsi said. She gave Nina’s feet one final squeeze and said, “You take as long as you need to get dressed.” The door shut behind her, the soft New Age chords switched off abruptly, and Nina, deposited back into rude reality, blinked open her eyes to a shelf of unguents and towels and strong mountain sun filtering through the pines outside Chelsi’s window.
She sat up reluctantly and slid off the table. While she dressed, she thought about Chelsi. She pulled on her blue silk jacket last and brushed her hair in the mirror above the sink, then consulted her watch. Court in thirty minutes.
She opened the door.
In the cubbyhole office, Chelsi hung up the phone and said, “Feeling better?”
“Much better. There’s one thing I wanted to ask you. For about two minutes, when you were working on my face, I suddenly got the most splitting headache. Then it disappeared like air, and now I’m fine.”
“That was your headache quota for the week. It let go all at once. You’ll have a good week.”
“Thanks. Really. I’m glad I found you. What do I owe you today?”
“Nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not a thing. And nothing next week, either.” Chelsi folded her arms over the flowers embroidered on her smock. “I’d like to ask you a favor instead. My uncle Dave has-he needs-he has a legal thing. Would you talk to him?”
Nina put on her sunglasses and laid her business card and fifty dollars on the desk. “Like I said, Chelsi, anything that comes through the door. The first consultation is free.”
“It’s urgent. My dad and I have been trying to help him find a lawyer fast.” Fast usually meant too late. Nina grimaced. “He’s charged with a crime?”
“No! No! He was a victim. He and my aunt Sarah. Two years ago. There was a robbery in a motel they were staying at near Prize’s and-and my aunt Sarah was shot.” Chelsi gave Nina’s body a look and Nina could almost feel her curious fingers on the scar again. “The South Lake Tahoe police couldn’t find the shooter. Uncle Dave went to a lawyer who helped him file a suit against the motel. For-for-”
“Negligent security?”
“Right. Something like that. And he put in a bunch of John Does like the lawyer said, so when he found out who the robber was he could do a-”
“Substitute in the robber as a defendant,” Nina said. “There must be a wrongful-death cause of action too.”
“That sounds right. Even if the police didn’t feel they had enough evidence to arrest the robber, Uncle Dave could still sue him for damages. But now there’s a court deadline or something where the motel is going to have the suit thrown out. Uncle Dave drinks too much, you know? He’s broke and he’s broken. My dad and I can put in some money to help, but-anyway, would you talk to him and look at his papers? For two massages?” She handed Nina her money back.
“I’ll be getting the better of the barter,” Nina said. “Have your uncle Dave call my office and set up a time with Sandy, my secretary.”
“Great! My aunt Sarah was such a good person. It can’t happen that the universe could let her die and not punish anyone. She was only thirty-eight, and here’s the worst, it still makes me choke up to talk about it, she was pregnant. Their first baby. They had been trying so long. It makes me so sad and mad. My mother left us when I was three, and Aunt Sarah was always there for me. Anyway, I appreciate it.”
“I’ll see you next week, then.”
“We won’t talk about it during your next massage. It’s bad for relaxation.”
“I’m sorry about your aunt, Chelsi,” Nina said.
Chelsi gave her a pained smile.
“Thanks. I can tell you mean it. I know you can’t bring her back, but-anyway, thank you. Now here’s your assignment for the week. Yawn whenever you feel tense,” Chelsi said.
TWO DAYS LATER, A FRESH MUG of Italian espresso in hand, stockinged heels riding the edge of her desk, Nina stole a moment to reflect.
The long workday had begun. On the drive down Pioneer Trail that morning toward the office, Nina had watched the bicyclists and joggers with even more than her usual envy. They were out grabbing the last glories of fall, so damn happy, smelling the fresh tang of high snows and watching fluttering dry leaves while she contemplated her day, the bitter child-custody battle coming up, along with two grisly settlement conferences, all to be conducted in the windowless courtroom of the irascible Judge Flaherty.
Long ago, when law began, the advocates and judges must have met in tree-shaded glades, toga-clad, birdsong the accompaniment to their work, courtesy and dignity their style, and-
– And of course, as a woman, she would have been pouring the wine from the ewer, not arguing the case. But one could fantasize at 7:45 in the morning while watching birds and squirrels chase around the autumnal marsh that rolled out toward a distant, twinkling Lake Tahoe.
After several months in Monterey, she and her teenage son, Bob, had returned to Tahoe. Sandy Whitefeather had returned to her domain in Nina’s office in the Starlake Building and was drumming up business before Nina had time to put down her cup on the desk. The young woman lawyer who had been handling Nina’s cases found a law job in Reno, and left open files and a busy calendar of court appearances.
In spite of the time crunch, Nina found just enough space in the morning to pour Hitchcock’s kibble and Bob’s cereal, and to enjoy the short trip up Pioneer Trail to her law office.
When evening came, after she and Sandy locked up, Nina would drive home through the forest to the cabin on Kulow Street, noting the hints of winter to come she perceived in the dry pines and parched streams. The cabin still basked in early-evening sun. Inside, she would kick off her shoes and pour herself a glass of Clos du Bois and watch the world news, make dinner, and nag Bob into finishing his homework. Once a week she called her father, and once or twice a week she and Bob went to her brother Matt’s house for dinner.
September and October passed in a flurry while she reestablished her routines. The fees rolled in and she paid off her debts.
The judges accepted her back. She had a pretty good working relationship with most of the local lawyers, and she finally knew what she was doing.
The small office suite in the Starlake Building on Lake Tahoe Boulevard, right in the heart of town and less than five miles from the Nevada state line, now felt like home, but some part of her was still restless. She had gone from Carmel to San Francisco to Tahoe and back to Carmel and then back to Tahoe again in the past few years. She was starting to ask herself, uncomfortably, if she would ever settle down. Bob deserved stability, and she was going to have to stay put for a while.
She wasn’t even sure why she had returned to Tahoe. She might just as well have stayed in Carmel and joined the Pohlmann firm, which had made her a very good offer.
And she had made one other uncomfortable discovery since returning to Tahoe.
Her ex-lover, Paul van Wagoner, and his new flame, Susan Misumi, had quickly moved in together down in Carmel. Fair enough, since Nina had ended it with Paul. The choice of Susan Misumi, with her black bangs, her humorlessness, escaped Nina, but it wasn’t her business anymore. Nina and Paul still checked in on each other. They managed to stay friendly because they had been friends before they became lovers.
Nina had moved on. She went out, danced, ate good food, had a few unexpectedly intimate conversations. But she had discovered that she didn’t expect much from men anymore. She didn’t want to try for love.
That feeling had been growing in her for a long time, and she sometimes wondered if it had something to do with the breakup with Paul. Finding a partner seemed impossible, based on her experiences, so she put it out of her mind.
Men and places. Still, the restlessness would come over her, and she’d feel a need for another place and another man. Other people followed their lifelines. She careened along, too fast, not able to see her own.
But she would always have two constants to ground her: Bob, and her work.
Today, we persevere, she thought. With the last gulp of coffee, she threw two ibuprofen down her throat.
The phone buzzed. Nina swung her legs down, sighed, and picked up the phone. Sandy must have come in. Her desk was only ten feet away, through the closed door, but Sandy didn’t like getting up.
“He’s here, and so’s she. Your eight o’clocks,” Sandy said.
“And a fine morning it is.”
“Hmph. You have half an hour.”
The man stood with his back to her, hands in his pockets, looking at one of Sandy ’s decorations, a Washoe Indian basket on the shelf. He wore a green-and-black plaid lumberjack shirt tucked into a well-broken-in pair of jeans. The belt, a leathercraft affair, must have dated from the sixties. Work boots, a body used to physical work.
A conservative local, Nina thought, pegging him almost before he turned around. Nice wrinkled tan face. Grim expression. Plenty of gray-brown hair on both head and chin. A belly, that was a surprise.
Behind him, pretty Chelsi nodded. She was taller than her uncle. She wore her hair down today and it fell straight and satiny. Something had turned off the smile.
“Hi. I’m Nina Reilly,” Nina said, looking the man in the eye, holding out her hand.
“David Hanna.”
“Please come in.” After ushering Chelsi in, too, Nina glanced toward Sandy, who, resplendent this morning in a heavy turquoise necklace and a denim jumper, seemed to be writing something in the appointment book. Sandy gave Nina a swift look back, one eyebrow cocked.
Look out.
Now, that was an interesting take, since Uncle Dave looked harmless, but Sandy ’s first impressions had to be taken seriously. Sandy knew where clients hid their guns and buck knives; she knew if the Rolex was real or faux; a few words to her in the reception area revealed if a new client was resentful, desperate, or suicidal. Recently they had installed an emergency button hooked up to the local police under her desk, and the golf club propped behind her desk only doubled as a decoration.
Such is solo law office life in a gambling town. Prepare for Uzis, Sandy frequently said.
Nina closed the door and Hanna pulled an orange chair away from the wide desk. He sat, crossing one leg at the ankle, stroking his beard, looking out the window behind her desk toward the steel gray lake, but not focusing, just gazing. Chelsi sat in the chair next to his, back straight.
Nina took her time getting comfortable, arranging a few papers on her desk, adjusting her chair. Let them get used to her.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” David Hanna said finally.
“Because you need to be,” Chelsi said.
“I’m not working much. Money’s tight. Chelsi and her dad, they’ve offered to pay for your services, but I just don’t know. It doesn’t seem right. I hear Chelsi’s already told you about the case.”
“A little,” Nina said.
“Rog was Sarah’s brother. I know he can’t help wanting to do something. What I can’t figure out, what I haven’t been able to get my head around all along, is what good it does, suing someone. My wife is gone.”
“What’s your brother-in-law’s name again?”
“Roger Freeman.” While Nina made a note on her yellow pad, Hanna watched, squinting. The tops of his ears were red and his nose looked sunburned, too. Either he spent a lot of time outside, or, as Chelsi had suggested, less healthy indoor pursuits heightened his natural color. “What’s your usual line of work, Mr. Hanna?”
“I’m a carpenter. Used to be a firefighter.”
Nina looked at her client-interview sheet. “ Placerville ’s a great town.”
“It’s a long drive up Fifty to get here. I don’t come up the Hill much anymore since it happened. Chelsi said this conversation right now isn’t going to cost us anything?”
“Free consultation,” Nina said. “We have half an hour and you came a long way, so how can I help you?”
Hanna shrugged and said, “That’s the point. I haven’t got a fucking clue.”
When Nina didn’t bridle at that, he added, “Like I said, talk won’t bring her back.”
“But you’re already involved in a lawsuit. Isn’t that right?”
“I had a lawyer in Placerville named Bruce Bennett. Two years ago, after Sarah died, Roger contacted him and had this lawyer file a civil suit against the motel where it all happened. I wasn’t sure about the whole thing, but Bennett got us in his office and oh, he talked it up, how much money we were going to hit them up for, how they were negligent. They let the bastard onto the property. No video camera and the clerk off somewhere. The lawyer talked us into suing the motel. Why, he practically had us convinced that the motel owner, who by the way wasn’t even around that night, did the shooting.”
“Sounds like he was trying to put on a very aggressive case on your behalf.”
“I guess.” He shook his head. “It never sat right with me, blaming the motel, but Roger was so gung ho. We used up some of Sarah’s life insurance to pay Bennett, but when the money ran out he filed a substitution-of-attorney form and left us flat.”
“I guess that didn’t leave you with a very high opinion of lawyers. I know Bruce. The lawsuit stayed active?”
He shook his head. “I really don’t know where things stand with it.”
“You couldn’t pay Bruce Bennett, so he quit?”
“Basically.”
“I would think carpenters were in big demand around here. I can never get anyone to come out and fix my porch,” Nina said.
“I don’t work much lately.” He sighed. “I have problems.”
“Problems?”
He chewed on a thumb, as if the question demanded arduous consideration that was beyond him. Scanning the room as if he might locate a swift escape route that wouldn’t require him to pass Sandy, his eyes landed on Chelsi.
“Uncle Dave’s been sick,” Chelsi said, taking her cue.
“Hmm,” Nina said. “Well, I understand you were going to bring me the court papers to look at,” she went on neutrally.
“Right.” He reached inside his wool shirt and pulled out a battered envelope. He set it on the desk, the hand revealing a slight tremor. Nina looked at him carefully, noting the thin burst of broken capillaries in his ruddy cheeks, the tangle of red veins around the edges of his eyes.
He hasn’t had the hair of the dog this morning, she thought, and he misses it. No wonder Sandy had given her a warning eyebrow. Sandy didn’t like drinkers.
On the other hand, wasn’t it a positive sign that he had held off to talk with her? Maybe there was still hope for him.
She opened the envelope and pulled out several legal documents in the Wrongful Death and Negligence case of Hanna v. Ace High Lodge and Does I-X.
The complaint Bruce Bennett had drafted was on top, followed by some unserved summonses, an answer filed by the Ace High Lodge, and a set of pleadings filed recently by the Lodge’s attorney, Betty Jo Puckett of South Lake Tahoe. While Nina skimmed through the pleadings, Dave Hanna slumped in his chair, never taking his eyes off her.
Chelsi had displayed a good grasp of her uncle’s legal situation. He was about to have his case dismissed on the motion of the Ace High Lodge, because he had done nothing to bring the matter to trial for almost two years.
Bennett had done a workmanlike job laying out the facts in the complaint. The Hannas had been celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary by spending the weekend at Lake Tahoe at the Ace High Lodge, one block from Harveys and the other Stateline casinos. They had gone to a show at Prize’s and walked back, then stepped out to the second-floor balcony of their room.
There, according to the dry legalese of the complaint, “they observed an armed robbery in progress.” And, in what seemed to be a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, at thirty-eight, third-grade teacher Sarah Hanna had been shot once through the heart. She was three months pregnant.
There were few traces of the gunman or other witnesses. The motel clerk, Meredith Assawaroj, had heard the shots from an adjoining property. She had missed seeing the killer but had provided the South Lake Tahoe police with a fair description of the three motel guests who had been held up, young people who had packed up and left before the police arrived.
The clerk’s descriptions of these three led nowhere. The gun hadn’t been left at the scene. The witnesses had paid in cash and the description provided had been inadequate to find them. Nina made a note to find out more about that.
Now the Ace High Lodge wanted out of Hanna’s lawsuit, which alleged that its clerk should have been in the office, that the motel security should have been better, and so on and so on. Hanna might have had some sort of case on the merits if he had pursued it, but leaving it to languish for so long had exposed him to Betty Jo Puckett’s Motion to Dismiss.
Puckett’s work looked good. Her law was solid. Statutory limits restricted the ability of plaintiffs to file a lawsuit and then do nothing, as Dave Hanna had done.
Puckett had apparently advised the motel owner well-to lay low for as long as possible and then attack Hanna for failure to prosecute. Nina hadn’t met the lawyer, but the courtroom grapevine said she had an effective style.
She looked up. Hanna’s cheeks flamed, but his eyes were sunken into the sockets. He looked like a big, healthy man who had developed some wasting disease that was ruining him. Nina wondered how long he had been drinking way too much. At least he was sober at eight in the morning. She found it painful to imagine what he’d gone through, how bitter he must feel now.
She cleared her throat. Setting down the motion to dismiss, she said, “Your wife seems to have been the classic innocent bystander.”
“Did you know she was expecting?”
“Yes.”
He shifted in his chair, like the seat hurt him.
“What do you plan to do now?” Nina asked him.
“Slink away, I guess.”
“The Lodge wants attorney’s fees.”
“I might get socked with their lawyer fees?”
“Perhaps.”
Dave Hanna put his hand on his heart and said, “Let me get this straight. They want me to pay them? How much money are we talking about?”
“I don’t know. I could guess, from the amount of work I see here, possibly several thousand dollars.”
“If I do nothing, what will happen?”
“You’ll probably have to pay their fees.”
During a long silence Hanna deliberated about whether to-what? Confide in her? Walk out on her?
“Well?” he asked finally.
Nina raised her eyebrows.
“What do you think?”
“It isn’t hopeless,” Nina said.
“There isn’t a damn thing I can do to stop them, is there?”
“You can fight the motion. The Code of Civil Procedure does require that a suit like yours be dismissed two years after service on the defendant with no action. But it hasn’t been quite two years. It’s still in the discretion of the court.”
Hanna blurted, “Look, lady. I understand you need to drum up business. Maybe you hope we’ve got a stash of dough hidden away. I hate to say this, but we don’t. Bennett demanded a hundred fifty dollars an hour and five thousand up front, and called himself cheap. I don’t want to bankrupt Roger and Chelsi. And I’m broke, like I keep telling you.”
“We’ll take care of the money, Uncle Dave,” Chelsi said.
“I will need a retainer,” Nina said, thinking of Sandy, who would hold her accountable. She came up with the lowest amount she could manage. “Two thousand, billed against my hours. I also charge a hundred fifty an hour. There may be expenses. If we manage to keep the case going, those expenses could mount up fast.”
“Done,” Chelsi said, whipping out her checkbook. Hanna bowed his head, looked at the rug. “It’s not for revenge,” Chelsi said. “It’s not for money. It’s for my aunt. You know?”
Nina nodded. She pushed the button as though Sandy hadn’t left the door open a crack and been listening the whole time.
After Hanna had signed an agreement and left with Chelsi, Nina adjusted her suit coat and hung her new briefcase over her shoulder.
“You think we can make money on this?” Sandy said. She reposed like a Buddha in her Aeron chair, detached, hands folded calmly on the desk over Nina’s notes.
“I do. Fast money. That’s if we can get past this motion to dismiss. The motel clerk should have been in the office. The area should have been less of an ambush invitation. There may have been other incidents-this kind of crime occurs in clusters. Maybe the motel should have been on notice.”
“The client’s unreliable.”
“Yes. But his relatives seem to have him in line. I think some money might help him, Sandy. Rehab. Grief counseling. Whatever. I trust Chelsi to steer him right.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“Let’s get the police reports and check to see if there were similar crimes reported in the area over the past ten years. File a notice that I’m in as Hanna’s attorney and send a copy of the notice to Betty Jo Puckett. She represents the Ace High Lodge.”
“Betty Jo Puckett?”
“You know her?”
“I met her. She has a problem in the tact department.”
Nina smiled, saying, “Report anything else you hear.”
“Before you go, what else do you need?”
“Get the file made up. I’ll get going on drafting the Response to the Motion to Dismiss after court. There is a long line of precedents regarding innkeeper liability for inadequate security. Sandy, remember Connie Francis?”
“The singer? Nineteen-sixties. ‘Lipstick on Your Collar.’ That wasn’t even her biggest hit. But even now it strikes a chord with me.” Sandy ’s husband, Joe, and she had broken up for many years and only recently remarried.
“She won an early motel-security case. The damages award was in the seven figures. I don’t think it was in California, though. The trial took place in the mid-seventies. See if you can locate the case on Lexis.”
“She was robbed?”
“She was raped. While staying in a hotel room. It was brutal. I think it almost ended her career.”
Neither woman spoke for a moment. Nina was thinking that people don’t get over violence like that. They may carry on, but they are changed forever. Finally Sandy said, her voice tight, “So some turkey fired off a wild one during a stickup and killed a pregnant third-grade teacher. Do we go looking for him, or just nick the motel?”
“We go looking.”
“Good.”
“We get started, at least.”
“Shall I call Paul?”
“He’s tied up.”
“You’ll need an investigator, and he’s the best.”
But for many reasons, Nina did not want Paul van Wagoner involved. She did not wish to see his confident face, his flirty manner, his sexual vibrations. She was over him, at least for the moment. Someday, Paul could reenter her life neutered into a professional associate. Until then, he needed to stay filed in the Great Memory file.
She said with emphasis, “Do not call Paul.”
“Okay, okay. I heard about another good investigator who might be available.”
“Good. See what you can do.” Nina trotted down the hall and climbed into her old Bronco. Five minutes until court. She bumped off the curb into the street.
There’s an advantage to small-town law. She would make it to court right on time.
TWO DAYS LATER, JUST AFTER FIVE, Nina drove north on the Nevada side of the road that circled Lake Tahoe.
Her response had been filed with the court that morning, and opposing attorney Betty Jo Puckett was nothing if not decisive. She had called Nina within an hour of the faxed service to her office and invited Nina to have a drink with her at her home in Incline Village, on the North Shore.
In all her time practicing law at Tahoe, Nina had never been invited to the home of another lawyer. A talk like this would ordinarily occur in a paneled office where computers clicked and whirred just outside the door. The reason, she had long ago decided, was that she was one of the few women lawyers in town. Men could meet after work, but a meeting with a woman lawyer caused gossip and trouble at home.
She hoped Ms. Puckett would be reasonable. Maybe she’d even be a congenial person, a new friend. Nina snorted at herself as she waited at the Stateline light. A new friend! The woman was a lawyer on the other side of a case, for Pete’s sake!
At least she’d enjoy the forty-five-minute drive.
Rush hour does not exactly exist on the twenty-five-mile stretch between the south and north shores of Lake Tahoe. Traffic may be slowed by gawkers, by people pulling over to park at the nude beaches, by the construction projects that last all summer, but the population for a real traffic jam just isn’t there.
Just barely over the Nevada state line, extending for a few blocks along Highway 50 on the South Shore, the gaming industry reigned supreme. “Gaming” had a much nicer ring than “gambling.” “Gaming” implied ingenuity, and Nina did admit poker and blackjack to a realm where gambling could ascend into skill. Most people played the slots, though, and everyone knew that slots were the main source of casino revenue.
The casino district’s face-lift was almost complete, down to a new gondola gliding up the slopes of the Heavenly ski resort. Old Cecil’s Liquors with its narrow aisles and products piled to the ceiling had been replaced by the new Cecil’s, twice as expensive, a neon sign advertising its new location, too brightly lit, too neatly stocked.
Cecil’s also had new, twenty-first-century neighbors: a bookstore, a Starbucks. The Village Center -brand-new, built with a heavy hand from fieldstone-held a hotel and expensive shops. On her left, the unregenerate originals, the T-shirt shops and tchotchke vendors, stuck it out behind shabby storefronts, still fielding plenty of customers. Raley’s Supermarket had been gussied up into chalet style. As she passed that corner, Nina searched for the lone tree in the parking lot, which had once figured in a murder case she had handled.
No tree. Progress had leveled trees, crime scenes, and favorite haunts with the same dispassion.
At Prize’s, with its house-sized treasure-chest logo looming overhead, she saw that Sammy Hagar’s Cabo Wabo Cantina had started up. Caesars, the class act of the district, had the Reno Philharmonic playing Carmina Burana, but for the regulars, DJ Jazzy Jeff was spinning CDs at Club Nero. X-An Erotic Adventure would be getting playful on Friday night at Harveys. Tall, forest-green Harrah’s looked down its nose across the boulevard from humble Bill’s, which didn’t monkey with erotica, magic, or expensive music acts, but got right to the point. Its neon marquee simply promised “Loose Slots.”
She hit another light at the end of the row, near the Lakeside Inn, the locals’ casino, the last casino before the forest crept back in. To her left now was Kahle Drive, where the casino workers lived in mobile homes and cottages facing an undeveloped meadow. A young woman with long bleached hair, a leopard-print blouse, and jeans walked her big, wild-looking mastiff, fitting symbols of the transition from civilization back to the wooded mountains.
The forest closed in, olive and brown, the sky blindingly clear and the lake on her left filtering its blue-grays now and then through the firs. With air so dry and at an altitude of over six thousand feet, everything was high-focus, almost too clear.
Off Cave Rock, a white cabin cruiser trailed dark blue waterlines. The lake looked as enormous as an inland sea. Sometimes waterlines appeared by themselves out there, sinuous ridges that had given rise to the Tahoe Tessie legend.
Just after the Carson City turnoff, the road wound up high above the lake and the Bronco passed an unmarked gated trail to the left. Nina knew from Sandy that this led down to Skunk Harbor, where the Washoe Indians had been granted an exclusive right to camp, hunt, and fish. The cove was invisible, but she could see from her high seat the untouched meadows and forests below. A couple of hikers toiled up the trail.
Fifteen minutes later she came to the North Shore, the water suddenly close and sparkling on her left, down a hundred feet of steady-sloping granite and dirt to the nude beaches. Nina could see a few plumes of smoke on the distant West Shore -prescribed burning even this late in the year. The mountains over there were a deeper blue frosted with white from early snowfall.
She was alone on the road, Sand Harbor ’s shallow, bright water just ahead. Swinging the wheel, she continued around the curve past the old Ponderosa Ranch and took a right at Country Club Drive, the street name that told her, in several ways, that she had entered Incline Village.
The Bronco labored up the mountain. Just off Mount Rose Highway she came to Champagne Way and turned down the long, winding street, marveling at the chateaus with their mile-high views of the lake basin. She had heard of this street. Local gossip said that a very well-known singer, songwriter, and record producer had a home here. The neighbors didn’t exactly look poverty-stricken, either.
At the end of the street she arrived at a large stucco hacienda with a green-tiled roof surrounded by walls with fir-tree borders. The house was built on a promontory of the mountain. Nina slowed down to take in the view, but then Betty Jo Puckett appeared in the flagged driveway and the Bronco plowed toward her.
Betty Jo practically dragged Nina out of her seat. “I’ve been wanting to meet you,” she said. A tall, rugged, gray-haired woman in her fifties; her jeans and white shirt encased a rangy body. Her face, sawed into a hundred lines and angles, exhibited every second of wear, and she had let dark eyebrows grow in thick. She looked a little like Judge Milne, in fact.
“Let’s go inside.” They passed through a tall entry with saltillo tiles underfoot and a lot of plants into a high-ceilinged living room with a flagstone fireplace next to a bar at the far end.
A little old man stood behind the bar, pouring from a bottle of vodka. “Heh,” he said.
“That’s Hector, my husband. He doesn’t talk too well these days, but he loves company. What would you like to drink? Here, set down.”
Nina chose a leather chair near the fire. “Tea?”
“Tea?” Hector growled almost incoherently, obviously peeved.
“Tea,” Nina said firmly.
He took a flowered teapot from below the bar and flicked the lever of a spigot over the sink. Steaming water filled the pot. He measured quantities of tea from a silver tin, dunked a big silver tea ball into the pot, and set a timer. He said something Nina couldn’t catch.
“Four minutes,” Betty Jo translated.
They chatted while they waited and Nina looked around. Picture windows, French doors, whitewashed beams, a lot of expensive furniture. Precisely four minutes later, Hector removed the tea ball, poured liquid into a mug for Nina, and shuffled over to her.
“Thanks.” Close up, she saw he wore a silk ascot. His teeth were blindingly white and perfectly regular. The tea sloshed dangerously as he handed it to her.
“Heh.” Back behind the bar he began sipping something of his own. Betty Jo sat on the long white leather couch opposite Nina’s chair, picked up a beer mug from the Noguchi coffee table, and said, “Salud!”
“Heh!”
“Salud.”
They all drank. Nina took a sniff, then a taste. The tea tasted delicate, perfumed with flowers and something like popcorn, quite a change from the supermarket stuff she was used to drinking. “What is this? It’s great.”
“Is that the stuff from China we got last year, doll?”
Hector nodded his hoary head. He was very old, in his eighties, Nina decided.
“Shoot. I forget the name. Hector, what’s it called?”
He examined an ornately decorated canister and answered her.
“Right,” Betty Jo said, nodding. “How’d I forget that?”
Nina, who had not understood him, sipped some more, wanting to know but not enough to ask again.
“Oh, here’s Jimmy.” Betty Jo got up to greet a man who had entered the room. She took him by the hand and brought him in for a hug, then led him toward Nina. “Jimmy Bova, Nina Reilly.”
Bova shook Nina’s hand.
“I’m the owner of the Ace High,” he said. “You know-the motel.” Bova wore a red sweater, which clung like silk to his well-defined upper body. He had fleshy lips, a long Roman nose, the kind that drops straight from the forehead, and unusual, light-colored eyes set off nicely by the even tan a tanning booth provides. He looked like a man who took his exercise inside a gym, wearing really nice sweats, rather than the typical Tahoe man, who got it outside at the woodchopping block.
“Glad to meet you,” Nina said. “I didn’t know you’d be here.” Betty Jo had sprung a surprise, inviting her client along. Bova smiled. It was a warm smile, and Nina gave him one back, always ready to give the benefit of a doubt. If he hadn’t been on the opposite side, she might not have described him to herself quite so harshly. He actually had a dash of Sylvester Stallone when he smiled.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Betty Jo said innocently. “I always reckon people should talk, get to know each other. Didn’t figure Mr. Hanna was ready to join us, though. He’s hell to talk to. I’m glad you’re in the case, Nina.”
Nina set her cup down and decided to play along with Betty Jo. They were all friends here, with no sticky clients like Nina’s around to mess the place up. “Your house is superb. Spanish style isn’t common up here.”
“Hector and I couldn’t resist when we saw it. We’re from Modesto. Only been up here a couple of years.”
“Happy practicing law at Tahoe?” Nina asked her.
“Oh, yeah. Love it.”
Bova, roving the room as if searching for a comfortable landing site, made no attempt to enter the conversation. Walking over to the fireplace, he picked up a poker, which he used to make a perfect pyramid of the burning logs. Then he turned to look at her, and Nina felt a shiver in spite of the warmth from the fire. She had been a little startled by how attractive Betty Jo’s client was. He did not resemble the mean-spirited innkeeper of her imagination. His amber eyes glowed in the dimly lit room like the fire behind him.
Betty Jo launched into a story about meeting Sandy at the grocery store. “She walked by me and I noticed one of the buttons on her blouse had popped. It happens to us big gals, so I kind of whispered as I passed, ‘Look down in front. Your button.’ So she looked down and she fixed it. Our carts passed and she never said a word. Then at the checkout she came up behind me and she whispered, ‘Look behind you. Your butt.’ ”
And at that, illustrating for them, Betty Jo turned her back on them, bent over, rolled her neck so that she could see her backside, and jiggled it.
When nobody said anything, she jiggled again. She was not to be denied.
Nina and Bova, equally astonished at this display, looked at each other and broke out laughing.
“ Sandy doesn’t take kindly to being corrected,” Nina said when she recovered herself.
“Well, I’m sure she’s a fine legal secretary in spite of that big honking mouth of hers,” Betty Jo said, sitting down again on the couch. “And she’s observant. I do have a big ass, which Hector considers a major asset, don’t you, Hector?”
Studying Betty Jo there on the couch, taking it all in-the invitation, the fire, the down-home way of talking, the drinks, the little old husband, the alert eyes-Nina suddenly realized what this foolishness was all about. Betty Jo wanted Nina unguarded. She wanted her friendly. She wanted Nina to underestimate her enemy. A little joke at her own expense was far cheaper in the long run than a big settlement. Legal strategy, country-style.
“Now, I also hear that you recently came back to Tahoe and set up again. That right?” Betty Jo was saying.
“I tried something else out for a few months, but I’m back for good now.”
“Glad to hear it. The more women we get up here, the less cussin’ and fightin’ there’ll be in court.” A Chihuahua skidded into the room, followed by a large gray cat. They both jumped into Betty Jo’s lap. Her strong hand settled the sudden squabble as they vied for position.
Nina said, “How about you?”
“Oh, I was living in the same little place I’d had for thirty years down there in the Central Valley, doing a little divorce work here and some personal-injury there. And what should pop up one fine morning but a great big injury case with a deep-pockets insurer. I had to litigate it. By the start of trial I was in hock to my kids, my friends, plus the devil. Three weeks we went to court every day, me palpitating and my poor old client on his last legs. Then the jury came in and gave us fifteen million bucks.” She laughed. “You believe it? Like winning at Lotto. Impossible odds.”
“Congratulations.”
“I always thought I would hit a big one. Thirty years was a long time to wait, though. Anyway, Hector and I fell in love and got married and decided to spend our best years someplace beautiful. So we came here. You married?”
“No.”
“Divorced?”
“Divorced and widowed.” Nina felt rather than saw Bova absorbing the information. He cruised over, close to her chair, shifted on his feet, and leaned in.
“And still so young,” he said.
She couldn’t believe it. He was flirting with her. And this wasn’t the first time since she had returned to Tahoe she had been hit on in ridiculous circumstances. Could it be some kind of single-female pheromone she put out now that she was no longer with Paul?
If so, she didn’t mind too much, because she liked male attention, always had. Lately, maybe, she had started to wonder if she had come to rely on it a little too much. That didn’t mean she trusted Bova. She drew away from him, attempting to use body language to send him an unmistakable friendly nonverbal signal to get lost. Businesslike, aloof, and polite: She went for that effect, and it worked. Bova stepped away and resumed his examination of the objects in the room as if nothing had happened. Nina picked a few grapes from a bowl on the immaculate glass coffee table and ate them, giving herself a moment to slip back into lawyer mode. “Shall we talk about the Hanna case? I’m afraid I’ll have to get back soon.”
Betty Jo said, “I know you’re busy. Yet you came to see me right away and didn’t put us off. I like that.”
“I consider this situation urgent. You’re fighting to have David Hanna’s case thrown out and I can’t let you do that.”
“In a nutshell. Yes, in a nutshell. Here Jimmy and I thought we were in the home stretch and then you galloped up from behind. Your responsive papers are good, and that worries me. Understand, Jimmy didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t put up an electrified fence around a motel with a guard gate to prevent robberies, especially right around the corner from a casino district. You could just as well have sued the cops for not showing up and preventing the incident.”
“You don’t need me to tell you the law,” Nina said, “so I know I don’t have to remind you that places of public accommodation have duties to their customers that are completely different from the duties of the police.”
“Jimmy’s a nice guy.” Betty Jo continued to talk as if Bova weren’t there, ears cocked to take in every word. “The motel’s all he’s got.”
Nina took a long sip of tea. “No offense, but Mr. Hanna lost everything he held dear when he lost his wife.”
“He’s only suing me because he can’t find the guy who killed his wife,” Bova interrupted. “I’m sorry about that woman. I heard she was pregnant. Is that true?”
Nina nodded, watching him touch the smooth brown skin on his forehead.
“It’s a shame. You think I don’t wish every day this hadn’t happened? But I’m not responsible.”
“You have a proposal?” Nina said, on firm ground with him at last. “Do you want to settle this case and have peace of mind? Because I’m sure Betty Jo has told you, we can do that. We can settle with you and keep looking for the killer.”
“We can come up with something,” Betty Jo said before he could respond, “but I’m afraid your client won’t want to take what’s on offer, because we’re the only money around, and he thinks we should pay for everything.”
“Surely the motel’s liability insurance covers this situation,” Nina said.
“The company said no for a long time. But in the last two days they offered to make a payout.”
“What is the policy limit?”
“They offered twenty-five thousand. And we’ll drop our claim for attorney’s fees.”
“I see,” Nina said.
Hector brought over another bottle of beer for his wife. She gave him a pat. She had not touched the first beer after the initial toast. Her mug now stood on the coffee table like warnings to Nina not to relax too much. “It’s all standard stuff,” Betty Jo said to Nina.
“Standard? One, you won’t tell me their limit, and two, the offer’s a pittance.” Ah, she loved this tea. What in the world was in it to create an effect so relaxing yet so exciting? She felt a sneaky sympathy for Betty Jo, who was doing her damnedest to settle the case for a miserly amount of money, and who would not succeed unless she found more. For a moment, she wondered if Hector would go so far as to spike her tea somehow.
No. It was just wonderful tea.
Betty Jo looked at Jimmy Bova, now sitting beside her on the sofa. He shrugged. Then he turned his yellow eyes toward Nina. They now held nothing personal.
“Jimmy’s just getting by. But he can put a little in too, from his personal account. Now, let me explain something about the way I practice law. I really think the way the men do it, with all the dicking-excuse me, I mean dickering, around, and the hee-hawing and trying to score points, is a waste of energy. What I do is this. I make my last and final offer the first time around. And I stick to it. It never goes up, because I’ve already put out everything I can.
“A good attorney on the other side, she’s going to appreciate how efficient that is. It takes a little trust to work. I know I haven’t got my reputation established up here in the mountains. All I can tell you is, I’m about to make you a last and final offer from the Ace High Lodge, and your client has two days to decide whether to accept it. After that, we incur a bunch of expenses getting ready for trial, and we withdraw the offer.”
This practiced-sounding speech had a lot of appeal. Implicit in the offer was an assumption that the motel would lose its motion to dismiss. If Nina heard right, then Betty Jo was making a concession lawyers weren’t supposed to make, in addition to offering an authentic settlement.
“I don’t know how much you’re offering yet, but I appreciate your frankness,” she answered.
“Jimmy can scrape together another twenty-five thousand. That’s absolutely all he can spare and keep going. He feels terrible about what happened at his motel and he’s willing to dig deep. But these fringe places are strung out on the profit end, Nina. He’s not a rich man. We’re prepared to show you his income-tax returns to reassure you that he’s not hiding money and that this constitutes a real sacrifice. So, fifty thousand dollars to the bereaved husband, and you can still go after the killer.”
“I’ll talk to my client,” Nina said. “But I can’t advise him to take your offer. I’ll advise him to request the policy limits, which are going to be quite a bit more.”
“The insurance company won’t go for that. You think I haven’t tried?” Betty Jo said.
“Maybe losing the motion will convince them.”
“It won’t. They already factored that in. Even if a jury finds the motel negligent, it’s only contributory negligence. They’ll decide that the motel is about ten percent responsible and the killer’s responsible for the rest. So even if you get a half-million judgment, we’re still only going to have to pay the same old fifty thousand. Last and final, Nina.”
“I understand,” Nina said. She stood up. “Nice to meet you, Hector. That is some amazingly delicious tea.”
“Heh. Heh.”
“He’s delighted you liked it,” Betty Jo said cheerfully.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Bova.”
Bova said, “I’m sure we can work something out.” The words were basically formulaic, but Nina thought he really did want out, and that there wasn’t any more money. How would Dave Hanna react to the offer? Nina followed Betty Jo’s broad backside outside.
At the Bronco, Betty Jo said, “I forgot to mention one teeny thing, which is a possibility based on complete speculation and not a scintilla of evidence, that Jimmy might have a line on one of the witnesses. The tourist kids with the fake IDs.”
Nina stiffened. “What’s that?”
“He’ll be glad to tell you when we settle.”
“You can’t do that. You’ll be getting my interrogatories tomorrow, and he’d better answer the questions.”
“He doesn’t have to provide complete speculation to your client.”
“He’ll be in court if he-”
“Let’s part friends,” Betty Jo said gaily. “Okay? Let’s just think on it. We’ll talk again. Meantime, I like your style, Nina. You’re a cool customer.”
Nina smiled. “Okay. We’ll talk. I appreciate your straightness, too. I’m with you on the negotiating business. I also prefer to lay what I have on the table.”
“We’ll have lunch sometime. I’d like to hear some juicy legal gossip.”
“Sure. Nice having you up here, Betty Jo. The winters must be knocking your socks off after Modesto.”
“My love bunny keeps me warm.”
“Hector-he’s retired?”
“Oh, yes. He had a bad accident and crushed his larynx and suffered a little brain damage. But he’s fit as a fiddle in other respects. In all the ways that count.” She smiled. “He was as broke as me when we tried his case, and we both got rich at the end.”
“He was your client?”
“Yeah, he got ten million and I got five, and we decided what the hay, let’s put the whole shebang together.” Betty Jo put her hand on Nina’s shoulder and said, “I wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t a world-class lay. Life’s short, and you better pay attention to that, sister.”
Nina got into her vehicle, and Betty Jo closed the door after her. “Jimmy and I look forward to hearing from you.”
Nina started up the engine and waved. Betty Jo had seen it all, engineered every nuance of the evening, this canny, middle-aged lady from Modesto. Driving away with her windows open to the night, loving the way the cool air lifted the hair on her arms like the brush of a hand, Nina thought, Life’s short. She’s got that right.
ELLIOTT WAKEFIELD WENT TO WORK AT Caesars casino-hotel on Lake Tahoe Boulevard at 10:00 P.M. on Friday night, dressed as usual in baggy khaki shorts and Vans sneakers from his MIT days. The night had a flat, metallic smell to it. The stream of light along both sides of the slow-moving line of cars could almost have passed for palaces and public buildings in some grand European metropolis that had missed being bombed in World War II.
But Stateline wasn’t a real city, it was slow robbery in a mountain town dressed up with a lot of liquor and eyeliner, and those weren’t palaces, they were casinos. November had arrived, and it was cold after dark. As he climbed out of the subcompact, handing the keys to a valet older than he was, a couple of very young hookers sashayed by in black leather minis. He walked across the portico, jammed his hands into his pockets, and ignored them.
He didn’t like Tahoe, but he’d been flying here for years. He entered the imposing glass doors of the casino and the stark air-conditioning caught him.
Inside, people flowed in and out of the main gaming floor. Most were excited; some were drunk, and a few were thieves. Elliott was acutely conscious of being alone. Knock knock, who’s there, Thelonius. Thelonius who? Thelonius boy in town.
At MIT, living in the tiny dorm room, eating at the Commons every day with the same people, Elliott had still always ended up alone. Now, living with his father in the small brick house on Vashon Island near Seattle, he sometimes felt the loneliness might kill him when the MS got Pop. He did it to himself. Even now he was wishing he were back on the island, sitting at his desk and working with his Mathematica program on the computer.
He loved Pop, and Pop was his only company. They ate dinner and watched TV together like an old married couple, and Pop didn’t have a clue as to how Elliott paid the mortgage. They were happy, happy like a pair of trilobites embedded in a layer of shale, safe and stable.
Still, even if he had the misfortune of being a mathematician, he wasn’t a priest. He had thought sometimes about paying for sex, since he seemed to be too picky and shy to pick up a regular girl. But hookers, no. They were phonies. He couldn’t stand the fake smiles and arm squeezes, the self-conscious way they went about their business. Elliott wanted love, not a hustle. And sometimes they could be dangerous, and the danger quotient in his work had already proved high enough.
He took one more look at the girls entering the casino. Then he rubbed his pocket, where his stake was.
He couldn’t help glancing upward as he moved into the gaming area. The Eyes in the Sky, video and live cams, were barely visible in the ceiling if you knew where to look. In spite of the marble columns and marble floors of the hotel section and the sumptuous look of the casino, it attracted exactly the same customers as anywhere else in Stateline. The out-of-towners, especially the Asians, dressed up. The locals and California weekenders wore the same clothes as Elliott, straight off the sale table at the Gap. He looked just like every other techie from Silicon Valley, getting ready to say adios to his paycheck after a hard week writing code in a windowless cubicle.
Elliott circled the blackjack tables, which were almost all full. He liked that, because it kept the pit bosses occupied. They might not notice him. Not that he was looking for a killing tonight without Silke or Raj or Carleen to act as a spotter. He only needed a few thousand, and he still had Saturday night coming up.
The minute he thought of Silke he wanted to call her, say, “Guess where I am?” just because he knew she would be shocked and angry that he was back at Tahoe. He was still heartsick enough over her to enjoy any kind of emotional reaction, even the negative ones. But she belonged with Raj, working like him on her doctorate, and he had no business bugging her.
He stopped suddenly at a twenty-five-dollar-minimum table where a First Base spot lay open. On the next seat, a girl with red streaks in her hair, spotty skin, and trendy glasses sat behind several stacks of chips.
Oh, shit, he thought. Carleen. What’s she doing here? How coincidental was that, him thinking about her just a minute ago and her being here?
Well, it shouldn’t surprise him. Once, they had traveled this route together.
He ought to leave; no telling how she would greet him, but driven by perverse curiosity, he slid in beside her. She looked up at him. After the first flash of disbelief, her expression turned firmly noncommittal. Only he would know the tense brow-pinching thing she did when she was truly angry. She looked up once more, just a glance, full of fire. Her eyes said, What the hell are you doing here, anyway?
He settled down in his seat. She didn’t own the joint.
She slapped her chips into neat stacks. Okay, then I don’t know you, her body language said, and you don’t know me. He remembered her silent language well, and instantly perceived the virtue in not knowing her. Maybe they could play the old game together a few times and make a few bucks.
The shoe was a six-decker, and the dealer, a middle-aged woman who wore a lot of gold in her cleavage under the required white shirt, had only run through a couple of hands. Giving Elliott a sharp look, she exchanged two thousand for him. The black chips felt as substantial as marbles as he pulled them toward him. He put one dead center on his spot on the green felt and waited for the cards.
He pulled a thirteen and busted when he hit on it. Fine. He was only playing basic strategy right now, warming up, checking out the cards. He played a few more hands, going down three hundred dollars rapidly on his single-chip bets.
“You’re too hot,” Carleen told the dealer.
“Our luck turns just like yours does,” said the dealer, who fielded complaints like this all night long. Carleen was winning most of the time in spite of her complaining. The other people at the table, who told everyone they had just arrived on a bus from Boise, Idaho, each set out a chip at a time, playing decently.
A couple of minutes later: “No, she’s gonna come through for us,” Elliott said, including everyone at the table in his optimism. They were two full decks into the shoe by now, with enough cards laid down for him to know the deck was ripe. He placed all the chips he had left onto the table, seventeen hundred dollars’ worth, not an outrageous amount at a twenty-five-dollar minimum table.
Edging her bottom teeth with her finger, Carleen fidgeted unhappily at his bet, but she pushed all of her remaining chips onto the playing area, too, thirty-seven hundred bucks and change. “I fly back to Seoul tomorrow,” she said. “This better be good.”
The dealer pulled a six after her hole card. Elliott checked his own ace in the hole with a seven showing, soft eighteen, a very good hand against the dealer’s probable sixteen. But he scratched for another card. The card count told him the deck was very short on high-count cards.
A two. He had pulled a total of twenty. A thrill coursed through him.
Carleen was showing a ten card. Elliott bent around to catch a glimpse of her hole card when she turned up the corner to have a look, but she turned it over so they could all see.
Another ten.
“I’ll split my tens,” she said, pulling a wad of cash out of her wallet and handing it over, and now she was running two hands on the table. They were still barely under ten thousand in bets for the whole table, so the dealer didn’t have to get approval to accept the bet.
The Boise couple couldn’t believe she was splitting tens, a stupid mistake under basic strategy rules. The dealer laid down a card on each ten, face-down. Carleen picked up the edge of the new card over one of the tens, then scratched for another. The dealer flipped her a card and let her hand stay right there, ready to scoop up the busted hand, but Carleen hadn’t busted yet.
“It’s such a fun game,” she said, uttering a totally uncharacteristic girlish giggle. “I wish my fiancé hadn’t gone over to the Sports Book.”
Elliott watched her check the new card over her other ten, and scratch again.
Standing pat, Carleen waved her hand negligently over the hands.
The rest of them went through their paces, and when they had all finished the round, the dealer flipped over her hole card. Another six. Now she was showing a total of twelve and she had to hit again.
The dealer turned over a four this time. Sixteen. The rules required her to hit again, so she flipped herself one more card.
A third six. She’d busted. “Too bad we’re not playing poker,” said Third Base from Boise. “You’da wiped us out.”
Starting with Elliott, the dealer went around the table turning over the hole cards. When she turned up his hole card, she looked surprised. “You got someone watching out for you,” Boise said as they all stared at the three cards adding up to twenty. “You hit on a soft eighteen.”
“I had a good feeling,” Elliott said. The dealer turned over Carleen’s two hole cards and they all had a look. She had taken another card on hard seventeens on both hands. Both those plays were also dead wrong against the dealer’s original twelve, according to basic blackjack-playing strategy.
But she had won. She had pulled threes on each of her hands, winning both. The dealer pushed over their stacks of chips and the pit boss came over to check out the table and spread some glowers around.
Between the two of them, Elliott and Carleen had just won almost ten thousand dollars on a single bet. The pit boss, a short thin man in a dark suit, moved in to stand next to Elliott, hanging in close enough so that Elliott could smell the cigars on his breath. Then the boss motioned to the dealer to shuffle up, wheeled, and walked rapidly back to the podium in the pit where the phone was.
Elliott gathered up his chips, passing a couple over to the dealer as a tip. “I’m out,” he said with a smile that hurt his chapped lips, it stretched them so wide. He felt eyes chasing him as he cashed in and hurried out the door.
Carleen followed him. Sitting on a bench alongside the driveway, leaning against the wall, his eyes half-closed, he was waiting for his car.
“So, Wakefield. What’s up? You following me?”
“You don’t want to be seen talking to me here.”
“You’re the one who sat down by me.”
“I mean because of the cameras.”
“Screw them,” she said, “any damage is done. I should have jumped up and left when you sat down.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Maybe I foolishly imagined you would have more sense than to sit down beside me. Or come to Tahoe at all.” She took off her useless glasses and tucked them into a shirt pocket. “You spot two security men who were following me when I left?”
“Why didn’t your fiancé from the Sports Book take care of them? I’m sure he’s a muscle-bound freak, just the way you like them.”
She laughed. “Why, are you jealous at the thought?”
“Yeah, sure. I hate imaginary rivals. Is he from Korea, too?” They had a running disagreement about Carleen’s disguises. She liked them conspicuous, like the nasty tricolored hair she wore tonight sticking up like a kid’s paper crown, thinking that she was less likely to get made if she went bold. And she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She chatted up the dealers, compounding lies until nobody could keep track of the latest story.
“Why’d you bet so big? If you hadn’t put up such a massive bet, we could have made the same money in three or four hands without anybody noticing. We could still be playing.”
“You bet twice what I did.”
“Well, hey, I had to, didn’t I, after you spoiled any chance for anonymity. She was going to shuffle up for sure after you bet. The pit boss made us so fast after that.”
“Ah, but it was kind of fun, wasn’t it, Carleen? Like old times. So what was all that about flying to Korea?”
“I don’t know. I just felt like saying it. God, it’s cold tonight. Wakefield, really, are you nuts? What are you doing here? Are you here with Silke and…”
“I’m alone.”
“She stayed on the East Coast after graduation, didn’t she?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.” Best not to feed her gossip about Silke.
“Don’t know? Yeah, right. She still with Raj?”
“Challenge question.” Dr. Braun used to come up with these quizzes on a regular basis. She would recognize the allusion. “Is the square root of two still one point four one two and change?”
“I thought so. So what else?”
“I wait for my car.”
She shook her head impatiently. “Not until we talk.” She looked away, toward a white-haired man in an aloha shirt who was climbing into a limo, but Elliott still felt the force of her nervousness and interest pouring over him like sticky goo. He looked at her, at her streaky hair and the triple piercings in her ears and the discontented expression, and thought, She keeps coming back to gamble just like me.
“I went back to Seattle after graduation,” he said.
“Still living with your father, I bet.”
“And?”
“Is he still driving you into mad ambition?”
“Not at all. He’s infirm. He needs me.” Elliott was well aware that he was minimizing his father’s influence, but then, what did you say about your father to a girl who must hate you at times and who knows things you wished she didn’t know?
“I guess he probably does. You can’t just dump your family the way you can dump a lover. You’re locked up into playing along with their psycho needs for life, aren’t you?” She untucked the silk blouse she had been wearing and slouched down on the bench. “Hey, Elliott. Forget I said that. You know I’m not talking about your father.”
She had her own family problems, a brother with troubles of his own. But Elliott didn’t want to ask about her problems right now.
“So where are you working, Elliott?”
“Here, tonight.”
“You were supposed to become a professor, but you still make your living counting cards at blackjack?”
“It pays the rent,” Elliott said.
“How does your father like that?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“I never took you for the outlaw type,” Carleen said. “I’m still in good old Boston. I’m making big bucks.” She shifted a little and he felt her small breast brush his arm.
Pathetic, the fact that they were two hungry twenty-somethings in desperate need of human contact, the fact that he didn’t like her but wanted to kiss her. He sat on the bench, unable to decide what to do. She seemed to want to stay with him, though he wasn’t sure, she was so nervous, looking around like casino security might come outside for them.
“You are actually alone, aren’t you?” he said.
She wet her lips and said “Yes,” but Elliott thought maybe she was lying. Then-she was willing to walk out on her date?
But-now that he was calmer-he didn’t want Carleen to join his lonely party. He was reacting to her just as he always had. She put his teeth on edge.
“I never thought I’d see you here,” she said. “Not after the robbery and all. I thought you and Silke and Raj decided-”
“They don’t know I’m here. I’m doing some checking.”
“I was curious, since I was coming here for the gambling. I checked the Tribune archives and found out they haven’t caught the guy. Is that what you’re checking?”
“Yes. And the case that got filed afterward. By the husband. Why do you care? You weren’t even there. You quit taking trips with us months before.”
“Oh, I care, Wakefield. If you all got in trouble, do you think I wouldn’t have been dragged in? MIT would have found a way to expel all of us. It would have been very public, and I wouldn’t have gotten a good job. And if it comes out now, how we paid our tuition, all that, it will still cause me trouble.”
“Relax, Carleen, you weren’t a witness. You’ve graduated. The publicity might not hurt you at all.”
“I thought you all agreed to stay out of it! It’s too dangerous!” She looked really upset. Carleen always had an opinion on everything.
“It’s bothering me that they still can’t find the shooter,” Elliott said.
“No. You can’t be that stupid,” Carleen said. “You can’t be thinking of going to the police after all this time!”
He retreated into himself and said nothing. It was none of her business, but she knew all about it. The only way he knew how to deal with her incessant questioning was to be silent. Unfortunately, that made Carleen furious every time.
It had been bad luck, running into her. All thought of picking her up, getting laid-okay, that had been in his mind-fled. Where the hell was his car?
“Well?”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Yeah, calm down.” She put her hand on his arm, but that wasn’t working either, he could feel the crackle of her edgy energy even better that way. She licked her lips again.
“So,” she said.
Elliott thought she was pissed off but still hoping. She really did want to go with him. He’d never understood Carleen, and he really didn’t have the energy to start now. He was weary of her. “So.”
“Still obsessed with predicting the primes?” Carleen said. “Still addicted to dreams of greatness? Got anywhere yet?”
“Got to go. Places.” The Neon or Echo, or whatever the little blue car was, had rolled up. Finally! A chunky, red-faced valet got out and gave Elliott his keys.
Elliott handed him a few bucks.
“I could use a ride back to my hotel,” Carleen said behind him.
“Sorry. In a rush. I’m going straight to the airport in Reno.” He opened the car door and climbed inside.
For a minute she didn’t move, absorbing the insult. Then she got up and stood by his open door and said, “That wasn’t a pass, that was just me needing a ride somewhere.”
“Next time,” he said. He tried to pull the door closed, but she held on to it, eyes flashing.
“Silke would never have dumped Raj for you. The way you mooned around after her was disgusting, a real turn-off. I don’t care how brilliant you think you are. You suck.”
“I need to go, Carleen.” He pulled again. She jerked the door back so that it was open. The valet, arms crossed, watched, wearing a slight smile.
“I have a boyfriend now, several boyfriends, and maybe this will surprise you, Robot, but I don’t give a shit about you anymore.”
He disliked the nickname. He hadn’t heard it in so long, he had almost forgotten it.
“I wasn’t hitting on you,” she repeated. “Is that clear? Is it?”
The valet exchanged a sympathetic male glance with Elliott.
“You’re very direct. It’s admirable, in fact, how you state your mind,” Elliott said.
“Fuck you! I hate you.”
Elliott said, “I’m getting close to a proof.” He couldn’t help himself. He patted his chest, where he kept the notebook.
“God! Same old crap!” She made a guttural sound in her throat. “You don’t have anybody else to tell, so you tell me! Screw you, Robot, you big loser.” Her eyes filled with bright angry tears.
Elliott left Carleen standing behind the car with her fists clenched at her sides. He pulled into the neon boulevard with its miles of traffic.
She had got to him, talking that way about him and Silke. He had never mooned after Silke. In fact, he hadn’t known that Carleen knew how much he…
What now? Elliott, who did not have to go to the airport yet, got off the main drag and drove down a dark winding road until he came to some subdivision where the streets were empty.
It was self-castigation time. He couldn’t talk reasonably for five minutes with Carleen, after four years at college and many successful blackjack trips together. The craziest thing was that she had tried to pick him up, or something.
He was too lame to even drive her back to her room, a girl he knew and once loved. Well, okay, he made love to her, not the same as loving her but almost. He hadn’t loved her, be honest.
Actually, he’d never made love to her either, now that he was telling himself the truth. But he could have, she would have let him. She had wanted him. She had been interested in his theories and she had been willing to listen. He’d even seen the glint in her eye when he said just now that he’d almost finished the proof. She knew what that meant, and she was still interested no matter what she said.
But he’d found reasons to chase her away. As usual.
He’d never felt so lonely.
It was getting to be a mantra.
At a strip mall along the forested road he saw a Mexican restaurant with red and yellow and green pepper lights strung around the front. Fuck it, I’m hungry, he thought.
Inside, he almost thought better of it. Except for the cooks and the waiter, who scowled at him, the place was empty. When the waiter threw down Elliott’s beer in front of him, Elliott said, “If you want to close up, just say so and I’ll leave.”
The waiter didn’t answer; he just walked away and stood behind the counter, ignoring Elliott. Fingering the wad of cash in his pocket, Elliott drank his beer. His notebook nestled reassuringly in his pocket, and he thought of getting it out to review some figures, but he didn’t. Pretty soon greasy chiles rellenos arrived on a plate with room-temperature rice and refried beans. Elliott ate until he thought he’d explode.
When he came outside, he saw a guy in a black leather jacket and baseball cap bending down, looking at the half-bald thirteen-inch wheels of the rental car with a flashlight. When the dude saw him, he gave Elliott a hard stare. Then he turned and left, leisurely, as if he knew Elliott wouldn’t question him or follow him. The way he moved as he walked off into the night scared Elliott.
It couldn’t be! He stepped back into the shelter of the restaurant and held on to the door, breathing hard.
So someone had been watching while he and Carleen wrangled.
“We’re closed,” the waiter said.
“Just-one second. I have to use the head.” He wasn’t ready to go out there yet. Locking himself into the bathroom, Elliott pulled out his cell phone and called Silke. “He’s here,” he said fast into the phone. “The guy who robbed us at Tahoe. The shooter. He followed me from a casino.”
“Elliott? Do you know it’s three in the morning? What’s the matter?” came the sleepy voice with its accent that took the r way inside the mouth.
“You are probably aware that most of what happens on a daily basis follows a pattern, a predictable one,” he said. “Today’s unique. The ski-mask guy has found me.”
“Hang on a minute.” He heard a male sigh in the background, all the way from Boston. Raj, next pillow over. Then Silke got back on. “I have turned on the light,” she said. “If this is one of your persecution delusions, I will never talk to you again.”
“I’m giving you facts, nothing more. I made a few bucks and I got hungry so I stopped at this restaurant…”
“Are you playing blackjack again? I thought we agreed…”
“Just a hand or two.”
“Just wait a minute. Back up. Elliott, where are you exactly? Vegas? Atlantic City?”
“Tahoe.”
Silence on the other end of the line while she digested the information and passed it along to Raj. Well, he had wanted to shock her earlier, and now he had gotten his wish.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“It’s been two years. I wanted to find out whether it was all over. It’s been bothering me.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Elliott. You promised you’d stay away from there.”
“Yes, and that’s not the only remarkable thing happening. I ran into Carleen earlier.”
“Carleen?” Silke sounded confused. “She was with the robber?”
“No, no! She was playing cards. I left her at the casino and drove to another part of town. I’m coming out of this restaurant and some dude in a hat has got his hand on my wheel cover and he’s bending down. He stands up and sees me and leaves. It’s him.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No.”
“You got a good look at him?”
“It was dark. He wore a baseball cap this time. But it’s him. Ski Mask.”
“You say he followed you.”
“I’m at Zephyr Cove in a tract where the locals live. It’s midnight. There’s nobody around but me and the people who work at the restaurant. And I come out to find this guy examining my car.”
Silke said, “Remember how in junior year you thought a police siren was following you all the time and you had to stop driving…?”
“I’m not imagining this.”
“How can you be sure you recognized him?”
Elliott hesitated. “I still couldn’t tell you what his face looks like. But his right foot turns outward about eighteen degrees.”
“Oh, no.” She covered the phone and he heard muttering on the other end.
Raj got on the phone. “Hello, old man. Has he gone?”
“He left. I’m safe, I think. The car’s right in front of the restaurant front door.”
“Was it unlocked?”
“No, and the alarm was on. You think he was trying to steal it?”
“Maybe he saw you win. Maybe he wanted to steal your money. He robs people. You know that.”
“He’d know my cash was on me. Damn, Raj. Could it be a coincidence? Do you think he remembered me? Maybe he planned to hide in the back seat and attack me…”
“Take it easy.”
“No problem! Meanwhile, you lie peacefully in bed with a-a woman three thousand miles away. I’d better call the cops.”
“Don’t do that! Look, we’ve kept things controlled all this time. You say you’re safe, and you might still be wrong about who he was.”
“I recognized him!” Elliott said. He heard a pounding on the bathroom door and some Spanish expletives. “What should I do?”
“Go home to Seattle. Hurry. Can you manage that?”
“Okay.”
“Call us then and we’ll talk. And just to be sure, you might check the underside of the car before you leave.”
“Oh, hell,” Elliott said, and he couldn’t control the tremor in his voice. “I shouldn’t have come back. It was foolish, wasn’t it?”
Raj, always the diplomat, cautious with Elliott’s moods, said nothing.
“I’ll check under the car,” Elliott said. “I definitely will.”
“Be careful. Call us the minute you get home.”
The waiter followed him to the door, locking it pointedly behind him. It was only after the lights went out in the building and the dark closed in that Elliott realized the two rear tires on the rental had been slashed.
Frantic, examining the woods at the edge of the parking lot for a lurking figure, he pounded on the restaurant door, but nobody answered.
Elliott started to punch in 911, but before he could send the call, the waiter and a buddy walked around the corner into the parking lot, talking loudly. Elliott rushed over to them, wallet in hand. It cost a hundred bucks to get back to the hotel, but he got to ride in an old Trans Am. The whole way, Elliott watched out the back window, but nobody seemed to follow.
Once in his room, he bolted his door and left a message on the rental-car company’s tape. He could take a shuttle to the airport. Let them deal with their vandalized car.
It’s him, he kept thinking. He’s letting me know. He wants me to shut up and go home.
Fingers shaking, he called downstairs for the shuttle number.
SATURDAY, AN INDIAN-SUMMER DAY: NINA wore hiking shorts and a tank top to the office, with a light sweater in deference to the changeable season. At least she could pretend she wasn’t working. And, indeed, she would be shopping at Costco at the foot of Spooner Pass that afternoon. With any luck, she and Bob could also take a quick hike around Spooner Lake late in the afternoon to take in what remained of any fall foliage.
Sandy had already come in and brought along Nina’s new investigator. Wish Whitefeather, Sandy ’s son, stepped forward shyly, waiting for his hug.
“I heard you needed a real pro.” He smiled, white teeth a bright contrast to the brown of his skin. At six-four, a hundred sixty pounds, Wish was all smile and big nose. He had gone back to his old ponytail and familiar denim shirt, but he had passed through the difficult late-teen years and now, entering his twenties, his face had toughened and his body, once so gangly, had knitted itself together. He had finally finished his criminal-justice program and, only a month earlier, received his license to work as a private investigator in California.
He was an old friend and Paul’s assistant. Wish had worked down in Monterey with Paul for a few months but decided he missed the mountains and his family too much, so he had come home to roost and start his own business. Wish didn’t have Paul’s experience, but he was tireless and devoted. Paul, the master, had trained him well.
They sat down at the conference table, Paul’s absence as active as a poltergeist in the room. But lovers break up, and they don’t often work together afterward, and Nina had high hopes for Wish. She knew how important he considered the work, and how excited he was.
“Mom already gave me the files,” Wish said. Sandy nodded. “I have some ideas.”
“Go ahead,” Nina said.
“Point one, the obvious thing, we find out who shot Sarah Hanna two years ago, locate the individual, and collect evidence against him. But at the moment, we don’t have a description. We don’t have anything on this individual. Our client doesn’t seem to remember a thing about him.”
“Except that he was masked.”
“Right, even though this all happened in October, he wore the good old ski mask. Except at Tahoe it doesn’t look totally crazy, even in early fall. People just think he’s some skidoggy who rents helicopters to take him to the top of Job’s Peak or some other ten-thousand-footer so he can keep skiing through spring and maybe even into summer.”
“The shooting happened after midnight,” Sandy reminded him. Sitting across the table from him, she took computer notes just in case something important was said. “It can get cold any time of the year.”
“My point is that anyone seeing this individual on the street wouldn’t automatically call 911, not up here in the mountains,” Wish said.
“He entered the parking lot of the Ace High,” Nina said, “and probably slipped on the mask then. The motel clerk was instant-messaging her boyfriend in Thailand from the cybercafe next door, so nobody saw him.”
“Except the three individuals he proceeded to rob, who gave fake IDs to the motel to start with, and split in a hurry. I recommend we start with the witnesses.”
“Be my guest,” Nina said. “Book ’em, Danno.”
“If the police couldn’t find them, where do we start?” Sandy asked.
“First, we contact the authorities. Try Sergeant Fred Cheney of the South Lake Tahoe police,” Nina told them. “He’s worked with Paul.”
The name hung like a cloud in the air for a moment, then dissipated. Sandy liked Paul, too, and while she was no doubt proud of her son, Nina knew she missed him.
Wish wrote the name down. “And reconnoiter the premises.”
“You mean the Ace High?” Sandy asked.
“That’s it, Mom. The premises. The crime scene, where the shooting occurred. I’ll interview the clerk, Meredith Assa-Assawaroj.”
“Go for it,” Nina said, pleased at his careful attempt to pronounce the unfamiliar name. “Then I’ve got something special for you.”
“Oh?” Wish said. “What’s that?”
“I think the motel owner, James Bova, knows something about the witnesses,” Nina said, “but he’s represented by counsel. Now, I can’t talk with him directly.”
“Does that mean I shouldn’t?” Wish asked.
“No ethical rule forbids you from talking to his wife or his drinking buddy. Or anybody else he might be inclined to unload on.”
“Excellent,” Wish said. “It’s so useful, working for attorneys. You people know rules nobody else knows.”
“Keeps you out of trouble,” Sandy said.
The comment made them all smile. Wish had had his share of trouble. They all had.
Flipping through some papers, giving him a home address, Sandy said, “Maybe he talked to the motel clerk. The Meredith individual.”
“See what you can find out,” Nina agreed. “Also, these three young people-the witnesses-they were outside, evidently on their way back to their rooms. That means they had just returned from somewhere. This is harder, Wish, but if you can get decent descriptions from the clerk, you should check the casinos. It was too late for theaters and restaurants, after midnight.”
“But if they were kickin’ it at certain eating establishments earlier, someone might remember them. Because, who do you talk to at the casinos? There are a dozen of them, with all kinds of staff, and they’re all on privacy patrol,” Wish said.
Nina nodded. This made sense. “They had to eat somewhere, and it might have been close.”
“So first we find the witnesses, and from those individuals we get the shooter’s description so we can find him.”
“Child’s play,” Sandy said, “for an individual of your vast potential.”
“That is correct,” Wish said. “I hope.” He swiveled to eyeball his mother. “Are you teasing?”
“Far be it.”
“Because if you are, now’s not a good time. A woman died. I intend to help Nina find out how it happened.”
Appearing chastened for the first time Nina had ever witnessed, Sandy nodded. “I know you will, Willis.” As quietly as the breeze floating through the pines outside the window, she added, “I hope you realize your dad and I are proud of you.”
Wish sat up straight and firmed his jaw. He and Sandy looked away from each other.
“The court hearing on the motion to dismiss the lawsuit is set for Tuesday,” Nina announced.
“Say no more,” Wish said, getting up.
“How’s the old brown van working these days?” It had been Paul’s before he passed it on to Wish and bought himself a Mustang. It had been Paul’s when she met him, and danced with him, and fell in love with him.
“Perfectly, as long as you fill the tank every five minutes.”
“Well, good luck, Wish.”
“Thanks, boss,” Wish said, donning his sunglasses. “I’ll check in on Monday.”
Nina and Sandy worked through the morning. Finally, Nina said, “Enough. I have to pick up Bob.”
Sandy squared up her file pile, asking, “What’s he doing this fall? Besides high school?”
“Well, he started a business. He wants to make some money.”
“What’s he doing, yard work?”
“No,” Nina said. “He collects hazardous waste all around Tahoe Paradise and takes it to the dump. He has a partner, Taylor Nordholm, his friend at school.”
“Hazardous waste?”
“Paint, mostly.”
“And how does he get it to the dump? He’s only fourteen, right?”
“ Taylor ’s father takes them in his pickup. But I think the neighbors are driving hard bargains. They ask the boys to take washing machines, car parts, all kinds of stuff that’s hard to dispose of. And they want to pay later.”
“I’ll have a talk with Bob next time he comes in the office about getting paid and what’s legal.”
“Great. Uh, speaking of pay, I can’t give you that raise for a couple more months. When some of the receivables come in.”
“I should know. I cook the books.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” Sandy said. She shut down the Macintosh and pushed her chair back, her earrings faintly tinkling. “Of course, you could give me a raise effective today and make a back payment when the checks come in.”
“Good suggestion. I’ll think about it. Well, got to get going,” Nina said.
“Me, too.”
“What are you up to on this beautiful Saturday afternoon?” Nina asked as she packed up her briefcase.
“Job interview,” Sandy said. She checked her watch, her face serene.
“What?”
“Michael Stamp’s office. His secretary quit to have twins. Very inconsiderate of her, he said. I hear the pay is good.”
Nina snapped the briefcase shut. “Very funny. Stop kidding around, Sandy. You gave me a bad shock for a minute there.”
“I never kid,” Sandy said. She wiped a speck of dust off the telephone with her finger. Nina stared at the competent brown hand, the varnished fingernails, the silver ring with its three turquoises. Sandy bent down and blew on the phone receiver, inspected it critically, seemed satisfied. She picked up her tote.
Nina said, “Hang on. I’ll walk out with you.” She locked the door and they walked at Sandy ’s dignified pace down the hall to the exterior door of the Starlake Building, Nina deep in thought. The hell of it was, Sandy didn’t kid, not much anyway.
“See you Monday,” Sandy said.
“So what I’m thinking is, when some of the big checks come in, you’ll get your raise retroactive to today,” Nina said.
Sandy shaded her eyes and looked east toward the mountains.
“Okay?”
“I was just thinking I better get home right away. Clouds risin’ up from the coast. Might storm. Joe’s getting lazy. He needs to make sure the animals make it into the barn.”
Late in the afternoon, just as Nina, Bob, and their dog, Hitchcock, reached the far side of Spooner Lake, the clouds did boil up and blow, offering them the choice to run for twenty minutes through the downpour or seek shelter. They decided to run for it, Bob recklessly crashing along the trail with its clutter of roots and pine cones, Hitchcock at his heels, running with his nose to the ground, Nina picking her way behind, the brim of her baseball cap pulled low. They jumped into the Bronco, laughing wildly, Hitchcock making a mess in the back seat.
Nina turned the key in the ignition, and stopped laughing. “Our truck appears to be dead,” she said. Rain pounded on the roof, and she shivered and reached back for her emergency sweatshirt.
Bob scratched his head and leaned over. “It’s in gear. It won’t start in second gear, y’know, Mom.”
“Of course I know. Did you put it in second for some reason?” She moved into park, started up, shifted to drive, and turned on the wipers. Bob found some paper towels in the glove compartment and dried his face. Hitchcock poked his furry head between them and Bob carefully wiped the dog’s face too, saying, “That’s it, blame me.”
“Well, I didn’t do it.”
“You did it by accident. You’re getting absentminded.”
At fourteen, he thought the worst of her. “Not so. Why would I do such a thing?” She pulled onto the wet road.
“Why would I?”
She had no answer for that.
“Hey, do a rooster tail in the flooded part of the road there.”
“I don’t think so.” But the water was so tempting. Pushing hard on the accelerator, getting up to forty, she angled through a foot of water and enjoyed spritzing the fir trees along the road.
Bob laughed heartily. Then he said, “Uh-oh. A guy was standing in the trees right there. I think we got him.” Nina slowed.
“Too late now,” Bob said. “Anyways, he was already wet.”
“We’d better go back and apologize,” Nina said, “or he’ll go home and kick his cat. Bad karma will vibrate through the universe.”
“Let’s not and say we did,” Bob said. “He looked funny.”
“Funny?”
“I think he was wearing a ski mask. Like in a slasher movie. It was hard to see.”
“It’s raining.”
“That’s really going to keep the rain off, a knit ski mask.” Nina thought, But you wouldn’t call 911 because of it. The shooter in the Hanna case had worn a ski mask.
Don’t think, she told herself. It’s just a guy in the road.
But what was a man doing in the road in that downpour, in a ski mask?
“I say keep going. If you want to get punished, I can always spray you with the hose when we get home,” Bob said.
Looking in her rearview mirror, Nina could see no sign of anyone. The rain came down like the sky really was falling, one of those autumn cloudbursts that come from nowhere and leave just as abruptly. The wipers had a hard time maintaining visibility.
They had lost him. “Okay, let’s go.”
When they reached the highway that circles Lake Tahoe, the rain stopped. It was almost six o’clock and wouldn’t be dark for some time yet. “What shall we have for supper?”
“Pancakes.”
“That’s so inappropriate for dinner.”
“You could have a burger. You don’t have to eat pancakes. We’re almost at Zephyr Cove. Are you pulling in or not?”
“Okay, okay.”
The pancake house, an old wooden structure in the trees not far from the yellow beach, housed a motley collection of drenched tourists. Their table, just under a tall window, offered a good westward view as another cloudburst flitted across the lake. They sipped ice water, watching as sheets of rain fell here and there in the distance and evening slipped across the world. The mountains ringing the lake were only a shade or two of darker blue against sky above and water below.
“Uh-oh. Red alert. Look who’s here,” Bob said, pointing toward the window with his menu.
“Who?”
“I think maybe it’s that guy in the woods you soaked.”
“Where?” She felt a clutching in her chest.
Oh, yes. There was a figure a long way away, in the parking lot, near a beat-up white SUV…
“Hey, that’s our Bronco!” Nina cried, sliding off the wooden bench.
“Wait for me!” Bob took the lead as they ran out the front door. Now, even across the lot, they could hear Hitchcock. Part malamute, mostly mutt, he seldom barked, but he was barking now, loudly and continuously. The man had disappeared.
They walked around the Bronco, trying the doors-locked, as they had left them.
“Mom!” Bob yelled. Nina ran around and saw Bob crouched on the ground by the right rear tire, holding something. He held it out and Nina saw that it was an air-valve cap. Bob jumped up and walked cautiously around the truck with her. The air plugs had been opened on all four of their plump, balding snow tires.
Bob twisted the caps back on. The tires looked soft but drivable. Hitchcock leaped against the window.
“Well, at least he didn’t get in the car and steal our crummy radio,” Nina said. There was plenty of open asphalt around them. He seemed to be gone.
“Hitchcock would’ve had to kill him.”
Nina didn’t want to disturb Bob any further. She said, “Let’s get poor Hitchcock out and calm him down, then go back inside and eat. This guy’s not coming back. Man, some people don’t know how to take a little accident with good grace. Can you believe he would follow us just to pull a nasty trick like this…” She took out her keys and began to stick one into the driver’s-side lock, but Bob’s hand swooped out to stop her.
“Mom, wait a second. I have a bad feeling.”
The paranoid professional self kicked in immediately. She clipped her keys to her bag and stepped back. “What’s the matter, Bob?”
“Maybe those caps-you never know. Maybe he wanted to distract us.” Bob apparently found that an adequate explanation.
“From what, exactly?”
But he had finished explaining. “Just wait, okay? Step away a long way from the vehicle.” He said it playfully, but she sensed he was trying to protect her in his own way.
She stepped back, frowning, nervous and unhappy. Black clouds like the ones overhead clumped in her mind.
Methodically, moving with the practiced ease of an experienced Gulf Warrior, or at least like a kid who had played quite a few video combat games in his day, Bob slunk around the car, examining each inch of the exterior, then shimmied underneath.
“What are you doing? Don’t do that.” Nina kept the panic out of her voice with an effort.
“Looking.”
She swallowed, watching Hitchcock hurl himself against the window. “Anything?” she asked when she could stand the suspense no longer.
“Well,” Bob said, “yeah.” He wriggled out from under the car, grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her farther away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Come on! I hate to tell you, but it’s bad.”
“A tracker?” she asked. “GPS or something?”
“Worse!”
“What do you mean?”
“Mom, I think it’s an explosive. Call the cops, Mom. You stay right here. I’ll get Hitchcock out…”
“No! No! Stay away from it!” This time Nina did the pulling, and it took some lengthy argument and anguished begging to stop Bob from risking his life to save his pet.
Once she felt she could trust Bob to stay away from the Bronco, she called the police, all the time watching Hitchcock’s liquid eyes, frightened for him and his big wet tongue. Oblivious, just wanting to get with the people he loved, he continued to assault the windows. Nina and Bob walked out of his line of sight so that he would stop.
Within minutes several police cars arrived. Six officers carefully evacuated the restaurant, filing people out one by one, keeping them as far away as possible from the parking lot. People from the restaurant, unable to leave without cars, were joined by a crowd of neighborhood people. Everybody stood bug-eyed behind yellow caution tape, rubbernecking, but still unable to see much.
“Our dog,” Nina said to a policewoman. “Our dog!”
“We’ll try to save him, ma’am.”
Was that supposed to make her feel better, she wondered, succumbing to an anxious gush of tears. Bob, glitter-eyed but too old to cry, patted her on the back.
A bomb squad showed up in a white van. For another hour, they scurried back and forth between the parking lot and van. “What’s going on?” she asked everyone she saw who looked official. “What about our dog?” She imagined him inside, confused by the strangers invading their territory, banging against the window, and although she tried to stop such thoughts, she imagined him dead, in pieces flung all over the parking lot.
In every scenario she had ever seen on TV, the car blew up. In this scenario, the police prodded spectators to move back, back, back. Everyone moved. They all heard the bass boom as the bomb detonated hundreds of yards away on a beach by Lake Tahoe, well away from the parking lot.
They were informed that their vehicle was now “good to go.”
Bob walked up to their car and stuck his hand through an open window so that he could touch Hitchcock. “I guess we won’t be doing any more rooster tails, Mom.”
Back in the restaurant the newly returned, excited patrons plied her with questions, but Nina didn’t know what to say, so she beelined back to their table and tracked down their server. “You saw what happened. Was anyone around here-watching us or anything?”
“There was a guy. He checked out your table after you left. I thought he might be hoping you ran out without your purse or something.” The girl, no more than seventeen, held a steaming platter with at least four plates full of food in one hand.
“What did he look like?”
“About forty. Denim jacket, work boots. Dripping.”
“Was he wearing a ski mask?”
“A floppy hat. Uncool people wear them to golf in, you know? I chased him off.” She eyed the plates she was holding. The food was getting cold.
“Thanks,” Nina said. She pulled a bill out of her wallet and put it in the girl’s free hand.
“Oh, one other thing,” the girl said, tucking the money into a pocket. “He walked funny.”
“How funny? How did he walk?”
“Crooked, like the old guy on the old The Real McCoys show. Remember? Well, that was pretty exaggerated, the way he walked. This guy was bowlegged. Or maybe he just has a bad foot?”
Out in the lot the wind whipped through the trees. She spent some time with the cops. She told them about the ski mask in the Hanna case, and the floppy hat, and the bad leg. The officer did not seem impressed. “Ski mask on the road, no information as to his walk. Then floppy hat, bad leg. Different individual, probably,” he said. “Too bad you didn’t see the guy in the road take a few steps.”
“Look. This was an attempted murder.”
“More likely, ma’am, an attempt to frighten you. There wasn’t enough explosive to kill you inside the passenger compartment. On the other hand, any explosive at all is terrifically dangerous around a gas tank. You were lucky.”
“Please give your reports to Sergeant Cheney. It may be a link to the Hanna case.”
“I will.”
“Who else would try to blow us up? I don’t have any enemies like that.”
“How would this man even know you were in the case? And if he knew, why would he want to kill you?”
“Because-I don’t know why.”
“I’ll talk to Cheney.” They talked about her security system.
Bob waited for her in the truck, petting Hitchcock.
“Did you walk him?” she asked through the window.
“Yeah. He took a good long whiz. Must’ve smelled the explosive. He was heading for the beach.”
“Tell me you didn’t go there!”
“I stayed by the truck. The beach was roped off. They’re still cleaning up.”
She slammed the door and got in. “Whew! It’s evil out there!” She unclipped her keys and they dropped onto the floor.
While she felt around for them, Bob said, “You don’t have to worry anymore, Mom. This car’s safer today than most days.”
Finding them, she reached toward the back seat to give Hitchcock the opportunity to lick her wrist and hand.
“You were right about the bad karma,” Bob said. “He followed us here. It’s like, if you accidentally spill your soda on some kid, of course he turns out to be the meanest psycho kid in school, and waits for you after school, gets you back much worse. Know what I mean?”
“What did the police say to you?”
“‘What’s he look like?’ I told them.”
“Bob, do you remember? Was the man in the parking lot wearing a ski mask? Or a floppy hat?”
Bob shrugged. “He was a ways away.”
“Maybe. Bob-” Bob had his arms around Hitchcock’s damp, furry neck, his eyes closed, his cheek pressed against the dog’s ear. Hair pressed flat to his head, ears standing out, Bob looked a bit like a dog himself as he communed with Hitchcock. Nina caught herself thinking, If anything ever happens to that dog-and she knew she was really thinking about Bob. A sharp pain lanced through her right eye.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“How sure are you that the man by the Bronco was the same as the man in the ski mask on the road?”
“I just thought it must be him. I’m sorry, Mom. I just figured, you know. I couldn’t see the man by the Bronco through the rain.”
“It’s okay, honey. I think you saved our lives.”
“Yeah, Hitchie, we saved you.” Bob hugged the dog some more. He did not seem particularly upset by the whole incident.
Nina said, “The world has-it’s changed. It’s not a safe place.”
“It never was, Mom. That’s why we buy good locks and use ’em.”
That night, as Nina lay in her bed reading, Bob knocked and came in and sat down in the wicker chair. He usually stayed up much later than she did and slept as late as he could in the morning, but he asked her to wake him up if he slept through his alarm.
“But tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“The dump takes hazardous stuff on Sundays. We have some things under the house I need to get rid of. Taylor’s garage is full, too. What are you reading?”
She struggled to remember. “A book about the Big Bang. New theories about what the universe looked like in the first few minutes after the explosion. Speaking of big bangs, is any of the material you have been collecting flammable? Or potentially explosive?”
“Only a little.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Don’t store anything like that under the house!”
“We charge twenty bucks per house to haul away old motor oil, mostly, Mom. We have all the customers we can manage. We’ll put it in the backyard under a tarp if you want.”
“Why do you need money, Bob? You have a new bass. You like your skateboard, and you can’t want new clothes after all the shopping we’ve been doing.”
Bob dropped his eyes to Hitchcock, snoozing on the carpet, and nudged him with his stockinged foot. “I want to take a trip to see my dad.”
Nina put her fingers to her temple, closed her eyes. “You saw him in Sweden a few months ago.”
“I need to go again.”
“You miss him so much?”
“Well, sure, I miss him, but the thing is, I talked to him a couple of weeks ago. He lost his job with the Stockholm Opera Company and he’s back in Germany. He’s having trouble with his hands.”
Kurt Scott, Bob’s father, was a concert pianist who had eked out a living touring Europe for most of Bob’s life. He hadn’t known about Bob’s existence until a few years before, because Nina hadn’t wanted him to know. He had left her, waiting for him, with no word, soon after she learned she was pregnant. That day had become a turning point in her life, and she had polished the memory, along with the grief and rage over being abandoned, for so many years, that even when she learned years later that Kurt had left her to save her life, she had not been able to change her feelings from that day. The memory was encysted in her, permanently, it seemed.
But Bob had no such memories. Since discovering each other, he and Kurt had seen each other several times and developed a close bond that didn’t include her.
Nine felt a now-familiar tugging at her heart. She didn’t want Bob to leave her. It wasn’t Kurt’s fault that his life was in Europe or Bob’s fault that he wanted to see him again, but she didn’t want Bob to go, even for a few weeks. Her life, her routines, were built around Bob. She knew she feared that one day he might go and live with Kurt. Then what would she do? He was her companion, her fellow traveler.
All right, tell the truth. She didn’t want to stay alone in the house, not right now.
She had barely seen Kurt in the years since Bob’s birth. She trusted him with Bob, knew he cared for Bob and had been unfairly deprived of the chance to father him over the years, knew he needed to make up time. But she didn’t see why he had to take Bob away right now, at the start of a new school year, when she had so many plans for them. Okay, she hadn’t made many plans. But she would think some up, right now.
“Now isn’t a good time,” she said.
“I’m not asking you for a ticket or anything, Mom. I’ll pay my own way.”
“I’m thinking we should spend some time poking around the Gold Country on weekends,” Nina said. “Take a car trip up to Idaho to ski. Maybe Uncle Matt and Aunt Andrea and Troy and Brianna would come with us.”
“Troy and Brianna are in school. Like me. Aunt Andrea’s busy with the new baby and Uncle Matt works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, winter and summer.”
This was more or less true. Troy, her nephew, a few years younger than Bob, had been diagnosed with a learning disability and couldn’t miss school, and her brother Matt’s tow-truck business had started up the day parasailing got too cold on the lake. There would be no big happy family trip to Idaho.
Bob ran his hand through his dark hair. Like Kurt’s, his eyes were a speckled green.
“Did your dad ask you to come?”
“No. But he’d like it.”
Nina wanted to say, But I won’t like it if you leave, but Bob didn’t need any more burdens on him right now. “What’s wrong with his hands?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk more about it tomorrow night,” she said. “It’s been a hard day. I’ll give your dad a call.”
“Okay. Want to go to Wild Waters in Sparks tomorrow after I finish? They close next week.”
“Sorry, honey. I have a meeting in Placerville.”
“On Sunday afternoon?”
“Drive down with me.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather hang around here with Taylor.”
“Okay. Did you set the alarm?”
“An’ checked the windows good. Are you scared, Mom? I don’t see how he could know where we live, and the police are watching an’ I’m watching. He got what he wanted. He made us afraid. That’s the last of him.”
“I guess so. I’ll be fine. Love you. G’night.”
“G’night.”
She turned off the lamp and shut her eyes, seeing once again Hitchcock’s frantic eyes as he lunged against the window of the Bronco.
FOUR-ELEVEN IN THE AFTERNOON. ELLIOTT was just waking up. He crunched through two bowls of crispy cereal, standing at the kitchen counter, back safe at home on Vashon Island. He had gotten in very late from Tahoe and hadn’t been able to sleep until morning because he couldn’t stop thinking about the man in the ski mask.
In the dreary daylight, which highlighted the broken tiles near the toaster, he considered that he was now more than a thousand miles from Tahoe, an eighteen-hour drive. He was safe. Relatively safe.
He went through a box a day sometimes. Boxed cereal might look like pure junk, but actually, the vitamins added later, plus the fact that the cereal had once, a very long time ago, grown in a field and been alive, resulted in a substance that tasted good and also contained all minimum daily requirements. It took almost no time to pour cereal and milk into a bowl. All in all, he wouldn’t eat anything else, except that Pop had surprised them both and turned into a master chef after his mother’s death.
Through the door into the living room Elliott could see the back of his father’s head, the silver hair shaking when he disagreed with the umpire or got excited about a play. The orange-leafed trees outside their picture window, and the fact that his college team was winning, made Pop forget about the MS. Sometimes he did get depressed, though. Then he’d say things like, “El, you’ll be on your own someday.”
But most of the time Pop seemed to feel fine. He ran the house from his wheelchair, he and Gloria the sexy housekeeper.
Someday Pop would be in trouble. Elliott was saving up for that, to make sure he’d have the best care.
Four-thirteen. “Get ’im!” Pop said. “Did you see that, El?”
They still lived in the brick house he’d been born in. For many years, Pop had ferried back and forth from Seattle, where he was a professor of linguistics at the university. He was also a Sanskrit scholar. Even now, those two words sent a shiver of excitement through Elliott. His father knew things nobody else knew, about ancient magical words.
Pop had seemed like the smartest man in the world when Elliott was a kid. Most nights after supper, between six and seven, they’d go into the den and shut the door. His father would pull down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from the shelf, and they would read an article together. They worked in alphabetical order, so one night it would be electromagnetism, and the next, elephants.
Then Elliott would finish his homework, which hardly took any time, because he was a bright one, so Pop said. He told Elliott about Sanskrit. Linguistics wasn’t about languages, it was about logic. Pop showed him how to diagram Sanskrit grammar so the little x’s and y’s added up to a sentence, and Elliott enjoyed this a lot, even though the words themselves flitted from his mind.
Somehow his interest turned from the language to the x’s and the y’s. Subject plus verb plus direct object equals a sentence. In English, anyway. English moved like a number line, marching to the right. But there were other languages that put the direct object first, or even the verb. X stayed the subject, y still described the verb. Math described language; wow!
He had first discovered numbers when he was three or four. Someone gave him a set of magnetic numbers and letters that his mother put on the refrigerator for him, and he threw away the letters and kept the numbers, because he couldn’t read, but he could add.
He was sure numbers were real. One was the Stick, a skinny black stick that got left behind all the time. Two was the Blue Policeman; Zero was the Crystal Ball, white and glowing like a ghost. Three was the Bully, red and angry. It turned all the numbers it could divide into a reddish color.
To him these four numbers were as real as rocks, more real, alive in some sense. But what were they? What was a number? Where did numbers come from? Had humans invented them or discovered them? Where did they go? He thought they followed a line toward some far infinity where a little breeze sprang up and supported them.
He never saw the integers as hard-edged; to him they were like clouds, with moving centers depending on what was pulling on them from either side. The clouds touched each other, even early on in the line of numbers, but as the numbers got bigger the clouds became a continuum, a long streak of cirrus.
But when he was young, he had little interest in the large numbers; it was Zero, One, Two, Three, and the rest was just amplification.
“Yes, Elliott?” Mr. Pell said from the blackboard. Sharon, the girl in the desk next to him, grimaced, because Elliott was a pudgy pest who kept his hand raised all through class. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Pell kept saying all these things that made no sense. The class had spent most of the year memorizing the multiplication tables, which Elliott already knew, and this month they were learning long division.
“Why is the answer zero when you multiply by zero?” Elliott asked.
“Because that’s how the system works,” Mr. Pell said. Then he sighed and said, “Zero times three equals zero plus zero plus zero. Think about it.”
Elliott was supposed to be quiet now, but instead he argued, “But zero is nothing. It can’t do anything to another number. Three times nothing can’t change three.”
“No, one is the number that doesn’t change anything in multiplication,” Mr. Pell said.
“Then zero and one must be the same number,” Elliott told him. The class giggled, even Sharon, as if he had said something funny, but he felt a need to know, or maybe to be right, and it didn’t stop him. “Ten times one, that’s ten times itself, isn’t it? Shouldn’t that be a hundred? One should be a-a-”
“An exponent,” Mr. Pell said. “You’ll learn about them next year. Ten times itself is a hundred, true. But ten times one is ten.”
“And ten times nothing is nothing?”
“Good. Right.”
“Then what is ten divided by zero?”
Tall Mr. Pell looked at the big clock on the wall and finally said, “You can’t divide by zero, Elliott. It’s a rule.”
“Why is it a rule?”
“Because the rest of arithmetic won’t work otherwise. You just have to accept it.”
“I thought math was supposed to be logical.”
“It is.”
“Then how come multiplying by nothing wipes out a number?”
“Talk to me after class.”
Mr. Pell went back to the blackboard after the bell rang and the rest of the class ran out. He was awfully young to be a teacher. Elliott’s father said Mr. Pell had been a PE major, but he’d minored in math and the school needed a math teacher more than a coach. He wore a bow tie and a short-sleeved blue shirt. He looked like Eddie Murphy, but without the funny stuff.
“Look. Division is based on multiplication, right? Twelve divided by zero equals x. Then zero times x would have to equal twelve, but that can’t be. Zero times x equals zero, you already know that.”
“But why?”
“Because,” Mr. Pell said, “it works. A million math operations say it’s true. Let’s look at it this way. Let’s take nine divided by three. If you have nine rocks, you can separate them into three groups of three. Got that?”
“Sure.” In his mind they were reddish rocks, like on Mars.
“So let’s look at nine divided by zero. How many groups of zero can you separate nine rocks into?” Mr. Pell smiled. “You see? You can’t have a group made of nothing. It just doesn’t make sense.”
“That’s an artifact of your definition,” Elliott told him.
Mr. Pell dropped his chalk. “Who told you that?”
“It’s logic.”
The teacher gave Elliott a long look. He seemed excited. Elliott thought, I’m a bright one, and warm satisfaction spread through him. He couldn’t wait to see what Mr. Pell would come up with next. Without noticing, he had clenched his fists and stood with his legs apart, chin out.
“This isn’t a boxing match,” Mr. Pell said. “You’re pretty competitive, aren’t you? All right, Elliott. Let’s try looking at it this way. When you divide by a number, you expect the result to be a number. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Let’s look at a sequence of numbers.” He wrote some fractions on the board. One over two, one over three, one over four, one over eight…
“See how the numbers change in a regular pattern? Get it?”
“Got it.”
“Know what happens if you keep on going this way?”
“They get smaller.”
“Very good! That’s right. The end result is something infinitely small. Approaching zero.”
“Awesome! It ends at zero?”
“No, it never ends.”
Elliott’s mouth fell open.
“It goes on forever, approaching closer and closer to zero. Zero is sort of the end of infinity.”
“So when it gets so small… when it’s one over zero… that’s infinity?”
“It’s something we simply can’t assign a number to at all. It’s outside the system. I’ll tell you why. You know what negative numbers are? Minus numbers?”
“Sure.”
“Try following another sequence: One over minus two, one over minus four, and so on. What’s at the end of the sequence?”
“Minus zero?”
“Good try. In fact, the answer is also zero. Because zero is zero. There cannot be a minus zero.”
“Why?”
“It’s not allowed. Don’t ask why. Just accept that the answer is zero for both sequences. But you can’t have the same answer for two different number sequences. Don’t ask why. You can’t. Since you can’t, we say that dividing by zero doesn’t result in a number.”
Mr. Pell expected Elliott to ask why you couldn’t have two separate answers, or why the second sequence was zero when it ought to be minus zero. He had a couple of slam-dunk sentences planned to put Elliott away, like “Don’t ask.”
But Elliott was way past that. “Yeah. That’s right. I always thought there was something strange about zero. Now I understand,” he said.
“Good.” Job well done, Mr. Pell’s face said.
“The number line must be a circle,” Elliott said. “Like a clock.”
“No. No.” The bell rang again and the next class started coming in and sitting down while Mr. Pell was still shaking his head.
“The number line. It’s really a circle. Like you said, the zero at both ends ties it together,” Elliott said hurriedly.
“No. The number line is a line. By definition.” But Mr. Pell rubbed his mouth and said, as if he were talking to himself, “… not bad. Sounds like elliptic geometry.”
“What?”
“Just accept that it’s a line, Elliott.”
“But why? Who made it that way? God?” Now several other kids were listening in. Elliott didn’t care. He needed a real answer, not an answer for a kid, an answer that worked for him, or else it might be that the nagging thought he sometimes had at night was true-that he wasn’t a bright one after all, he was just the pudgy pest of the class, too stupid to understand what was obvious to Mr. Pell.
If he couldn’t understand a simple thing like why you can’t divide by zero, then he’d never understand anything. He felt like he was going to bust out crying. Why couldn’t Mr. Pell answer the question in a way he could understand?
Elliott said loudly, “You don’t know anything, I guess,” to his teacher. He heard the laughing in the background again. Everybody thought he was a freak. It made him mad. “I know what an exponent is,” he boasted. “I know what a square root is. What’s the square root of minus one?”
“This is way beyond third-grade arithmetic,” Mr. Pell said. “Who told you to ask me these questions?” He still had a peculiar look, like he was really interested, too, and this emboldened Elliott.
“Nobody. My pop. He’s a Sanskrit scholar. What’s the square root of minus one?”
“You know what? I bet your father already told you the answer, told you it’s an imaginary number with its own number line.”
“Egg-zackly. So if you can set up a brand-new number line for negative square roots, why can’t you set up a new number line for one divided by zero?”
Mr. Pell looked down at him from the height of a mountain. He bent and picked up the chalk, and said in a low tone, close to Elliott’s ear, “Listen to me, kid. I’m going to tell you a secret. You’ll understand it better when you’re older. Do not tell the rest of the kids about this. You cause enough trouble already. They’ll get confused.”
Elliott raised his eyebrows. He tried to look nonchalant.
“You can divide by zero, if you invent another arithmetic. This arithmetic you’re learning-it’s just the one that works best for things like building houses. There are all kinds of arithmetics and geometries.”
Elliott understood immediately. His head swam. The relief was so overwhelming, he almost fell down. This arithmetic was a game, and there were other games.
“Got it?” Mr. Pell said. “Satisfied? Now beat it, would you? Please?”
On his tenth birthday, his father gave Elliott an old edition of Euclid ’s Elements. Winter had brought its cold wind to sweep down on the island. Elliott stayed up in his room for two weeks. When he came down he said, “I don’t understand this at all.”
“Let’s have a look.” They opened the book to Euclid ’s assumptions, the logical statements that are self-evident and are the basis of plane geometry.
“Two points make a line,” the book said.
“Why?” Elliott said. “The line could stop halfway to the second point. Or the two points could be on top of each other, so it looks like one point. Or the line could be wavy.”
“Oh, I quite agree. But you have to think like Euclid,” his father said. He smoked Marlboros. The smell of math to Elliott forever more would be connected to the smell of burning tobacco. They were in Pop’s warm den, piles of papers and books everywhere, the TV on a football game as usual. Elliott’s mother was sitting on the chair under the window, reading a book, her brown hair lit by the lamp.
“ Euclid developed a system that hangs together, that’s the main thing. Let’s try to make his sentence about points more accurate. He’s saying that if you take any two points in the universe, the simplest relations between them is generally a directional arrow that we call a line.”
“Okay. That makes sense. But why triangles? Angles and sides and all that. Why is a right triangle so important?”
Pop stubbed out one cigarette and fired up another one. “Because the Greeks discovered that they could say beautiful, simple, elegant things about right triangles. And because they could build houses using right triangles.”
“Houses again! How come it’s always about houses? Why not start with a-a cloud? Why not invent a formula for finding the volume of a cloud?”
“Too messy,” his father said. “ Euclid started with something easy and useful. In all fairness, he was fond of squares and circles too.”
“Why did he get to make up his own rules? They’re wrong!”
“The one about parallel lines may not always work. The others have stood up pretty well,” Pop said mildly.
“But what about two points making a line? I could make a system where they don’t, couldn’t I?”
“Attack the system at your own risk. I’m going to tell you a story.” Commercials had taken the place of football on the TV in the wall unit across from his father’s desk. He muted the sound and said, “A long time ago there was a genius named Pythagoras. He was a genius because he made some discoveries about the integers that no one had ever made before. These discoveries were so elegant, so incredible, that numbers became a religion. The Pythagoreans believed, for instance, that the cosmos formed from a one. It split into the integers, which formed themselves into geometrical shapes, and finally became air, earth, fire, and water. All Nature, all Reality, grew from Number.”
“Is it true?”
“I’m a linguist,” Pop said, “so I wouldn’t turn to Number. I suppose I could found a religion that said that in the beginning was the Word. Wait a minute, I’m already Episcopalian.” Elliott’s mother laughed.
“So the Pythagoreans were an important cult. The most important belief they held was that all Nature came from whole numbers, by which I mean integers and ratios of integers, what we call fractions today.
“Then one day something terrible happened. One of the Pythagoreans, maybe the Master himself, made a new discovery.” The football game came back on, but Pop was rolling now and his eyes went to the screen but his voice stayed with the story.
“They had just discovered the formula for finding the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle,” he said. “A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Can you imagine how they must have felt, sitting in the shade on a summer’s day, looking at each other when they found this wonderful formula?” Elliott thought of the bearded men in white robes, sitting on steps by white columns, clapping each other on the back. It must have felt like winning the Super Bowl.
“Then somebody said, ‘Let’s try that triangle out with a side that measures a single unit, a one,’ ” Pop said. “They tried it out. And a devil sprang out! Because one squared plus one squared equals two. Therefore the hypotenuse was the square root of two.” He leaned toward Elliott and said in a chilling theatrical whisper, “And that number couldn’t exist.”
“Wow!” Elliott said.
“That thing, that square root of two, couldn’t be described as an integer or as a ratio. It completely contradicted the beautiful universe the Pythagoreans had constructed. Now they had a choice-to accept this ugly thing into their system and work with it, or to try to suppress the fact that it existed. To lie about it, because the Pythagorean religion could not encompass something as ill-formed, as unlocatable as this.”
“So what did they do?” Elliott’s mother said.
“They swore the whole brotherhood to strict secrecy. This secret made a mockery of their beliefs. Now their religion was based on a lie.”
“What happened?” Elliott asked. He lay on the rug, his head propped in his hands, near the fireplace, the book forgotten. It was almost nine, but he wasn’t feeling sleepy, he was all fired up.
“A young man named Hippasus leaked the secret,” Pop said. “And you know what happened then?”
“What?”
“They killed him. Set fire to a ship he was on near Calabria. Sunk it.”
“The Pythagoreans did that?” Elliott gasped.
“Never underestimate the passion of a mathematician,” Pop said. “Of course, the secret was already out. Nowadays we call those ugly numbers the irrational numbers.”
“We let those numbers in?”
“And even uglier things. The imaginary numbers. The transcendents. The transfinites.”
“Poor Hippasus,” his mother said. She dog-eared her page and went into the kitchen.
“Those numbers aren’t real,” Elliott said. “Not like One and Two.”
“Prove they don’t exist and I’ll give you a canoe,” his father said.
In this way Elliott learned that what his intuition told him was only acceptable to other people if he could show them a proof. Elliott became obsessed with mathematical proofs. He had found his own language, a language his father couldn’t learn any more than Elliott could remember the conjugation of a Sanskrit verb.
The proofs of the main theorems of mathematics contained absolute certainty, a certainty that existed nowhere else in his universe of home and school.
A fever overtook him. The proofs burned into his eyes late at night.
Proofs were the rewards of playing this particular game of arithmetic, but he never forgot that other, more difficult games waited in the murk of the future for him to discover.
“El,” Pop called. Elliott put his memories aside, set his bowl into the stainless-steel sink, and went into the living room. Pop never went upstairs anymore; the muscles in his legs had become too weak. Pop was barefoot. His back had hunched in some indefinable way. How strange. He was growing old as well as sick.
As he looked at his father carefully taking out the ad supplements, then putting the newspaper back in order so he could read it in sequence, he felt again the burning pressure to work, to find, as quickly as possible. Pop was only fifty-five, but he had been ill for five years now and his sharp mind had changed in some way hard to describe. It was as though only small things mattered to him anymore, the Zeros, the Ones.
His mother’s clock ticked on the mantel, next to a picture of his father shaking hands with Noam Chomsky at a podium somewhere.
“I don’t know why, but I feel so cold,” Pop said.
“How about a bath?”
“I need a little push.” Elliott pushed his chair into the adjoining bedroom, pulled down the curtains, and got the water running in the tub. Pop had a special tub where you opened the waterproof door and stepped in and sat down on the bench. So far, he could manage.
“Think I’ll go upstairs and do some work,” Elliott said.
“You look tired. You haven’t told me about the conference at Lake Tahoe.”
“Well, lots of presentations that didn’t interest me much. Nothing new, really,” Elliott lied.
“Did you see any old friends?”
“I did see a couple of guys from MIT, but I didn’t know them well.”
“What are they doing these days?”
“One works at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California. The other one went to Los Alamos.” He was used to lying about his activities, so the words came out very naturally.
“Oh. Physicists. That’s nice.”
“By the way, I got paid on the consulting work I did last spring. It’ll keep us going until Christmas.”
His father said, “You have found such an interesting career, all this flitting about, doing your consulting. It’s wonderful that you can spend so much time with me.”
“It’s my home. I doubt I could work anywhere else. I wouldn’t want to leave you, Pop. We get along.”
“My good fortune, that you love it here so much.”
“I do have to go to town for a couple of hours in the morning. Gloria will be here, though. Do you want anything special at the store if I leave before you’re up?”
“How about some of those Paul Newman chocolate wafers. Those are so good.”
“Cookies it is,” Elliott said. He locked up, then went upstairs, to the scratched oak desk he had spread his papers over all his life, to the single bed with its heavy plaid comforter. The closet door was open; he pulled it shut, locked the bedroom door, and leaned out the window toward the gleam of Seattle across the sound. Cool air flowed in, and he breathed in deeply.
His thoughts went back to the man in the ski mask at Tahoe, doing something to his car. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it anymore. He went over the events of the night before again and tried to analyze them.
Two possibilities presented themselves: Either he was heading toward another psychotic break, or the Tahoe shooter had found him and still wanted something from him.
Both alternatives frightened him. It felt like his heart had turned to a sack of crushed ice. He slammed the window shut and checked the lock again, pulled the blinds.
Then peered through them one last time, but all he saw was darkness.
PLACERVILLE USED TO BE A GOLD town back in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Today, gold still can be gathered, especially in the summer, from tourists on their way up Highway 50 from the San Francisco Bay Area toward Tahoe, 250 miles of not much happening until the steep peaks of the Sierra take over. First there is the Bay Bridge to get across, then the long traffic jam of the East Bay, then the new Carquinez Bridge where the Delta country begins.
Then there is nothing much-fields, heat, truck stops, military bases, Sacramento, factory outlets-for a couple of hundred miles. Then the uplift of the Sierra succeeds the hot valley behind as the SUVs and sedans labor up seven thousand feet of altitude to Echo Summit and Lake Tahoe just beyond.
But first, where the foothills begin, still seventy miles from Tahoe, the highway goes through Placerville, with its historic courthouse, quaint streets full of shops, and endless forest all around, and the culture begins to change with the climate. The idea of working ten hours a day in a Silicon Valley cubicle begins to seem suspect. The men want to stop for a beer, DUI laws be damned. The women want to wander down the street looking for a tiny piece of history to take home with them. It is freedom they are looking for, as if the flatlands have imprisoned them, and Placerville is the first town on the road where they can let loose.
Nina turned left and went up a short hill. Most of the homes were small and old, well-settled in their arbors of firs.
She drove until she saw a metal mailbox reading “Hanna.” Cracked asphalt led to a red Ford 150 pickup, which took up a lot of the driveway, and another filthy old truck huddled in the carport. Nina parked behind the pickup and climbed out. The sun shone down; it was so quiet here she could hear the creak of the trees catching breezes high above.
Chelsi, in shorts and a shirt that showed her brown stomach, opened the screen door on the shady porch and came out to greet her. Behind her shambled a man who must have been her father, tall and athletic like her, big-handed and big-footed.
“Dad, this is Nina.”
“Roger Freeman.” He squeezed her hand and put his other hand lightly over the squeeze as if to apologize for the strength of the handshake. “Sarah’s brother. Come on in, Dave’s inside.” He shot a quick glance at Chelsi. “He’s not at his best this morning.”
Dave Hanna sat in a La-Z-Boy in front of a recorded ball game on TV, the sound turned off, his eyes glued to the screen. He didn’t get up and barely acknowledged Nina’s greeting.
The small living room still held traces of Sarah Hanna-a white-framed wedding picture on the mantel of a smiling young couple, she seated quietly, big blue eyes hopeful, flowers held in her lap, he with his hand on her shoulder, making it clear how the marital dynamics would work even then. Sarah’s auburn hair touched the shoulder of her ivory gown. Dave looked a lot younger in the picture. Nina knew from her notes they had been married for ten years before Sarah died. Dave had been thirty-two, Sarah twenty-eight when they married.
A white lace tablecloth on the dining-room table still looked as if it had received Sarah’s touch, and the green upholstered chair and ottoman with its own reading lamp across the room had obviously been hers. The rest of the room had a shoddy, stained look, and smelled like somebody slept in it.
The wreck on the recliner pressed the remote control. The TV went black. Dave Hanna shifted around, saying, “This better be good.”
“A settlement offer usually is,” Nina said. “May I?” She took Sarah’s chair. Roger pulled out a couple of straight chairs from the table, and he and Chelsi sat down. Now they had a sewing circle going, only Dave was clearly a stitch short today. Eyes downcast, he scratched his neck. Nina would bet he had already tossed down a couple of beers this morning.
She glanced again at the wedding picture. A traditional male, yes, but he had lost the woman most important in his life. Grief killed some people, she thought, along with: You take the client as you find him, unless he or she is too far gone to reach at all. Nina opened her briefcase.
“It’s a formal offer, made in good faith, I think,” she said. “But it isn’t much to compensate you for the loss of your wife, Mr. Hanna. A total of fifty thousand dollars.” She recapped her visit to the Puckett mansion and Bova’s proposal to add to the insurance company’s offer. “We have until Tuesday before court to accept or reject. Or counteroffer.”
“Not enough,” Roger said. “Obviously.”
“It may be close to all they have to offer,” Nina said. “Bova brought the Ace High out of bankruptcy three years ago. He has tax liens against him as an individual. His home in Incline is mortgaged heavily. The motel isn’t exactly flying high as a business.”
“But Aunt Sarah is dead and those people have got to take some responsibility for that!” Chelsi cried. She shook her head, her expression pained. “I don’t think I told you enough about her. She was so great. Did you know she coached the girls’ basketball team at the high school here? There were easily a hundred kids at her funeral.”
“Crying,” Roger Freeman added.
“I understand,” Nina said. “No amount of money can compensate your family for losing her. But you have to remember the motel wasn’t directly responsible. It was negligent at best. In other words, the motel legally won’t have to bear the full burden of compensating you for your loss.”
“If the clerk had been at the office watching out like she was supposed to, she could have called 911!” Chelsi argued.
“I agree,” Nina said.
Roger said, “Maybe Bova had something to do with the shooting. Maybe the clerk did. Maybe the clerk had a friend who picked the motel because she’d conveniently go next door. We don’t know anything yet.”
“We’re investigating,” Nina said. “But we’re starting so late, we’re in a risky position. The judge may dismiss the case against the motel on Tuesday.”
“How much did you say?” Dave Hanna said.
“Fifty thousand. Each side pays its own attorney’s fees.”
“How much would you get?”
“I’ll add up my actual time and my investigator’s time. A couple thousand dollars, I’d guess, would be the amount.”
“That’s very decent,” Roger said. Chelsi nodded.
“The important thing you need to know is that if the motel was directly involved in the shooting in some way and we find that out, I believe we can sue them again on a different legal theory. This settlement would not release them from any direct involvement, only from a negligent involvement,” Nina said.
“What do you think?” Hanna said.
“I would let the motel out, so long as Mr. Bova agrees to cooperate fully while we try to catch the shooter. And so long as the judge will let us keep the case against the shooter alive for a while longer.”
“If it’s going to end the case, I don’t want to settle,” Roger said.
“Rog, this isn’t about you,” Hanna said. “Sarah was my wife. This is my case.”
“My name isn’t on it, sure, but she was my sister.”
“Why don’t you butt out?” Hanna said. “Whatever happens, you won’t get a dime. Sometimes I think you keep hammering at this suit to punish me.”
“What are you talking about?”
The glaze of alcohol in Dave Hanna’s eyes suddenly departed, to be replaced by simmering anger. “I was there and couldn’t save her. You hate me for that.”
“That’s not so.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t give a damn about me, about how this has affected my life. You’re chasing a ghost. You keep Sarah alive that way. For you, this lawsuit is really just a way to keep people thinking about her, isn’t it? Sometimes I think if we ever found the guy who shot her, you still wouldn’t believe it! What would you do for a hobby then, huh?”
“Dave, please.”
“Meanwhile, I’m stuck in this goddamn chair with the goddamn TV on. I can’t work. I can’t do anything. We should take the money, shut our mouths, put flowers on her grave, and get the hell out of Dodge.”
“This is not about money!” Roger cried. “Sarah was slaughtered, and for what? Being in the wrong place? It was so random. I want the bastard who killed her to be watching his back for the rest of his life, right up until the day he’s arrested and thrown in jail.”
Hanna turned to Nina. “I’ll take the settlement offer. I want this thing over. I need that. I need to stop being sick at heart. I need to move on. We all do, Roger, you and Chelsi as much as me.”
“Taking a settlement won’t fix everything, Uncle Dave,” Chelsi said. “You need more help than money can buy.”
“If you two would just leave things alone. Isn’t it enough, that we lost her? Isn’t that enough punishment, that I’m alone and feel so guilty? I think back to that night-I think of what should have happened. Maybe I could have saved her. It all happened so fast.”
“Of course you did what you could, Uncle Dave. We know that,” Chelsi said.
He didn’t seem to hear her. “For two years dinner conversation is all about her, all about justice, all about finding the killer. I don’t even remember what normal life is like. You and your dad are making me sick with all this obsessing,” Hanna mumbled. “You’re the sick ones.”
Chelsi looked stricken.
“Don’t speak to her like that,” Roger said sharply. “If you want to fight, you fight me.” He sagged. “Ah, why do I talk to you? Why do I bother?”
“Nina,” Chelsi said, “even if Uncle Dave takes the settlement, I want you to know our position. We want you to try to keep the lawsuit alive.”
Roger agreed. “We want Sarah’s killer found. Do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
“Even if the case settles, the police will-” Nina started, but she didn’t get a chance to finish.
“You stay the hell out of this!” Hanna said, rising from his chair like a hungry bear. “You feed off her memory, you stinking ghoul!” He raised his fists and threw a punch that Roger easily dodged. Roger put a widespread hand on Hanna’s head and shoved him back into his chair.
“Everybody get out,” Dave Hanna said. “Go.”
Roger stomped out of the room, but Chelsi went over to him, putting her hand over where his lolled on the chair arm. “We understand how hard this is for you, Uncle Dave. We really do. Maybe the money will help you get a new start,” she said.
“Sure, sure,” he said, all the fight gone out of him. He picked up the remote control and turned the sound up on the television. Sighing, Chelsi left the room.
Nina thought, He’s still got papers to sign, but I’m not staying in the house alone with him. She could hear Roger in the next room speaking softly to Chelsi.
“Dave,” she said, “if you want the settlement, here’s where you sign. Let’s go over to the table.” He went with her, casting looks through the open door toward the next room. Then he took the pen and signed where she indicated.
“You need to come to court on Tuesday morning,” Nina told him. She wrote down the time and place and handed him the note with another of her cards. “My secretary will call and remind you.”
“Another trip up there?” Hanna said. “Okay, let’s get it over with.”
Chelsi stood in the doorway. “We’ll walk out with you,” she told Nina. “Good-bye, Uncle Dave.”
Hanna waved a hand, his eyes back on the TV screen.
Out on the driveway, Roger said, “He needs an intervention, a treatment program. Don’t get the wrong idea. He wasn’t like this until she died. So it’s good that he has the money coming in. Is there any way to get a hold on it so he has to use it for medical purposes?”
“You’ll have to talk to another lawyer about that, Roger,” Nina said. “He’s my client. I’m not comfortable talking about something like that without him present, and I think he’d probably object.”
“Oh. Of course. Sorry.”
“I understand.” She not only understood, she agreed with him, but she was in no position to say so.
“He doesn’t want to move on, you know,” Chelsi said softly. “I believe he just wants to be left in peace to slowly kill himself. He misses her so much.”
“I hope you’ll continue to be patient with him,” Roger said.
“Come on, Dad. Let’s go home. Uncle Dave has definitely kicked us out. Thanks for doing all this, Nina. See you Thursday for your massage,” Chelsi said.
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Nina started up the Bronco, her briefcase on the seat beside her, relieved. The case would probably be over on Tuesday, and she had helped Hanna some.
He wasn’t the most charming client she had ever had. She wouldn’t miss him. She felt sorry for him, though. You can’t blame a wounded dog for snapping.
She rejoined the line of cars winding up toward South Lake Tahoe. At twenty-five miles an hour, she thought it would be safe to make a cell-phone call. The German time zone was nine hours ahead of California, making it about 8:00 P.M. at Kurt Scott’s home in Wiesbaden.
His number was in the phone memory. She hadn’t spoken to Kurt since Bob’s last trip to Europe, but if she was going to stamp out the idea of another trip she would have to do it before Bob made enough money for a ticket.
He answered immediately.
“It’s Nina.”
“I knew that.” He had a deep voice. “Is Bob okay?”
“He’s great.”
“Good.”
“How are you?” Nina said.
“Apparently you heard I’m back in Germany.”
“Bob told me. Why’d you leave Sweden and go back there?”
“The doctor says I’ve pounded my fingers on piano keys so many millions of times that I wore them out. It feels like rheumatoid arthritis and the joints get swollen, but he says it’s just a nasty tendonitis.”
“You’re taking time off from the Stockholm Opera Company?”
“It’s permanent. I’m finished as a performer.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “My hands were bugging me, so I dosed up on ibuprofen. Every day, maximum dose. One day, that didn’t work anymore.”
“Oh, Kurt, I’m sorry.”
“I’m not crippled. The old hands work fine for most things, just not toccatas. Nina,” he paused, “do you remember what I was doing for a living when we met?”
They had met at Tahoe fifteen years before and embarked upon a passionate romance that lasted three weeks. Then Kurt had gone away, not because he wanted to, but Nina hadn’t heard the full story until years later. She had been angry when he left, so angry that she hadn’t tried to find Kurt to tell him about her pregnancy. “Remember?” she asked. “I was camping in one of the cabins at Fallen Leaf Lake. You came around to warn me that bubonic plague had been found in the area. Of all things.” She recalled her reaction. She had thought, What a line.
“I had to convince you to quit consorting with raccoons and squirrels.”
“You were a park ranger.”
“And you were an argumentative law student. Barefoot and beautiful, sitting on the rickety steps of that little place you had rented, painting your toenails, as I recall.”
Embarrassed, Nina said, “Anyway.”
“Anyway, I’ve missed the outdoors. I always regretted that a person can’t play the piano outside. Meanwhile, I have some free time to consider my future. I thought I’d do some camping in the Taunus woods, not far from Wiesbaden. Then Bob called me and I thought, I’ll take him along. I suppose he mentioned that?”
“He said he wanted to visit you. It’s why I’m calling,” Nina said. “He’s worried about you.”
“He thinks I’m lonely.”
“Are you?”
“Now and then.”
“I think he’s concerned that your hands-that the changes coming up…”
“He’s a good kid when he’s not being a rascal. I’d send him a ticket, but I can’t get at my money. Long tangle with the bank, which amounts to I’ll get things straightened out eventually but meanwhile I haven’t got the ready cash.”
Nina felt worse and worse about the purpose of her call. “Kurt, listen. Bob’s moved to Carmel and back in the last ten months and made a trip to Sweden to visit you,” she said. “He’s back in school now. He needs stability.”
“You mean you do.”
“What?”
“Bob told me you split up with Paul.”
“It was inevitable. But that has nothing to do with…”
“Bob seems confused.”
“You mean-because I took away his father substitute?” Nina said. “That’s ridiculous. He never viewed Paul as a father.”
“He liked Paul. They had a relationship, too.”
Stung, Nina said, “I can’t help that. I really can’t. What’s your point, Kurt?”
“Hey, just be honest about what’s going on.”
“I’m trying.”
“Let him come, Nina. He can miss a week or two of school. He’s a smart guy. He’ll make it up. He can write a photo-essay about Germany.”
“I just think that Bob-”
“Ah, it’s so frustrating. I have no power in this situation, which makes me angry.”
“Kurt, it’s tough. You live half a world away. Okay, I do rely on him, maybe more than I should. And I don’t want to keep him from you, but I don’t like him putting his energy into schemes to get back to Europe all the time.”
“You’re used to having him all to yourself. Wait. I don’t mean it that way.”
“You can always make me feel guilty.” She had kept Bob’s existence a secret from Kurt for twelve years. Now he liked being in his son’s life. Naturally.
“I’m not trying to bring up old business, Nina. Let’s deal with this right now.”
“Right now I feel like I’m in some kind of popularity contest with you that I might lose.”
He laughed, easing some of the tension between them. “You’re joking, right?”
The car in front of her came to an abrupt halt. Slamming on her brakes, she realized minutes had passed and she had no consciousness of driving. “I have to go.”
“We aren’t finished, Nina.”
She knew that, and she knew they had reached an impasse.
“Give my love to the boy.”
And the feeling in his voice almost changed her mind, but swerving left, distracted by a car broken down alongside the road, she kept her good-bye brief. They hung up. The Bronco toiled up the winding road along the American River with the other trucks and SUVs. Nina felt guilty, but Bob would stay home. He would understand when she explained it to him, and Kurt would support her. He had no choice.
FOR SEVERAL DAYS IT RAINED STEADILY on the island. Elliott and his father had a thousand-piece picture puzzle to work on. Gloria brought in the groceries. Elliott spent a lot of time in his room, worrying about the man in the mask, thinking about the robbery two years before. He couldn’t concentrate on working on the proof. He stared out the window at the new streams running down the steep ravine behind the house into the cove.
Elliott never had been able to prove that irrational numbers don’t exist, but his father gave him a canoe anyway the day he turned twelve. That was when Elliott dropped out of school and started teaching himself, though his mother made him take piano lessons and volunteer at the library.
Not far from the house the woods gave way to a small, stony beach and a sheltered cove bounded by tumbled rocks. Elliott spent his teenage summers pulling rhythmically on the oars, circling the cove, mostly alone, thinking. His parents didn’t bother him, and he had no friends, so he was free to think. Sometimes he thought about girls, but mostly he thought about calculus. He began carrying a spiral notebook with him to record his thoughts. When it filled, he would start a new one.
Numbers: the integers, the irrationals, the transcendents, the imaginaries; numbers that presented mysteries brighter and more challenging than the mysteries of religion, because they could be solved with logic, someday, by someone.
He had first met the greatest mystery of all, the mystery of the prime numbers, when he was ten years old.
How these building blocks of all numbers are distributed along the great number line has never been understood. They seem to occur at random-2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17-and so on and on forever to those regions of monstrous limitlessness where Elliott’s little breeze blew. An integer was a prime number if you couldn’t divide it by any other integer except itself and one. But no formula could predict the sequence of primes. No formula could find the factors of large numbers, except by the crude method of searching one by one along the number line.
Yet all the great minds in mathematics over all the centuries agreed on one thing: The primes could not be random. If they were random, the ground of the universe was random, and this could not be, not with planets revolving around stars, not with the soaring bridges and skyscrapers people have built, not with the human eye, which seeks and finds harmony everywhere.
No, the primes could not be randomly distributed. One day as he furiously rowed across the flat water, Elliott made up his mind to devote his life to the primes. If he introduced a new devil into the world, if he found a truth that added to chaos instead of harmony, he would hold his answer close and decide then what to do with it.
He read everything he could about the attempts to find a formula to predict the primes. The geniuses of mathematics, the smartest people who ever lived, had tried to understand the primes, and been defeated. Some had lived long, quiet lives, but many who flirted with the primes had fallen while very young: Gauss, who left math forever in his twenties; Ramanujan, the vegetarian Brahmin who died at thirty-two; Gödel, who starved himself to death; Nash, teetering on the edge of the void most of his life; Grothendieck, still alive, cloistered in a hut in the Pyrenees, obsessed with the devil; Turing, who killed himself at forty-one by eating a cyanide-laced apple.
And the greatest of them all, in Elliott’s mind at least, Bernhard Riemann, who died in Italy at thirty-nine. Because of pleurisy, the books said, but Elliott figured he had died because the heat in him had died. Riemann had simply gone as far as he could. He had found a possible order in the primes and given the world a direction in the Riemann Hypothesis. It made sense to die then.
“The distribution of primes is linked to a mistake about what Zero and One actually are,” he told his parents at dinner one day. “Zero and One are the same point. They are definitely not numbers.”
“Prove it,” his father said.
“I will. I am going to be a mathematician.”
“Of course you are,” his father said. “But you have to study hard so you can go to a great university.”
Elliott scored a perfect 800 on his math SATs, but only 710 on the verbal side. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered him a scholarship anyway. He was eighteen when he got on the plane to Boston. His mother gave him two ham sandwiches so he wouldn’t have to eat airplane food. His father gave him a silver-chased mechanical pencil. He wrote down his solutions with that pencil forever after.
MIT appeared to bustle with student life, but in fact it was a lonely place where a lot of young people like himself, wearing specs, walked around in the same pair of jeans for days and ate alone in cheap eateries, punching calculators and hunching under the weight of their backpacks. Elliott wasn’t free to think anymore; he had to take classes in areas of knowledge that bored him, like English literature, and he spent a lot of time eating pizza and hiding out the first year. His dorm room, a high-rise on Memorial Drive, was always too hot from the central heating, and he shared the room with a social misfit from Minneapolis who talked even less than he did and dropped out during the second part of his sophomore year, leaving behind an empty bed and a starker silence.
Elliott tried out for crew, but confronted with the unfamiliar currents of the muddy Charles, he blew the tryouts. The broad shoulders he had developed rowing across the cove at home slumped and his neck was out most of the winter. He stayed through the winter break and caught a semipermanent cold from the foreign bugs of the East Coast. He missed his father and mother and wrote them endless E-mails.
His mother died suddenly. A heart attack. He spent the summer at home, trying to help his father cope.
It was so cold that second winter at MIT that Elliott almost gave up and went home. But then something happened that made weather and thoughts of home irrelevant.
At the Science Library one freezing January day, Elliott was working through some functions when Silke Kilmer, the most beautiful woman in his physics class, came up behind him and placed her divine soft cheek next to his. Startled, he gave her a push that almost knocked her over and jumped out of his chair.
“Sorry,” she said, smiling. She had recovered like a cat, her hand barely touching the table to stabilize her.
“No. My fault. I’m sorry.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute? I know you’re working, but-just for a minute?”
“By all means,” Elliott said, kicking himself mentally for sounding so pompous.
They sat down again, alone in the group of cubicles on the third floor where Elliott spent a lot of his evenings. Silke set down her heavy backpack and took off her navy pea coat, revealing a fuzzy white sweater with a turtleneck that gave her an exaggerated silhouette, the angles between her chest and ribs and stomach fascinatingly concave and convex.
Elliott tried not to stare at her. She had dark hair and red full lips, and olive skin as though she were Mediterranean, not from some little town in Germany whose name Elliott couldn’t remember.
He knew that she was on scholarship, too, and that she sometimes answered questions in class he couldn’t. She wanted to be a quantum physicist, they all did, all except Elliott, who wanted to be a mathematician. Of the three girls in the class, she was the one who came in late, who smiled, who would talk to any of them. The bet was that she would not return to Germany, that a big American university like Princeton would grab her. She had the smarts, but she was also gracious and sociable, which was not something you came across every day at MIT.
That she had sought him out brought a flush to his cheeks. That her young and beautiful body exuded heat and perfume right next to his made him take a wadded-up handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and take off his glasses and wipe them thoroughly.
“What are you working on?” she asked. “I don’t recognize your symbols, Wakefield.” A pink nail, comma-shaped, perfect as a seashell, tapped his paper.
“My paper for number-theory class. On the Riemann Hypothesis. The zeta function.”
“Of course.” She smiled, and he understood what she meant: that it was just like him to choose the most difficult, abstruse subject possible.
She said, “My paper is also on the primes.”
“You’re kidding!”
“But I’m following a line based on the work of Michael Berry. I’m interested in the idea that the energy levels in heavy nuclei seem to be related to Hermitian matrices in the same way the primes are. I’m a double major in physics, did you know that?”
“I didn’t know you had this interest,” Elliott said. “But the Hermitian matrices correlations-they are just interesting correlations, until someone can explain the actual relationship, if there is one. Personally, I don’t believe there’s any connection between the primes and the real world, even the subatomic world. I used to think that, though. When I was a kid.”
“You are wrong, Wakefield. The primes have a deep connection to the real world. I think maybe the primes are the real world, the real building blocks of the universe. Have you read Volovich’s paper for CERN on that topic? Anyway, there’s room for both of us, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure. It’s just incredible that you are into the primes. Berry, that’s pretty new stuff. He’s in England, isn’t he?”
Silke said, “Ja, it’s new. That idiot Riemann. Saying his hypothesis was probably true, but never giving us any part of a proof. I’ll never forgive him.”
“It wasn’t his fault. After he died, his housekeeper threw out most of his papers.”
“He should have had a better housekeeper.” She smiled. “Why can’t geniuses find decent housekeepers?”
“You should look at my work. I have brought in some of Ramanujan’s work on partitions and factorization. The primes show that addition and multiplication aren’t transparent vis-à-vis each other. It’s going to be revolutionary.”
“Oh, really? Ramanujan? I have a friend you ought to meet.” That smile again. She had a dimple to the right of her chin when she smiled, showing small, even white teeth. Elliott wanted very badly to impress her.
He jabbered, “Riemann was trying to get past the discrete problem. The primes are deep indications that the discrete is an arbitrary convention. You know, One, Two, Three. Discrete numbers. The integers.”
A silence followed this pronouncement. Elliott thought to himself, That is so elementary. If I get any more boring, no one will ever talk to me again.
But Silke finally said, “I love it. It sounds absolutely wild. I’d like to read your work.”
He wanted to give it to her, give her anything she required, but there existed many reasons why he could not share his work. “When I have the proof,” he said.
“What exactly will you be able to show with this proof?”
“More than Riemann.” He stuck his chin out.
“What an ambitious boy you are. Math students are supposed to be modest and retiring, aren’t they? ‘More than Riemann’?” She cocked her head and gave him a look of such understanding, such sweet compassion, that he wanted to fall at her feet and hold her legs in the neat jeans and brown boots and bury his head in her lap. She was so smart, he wondered if she might be on a better track than his. He decided then and there to take more physics courses.
“My God, I can’t believe we haven’t talked before,” he said.
“But what is this supposed to mean?” She was looking at his notebook. “This symbol looks like a little man with a long prick.” Her efficient accent made it sound dry and academic. “So you are going to outshine Riemann? Are you going to go after the Clay prize?”
“What prize are you talking about?”
“You have to be kidding. You don’t know about the Clay prize? It’s a million dollars for the first person to prove the Riemann Hypothesis. It was first offered in 2000, and so far there are no takers.”
“What about de Branges? He published a proof of it last year,” Elliott said. “Didn’t he apply for it?”
“Have you looked at his paper? People seem to think it won’t stand up to peer review. You really didn’t know about the Clay prize? I heard you came out of the Western woods, but how could you miss that?”
“Why are they offering money? It’s a corruption-a commercialization of pure math. I just do my work. And that symbol at the bottom you’re pointing at-that’s just a doodle.”
“ Wakefield. Look at me.” She still smiled, as though there was something amusing about him. He hoped he could somehow keep her amused. He didn’t want her to leave. He had so much to share with her, and she was so gorgeous, and he was getting an erection-oh God, she had noticed-
“I-I can’t just this minute,” he said, and heard her silvery laugh. She put her long hand with its pink nails on his leg. He stared at it, cheeks flaming.
“You need money, don’t you? I heard your mother died and you’re still living in the dorms. Not too good for concentration, is it?”
“I’m doing okay.” He wondered how Silke knew about his mother. Did the other students talk about him? The idea bothered him.
“I have a proposition for you, Wakefield.”
“Okay, S-Silke.” She was making him a-
“I’m going to help you make some money. Easily.”
“Money?”
“You look so silly. Stop by my place tonight about eight.” She gave him an address on Everett Street in Cambridge. He wrote it into his notebook. She patted him on the head like a dog and got up.
“Silke?”
“Ja?”
“Did you know I was working with primes before you talked to me?”
“I heard something about it.”
“Is that why you… sat down?”
“No.”
“Then, why me? Why did you talk to me?”
“Because you are the smartest SOB in the class,” Silke said. “Of course.”
LOOKING BACK, ELLIOTT BELIEVED THAT THE air in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January must be precisely equivalent to the air of Murmansk, Vorkhuta, or Nikel, Russia, in the same month; gulag bone-chilling. A wind sent from some cold hell whipped up the old cobblestones, sending trash flying into the dirty banks of snow. Icicles four feet long and six inches in diameter hung from the storm windows. The low white sky touched the rooftops. At night, ice formed along the sidewalk cracks and the yellow light of the lamps revealed high-water-content snow blown this way and that, born in the churning Atlantic.
The students came in September, when the grass was green and the boats slipped sedately along the Charles River. By the time they realized what they were in for, that the bucolic scenes of September wouldn’t return until May, it was too late.
By now Elliott had found ways to avoid the weather, seldom leaving his room at MIT with its damp towels hung over the radiator except to go to class or the library. This survival strategy limited him to the company of the all-male denizens of his floor, however. Tonight, on this sortie to the Harvard gulag, he wore rubber-soled boots and a parka with a fake-fur hood pulled around his face, and carried a brown paper bag containing a bottle of Chianti cradled in his arms.
He wasn’t exactly hopeful. But he was prepared.
The steps of the big house on Everett had been shoveled to allow an eighteen-inch-wide path to the door with its frozen mat. Christmas lights still hung unlit from the eaves, but behind the curtains of the windows flanking the porch he saw warm light and figures passing back and forth.
A party. His heart sank.
The door creaked open and the guy standing there looked at him without comment. He was an Asian Indian whom Elliott vaguely remembered from his class in set theory the previous semester.
“Hello, Wakefield.”
“Hello.”
“Raj.”
“Right. Raj. Is Silke here?”
“Of course. She’s waiting for you. Is that alcohol? Very good! Come in.”
It was a student house, one of the mansions near Harvard that was rented to the children of the well-heeled. The entry floor was piled with grubby boots and hung with jackets. A runner with a practical brown pattern mounted the staircase.
“This way.” They passed into the living room with its coffered ceilings and air of genteel decrepitude, where two girls were lounging on the couch, watching TV. Silke flicked it off with the remote in her hand and came over and stood under the shelter of Raj’s arm and said, “Welcome.” Reaching for the wine, she said, “Nice. You know Raj. And this is Carleen. She was in your class in set theory, too.” Carleen didn’t get up. With her legs curled under her, she looked like a punk kid of twelve or so.
“Hi” was all she said. Silke pointed to a chair and Elliott sat down and crossed his legs, which were now inches from Carleen’s on the couch.
“So what’s happening?” he said. Raj sat down across the coffee table from them and Silke came back into the room with a corkscrew, an extra bottle, and actual wineglasses. “Prost,” Silke said after their glasses were filled, and Elliott thought he wouldn’t be able to stand their attentive eyes much longer. Obviously the evening would not go as he had hoped-Silke had joined Raj in the big easy chair and it was clear their intimacy was long-standing-and therefore he wanted to go home.
Silke smiled and Raj reached into his pocket and drew out a deck of cards.
“Ever played blackjack? Twenty-one?” he asked, casually flipping cards onto the table. It seemed that they were about to have a game.
“A few times. With my father.”
“Let’s try a hand.” Carleen sat up and took a look at the face-down card she’d been handed. They each had a card face-down and one face-up.
“We already ate up the eights,” she said. There were three eights showing on the table among the four of them. “Hit me.” Raj dealt her a ten and she turned over her hole card in disgust. It had been a four. With the eight showing she had hit on twelve.
“How’d she do?” Raj asked Elliott.
“She lost.”
“Silke?”
“Hit me.”
Silke took a seven. With the six she already had showing, she now had thirteen points showing on the table, her hole card still hidden. “Hit me,” she said again. Raj gave her a two this time. “I’ll stay.”
“ Wakefield?” Elliott had a ten hole card and an eight showing. “Stay.”
“Okay,” Raj said. “So you lose.”
“How do you know that? You haven’t even dealt to yourself. You could bust.”
“I’m going to get a ten, so I’ll have total nineteen and beat your eighteen. See?” He dealt himself a card face-up. It was a ten. He turned up his hole card. An ace. With the first face-up card he had dealt himself, an eight, he had hard nineteen.
Since an ace could be one point or eleven, Raj had already had soft nineteen. He hadn’t had to hit. In fact, it had been crazy to deal himself another card.
Therefore, he had known already what the card would be.
“Oh,” Elliott said. “The deck is rigged. Fixed.”
“You think so?” Raj said. He gathered up all the cards and began shuffling expertly. “Eight times I’m going to shuffle,” he said. Silke drank her wine, her eyes bright.
Raj’s hands moved expertly, but there was no doubt that he was fully shuffling the deck over and over. “Here we go,” he said, and held the cards as if to deal them. “Ready?”
“For what?” Elliott said.
“For me to call the cards.”
“You want me to tell you the trick?”
“I don’t think you can tell me anything until I show you what I can do with these cards.”
“You’re gonna call them. You said so. You can probably remember a sequence of fifteen or twenty.”
Raj smiled and started laying down cards. “Ten of spades,” he said, and laid down a ten of spades. “Ace of hearts.” He laid down an ace of hearts. “Three of hearts. I can actually tell you the whole deck of fifty-two. So you know what I can do, but how did I do it?”
“Eight shuffles,” Elliott said. “I read about it someplace. If you already memorized the order of the deck, which you did, and you’re good enough, you can divide the cards equally from both sides as you shuffle. After eight shuffles, you’re back where you started from. Same old order.”
Raj and Silke looked at each other, and Silke smiled again. She wore a soft blue sweater tonight with her jeans. Elliott was jealous of the way her hip touched Raj’s hip so familiarly in their chair.
Raj said to Silke, “Not bad.”
“It was me who recommended him,” Carleen said. It was the first time she had spoken.
“Maybe you can tell me the next card,” Raj said.
“An eight.”
It was an eight. “There were three eights close to the top originally, and you hadn’t altered the order. It was the best guess,” Elliott said. He picked up his glass and let the liquid flow down his throat. He wasn’t much of a drinker-he had just turned nineteen and it had been hard to get alcohol, even with his fake ID, earlier. He took another look at Raj. Raj was definitely a few years older than the rest of them, not because he looked older, but because he dressed older and possessed the air of confidence that comes from age and money. He had a thick gold wristwatch that had some long French name scrolled across the dial. He wore a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, and actual slacks, and he smiled a lot. A happy type, like Silke. Elliott could see why Silke would find him attractive.
“I like games,” he said sourly, “but this feels like a test.”
“Part of one,” Raj said. “It remains to be seen whether you have the required nerve. I think you may pass that part of the test, too.”
“So?”
“Have some more wine. Pour it for him, Silke. I’m going to tell you a story, my friend. It’s about a team of people who play blackjack professionally.”
“You? You three?” Elliott said, looking around. “You all go to MIT.”
“We take a weekend off once a month,” Carleen said.
“We bring back ten to fifteen thousand apiece each time,” Silke said.
“Dollars? You mean dollars?”
“You have to practice for a couple of months. It takes a lot of concentration. We fly together and stay together. Sometimes Atlantic City, sometimes an Indian casino, sometimes Tahoe, sometimes Las Vegas.” Silke was leaning forward. “It’s fun, Wakefield.”
“You count cards? Isn’t that illegal?”
“If they catch you, they throw you out, but it isn’t illegal. We did get thrown out last month from Caesars in Atlantic City. That’s why you’re here.”
“I’m too conspicuous and they’re starting to recognize me,” Raj said. “We work as a team. Silke and Carleen are spotters. They go around the tables and play low bets until the cards get hot-lots of tens in the shoe. Then they signal me and I sit down and play big for a while. Then we move on.”
“And that’s why I’m here?” Elliott repeated slowly.
“We need another player. Another team member. We’ll train you.”
“I’m not sure I have time. I’m working on something, plus the classes are hard.”
“Tell me about it,” Raj said. His look was challenging. Elliott remembered him better now from class. He couldn’t understand set theory. He kept asking stupid questions all through that class.
He would be easy to surpass. Elliott thought, I can get an A in this game. Plus maybe some money. Plus travel with Silke.
“I find this hard to believe,” he said. “It’s not some joke? Because I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“It’s a business deal,” Raj said. “The tuition at MIT is staggering, in case your family hasn’t noticed.”
“And we all get to be friends,” Silke said.
It took three months before the team judged Elliott to be ready. He turned out to be a fast, accurate card counter. The calculations were nothing. He had no trouble concentrating, either.
Silke was still better. She had an eidetic memory, which meant she remembered every card played. She had a mental notebook where she jotted down everything she saw, and she could flip back a few pages in her mind and look at what she’d noted.
Carleen was fine as a spotter, but she got nervous and overbet. She seemed to like Elliott, and Silke and Raj kept throwing them together.
They held his first session at Circus Circus in Reno, Silke signaling him to an uncrowded table just past a set of progressive slots. A hundred-dollar minimum, and he had been provided with a stake of ten thousand dollars. He got to work.
The dealer, quick-handed and ready with a smile, dealt from a six-deck shoe that had already been played by Silke down to four decks.
She said from somewhere behind him, “I think I’ll get something to eat, a bagel or something.” The word bagel meant an extremely high number of ten pointers was left in the deck. He played five hundred, then a thousand a hand. Six minutes later he was up fifteen thousand, and the dealer shuffled. Elliott cashed in his chips, gave the dealer a couple of the hundred-dollar chips, then left the casino.
The rest of the team met him in the parking lot and they went somewhere-some other casino on the downtown Reno strip-to celebrate. Elliott got drunk and didn’t play any more. He was drained like a marathoner, and had to be helped to his motel room.
The next night he played for a longer time, with less money, and made $12,500. Raj, playing at another table with Carleen looking on, picked up $18,000.
They flew home with $45,500 in cash, carried by Silke and Carleen in plastic bags under their jackets. Airport security scared Elliott, but apparently the Reno screeners were used to seeing large amounts of cash on money belts. To draw notice to a tourist’s stash wouldn’t be good for Reno.
The girls had no problem.
Elliott’s share was $10,500 after expenses. He gave himself $500 for some books he needed and sent the rest to his father in Seattle, writing that he had been asked to do some consulting.
He went again in May and June, to the Mohawk casino in upstate New York, and to Loughlin, Nevada. Both times he came back with more than $10,000.
Raj became a friend. He was reliable and funny, impossible to dislike. Carleen hung around, sulky, right on the money with her job, though. The only problem was with Silke. He was in love for the first time in his life, and considering his personality, he thought maybe it would be the last time, too. But she and Raj were in love with each other, in a way he could only respect. Respect and suffer over.
Elliott picked up the phone again, wanting to hear Silke’s voice. The rain flowed down his window, and the calculations in front of him looked as blurry as the view. But he didn’t dare call her for the third time in three days. She’d be irritated. Raj would be irritated. They would be in touch when they had some information about the man in the mask.
Meantime, college had been over for two years, and Raj and Silke were still together. They would always be together, and Elliott’s job as third wheel was to avoid being a pudgy pest.
WISH SHOWED UP AT THE OFFICE on Monday afternoon, wearing his sunglasses and Paul’s old leather jacket, as Nina was ushering out her four o’clock.
“Coffee first,” Nina said. They went into the conference room next to her office and Wish pulled out his usual chair, next to where Paul used to sit. Sandy came in and shut the door. They all fixed espressos on the new machine standing in the corner. The windows streetside let in a fresh breeze and the sound of traffic stopping and starting at the light.
Wish passed out his report. He had his own new letterhead: “Whitefeather Investigations.” Naturally, a white feather was drawn under the new firm’s name.
“You’re the first people to see it. What do you think, Mom?”
Sandy said, “I never thought I’d see the day.” The side of her mouth twitched. She was thrilled.
“Are you going to rent an office?” Nina asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Wish said. “And you know, you don’t use this room much, and I’ll be in the field a lot. So just as a temporary move I, er, put down your address.” Now she saw it, just under the white feather.
Nina had to think about this. Wish wasn’t presumptuous, so why had he jumped ahead like that? Then she thought, He’s only twenty-five, he’s just gotten his license, and he needs to stay close to us. This conference room was the only office Wish had ever worked in, except for Paul’s in Carmel.
“You should have asked first,” Sandy said.
“It’s fine, Wish,” Nina said. “We just have to stay at arm’s length. We’ll do a written rent agreement and I’ll talk to the Starlake Building landlord.”
“Great! How much shall I pay a month?”
“ Sandy?” Nina said.
“Three-fifty,” Sandy said. Nina’s rent had recently gone up to twelve hundred dollars a month, not bad for a reception room, private office, and conference room in a small town.
“Let’s start at two hundred,” Nina said. “For the first six months.” Wish’s face broke into a big smile, and she saw how nervous he had been about his proposal.
“You’re the best,” he said. “And I’m going to give your work top priority. As soon as I get some other clients.”
“I’ll expect that. So-report.”
“I talked to Sergeant Cheney, South Lake Tahoe Police Department, Sunday. He was surprised the civil case was still pending. He said to say hi. The police report, the autopsy report, the coroner’s findings on the Hanna shooting are all attached.”
“That’ll help a lot. Did you notice anything of interest?”
“There’s plenty in there. Ballistics stuff. It was ruled a homicide by persons unknown. Mrs. Hanna was three months pregnant at the time. The best stuff is witness descriptions. The clerk, Meredith Assawaroj, had checked in this group of students who were the ones robbed. See the witness statement, right here.”
“Got it,” Nina said, thumbing through the pages.
“Meredith indicated that there were three people who checked in. A couple and a young man. The couple had one room and the man had a separate room.”
“Descriptions?”
“Pretty good ones. I think Meredith felt really bad about leaving her post at the desk that night. She still works at the Ace High, though.”
Nina was already reviewing the clerk’s description of the three witnesses.
“Sandy, let’s get this on a separate sheet,” she said. “The single one first. About five feet eleven, weight one-seventy, average build, blond hair, not too long, but hung in his eyes in front. No tattoos or piercings. White oxford shirt, jeans, hiking boots. Glasses. Backpack.”
“Generic kind of guy,” Sandy said. “Not conspicuous at all.”
“Wait till we get to the other two,” Wish said.
“She didn’t talk to the girl or her boyfriend at all, but Meredith heard this individual say something to one of the others. She thinks he said, ‘Professor Brown would love that.’ ”
“‘Professor Brown would love that,’ ” Sandy repeated thoughtfully. “So she decided they were students.”
“We’ll get to that. The couple was pretty conspicuous. Good-looking. The boyfriend did all the talking for the group. He paid cash for the two rooms. Meredith asked for a driver’s license and he gave her a fake ID. So did the other two. Meredith kept the copies and they’re attached.”
“It’s a New York license. The name is Mukul Dev,” Nina read. “Age is twenty-six. Address is-”
“Nonexistent,” Wish said. “Sergeant Cheney had it checked.”
“That’s an Indian name. East Indian, I mean.”
“We know what you mean,” Sandy said.
“Sergeant Cheney says it’s the name of a big star in Bollywood. The police checked him out, but he was in Mumbai working on the set of a musical that day.”
“Mumbai?” Sandy said.
Wish said, “ Bombay, Mom.”
“Then why not say so?”
“But our fake Indian actually was from India. At least, he looked that way to Meredith. I doubt she’s an expert.”
“Medium height, full lips, dark eyes, long eyelashes. Hmm. Gray slacks, black loafers. Blue dress shirt. Smiled a lot. Sort of British accent. She didn’t see his bag.”
“Doesn’t sound like a student to me,” Sandy said. “Now that first one, yes.”
“The Indian’s a standout individual,” Wish said. “He’s going to lead us to the rest of them.”
“And the girl?”
“On the next page. Five-five. Early twenties. Brown hair with a lot of curl. Not a lot of makeup. Trim shape. Wearing a pink tank top and jeans. High-heeled boots. And this one had a different accent,” Nina said, reading.
“Indian?” Sandy asked.
Wish answered, “German. Meredith said they used to get a lot of German tourists in her hometown in Thailand, and she’s pretty sure.”
Nina said, shaking her head, “It’s such a shame Dave Hanna let this drop. The three of them came to Tahoe two years ago. Somebody tried to rob them and they saw a woman get shot. Finding them isn’t going to be easy. They could have come from anywhere. What about the rental car?”
“Same fake ID and cash,” Wish said. “Dropped at the Reno airport Enterprise car-rental place at five A.M. There were several flights out early that morning and the sergeant checked the passenger manifests. United had three last-minute passengers to Logan Airport in Boston, Massachusetts, on its six A.M. flight that morning with the same fake names.”
“What were they up to?” Sandy said. “They sound like crooks. Drug runners or something.”
“They didn’t want to be found after the shooting, that’s for sure,” Wish said. “And nobody did find them. The trail went cold in Boston.”
“I bet airport security would have a film,” Sandy said.
“The airport-security firm stonewalled the sergeant. He couldn’t even find out if there was a film.”
“All right,” Nina said. “You talked to the clerk?”
“Meredith. She really wanted to help. So she saw them when they checked in, and she’s told the police all she knows about that. But-this is good-when she heard the shots-two quick shots-she ran right out the door with the kid behind the counter of the Internet cafe, and across the parking lot toward the office. She said she never thought about getting shot herself.”
“What happened then?”
“It’s all in her statement. She heard yelling. Two of the students, the Indian and the girl, ran right past her, telling her to watch out, toward their rooms. Then the third student came running in the same direction. She looked around the corner of the office toward the vending machines and saw Dave Hanna coming down the steps yelling that his wife was shot. Up on the balcony of his room she saw a woman crumpled in a corner.”
“Do we have photos of the crime scene?”
“The police report has copies of the photos taken. I also went to the Ace High this weekend and took digital photos. They’re in my computer, and I’ll have them printed for you by tomorrow.”
“And the shooter?”
“Gone,” Wish said.
“The gun?”
“She never saw one, and the sergeant says the police haven’t located one. But they have the casings and two bullets, including the one recovered from Sarah Hanna’s body, so the ballistics are really together. It was thirty-eight caliber. That’s it. There’s no description of the shooter or really the robbery except what Mr. Hanna said.”
“Or what the three witnesses could tell us.”
“Correct. It comes back to them. Okay, Nina, you know we decided to check the restaurants. After two years, I was just looking for security films. That’s going to take a while. It’s harder than I thought. I don’t have anything for you on that yet.”
“Fair enough.”
“And now we come to the big news.”
“You have big news?” Nina said.
“You are talking to Whitefeather Investigations,” Wish said. “Remember you asked me to check out the motel owner, James Bova, but not to try to talk to him? Well, I went out to his house at Incline Village this morning and jogged around there.”
“Oh, so that’s why you dug out those gym shorts this morning,” Sandy said.
“And he wasn’t there, but his housecleaner was. Her name is Esther. She cleans his house and his motel.”
“You talked to her?”
“I told her I was investigating, and she seemed to think I was undercover or something.” It was an old trick of Paul’s. “She said I was the first officer to talk to her. I said it was about time. She said she read about the shooting at Mr. Bova’s motel. And the next morning she came to clean the motel rooms the students had been in. She found a cash receipt in the room the single guy had stayed in. From a bookstore. She thought it might be important, so she gave it to Mr. Bova. And she hasn’t seen it since.”
Nina rubbed her temple. Sandy pulled at her lip.
Nina said, “If Bova didn’t pass it on to Cheney, that’s major.”
“He didn’t,” Wish said. “It’s not in the evidence list.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell the police?” Sandy asked.
“Maybe he was worried about a suit even then,” Nina said. “I don’t know. His lawyer hinted that he knew something.”
“The receipt might tell us if they really did come from Boston,” Sandy said. “Did she remember anything about the receipt?”
“She’s sharp. She was curious because of the shooting. She remembers it was from Sierra Books and the receipt listed the book titles. Two math books, she said. And the receipt was dated from the day before the shooting.”
“Sierra Books is the biggest bookstore on the South Shore,” Nina said. “They’re at the Y. Wish, I think they’re open until six. I know the manager. I’m going to call her.” She went into her office and called Gretchen Pike, who said she’d be willing to share her old records with Wish.
Wish and Sandy were waiting in the conference room.
“Better get going,” she said. “Check what got sold and who paid and whatever you can figure out for the day before the shooting. Call me tonight if you learn anything. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Court is at nine-thirty,” Sandy reminded her.
“Right. Sandy, call Dave Hanna. Then call Chelsi Freeman. Make sure Hanna’s got a ride up the Hill. If there’s any problem, Wish, will you go down there early and bring him up?”
Wish nodded, pulled on the jacket, and left.
Sandy said, “Well, well. I had my doubts. His room at home still has his old penguin posters on the wall, and he still keeps his clothes on the closet floor.”
Nina said, “He’s grown up a lot. I’ve watched Wish for two years. He’s very dedicated. And he was trained well.”
“He always planned to be a cop.”
“He could still do that someday.”
“He’ll be moving out soon. Find some girl.”
“Yes, he will.”
“The boys, they always move to wherever the girl’s mother lives. My girls, they’ll stick around.”
“He’ll find someone here.”
“You know anybody?”
The question was rhetorical. But Nina thought of Chelsi.
Ten P.M. in the Reilly household, Bob in the living room watching a reality show, Nina blowing out her damp hair in the upstairs bathroom, wrapped in her green silk kimono.
“Bob?”
“Yeah!”
She unplugged the dryer and leaned over the railing. “I talked to your dad yesterday! Could you turn that down!”
“She’s about to roll over in the kayak!”
“Turn it down!”
“What!”
“Your dad and I don’t think a visit to Germany right now is a good idea!”
He turned it down and the silence bristled. She could see him sprawled on the couch with Hitchcock. His head turned toward her and he said, “It was all your idea, wasn’t it? I know my dad wanted to see me.”
“Of course he did, but he agreed that right now-”
“He’s not doin’ so good. I told you. Why can’t I go?”
“Well, you’ve been doing a lot of moving around-”
“You mean you have, and you drag me along.”
Stung, Nina said, “You sound like a punk. I don’t like your tone.”
Bob didn’t answer this.
Nina considered her remark and realized she was out of line. But Bob had been, too. “I know you’ve been working hard. It’s admirable, the way you and Taylor have gone around the neighborhood. I doubt I could have done that at fourteen.”
“Okay, then.” He sounded as though he had reconsidered, too. He didn’t want to argue any more than she did.
“We’ll talk about it some more in a few days. Meantime, speaking of removal of hazardous wastes, our recycling bin is overflowing.”
“As soon as this show is over.”
“Sure.” They had passed through some sort of delicate and subtle negotiation, and they were still friends. She had extracted an okay from Bob. He still did as he was told. But she couldn’t read him like before, as though his transparent heart were being infiltrated by the shadows and solids of coming adulthood.
A BRIGHT MORNING AMID THE PINES, THE Springmeyer fountain actually spouting water for once in the courthouse yard, a couple of police officers exiting the adjacent station with coffee in their hands, stopping to watch the squirrels. Betty Jo Puckett came marching up the trail with her client, wearing a dark pantsuit and a diamond solitaire at her throat.
“Morning!” she called out. Nina stopped and shook hands. Bova wore a wool sports jacket. His hand squeezed Nina’s.
“It’s all over, then?” he said.
“Your part in the case is. With a few caveats.”
“I explained the conditions to Jimmy. We’re willing to go with those. You have the paperwork?” Betty Jo said.
“I’ll give you copies as soon as we’re inside, so you can look them over before the case is called.”
“Everything’s hunky-dory, then. I assume Mr. Hanna will be here?”
“Due any minute.”
“Anything else we need to talk about?”
“A receipt,” Nina said. They had paused in the shade just outside the doors to court. Nina nodded to a lawyer she knew who was just going in.
“You’re as good as they say,” Betty Jo said. “How did you ever learn about it? We were going to give you that as soon as we had the file-stamped paperwork.”
“I don’t want it,” Nina said. “I want to look at it but not touch it. Then I want Mr. Bova to deliver it to Sergeant Cheney with a full explanation.”
“Absolutely. Jimmy, show it to her right now, okay?” Bova reached into his pocket and pulled out a small unsealed envelope. The Sierra Books receipt was inside.
“I still don’t know if it belonged to the witnesses,” he said. “Could have been the people in the motel room the day before.” He held it out and Nina examined it. Then she reached into her briefcase and got out a copy of it. Wish had slipped it under her office door the night before.
“Yes, that’s it,” she said. “I’ll be checking to make sure that goes into police evidence.”
“Wow!” Betty Jo said. “I’m outclassed, no doubt about it. We didn’t follow up, no need to since the case wasn’t happening. But what did you learn? I’m as curious as hell.”
“It was a cash purchase the day before the shooting,” Nina said. “The clerk can’t remember anything about the purchaser, not at this late date.”
“How did you learn there was a receipt, though?”
“Good investigative work,” Nina said briefly.
“I guess you’re not violating anybody’s privacy if it’s a cash purchase,” Betty Jo said as if to herself.
“Not at all,” Nina said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Bova said. “I just didn’t feel it was important. Betty Jo didn’t hear about it until last week.”
“I scolded the shit out of him,” Betty Jo said. “He knows if you get any farther finding the shooter, he’s going to have to testify about it. He’s going to cooperate fully. So what books did the witnesses buy? Most bookstore receipts these days list the titles.”
“They do.”
“And?”
“That’s no longer your concern,” Nina said. “I’m letting you settle out of the case without making an issue out of this, but your client withheld evidence. I’m not in a position to share information I obtained in spite of his obstructive tactics.”
“Oh, come on,” Bova said. “Somebody bought a book. Big deal.” He gave her one of those speculative looks again, looked her up and down as if she were a doll propped up for viewing. It was obscurely exciting, and for the moment it took to catch that flashing glance Nina thought, Why not? He wanted her, and that was almost enough.
A whiff of his cologne reached her. He was from a world where men wear cologne. Not aftershave, not good soap, but a perfumy, expensive spritzer from a department store. Was this where she was heading? For anybody who asked? It struck her that she wasn’t looking for love anymore, that she had dropped out of that endeavor because it was just too hard.
Still. Not Bova. Not yet.
She looked away, toward the fountain, and Bova shrugged.
“Hush up, Jimmy. I understand, Nina. You’re right. It’s none of our business. Jimmy wants out, that’s the main thing. Let’s go in.”
They had to wait almost an hour while Judge Flaherty disposed of more urgent matters. Nina sat in her hard chair up front, watching the parade of the wronged with their petitions and their lawyers. Dave Hanna finally arrived about twenty minutes into the court session and took a seat in back.
Judge Flaherty, fiftyish and florid, had adopted a more judicious attitude since his elevation to the superior-court bench. He processed the cases efficiently and at ten-twenty he pulled out a file and said, “Hanna versus Ace High Lodge, motion to dismiss.”
“Good morning, Your Honor.” Betty Jo introduced herself and her client. Nina did the same, and sat down with Hanna.
“We have a stipulation,” Betty Jo said, “to dismiss the negligence case against the Ace High Lodge and James Bova as an individual and as an insured of his insurance company. Mr. Bova to continue to be available as required should the case proceed further as to other defendants. No admission of liability, limited release solely on the issue of negligent provision of security. In consideration for which a check in the amount of fifty thousand dollars to be paid by close of business today to Law Offices of Nina F. Reilly, made out to the plaintiff, David S. Hanna.”
A mouthful like this took a few seconds for Judge Flaherty to digest. He thumbed through the case file and said, “Just a minute. I see the proposed stipulation has been filed and I have it here. Let me read it.” He wiggled his glasses and got to work.
Flaherty had the power to refuse to accept the stipulation, and there were a couple of reasons he might do just that. Dave Hanna was sweating under the lights. He didn’t look well, though he had found a shirt and tie to wear.
“Why don’t I just dismiss the case?” Flaherty said eventually as he laid down the paperwork. “Ms. Reilly? There aren’t any defendants left.”
“There are still the John Does, Your Honor,” Nina said, getting up fast.
“After two years, nobody else has been served in this case.”
“The individual who killed Mr. Hanna’s wife is still at large,” Nina said.
“Sometimes we can’t get full justice,” Flaherty said directly to Hanna. “I’m sorry, sir, but this court can’t hold your civil case open forever. There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so if the person who shot Mrs. Hanna is ever apprehended by the police, you will have some justice in seeing him punished. But it doesn’t appear that you will be able to maintain this case here before me right now. Because I’m going to dismiss it based on Code of Civil Procedure Section 583.420, providing for a discretionary dismissal after two years when the remaining defendants haven’t been served.”
“Your Honor,” Nina said, “the Ace High has dropped its request for a full dismissal.”
“This is on the court’s motion. We can’t go forward on this, so we’ll have to end it.”
“With respect,” Nina said firmly, “this court does not have jurisdiction to do that.”
The famous flush spread across Flaherty’s cheeks. “Because?”
“Because it has not yet been two full years since the date the suit was filed.”
Flaherty went back to the file while Nina stood behind the table, waiting for him to have another look.
“I see that we are two weeks shy of the two-year discretionary limit,” he said finally. “You are correct, Counsel. May I ask if you expect to identify and serve another defendant in the next two weeks?”
“We hope to,” Nina said. “We intend to move forward much more rapidly from now on.”
“Well, give it your best shot,” Flaherty said. “I’m going to take this matter under submission until”-he looked at his clerk, who gave him a date two weeks away-“November twenty-seventh. On that date I will look at this file again. And if the plaintiff hasn’t found somebody else to sue I will dismiss the entire case at that time.”
Now Betty Jo was on her feet. “There would be no reason for the court not to approve the settlement with the Ace High today.”
“In the current state of the paperwork we have an all-or-nothing situation,” Flaherty told her. “Your client hasn’t made a move in two years, either. He can wait another two weeks, then we’ll sort out the whole thing. You don’t need to appear in court again. You’ll get a minute order and that’ll be that.”
“But-” Nina and Betty Jo said together.
“If you don’t like my decision, you can bring a different motion,” Flaherty told the two lawyers. “Of course, that will take longer than two weeks. Anything else?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“So ordered. The court will take its midmorning recess.” He stepped down and the audience straggled out.
Betty Jo came over to Nina’s table. “Sometimes I want to kick him right in the cojones,” she said. She and Bova went out.
Dave Hanna said, “We’re going nowhere fast, it seems. Why did he stop the settlement?”
“He postponed it. He doesn’t like cases to hang on. It messes up his calendar. He wants to dispose of the suit.”
“Why didn’t we just agree to end the whole thing?”
“Because we have a line on the man who shot your wife.”
Hanna looked startled. “We do? What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go outside and I’ll explain.” They went downstairs and out the doors to the fountain and sat down on Nina’s favorite concrete bench in the sunlight. Nina gave Hanna her copy of the bookstore receipt and said, “Dave, I think we can find at least one of the witnesses with this.” She explained its history.
“So what?” Hanna said. “One of them bought some books, and one of them mentioned a Professor Brown, and they flew to Boston, but that might have been a ploy. You think that’s enough to find them? I don’t.”
“Not just any books,” Nina said. “Wish found out the names of the books. They were texts in advanced mathematics. Now, I agree that there will be a number of Professor Browns on the East Coast. But there won’t be too many teaching graduate-level math. And we have descriptions of the three witnesses. Dave, as soon as I have a list of the Browns, I’ll call them. I think one of them will remember this trio. I think we can find them. I think we can give Judge Flaherty the name of one or more new defendants within two weeks.”
“Even if you find the witnesses, that doesn’t mean you have the man with the gun. The man who shot Sarah.”
“Leave it to me,” Nina said. “Did you drive up alone?”
“Yeah. Rog and Chelsi have gotten way too involved in this.”
“Well, sorry about the check from the motel. It’ll still be there in two weeks, though. Mr. Bova is going to want out even worse in two weeks, if we get lucky.”
Hanna said, “I’ll get going, then. Keep me posted.”
“Stay strong,” Nina said. She watched him walk down the path toward the side parking lot, sorry that he just didn’t seem to care about anything anymore.
Back at the office, she held a deposition in a medical-malpractice case in her office. The doc didn’t give an inch, and by the time she and Sandy slid into the booth at Margarita’s across the street she felt like she’d had a full day.
Sandy slid a printout of a long list across the table to Nina. “Colleges within a twenty-mile circle around Boston,” she said. “There’s one on every block, like convenience stores. There are hundreds. Think of all those heads in the clouds.”
“Good work! How’d you get this?”
“Off the Web. It took about five minutes. I’m going to look at the faculty listings this afternoon with Wish while you’re back at court.”
“That’s going to take longer,” Nina said. “Maybe we should prioritize.”
“Maybe we should eat.” The quesadillas had arrived and they took a break from talking. The little cantina was almost empty. The dark booth with its border of Christmas lights soothed Nina. She leaned back against the red vinyl and said, “The big universities first. Because they have the most professors.”
“Like Harvard?”
“Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, UMass Boston, MIT, uh, I can’t think of any more. But those are big places with graduate schools. Let’s start there.”
“Can Wish use your computer at your desk while you’re out?”
“Sure.”
“And all we know is Professor Brown. Why couldn’t he have been named Professor Rastafarian or something?”
“Might be a she,” Nina said. “Might be a high school. Might be the motel clerk remembered the wrong name. Let’s be grateful for what we have.”
“Hmph.” Sandy put out a twenty on the table.
“That’s way too much for your share.”
“I’m treating today. In honor of my raise. Which I hope to see in my lifetime.”
Sandy called Nina at the courthouse at four that afternoon. Nina was out in the hall, trying to set up a visitation schedule for another client, a father of twin toddlers whose estranged wife didn’t want him to see them. “Excuse me,” she told the client, and went into the bathroom.
“We found three Browns so far,” she said. “Plus a B-r-a-u-n and a B-r-e-h-o-n. All teaching math courses. Just with the five places you wanted to start with. Should we keep going, or do you want to make a few calls?”
“It’s already seven on the East Coast,” Nina said. “Try to find a few more before you go home. I’ll make some calls in the morning.”
She went back out into the hall. Her client was sitting on the bench, head between his hands. “Sometimes I feel like killing her,” he said to Nina. So she dealt with that, and didn’t get home until after six.
Dinner, a walk, a bath. Then sweet, sweet bed.