Mark Dooher couldn't take his eyes off the young woman who had just entered the dining room at Fior d' Italia and was being seated, facing them, at a table ten feet away.
His companion for lunch was, like Dooher, an attorney. His name was Wes Farrell and he generally practiced in a different strata – lower – than Dooher did. The two men had been best friends since they were kids. Farrell glanced up from his calamari, his baleful eyes glinting with humor, trying to be subtle as he took in the goddess across the room. 'Too young,' he said.
'My foot, Wes.'
'All parts of you, not just your foot. Besides which,' Farrell went on, 'you're married.'
'I am married.'
Farrell nodded. 'Keep repeating it. It's good for you. I, on the other hand, am getting divorced.'
'I can never get divorced. Sheila would never divorce me.'
'You could divorce her if you wanted to…'
'Impossible.' Then, amending: 'Not that I'd ever want to, of course, but impossible.'
'Why?'
Dooher went back to his pasta for a moment. 'Because, my son, even in our jaded age, when ninety percent of your income derives from your work as counsel to the Archdiocese of San Francisco, when you are in fact a prominent player in the Roman Catholic community, as I am, a divorce would play some havoc with your business. Across the board. Not just the Church itself, but all the ancillary
Farrell broke off a bite-sized piece of Italian bread and dipped it into the little dish of extra-virgin olive oil that rested between them. 'I doubt it. People get divorced all the time. Your best friend, for example, is getting divorced right now. Have I mentioned that?'
' Lydia 's divorcing you, Wes. You're not divorcing her. It's different. God,' he said, 'look at her.'
Farrell glanced up again. 'She looks good.'
'Good?' Dooher feasted for another moment on the vision. 'That woman is so far beyond "good" that the light from "good" is going to take a year to get to her.'
'At which time, you'll be a year older and forever out of her reach. Pass the butter.'
'Butter will kill you, you know.'
Farrell nodded. 'Either that or something else. This calamari milleottocentoottantasei, for example.'
'Or pronouncing it.'
A handsome young man in a business suit – every male customer in the restaurant wore a business suit – was approaching the woman's table. He pulled a chair out across from her, smiling, saying something. She was looking up at him, her expression cool, reserved. Farrell noted it, and something else.
'Don't look now,' he said, 'but isn't the guy sitting down with her – doesn't he work for you?'
Wes Farrell was on his schlumpy way up toward Columbus and the North Beach walk-up out of which he ran his law business. Dooher lingered in the doorway at Fior d'Italia, then turned and went back inside to the bar, where he ordered a Pellegrino.
He sipped the bottled water and considered his reflection in the bar's mirror. He still looked good. He had his hair – the light brown streaked with blond, camouflaging the hint of gray that was only just beginning to appear around the temples. The skin of his face was as unlined as it had been at thirty.
Now, at forty-six, he knew he looked ten years younger, which was enough – any more youth would be bad for business. His body carried 180 pounds on a six-foot frame. Today he wore a tailored Italian double-breasted suit in a refined shade of green that picked up the flecks in his eyes.
From where he sat at the bar, he could watch her in profile. She had loosened up somewhat, but Wes had been right – there was a tension in the way she sat, in her body language. The man with her was Joe Avery – again, Wes had nailed it – a sixth-year associate at McCabe & Roth, the firm Dooher managed. (McCabe and Roth both had been forced to retire during the downsizing of the past two years. Now, in spite of the name, it was Dooher's firm, beginning to show profit again.)
He drank his Italian water, looked at himself in the mirror over the bar. What was he doing here?
He couldn't allow himself to leave. This was something he thought he'd outgrown long ago – such an overwhelming physical attraction.
Oh sure, when he'd been younger… in college a couple of times… even the first few years of his marriage, the occasional dalliance, stepping out, somebody coming on to him, usually, on a business trip or one of the firm retreats.
But that had stopped after the one crisis, Sheila getting wind of what was going on with one of them. She wasn't going to have it. Infidelity wasn't going to be part of their lives. Dooher had better decide whether he wanted to sleep around or keep the kids.
A hundred times since, he wished he'd have let Sheila go, taking the kids with her.
But in truth, back then, fifteen years ago, he was already unable to risk a divorce, already working with some of the charities, the Archdiocese itself. There was big money there, clean work. And Sheila would have scotched it if things had gotten ugly.
He knew she would have. As she would today.
So he'd simply put his hormones out of his mind, put all of his effort into real life – work, the wife, the kids, the house. He would be satisfied with the ten-fifteen-twenty days of vacation, the new car.
Everyone else seemed to survive in that secure between-the-lines adult existence. It wasn't so bad.
Except Mark Dooher hated it. He never got over hating it. He had never had to play by the same rules as everyone else. He was simply better at everything, smarter, more charismatic.
He deserved more. He deserved better.
That couldn't be all there was. Do your job, live the routine, get old, die. That couldn't be it. Not for him.
He couldn't get the woman off his mind.
Well, he would just have to do it, that was all. He'd call up his fabled discipline and simply will her out of his consciousness. There was nothing to be done with her anyway. Dooher didn't trust the dynamic of lust, that hormonal rush and then the long regret. No, he wasn't about to get involved with all that.
It was better just to stop thinking about her. Or at least not get confused, keep it in the realm of fantasy. It wasn't as if he knew anything about her, as if there could be real attraction.
In fact, if that turned out to be the case, it would be far more complicated. Then what? Leave Sheila…?
No, it was better not to pursue it at all. He was just in one of his funks, believing that the opportunity that would give his life new meaning was passing him by.
He knew better. In reality, everything disappointed. Nothing turned out as you hoped.
He'd just suck it up and put her out of his mind, do nothing about the fantasy. He didn't even want to take one step, because who knew where that could lead? He'd forget all about her. He wasn't going to do anything.
It was stupid to consider.
Joe Avery looked up from the clutter of paper littering his desk, a legal brief which was already anything but brief. 'Sir?'
Dooher, the friendliest boss on the planet, was in the doorway, one hand extended up to the sill, the other on his belt, coat open, sincere smile. 'A Mardi Gras party. Feast before fast. Unless you've got other plans…'
'Well, I…'
'You'll enjoy it. Sheila and I do it every year. Just casual, no costumes, masks, taking to the streets afterwards, none of that. And pretty good food if you like Cajun. Anyway, eight o'clock, if you're free.'
Avery was young and gung-ho and hadn't spoken to Dooher more than a hundred times in his six years with the firm, had never spent any time with him socially. His mouth hung open in surprise at the invitation, but he was nodding, already planning to be there, wondering what was happening.
Dooher was going on. 'If you've got other plans, don't worry about it, but you've paid your dues around here – you're up for shareholder this year if I'm not mistaken?'
Avery nodded. 'Next, actually.'
Dooher waved that off. 'Well, we'll see. But come on up. Bring your girlfriend, you got one. Or not. Your call. Just let us know.'
Then Dooher was gone.
A long week later – party day – and it was going to rain.
Dooher had noticed the clouds piling up on themselves out over the ocean as he drove to his home in St Francis Wood.
He considered his neighborhood the best of all worlds. It was both the city and a suburb, but without the blight of either. He had civilized neighbors. An elegant, gracious canopy of old boughs shaded the streets by day, enclosing them with what felt like a protective security by night. Stands of eucalyptus perfumed the air in the fall, magnolias in the summer.
The street was quiet, with large houses, widely spaced. Most cars were in their garages, although – in the few houses with small children – vans squatted in driveways.
The afternoon sun gave a last glorious golden shout through the clouds – and it stopped him for a moment as he turned into the drive in front of his home.
Like the other facades on the block, his old California Spanish hacienda was impressive, with its tiled front courtyard behind a low stucco fence, ancient magnolias on the lawn, wisteria and bougainvillea at the eaves and lintels.
Upstairs in the turret, Sheila's office, a light had been turned on, although it wasn't dark. Imagining her up there, Dooher felt a stab of what he used to call the occasion of sin – the frisson of excitement. One deep breath drove the thought away. After all, he had done nothing wrong.
He pulled up his driveway.
He parked in the garage and closed the automatic door behind him, then walked back down the driveway and into the house through the side entrance, as he usually did.
'Hello!' Cheerfully announcing his arrival.
He knew she was upstairs in the turret, probably talking to one of their offspring, which she did when he wasn't around. He'd seen the light on up there and knew she wouldn't be able to hear him unless he bellowed.
So there was no answer except the silent echoes of his own voice. 'Hello.' More quietly, with an angry edge.
He went over to the refrigerator – stuffed with party supplies – and pulled out a beer. Opening it with the church key, he remembered days when she'd meet him at the door, his drink in her hand, mixed. They'd sit in the living room and she'd join him and they'd have a civilized half hour or so.
In those early years, even after they had the kids, he'd come first for a long time. When had it ended exactly? He couldn't remember, but it was long gone. He took another sip of the beer, staring out the French doors into their backyard.
The wind had freshened in the long shadows. A first large raindrop hit the skylight over his head.
'I thought I heard you come in.'
He turned. 'Oh? I didn't think you had. You didn't answer.'
She used to be very pretty – short, slim-waisted and high-breasted. She used to work at maximizing what she had. She still could look good when she put her mind to it, but at home – just for him – it never happened anymore. It didn't matter to her. Mark knew what she looked like underneath the clothes – slim waists and high breasts were in the past. She was forty-seven years old and in decent shape, but she didn't look the way she did at twenty-five. No one could or should expect her to.
Today she wore green sweats, green espadrilles. Her once-luxuriant black hair was now streaked with gray – she loved the natural look – and cut to a sensible length, held back by a green headband. There had been nothing wrong with her face when he'd met her – widely spaced hazel eyes, an unlined wide forehead, an expressive, beaming smile. There was nothing wrong with her face now, except that he'd seen every expression it could make, and none of them had any power to move him anymore.
She was up next to him and put her cheek against his, kissing the air – friends. 'I was on the phone, Mark. The caterers. They're going to be a half hour late.'
'Again? We ought to quit using them.'
She patted at his arm. 'Oh, stop. They're great people and they make great food. You're just jittery about the party.'
She turned on the tap at the sink and filled a glass. He took a slow sip of his beer, controlling himself. She was having water. 'You're right,' he said. 'It's nerves, I guess. You want to have a drink with me?'
She shook her head. 'You go ahead. I'll sit with you.'
'Are you going to drink tonight at the party?'
Challenging, she looked up at him. 'If I want to, Mark. It's all right if I don't drink, you know.'
'I didn't say it wasn't.'
'Yes, you did.'
He tipped his beer bottle up, emptying it, then placed it carefully on the drain. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You're right. I'm uptight. I'll go take a shower.'
Sheila was sitting at her dressing table in the makeup room behind the bedroom, wearing only her slip, her legs crossed, putting the finishing touches on her face. Outside, night pressed a gloomy and oppressive hand to the window. The lights in the room flickered as wind and driving rain rattled the panes. In the bedroom, Dooher had dropped a cufflink onto his dresser three times. More rattling.
Sheila stopped with her blush brush and glanced over. 'Are you all right, Mark? Do you feel okay?'
He got the cufflink in, turned it so it would hold, looked up. 'I'm fine. It's nothing, maybe the weather.'
Sheila went back to the mirror. 'It'll be all right,' she said. 'Don't worry. Everyone will fit inside. It might even make it more fun.'
Dooher made a face. 'Fun,' he said, as though the concept were foreign to him.
She turned again, more slowly. 'Can you tell me what it is?' An expression of concern. 'Wes not being invited?'
Because of Wes Farrell's pending divorce from his wife, Lydia, Sheila had suggested with the force of edict that they not take sides. So they had invited neither. It was the first party they'd ever thrown that didn't include either of their mutual best friends.
Mark Dooher could not tell his wife that he'd had enough of the man he'd been pretending to be for so long. Something had to change, was going to change. 'I don't think that's it. I've been known to have fun without Wes Farrell
'Not as much, usually.' Teasing him.
'Well, thanks for that,' he said. Then, as she began to apologize, the doorbell rang. Dooher looked at his watch. 'That'll be the band.'
He turned on his heel and left the room. His wife looked after him, her face wistful, saddened. She sighed.
The guests had been arriving through the teeth of the storm, and Dooher and Sheila were greeting the early arrivals in the spacious foyer. They'd hired a staff of five to handle the food and drinks and there was of course the band, cooking away early on the first of what would probably be twenty or thirty takes of When the Saints Come Marching In.
Dooher's palms were sweating. He didn't know for sure if the woman in the restaurant had, in fact, been Avery's girlfriend. She might be anything to him – sister, cousin, financial adviser, architect. But he did know Avery was coming, bringing a guest.
He hadn't planned what he'd do after he met her. It all synthesized down to the simple need to see her again. If she wasn't with Avery tonight, he'd just…
But she was.
Dooher was moving forward, Sheila at his side, putting his hand out, shaking Avery's as the woman shrugged out of her raincoat, passed it to one of the staff, shook the wet from a French braid. She wore a maroon faux-velvet dress with spaghetti straps. There was a tiny mole on the swell of one breast. Her body was already subtly catching the rhythm of the music. Avery was introducing her, first to Sheila, then…
'… and this is Mr Dooher, er, Mark, our host. Mark, Christina Carrera.'
He took her hand and then – without consciously intending to – briefly raised it to his lips. A scent of almond. Their eyes met and held, long enough to force her to look down.
No one noticed. Other guests were arriving. He realized he was still holding her hand, and let it go, including Avery now in his welcome. 'Thank you – both – so much for braving this New Orleans monsoon.' He lapsed into a drawl. 'Sheila and I had ordered a couple dozen degrees of humidity for… for verisimilitude's sake, but this is takin' it a bit farther than I'd hoped, wouldn't you say?'
He had struck the right tone. They laughed, at home, embraced by the host. Sheila had her arm on his, appreciating the return of his good humor. He nodded again at Avery. 'Go on inside, get yourselves some drinks, warm up. Have fun.'
Now that she was here, he could be gracious. After his earlier apprehension, an almost narcotic calm settled over him. There would be time to meet her, get to know her. If not tonight, then…
She was in his house now. He had her name – Christina Carrera. She would not get away.
They had remodeled their kitchen five years before, and now it was a vast open space with an island cooking area. A deep well, inset into the marble, provided ice and a continual supply of champagne bottles. Across the back of the room – away from the sinks – a twelve-foot table was laden with fresh-shucked oysters, smoked salmon, three kinds of caviar, crawfish, crab cakes, shrimps as big as lobster tails.
The band – cornets, trumpets, trombones, banjos and bass – was playing New Orleans jazz, getting into it. People were dancing throughout the downstairs, but here in the kitchen, the swinging doors kept out enough music to allow conversation.
Christina was standing at the well, alone, pouring champagne into two flutes that she'd set on the marble. Dooher had seen her leave Avery with some other young people from the firm, take his glass and go through the swinging doors into the kitchen.
He came up behind her. 'While you're pouring, would you mind?' He put his glass next to the two others on the counter.
She turned and smiled. 'No, of course not.' Her gaze stayed on him a second. 'This is a super party. Thank you.' She tipped his glass, poured in a small amount of champagne, let the bubbles subside, poured again.
'A woman who knows how to pour champagne,' Dooher said. 'I thought it was a lost art.'
She was concentrating on the task. 'Not in my family.'
'Is your family from around here?'
'No. They're from down south. Ojai, actually.'
'Really? I love Ojai. I've often thought I'd like to settle there when I retire.'
'Well, that'll be a long time from now.'
'Not as long as you think…' She handed him his glass, and he touched hers. 'When I think of the pink moment.'
She laughed. 'You do know Ojai.'
The town was nestled in a valley behind Ventura, and many times the setting sun would break through the fog that hovered near the ocean and seem to paint the red rock walls of the valley a deep pink. The locals set great store by it.
Dooher nodded. 'I tell you, I love the place.'
'I do, too.'
'And yet, you're here.'
'And yet…' Her eyes glistened, enjoying the moment, sipping champagne. 'School. USF' She hesitated a moment. 'Law school, actually.'
Dooher backed up, his hand to his heart. 'Not that.'
'I'm afraid so.' She made a face. 'They tell me it's an acquired taste, though I'm done in June and I can't say I've been completely won over.' She smiled over her glass. 'Oops. I'm saying too much. Champagne talk. I should never admit that to a managing partner.'
Dooher leaned in closer to her, dropping to a whisper. 'I'll let you in on a secret – there are moments in the profession that are not pure bliss.'
'You shock me!'
'And yet…' he said.
'And yet.'
A moment, nearly awkward with the connection. 'Well, Joe's champagne's getting warm just sitting there… that, I take it, is Joe's glass?'
'The dutiful woman…' she said, softening it with a half-smile, but there was no mistaking it – some tension with Avery. But she picked up his glass.
'Are you clerking somewhere this summer? Have you applied with us?'
Most law students spent their summers clerking with established firms for a variety of reasons – experience, good pay, the inside track at a job offer.
Christina shook her head. 'Joe would kill me.'
'Joe would kill you? Why?'
She shrugged. 'Well, you know… he's on the hiring committee… he thinks it would smack of nepotism.'
'From the Latin "nepos", meaning nephew. Are you Joe's niece, by any chance? Perhaps he's your nephew. Are you two related to the third degree of consanguinity?' He raised his eyebrows, humorous, but holding her there. 'Love those lawyer words,' he said.
She was enjoying him. 'No. No, nothing like that. He just thinks it wouldn't work.'
'Well, I may have to have a word with Mr Avery…'
'No! I mean, please, it would just…'
He stepped closer again. 'Christina… may I call you Christina?'
She nodded.
'Look, are you going to be a good lawyer?'
'Yes. I mean, I think I am. I'm law review.' Only the best students made law review.
Dooher pounced. 'You're law review and…' He put his glass down, started over more slowly. 'Christina, listen, you're not doing yourself a favor, nor would you be doing our firm a favor, by not applying if you think there might be a good fit. A woman who is on law review and…' He was about to make some comment about her beauty but stopped himself – you couldn't be too careful on the sexual harassment score these days. 'Well, you'll do meaningful work and you'll bring in clients, which is quite a bit more than half the ballgame, although that's a dirty secret I should never divulge to an idealistic young student.'
'Not so young, Mr Dooher
'Mark. You're Christina, I'm Mark, okay?'
She nodded. 'But I'm really not so young. I'm twenty-seven. I didn't start law school until two years after college.'
'… so you've already got practical work experience? Look, Christina, after what I'm hearing, if you don't come down and apply at McCabe & Roth, I will come out to USF and try to recruit you myself, clear?' He grinned.
Her champagne was half-gone. 'I should really watch what I say when I'm drinking. Now Joe is really going to be upset.'
'I bet he won't be upset.' He touched her arm. 'Don't you be upset either. This is a party. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to push it if it's-'
'No, he will. He also said that there's no sense applying if we're going to get married because there's a policy against attorneys being married.'
'Are you engaged? I don't see a ring.'
'Well, not yet, not exactly, but…'
Dooher pushed it. 'Christina, Joe's a good attorney but this doesn't have to do with him. It has to do with what's best for your career. It's your decision. You come down and apply, and it'll go through channels from there,capisce?'
'All right.'
'Promise?'
She nodded.
He clinked his glass against hers, and they drank.
He awoke without the alarm in the half-dark, listening to the water still dripping from the gutters. The digital clock on the nightstand read 5:30.
He and Sheila hadn't come up to bed until nearly 2:00, but Dooher had always been able to wake up at any time he wanted, no matter how long he'd slept. It was a matter of control, of discipline.
And he had made plans for early.
Sheila slept on her side of the bed, the covers pulled high over her, and he slipped out and walked over to the window. It was cold in the room but the chill braced him. He stood, shivering, enjoying it.
The storm continued with no sign of letting up. His spacious back lawn looked gray and somber, mottled with soaking clumps of plant matter. The old elm's skeleton hung barren, the bushes in the rose garden reached out their swollen arthritic fingers – the whole place sepulchral within its enclosing hedges.
It was Ash Wednesday.
Abe Glitsky's eyes opened to blackness and he was suddenly all the way awake, sprung from fitful sleep by the jack-in-the-box mechanism that had controlled his metabolism over the past five months, ever since Flo had been diagnosed.
Unlike a jack-in-the-box, though, he didn't move. Pop went the weasel and the lids of his eyes shot open, but that was all that happened on the outside.
He lay there, listening in the dead room. His wife was breathing evenly, regularly. His head rang – an anvil for the staccato hammering of his heart.
Glitsky was a Homicide Inspector with the Police Department. He'd been getting through the days by doing what he had to do in five-minute increments, on the theory that if he could just make it through the next five minutes, he'd be all right.
When the long vigil began, while he felt he still had some analytical powers left, he'd tried to make it through entire days at a time by force of will. He wouldn't think about what was coming, what would be. But his focus on those days would keep splitting up, disintegrating into pointillistic little nothings, the stuff of his life unconnected, separating.
Now he was down to five-minute intervals. He would function for five minutes, keep his focus. There were twelve five-minute intervals in one hour, two hundred and forty in twenty hours. He'd consciously done the math. He was doing twenty-hour days, on average. He was also into sit-ups, two hundred and forty sit-ups every day. A symbol.
He wondered how he could be so tired and not sleep, not be sleepy at all. He was never sleepy – tired beyond imagining, far beyond what he'd ever thought were the limits of his physical endurance, but his brain never slowed.
Sometime in the course of a night or post-midnight morning, the apparatus that was his body would shut down and he would lie unconscious for a few hours, but this never felt like sleep.
Last night – a blessing – the boom had lowered while he lay in bed next to his wife, praying for it.
Now – pop – he was up.
The digital changed – a flicker at the periphery of his vision, the only light in the room -5:15. Still deep dark, yes, but morning really. Far better than when the pop was 3:30, when he knew he was up for the day and it was still night.
He swung his legs off the bed.
At 6:15, Dooher was in the fifth row of St Ignatius on the campus of the University of San Francisco because of a hunch that Christina Carrera would appear, as she'd implied jokingly when she'd said her goodbyes last night.
Dooher realized that the odds might be long against her actually getting up and coming down to church for ashes, but long odds had never fazed him.
After all, what had been the odds, back when he was fifteen, that the baseball team he played for, from San Carlos, California, would go all the way to the Babe Ruth World Series? And then, beyond that, that Dooher would come up in the bottom of the seventh inning, two out, one run down, with his best friend Wes Farrell standing on second base? And that he would hit a home run to win the whole thing?
Long odds.
Or, when he'd managed the Menlo Park McDonald's in 1966 and '67 during his first two years at Stanford and decided to take the stock option they were offering to their management employees even though it lowered his pay by ten percent, to under three dollars an hour. He'd taken a lot of grief from friends about the thousand dollars he was throwing down the drain, but Mark had had a hunch, and when he got out of law school eight years later, that stock was worth over $65,000 and he and Sheila used it as the down payment on the home he still owned, which they'd bought for $97,000 in 1975, and was now worth well over a million.
Long odds.
Kneeling in the pew, his knee jammed painfully into the space between the padding so it would hurt, some of the other riskier chances he'd taken came back at him. The time when…
But, halting his reverie, Christina appeared in his peripheral vision. He lowered his head in an attitude of prayer. She was wearing jeans, boots, a Gore-Tex overcoat, and did not see him. She kept walking, her own head bowed. A couple of pews in front of him, she genuflected, stepped in and kneeled.
The Glitskys lived in an upper duplex on Lake Street, and Abe was in the kitchen, bringing handfuls of cold water to his face. A steady downpour was tattooing the roof, but a thin ribbon of pink hung in the eastern sky, off to the right, out the window over the sink.
The thing to do was get the chores started, but he couldn't move. The order of things didn't flow anymore.
How could he do this alone?
He wasn't going to ask that question, not in this five minutes. It would paralyze him. He wouldn't think about it.
He depended on Flo – she was one of the world's competent beings. The two of them had split up their domestic duties long ago. Glitsky had always helped with heavy cleaning; he'd fixed things, lifted and moved, washed and dried dishes, organized shelves and rooms and closets. When the boys had been born, he'd changed diapers and heated baby food, but eventually their care – dressing them, feeding them, comforting them – had fallen mostly to Flo.
And now it was falling back on him.
How was he going to do it?
Stop it!
It wasn't that he minded doing more work, or even thought about the work. Flo was not someone who worked for him. She was his partner. In some fundamental way, he felt he was half her, she half him.
And their life together – his job, her competence, the boys – had taken every bit of both of them together. How could that continue with only half of them? It wasn't a matter of shaking the thoughts because they weren't really thoughts.
He was resting his weight on his arms and hands, which were planted on either side of the sink, fighting vertigo. The ground felt as though it was going to give way to an echoing abyss.
He raised his head and the strip of morning hadn't grown appreciably wider.
After Mass, after the ashes, Dooher thought he would let Christina come to him, rather than approach her. Waiting on the steps outside, he watched the rain come down.
'Mr Dooher?'
He turned with a practiced look of surprise mingled with curiosity, then took an extra moment to place who she was, exactly. He knew her, but…
'Christina,' she said, reminding him.
'Oh, of course, Christina. Sorry, I'm not quite awake.'
'I know. Getting up this morning was a little…'
'Hey, we're here. That's what counts in the eyes of God.'
'The eyes of God,' she repeated.
'Penance,' he said. 'Lent. Some people need Thanksgiving or Christmas. I need the reminder about dust to dust, ashes to ashes.' He shrugged. 'One of the occupational hazards of lawyers is that we tend to think that what we do on a daily basis is important.'
'It is important, wouldn't you say? I mean, people's lives, solving their problems.'
He tapped the dot of ash on his forehead. 'Eventually, it all turns to this.' An apologetic smile, self-deprecating. 'This happy thought brought to you by Mark Dooher. Sorry.'
She kept looking at him. 'You're an interesting man.'
Glitsky had ten pieces of bread spread out on the counter. Five sandwiches. Two each for the older boys, Isaac and Jacob, one for the baby – no, he reminded himself, not the baby anymore, the ten-year-old – O.J.
'What are you looking at?' His youngest son didn't sleep much either – night terrors. Everybody in the duplex handled it differently. O.J. was wearing a Spiderman suit he'd slept in, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Glitsky had no idea how long he'd been there.
'I'm making lunches.'
'Again?'
'Again.'
'But you made lunch yesterday.'
'I know. It's going to happen a lot. I make lunch, okay. And let's talk quiet. Nobody's up. What do you want?'
'Nothing. I don't eat lunch.'
'O.J., you eat lunch every day. What do you want?'
'Nothing.'
Outside the window, the trees of the Presidio behind their duplex had come into relief. Morning breaking slowly.
He wasn't going to fight his child over lunch. He would just make something and put it in the box, and either O.J. would eat it or he wouldn't. Glitsky was in his mid-forties. He wore green string-pull pajama bottoms and no shirt. Crossing the kitchen, he went down on one knee, pulled his boy onto the other one.
'How'd you sleep?'
'Good.' O.J. had to be coaxed to give anything up.
'No bad dreams?'
'Nope.'
'Good. That's good.'
But the boy's arms came up around his father's neck, the small body contouring to Glitsky's chest. A moment holding him there – not really an embrace. An embrace might drive him off. 'I know you don't want anything for lunch, but if you did want something, what would it be?'
Eye contact. A shrug. 'Peebeejay, I guess.'
It took a minute to process. 'Okay, you get dressed. I'll make it.'
O.J. wasn't ready to do that yet. He stayed on the knee. 'But the way Mom does, okay?'
Glitsky took in a breath. 'Okay. How is that?'
'You don't have to yell at me. It's not that hard.'
'I'm not yelling. I'm whispering, in fact. And I didn't say it was hard. I'm sure it's not hard. I just want to know how you like it so I can make it that way, all right?'
'I said I didn't want one anyway.' The eyes were clouding up, threatening to spill over. 'Just forget it.'
Glitsky didn't let him pull away. 'I don't want to forget it, O.J. I want to get it right.' He had to keep from slipping into his cop voice. This was his son. He loved him. 'Tell me how Mom makes it,' he asked gently. 'Would you please do that for me, buddy?'
'It's easy.'
'I'm sure it is. Just tell me, okay.'
A pause, considering. O.J. stood, off the knee, and Glitsky straightened up. 'Bread, then butter – you never put butter, but Mom always does. You got to put butter first – then peanut butter, over the butter. Then, on the other bread, the jelly.'
'Butter, then peanut butter, then jelly. I got it.'
'On the other piece of bread.'
'I got it. But don't you close the sandwich when you're done, so that the peanut butter and the jelly are stuck together anyway?'
'But that's not how you make it. I could tell yesterday.'
'But yesterday I didn't put on the butter first.'
'Nope.'
'Nope what?'
'Also you put the jelly straight on the peanut butter.'
'I probably did, you're right.'
Glitsky couldn't believe he was having this conversation. His world was coming apart, as was his son's, and here they were discussing a completely undetectable difference in the placement of jelly on a sandwich.
But he had no strength to tell O.J. this was stupid. Maybe it wasn't stupid. Certainly it wasn't anymore stupid than all this talking about it. Perhaps it was O.J.'s cry for order as his universe devolved into chaos – jelly on the bread, not on the peanut butter.
One thing he could control.
He motioned his son closer and brought a hand down around his shoulders, then gave him a pat, sending him back to his room to get dressed. 'On the bread first, I got it.'
But he knew he didn't get it. The peebeejay was one thing, random and irrational, the first word in a whole new language that he had no ear for.
The other eight pieces of bread lay spread out on the counter. He couldn't think what he was supposed to do with them.
The rain continued steady as a metronome. The wind had let up and the drops were falling straight down out of black clouds. Miz Carter's Mudhouse had been serving high-octane Java on California Street for forty years and Dooher and Christina were in a booth by one of the windows. Miz Carter served her coffee in oversized, mostly cracked mugs, the product of some warehouse clearance sale of twenty years before.
'I really did try to become an ex-Catholic for a lot of years,' Dooher was saying. 'Stopped going to church entirely, even though I was starting to get some work for the Archdiocese. Hell, back then, a lot of the priests I was working with had stopped going to church. But it just wasn't me. I guess I need the ritual.'
'I don't think that's it,' she said. 'You don't have to explain it to me. I think you just believed.'
'That's the problem. I do.'
'That's not a problem.'
'Well…' He sipped at his coffee, moved food around on his plate.
'Why is that a problem?' she persisted.
Deciding to answer her, he let out a small sigh. 'Well, as you know, we lawyers get used to defending our positions. It's a bit awkward taking a position that doesn't really have a logical framework. I mean, it's faith. It's there or it's not. But there's really not any reason to have it.'
'Or not have it.'
'But you can't prove a negative.'
'But,' she pointed a finger at him, 'there's no reason to prove it. It's personal.'
'Well, of course, I know. But… it sets me apart, a bit, from my peers. It's old fashioned, fuddy-duddy
'Come on. It is not. Not on you.'
He pointed back at her. 'Says you.'
'Yes,' she said, 'says me.'
'Okay, I guess that settles it. So what about you?'
'What about me and what?'
'Faith. Belief. Why you've got ashes on your forehead here at…' he checked his watch '… seven o'clock of a rather inclement Wednesday morning?'
She glanced down at her food, cut into her waffle, wiped it in syrup. She did not bring the fork to her mouth.
'Evasive action,' Dooher said.
Still looking down, she nodded. 'A little, I suppose.'
'I'm sorry. I don't mean to push you.'
She took in a breath, raised her head. Her eyes had a shine in them. 'Penance, too, mostly. Figuring things out.'
Dooher waited. 'This isn't turning into the most modern of conversations, is it? Faith and penance. Sounds like the Middle Ages, or me and Wes on one of our retreats.'
She seemed grateful for the reprieve. 'Wes?'
'Wes Farrell, my best friend.'
'Best friends, another not-so-modern concept.'
Dooher studied her face – something was troubling her, hurting her. He kept up the patter to give her a chance to let the moment pass if that's what she wanted. 'Well, that's me and Wes, a couple of throwbacks. We go on retreats, we call 'em, replenish the soul, talk about the big picture, get reconnected.'
'You're lucky, a friend like that.' A pause, adding, 'Still believing in connecting.'
He took a beat, making sure. She didn't want to avoid it after all, didn't want to be protected, insulated from whatever it was. Not today, not now. She had decided to get it out, and this was an invitation to him, to ask.
'It's really so trite.'
She liked the way the corners of his mouth lifted slightly. 'Trite happens,' he said.
She leaned forward over the table. 'You know last night when I let you believe I'd been in the workplace after college for a couple of years? That wasn't the truth.'
She watched him for a sign, she wasn't sure of what – displeasure, boredom? Ready to retreat at any provocation. He only nodded, patient and tolerant. Taking a breath, she went on: 'He was a professor at Santa Clara, my adviser. Married, a great guy. You probably know everything I'm going to say, don't you?'
'Do you ever talk about this?'
'No. It's too…' She shook her head.
'I'm here,' he said. 'I'm interested and it won't go any further. If it would help…'
Through the expanse of window, a volley of rain raked the parking area, beat briefly against their portion of the glass, passed over. 'He was going to leave his wife,' she began. 'I guess that's what I had the most trouble with when it was first starting to happen, that I was going to wreck his happy home. Except that he told me that Margie and he didn't love each other anymore, that he was leaving her anyway, it had nothing to do with me… and I guess I wanted to believe that.'
'You're not the first person that's happened to.'
She had turned in her seat, one leg extended on the bench, her elbow on the table, leaning over toward him. The waitress came to clear and they both sat silently, watching her remove dishes, wipe the table down.
'More coffee here?'
After it had been poured, Dooher prompted her. 'It must have been painful. And not so trite after all.'
She was biting her lip again. 'You've only heard the short version – girl falls in love with college professor, who's going to leave his wife for her after she graduates. '
'Christina…'
She held up a hand. 'Listen. It gets worse. Girl has best friend from childhood, let's call her Ginny, who's kind of the liaison between the two of them, covers for them with the wife, all that. Girl gets pregnant – professor had been childless with his wife, told girl he was sterile, low sperm count. Now accuses girl of sleeping with someone else – couldn't have been him. Dumps her just as she graduates.'
Christina reached for her cup, took a quick sip, swallowed. She looked over at Dooher, met his eye. 'Girl has abortion,' she said. 'End of story. See? Trite. And PS, professor dumps wife and marries friend Ginny, just to tie it all up.'
Dooher picked up his mug, holding it with both hands. He blew on it, glanced at the rain outside. That's what the penance is for?'
She nodded. 'I still don't know what to do with it. It's been almost five years…' Sighing. 'It's so funny because I know better. I mean, I'm educated, reasonably smart. But, I don't know, it changed me, not just Brian's…' She looked embarrassed at the slip of the name, continued: 'Brian's betrayal, and Ginny's. Mostly the abortion, I guess.'
Silence.
'So what did you do for the two years before law school?'
'I went home – down to Ojai. I moped around, let my mom and dad take care of me. And then one day my dad and I had a talk about how giving in to grief, too much, is really wrong. Well, that struck a chord, and I decided I had to do something, start living again. So I applied to law school, as if that's living.' She gave him a weak smile. 'Anyway,' she touched her forehead, 'that explains the ashes, the penance.'
'The engagement to Joe Avery?'
That got a rise out of her. 'I didn't say that. Why do you say that?'
Dooher shrugged. 'I don't know. The connection just jumped into my head.'
'Well, that doesn't make any sense… I like Joe very much. Love him, I mean. Don't look at me like that!'
Dooher's voice remained measured. 'I'm not looking at you any way. I just made an observation, that's all. I like Joe, too. Hell, I hired him. I shouldn't have spoken so frankly. I thought we were baring our souls here. I didn't mean to offend you. I'm sorry.'
She softened. 'I'm sorry, too. I didn't mean…'
'No, it's all right.' He looked at his watch. 'And it's time for me to go to work. Can I drop you back at school?'
Christina sat straight-backed, pressed against her bench. 'Now you're mad at me.'
Dooher leaned across the table. 'Not at all. You're still applying to the firm? Today, tomorrow, the next day?'
'I said I would.'
'But will you? Now?' He broke a smile. 'After our first fight?'
Gradually, the face softened again. She nodded. 'Yes.'
'Then I'm not mad at you.'
Glitsky closed the door, having just gotten the three boys off to school.
He stood a minute in the tiny foyer, closing his eyes briefly against the constant sting of fatigue. He could hear the voices of his sons.
But he didn't stand still for long. He had about a week's worth of work to do today, which was how he'd arranged it. He would just keep doing things – that was the trick.
Today, Flo was alive, and his boys were healthy and doing fine in school. That's what he would concentrate on. He had five homicides he was investigating, and he was also studying for the Lieutenant's Exam, which he hadn't even decided to take. But it was more busy work.
He looked at his watch. He had to go now into the kitchen, pour himself some tea, get his day moving.
'Abe?' Flo, suddenly awake, called from the bedroom.
'Yo.' Hearty as he could manage. He was already across the living room, stopping in the bedroom's doorway. His wife had propped herself up and she was smiling at him.
'Get 'em off?' She meant the kids.
Glitsky saluted. 'Out of here, on time and looking good.'
She patted the bed and moved over so he could sit. 'What time did you get up?'
'Actually, I had a pretty good night. Got up before the alarm, but not much -I think about six-thirty.'
She searched his face, ran a light finger across the top of his cheek. 'Your eyes have bags.'
'That's just the way they look, Flo. I'm working on them as an investigative tool. Keep me from looking too friendly.'
'Oh yes,' she said, 'that's been a real problem.'
'You'd be surprised,' he said, 'witnesses thinking I'm all warm and fuzzy. I decided I ought to look a little tougher.'
'Good idea. You wouldn't want your sweet nature to show through.'
'People just take advantage. You wouldn't believe.'
Glitsky's mother Emma had been black. His father Nat was Jewish. So Glitsky had a dark-skinned face with a hawk-like nose. In spite of that, people tended to see first the uneven white scar that ran between his upper and lower lips. Even when his eyes didn't have the valises under them as they did now, his smile was a terrifying thing to behold.
He laid a hand on his wife's thigh. 'So how's by you? You want some food? Coffee? Tantric sex?'
She nodded. 'All of the above. I'll get up.'
'You sure?'
'Unless you want the tantric sex first, but I'm better after coffee.'
'Okay, I'll wait.'
'You put on the pot,' she said. 'I'll freshen up.'
He went into the kitchen. There, on the table, were the remains of the boys' breakfasts – empty bowls, cereal boxes, milk, sugar all over the table.
And his police reports – the five dead people and as much of their recent lives as Glitsky had been able to assemble. The latest, a young woman named Tania Willows who had been raped and murdered and whose body had been discovered just yesterday.
The cereal in the cupboard. Sugar on the counter. Milk in the fridge. Got to clean out the fridge – if there's that much mold on the cheese, who knows what the meat drawer is going to look like?
Sponge that sugar off the table. The smell of the sponge. The thing had to be three months old. He should toss it but they didn't have another one. Where did sponges come from anyway? He couldn't remember ever having bought a sponge in his entire life.
And then, oh yeah, the coffee, the water boiling now, and he still hadn't ground up the beans. He really should grind up a bunch all at once so he wouldn't have to do it every morning, but Flo liked the fresh-ground, and he wanted her to have…
At least he and Flo, this morning, that was a good wake-up. He'd just keep cheerful another few minutes, maybe a half hour, and so would she, and then that would be another morning, and if they just kept that up…
Christina's seven-year-old Toyota hadn't started and when it finally did, the windshield wipers refused to function. So she walked down the hill from USF, past St Mary's Hospital. She was planning to cut through the panhandle of Golden Gate Park on this rainy Ash Wednesday; the short-cut would get her to work on time.
But she didn't count on San Francisco's seemingly endless capacity to provide local color. This morning's entry was a substantial coven of half-clad Druids conducting some sort of tree-worshiping ceremony, chanting and clapping and having themselves a hell of a good time.
Christina broke right trying to skirt them, but a tiny, thick woman of uncertain though recent vintage latched on to her. A shawl covered the woman's shoulders, she'd woven flowers into her hair, and she wore a long leather skirt, but her breasts were completely exposed. When it became clear that Christina wasn't about to join them, was in fact going to work, she segued smoothly from missionary high priestess to spare-change artist.
In any event, by the time Christina got to Haight Street, where the Rape Crisis Counseling Center maintained its office, she was soaking wet and twenty minutes late for her appointment.
Her boss was a single, attractive, thirty-five-year-old smart-mouthed pistol named Samantha Duncan whose industrial-strength convictions on the ongoing battle of the sexes served her well in her role here – counseling women who had been raped.
Her genuine compassion for these victims was unfortunately matched by her impatience with the healing process for the women, the legal process in identifying and punishing their attackers, and the administrative reality of having to depend on part-time volunteers to keep the Center functioning.
When Christina had first interviewed for the work, Sam had impressed her with her humor and passion. Then she had laid out the ground rules in no uncertain terms. 'I know this job doesn't pay anything,' she'd said, 'but I need my volunteers to believe and to act like it's a job. I need you here when you say you're going to be here. I'm not very good with excuses.'
Up until today, Christina had been punctual and dependable. Sam had a fire, a presence, and Christina admired the hell out of her and wanted to please her. She also wanted to prove that she wasn't a dilettante – this was her own very real commitment as well.
Many of the barriers had been broken already; Sam and Christina had gone out for coffee together two or three times, outside of work, talking issues and politics. Christina thought they were close to real friendship.
But Sam had a hair trigger regarding her volunteers, always ready to see signs of their lack of commitment in the work, and based on that, to bail out of personal involvements with her staff.
And this morning, as Christina shook the water off herself, it was clear that their tentative relationship had suffered a major setback.
Sam didn't exactly greet Christina with a smile. 'Oh, here she is now. Christina, this is Sergeant Glitsky. He's with the police, investigating… well,' Sam sighed, 'you know about that. I'll let him tell you. Sergeant, nice to have met you.' Sam didn't favor Christina with so much as a glance before she disappeared back into her office.
But she couldn't worry about Sam, not now, and she turned her attention to the man in front of her.
This guy Glitsky was in some kind of trouble, Christina thought. He appeared, even at a casual first glance, to be under incredible pressure, in the grip of some strong emotion he was struggling to keep under control. She noticed his fingers clenching and unclenching before he reached out and shook her hand. A surprise, it was a gentle handshake, his touch softer than she would have imagined.
The half-smile he gave her didn't soften his looks any, though. 'I'm investigating the murder of Tania Willows, and Sam was telling me you had talked to her?'
Christina nodded.
Tentative, embarrassed and unsure, Tania Willows had been their most recent tragedy. Nineteen years old, just out to San Francisco from Fargo, North Dakota, she had come to the Center three times. She was being raped, she thought. She meant she thought it was technically rape. She didn't have a relationship with the guy, who was older. She was confused because she knew her assailant – he didn't jump out and attack her from behind some bush. So she wasn't sure if it was really rape.
He'd started coming by her apartment, gradually getting more aggressive, and then he'd force himself on her – she was sure of that – but she also seemed almost certain that it wasn't like he was going to hurt her or anything like that.
He never even hit her, though there was this sense of fear, that if she didn't… Maybe she had somehow been at fault, leading him on – did Christina know what she meant? How it could be? Sending the wrong signals.
But she definitely felt forced, was forced – she had kept telling him no and he wouldn't stop – but otherwise Tania didn't think the person was like a criminal or anything, and really all she wanted was for him to leave her alone now. She didn't want to get him in trouble, maybe she shouldn't even be here…
And then four days ago, Tania's murder had been all over the news. She'd been raped in her apartment, tied and taped to her bed, gagged and strangled.
The Center had called the police at that time.
Christina found she had to clear her throat. Glitsky was asking her something, which she didn't catch. 'I'm sorry…?'
He showed no sign that he was bothered by having to repeat the question. 'I was just wondering how much she might have told you about the man.'
Christina was sitting on the front edge of the ragged couch, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, her hands folded in front of her. Her hair, still wet from the rain, hung in front of her face. 'Almost nothing,' she said. 'She knew him. He lived near her, maybe in her apartment building. She definitely felt that if she moved she could get away from him, but she couldn't afford to move.'
Glitsky nodded. 'And she didn't want to press charges.'
'I'd hoped we were getting to there, but no, not by – not in time.'
'And no names, not an initial, a nickname…?'
She shook her head. 'No, nothing, I don't think. I wish… I'm sorry.'
'Did you take any notes I might look at? Maybe there was something.
'I know I took some. I'll go check. It wouldn't have been much, but maybe…' The Sergeant's face had clouded – he was staring blankly out through the fogged glass, out into the desultory traffic on Haight. 'Can I get you anything?' she asked. 'Cup of coffee or something?'
Glitsky didn't answer.
She touched his arm. 'Sergeant?'
Back with her. 'Sure. Sorry. Just thinking.'
'Are you all right?'
Suddenly the face wasn't terrifying at all. What she saw was sadness. Tm a little distracted,' he said. 'My wife's sick.' Then: 'Some tea would be nice, thanks.'
It still wasn't noon.
Christina was just tired, she told herself. After all, with the party, she'd been awake until nearly two last night, then had her nightly argument with Joe. This morning, then, her ashes and the long, strangely emotional breakfast with Mark Dooher, her car not starting, the neo-hippie woman in the park, Sam's disapproval.
Then Tania Willows and Abe Glitsky with whatever his sorrow was – his sick wife.
Suddenly, the rain launching a new attack behind her back against her grimy window, the lights off as she sat alone in her tiny cubicle, something broke in her. She wiped the back of her hand roughly against her eyes – as a child would – trying to will away the tears, but they kept coming.
She was just tired.
This – the sudden collapse – hadn't happened in almost two years. She wasn't going to let herself think it was anything to do with the baby she'd lost, with her past. Not that again. That was behind her and she wasn't going to let it get to her anymore. It was the events of the morning, that was all.
She'd just toughen up. That was it, that was what she'd do. Swiping again at her face, sniffling, she got up from her desk, pulling her Gore-Tex up around her face. The rain would hide the tears. No one would see.
His Excellency didn't have to explain it all to Dooher, but if it made him feel better, Mark would let him go on – he was the client, and every hour was $350. They were sitting in the Archbishop's office, above the children's playground at Mission Dolores. Their informal meetings always took place here, in the serenity of the laughter of children that floated up into Flaherty's sanctum sanctorum.
Although the Archdiocese employed a full-time attorney of its own, its mandate was far too broad for one man to do it all, and so a lot of the work needed to be farmed out to private firms. And over the years, Dooher's firm had come to specialize in the Church's secular affairs - dozens upon dozens of slip and fall cases, liability, property management, personnel.
Dooher, personally, had gotten close to Flaherty not only for his ability to handle the tougher cases diplomatically and with dispatch, but because there was an unstated but perfectly understood ruthlessness in each of the men.
Both got things done. Sometimes what the Archbishop needed to accomplish was better handled outside of his office. Dooher was unofficial but defacto consigliere.
Also like Dooher, Flaherty was an athletic man who looked a decade younger than he was. Still, at fifty-seven, he was running about fifty percent in his squash games (non-billable) with Dooher. Here, in private, the Archbishop wore tasseled black loafers, black slacks, a white dress shirt. Dooher, deeply molded – nearly imbedded – into the red leather chair, had his coat off, his tie loosened.
'I don't know why these things always take me by surprise,' Flaherty was saying. 'I keep expecting better of my fellow man, and they keep letting me down. You'd think I'd learn.'
Dooher nodded. 'The alternative, of course, is to expect nothing of your fellow man.'
'I can't live like that. I can't help it. I believe that deep down, we're all made in the image of God, so our nature can't be bad. Am I wrong, Mark? I can't be wrong.'
Dooher thought it best not to remind His Excellency that he had predicted exactly what would happen back in the early stages of the decision-making process over the current lawsuit. But he'd been over-ridden.
'You're not all wrong, Jim. You've got to take it case by case.'
Flaherty was standing by the open window, looking down over the schoolyard. He turned to his lawyer. 'As neat a turn away from philosophy and to the business at hand as one would expect.' He pulled a chair up. 'Okay, where are we today?'
Reaching down for his props, though he didn't need them, Dooher pulled his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and extracted a yellow manila folder labeled Felicia Diep.
Mrs Diep had come to the United States in 1976 from Saigon, a young single mother with a substantial nest egg from her deceased husband in Vietnam. She'd settled in the lower Mission District of San Francisco, where she became a regular parishioner at St Michael's Parish and, not incidentally, a long-time paramour of its pastor, Father Peter Slocum.
Over the course of the next twenty years, Mrs Diep gave Father Slocum something in the order of $50,000 for one thing and another, and all might have been well had not the good priest decided to take his promotion to Monsignor and move away from her, down the peninsula to Menlo Park.
He had abandoned her and she wanted her money back, so she decided to go to a young lawyer in her community named Victor Trang.
Trang wasn't in the medical field, but if he was, he would have qualified as an 'ambulance chaser'. Barely making a living in his first three years after graduating from one of the night schools that taught law, he took the case, hoping for no more than his fee of one third of the fifty grand Mrs Diep wanted.
He sued the Archdiocese for fraud – Father Slocum wasn't celibate as promised, and he'd taken Mrs Diep's money under false pretenses, promising her over the years that he would eventually leave the priesthood and marry her.
This was where Dooher got involved, and it hadn't been a big item on his plate. One of his associates took care of the preliminary motions in response to the lawsuit, then passed them up to him. He and Flaherty had determined that they would offer ten grand as a settlement and if Mrs Diep didn't accept it, they would go to court and take their chances.
So in the middle of the previous week, Dooher had called Victor Trang, conveying the settlement offer. It was then he discovered that things had changed, and he'd arranged this meeting with Flaherty.
The Archbishop's face did not exactly go pale, but he was rocked. He lifted his eyes from the folder. 'Three million dollars?'
The lawyer nodded. 'Trang's got nothing else to do, Jim. The Church has deep pockets so he went looking.'
Flaherty was trying to read and listen at the same time. 'Not very far, it seems.'
'No.'
'Slocum was sleeping with the daughter, too?'
'Veronica, now nineteen. That's Trang's story. To say nothing of several other immigrants whose names he didn't provide. He may be bluffing.'
Flaherty closed the folder abruptly. 'I know Slocum. It's possible Trang's not bluffing. This is nowhere near the first allegation.'
This was not welcome news. Dooher leaned forward. 'If you knew some of this, why'd you make him a Monsignor?'
A crooked smile. 'I didn't know it. They were allegations we'd heard. We thought we'd remove him from the temptation, put him where he didn't have the same freedom of movement, give him more responsibility.'
A shake of the head. 'And thereby change his nature?'
'I know, Mark, I know. My nature's the problem. I believe people. I trust them.'
'Well,' Dooher slapped his palms on his knees, 'that's why you've hired a top gun like myself. I trust no one.' He pointed down at the folder, still on Flaherty's lap. 'You get to the end of that?'
'No. I stopped at the three million.'
Dooher took it. 'Okay, I can give you the short version. It gets worse.' He went on to explain what Trang had told him last week on the phone. The young upstart would be initiating to conduct a series of investigations with other immigrants in San Francisco to determine with what kind of frequency these clerical abuses were occurring. He expected to discover that the Archdiocese systematically condoned this kind of behavior from their priests. 'He's calling it a policy of tolerance, Jim. He's going to amend the complaint to name you personally.'
The Archbishop was back at his window, looking down at the children. 'Can we have Slocum killed?' Quickly, he turned, hand out. 'I'm joking, of course.'
'Of course.'
'But all kidding aside, Mark, what are we going to do?'
Flaherty wasn't having his best year.
Six months earlier, after an extensive two-year study by the Archdiocesan Pastoral Planning Commission had confirmed their predicted results – he'd finally bitten the bullet and announced the closure of the ten least financially viable parishes in the city. He knew that the Archdiocese would not survive into the twenty-first century if it didn't take steps now. The city had taken a hard line after the World Series earthquake and passed an ordinance that assessed the Archdiocese $120 million for retrofitting their unreinforced masonry churches. (Dooher had worked his magic to lower the bill down to $70 million, but it might as well have been $3 zillion for all the Church could afford to pay even that.)
The plain fact – and it broke Flaherty's good heart – was that the Archdiocese couldn't afford to keep the smaller parishes operating with attendance down at Masses throughout the city – Holy Family Church out in North Beach, for example, averaged only seventy-five people, total, for four Masses on Sundays. And there were really no significant private donations to offset the appallingly low Sunday offerings. But after the closures were announced, a firestorm of protest had developed. Flaherty had even heard from Rome.
The problem that Flaherty had not foreseen (and Dooher had) was that perennial San Francisco two-headed serpent, ethnicity and money. Most of the parishes that had been closed were those in the poorest areas – Hunters Point, the lower Mission District, the Western Addition, the outer Sunset, Balboa Park. So Flaherty was widely vilified for abandoning the poor and what had been a purely financial move had been totally misinterpreted.
Flaherty had also believed that the Catholics in the closed parishes would simply move to other buildings for their worship, and would be accepted in those new locales by the other Catholics who already worshiped there.
'That is truly an ecumenical theory, Jim, and in a perfect world, that would surely happen,' Dooher had said. 'But my prediction is that my fellow parishioners' – St Emydius, in St Francis Wood – 'are simply not going to offer the kiss of peace to the Vietnamese community from St Michael's that's going to descend upon them. It's not going to happen.'
Flaherty responded – as he always did – that people were better than Dooher gave them credit for. The Commission had made its recommendations – it had not been Flaherty's decision alone. The people would get used to it; it could actually be a force for growth, for advancement of the whole Catholic community.
'Well, yes, Jim, I guess you're right. It could go that way,' Dooher had finally said, thinking, 'and I'm the King of Ethiopia.'
And now Trang was threatening to name Flaherty in a lawsuit contending that he tolerated fraud and licentiousness among his priests. Before all of these problems had begun, there was a rumor that Flaherty had been on the short list to be named a Cardinal. He had confided to Dooher that he had dreams of being the first American Pope. Now all of that, perhaps even his immediate survival as Archbishop, was at stake.
He was at his desk now, moving items randomly, nerves showing. 'But Trang hasn't yet amended the complaint?'
Pacing, Dooher stopped. 'That's why we're talking here, Jim. I need to head this off. The guy's obviously looking for press, make his name in the community, bring in some clients. I've got to talk sense to him.'
'What are you going to say?'
'I'll just tell him we'd be grateful for his cooperation. He knows – you know there wasn't any policy here. We've got to get him off this, Jim, or at the very least you can forget about your red hat.'
Flaherty pulled himself up in his chair. 'How grateful?'
Dooher clasped his hands in front of him. 'Settle for six hundred thousand, if it goes that high.'
'Lord…'
'And a gag order. No press conferences. No "conscience of the community" nonsense. Trang pockets two hundred thousand dollars. Mrs Diep gets a nice return on her fifty grand and her broken heart. Everybody's happy.'
The Archbishop shook his head. Tm not. We start at six hundred?' Dooher tried to keep his tone light. 'Jim, this is Mark Dooher you're talking to. We start by offering to break Trang's legs. Hopefully we stop a long way before six.'
Flaherty nodded. 'A long way if you can.'
Dooher bowed slightly from the waist. 'I understand,' he said. 'I'll take care of it.'
'You're not actually seeing her.'
'Wes, I ran into her at church. That's all.'
'At church. That's very good.' Wes Farrell lowered his voice a notch. 'The night after your party, which she happened to attend because her boyfriend got himself invited? Markus, we're running into a critical coincidence factor here.'
Wes Farrell had his feet up on the desk in his small office. Behind him, through wooden slats, rain beat against the window. Dooher was continuing with the fairy-tale version of his story about Christina, and Farrell finally stopped him.
'This is all good stuff, Mark. I mean it. And because I am your longstanding friend, I believe every word of it. However, I will offer one word of advice, lawyer to lawyer.'
'What?'
'Don't try it on anybody else. It sounds suspiciously like a rationalizing crock, although I know in my heart of hearts – because you would never lie to me – that it couldn't possibly be. How did she look?'
Dooher crossed his hands behind his head, considering. 'Who, in your opinion, is the all-around best-looking woman in the world? Face, body…' an expansive gesture '… the whole schmeer. Everything.'
Farrell thought a moment. 'Demi Moore.'
Dooher nodded. 'Well, Demi Moore is a dog next to Christina Carrera. Even with wet hair and ashes on her forehead.'
'I've never seen Demi like that,' Farrell said. 'Usually, when we go out, after she ditches Bruce, she dresses up, puts on some makeup, stuff like that. Come to think of it, I wonder if she's why Lydia's divorcing me. If she found out about Demi and me?'
'That could be it,' Dooher said. 'Those damn paparazzi.'
Dooher cracked a grin. 'Your fantasy life is much too rich for you to be a good lawyer.'
Farrell pointed across the room. 'Says the man who meets his associate's fiancee at church. What do you plan to do with her, if I might ask?'
A shrug, as though he'd never considered the question. 'I don't know. I'm thinking of hiring her.' At Farrell's expression, he added, 'Just as a clerk. She's law review. Pretty sharp kid, actually.'
Farrell pointed again, 'I must tell you, this is fire.'
'It's all innocent, Wes. I swear. Nothing's going on.'
'So do yourself a favor and get another clerk.'
'We're going to have ten other clerks. Christina's just going to be one of them.'
Farrell scratched his chin. 'Oh boy,' he said. 'Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.'
'I'm so worried about Mark. He's just not been himself.'
Lydia Farrell – Wes's wife – threw an 'Oh, please' expression at Sheila Dooher over the rim of her china cup.
The two women were in the glass-enclosed breakfast nook with the French countryside motif, above which the driving rain of the earlier morning had turned to a romantic Normandy drizzle. At the look, Sheila said, 'Come on, Lyd, they're not all bad. Men, I mean.'
Lydia put her cup down. 'I didn't say they were. You know I don't think Wes has anything bad going against him. He's just got nothing going, period. Either direction. Against, for, sideways. Mark, I don't know.'
'Mark's a good man, Lyd. That counts.'
Once, in the very early days, Mark had subtly but very definitely come on to Lydia, his best friend's wife. When she'd called him on it, he'd backed off, saying in his charming way that she must have misunderstood something, he was sorry. But she knew she hadn't misunderstood a thing.
She'd never mentioned it to Wes or to Sheila. On some level she was flattered, even amused by it – to have something on the great Mark Dooher, who obviously thought she was attractive enough to run that risk. Imagine!
But she had decided opinions about his inherent goodness.
Still, Sheila was her friend. They'd been through moves and children and schools and their husbands' careers together, and she deserved a listen.
'I'm sorry. You're right. Good counts. I'm just a little snippy today. I'm seeing Sarah' – her divorce lawyer – 'tomorrow, and I want to be in shape. I'm always tempted to be so nice, let Wes have something I've got a legal right to. So Sarah told me, "Start thinking hate thoughts the day before. Think of all the shitty things he's done, the times he hasn't shown up when he said he would, the dinners that got cold, the shirts you've ironed, to say nothing about… more personal things. You'll never regret it." Sarah's a jewel.'
'I never want to go through that.'
'Well, I didn't either, dear, but divorce is like war. If you're in one, you'd better win. Still, you and Mark aren't going to get divorced.'
'No, I don't think that.'
'But?'
'I didn't say "but".'
Lydia smiled at her friend. 'Yes, you did. So why?'
'Why what?'
'Why do you think your marriage is suffering?'
Sheila put down her cup, picked up the tiny spoon and stirred. After a long moment she answered, 'Because Mark is.'
'From what?'
Sheila took a moment phrasing it. She wasn't sure herself. 'I think he's clinically depressed. With the kids gone now and all. I think he's lost.' A pause. 'I'm worried he might kill himself.'
'Has he said that?'
'No. You know Mark, but he's made a few comments.'
Lydia picked up her cup, sipped at it, eyes on Sheila. 'Why would he kill himself? He's got everything.'
'Maybe what he has doesn't mean anything. Or enough.' Sheila's eyes were dry and she spoke calmly.
But Lydia had known her since college, and had learned that just because Sheila wasn't given over to histrionics didn't mean she didn't go deep. 'How's he acting?' she asked.
'Silent. And he's not sleeping. His doctor gave him some pills but he won't take them. He was up and out by seven this morning when I got up, and we didn't get to bed until very late. Two-ish.'
'Up and out?'
'Gone.'
'To work?'
'No. I called. He didn't get in till after ten:'
'I don't want to say-'
Sheila held up her hand. 'No, it's not an affair. He doesn't have time. You don't go meet your lover at six in the morning someplace. Actually, he went to Church – Ash Wednesday – for ashes. I asked and he told me.'
'The good Catholic. Still.'
'That's him. But the point is he's getting no sleep. This has been going on almost a year now. It's like he's afraid he's going to miss something – some excitement, I don't know. And then he's constantly disappointed when nothing happens.'
'Are you two doing okay? I mean, personally?'
Sheila wore a rueful look. 'You mean our sex-life, speaking of nothing happening…' Then, as though she'd said more than she intended, added, 'It's great when we get around to it, which is about every four times the moon gets full, if that.'
Lydia looked out at the drizzle, at her manicured lawn. She sighed. 'That happened to Wes. The whole thing you describe. I tried as long as I could, but I just couldn't stand it. He wasn't depressed, I don't think. He'd just stopped loving me. I don't mean that's you and Mark, but that was me and Wes.'
Sheila thought a moment. 'I just don't believe that,' she said. 'I think it's deeper and if I could just figure out what it was, everything would get better.'
Lydia took her hand over the table, patted it. 'You know him better than me, Sheila. I'm sure you're right. I hope so.'
Sheila really blamed herself.
That was her training as well as her inclination. She always blamed herself, for everything that went wrong – their kids, Mark's dissatisfaction. It had to be her.
She knew it couldn't be Mark, who didn't make mistakes – not the way other people did. Factual errors, even in casual conversation? Forget it. The man knew everything and forgot nothing. Sheila made lists to remember all of the many jobs she had to do every day or week. Mark just did them – all, and perfectly. He never needed a reminder. He never lost his temper. (Well, once in a very great while, and invariably when she had provoked him beyond the limits of a saint.) Mark Dooher performed his duties flawlessly.
So if something was wrong, and something was, it had to be Sheila's fault.
She thought it was probably the double-whammy of the onset of menopause and Jason – their baby – finally going off to school. Way off, to Boulder, where he could snowboard all winter long. And Mark Jr working now on that rig in Alaska, trying to make enough to pay the bills for a summer of his sculpting since his father wouldn't help him if he was so set on doing that kind of stupid art, and Susan in New York.
Well, at least Susan called every week or so, tried to keep them up on her life, though Sheila and especially Mark would never understand why she had no interest in men.
Sheila's hormones, too, had caught up with her, swirled her into depression. She couldn't deny it and she couldn't blame Mark. She'd become miserable to live with, a hard truth to accept for Sheila Graham Dooher, who until she turned forty-five was one of the city's legendary partyers.
But as the gloom had begun to settle and she couldn't shake herself out of it, she felt less and less motivated to try. For over a year, everything Mark did she'd pick pick pick, losing her temper, poking viciously even at his perfection, his charming smile, his trim body, his own patience with her. She couldn't blame him for retreating into himself, his work, for not approaching her on sex. Whenever he did, she turned him down.
Then came the end of their nights out, or even the laugh-filled gourmet dinners at home with Wes and Lydia. In their places thrummed the somber pervasiveness of the big, empty house.
No wonder it had gotten to him, finally worn him down.
Which is what had finally woken her up. She hadn't intended to hurt Mark. She'd just been in her own funk, thinking somehow it would end. It was her problem and – a good Dooher all the way – she would suffer it in silence.
What she hadn't counted on was the long-term effect that her depression had on Mark. He had withdrawn, and she didn't know if she could get him back.
She'd decided she had to get over it, had finally gone to her doctor, and he'd prescribed the anti-depressant Nardil, and it had worked.
The only drawback was that she couldn't drink while taking the drug, which meant no more cocktails with Mark when he came home after a hard day, no more sharing his passion – hers, too – for wine with dinner. No more getting a little silly and loose and rubbing up against him.
She might have told him about the prescription, but she was afraid of his reaction, that his opinion of her would sink even lower. Doohers didn't need to take anti-depressants, they willed their weaknesses away.
So she told him, instead, that she'd reached the decision that her depression was a result of her drinking too much and she was going to stop, cold turkey. That was the kind of decision a Dooher would make – an act of will to better yourself. Mark had to respect that, even if he didn't like it. It was far better, she reasoned, to give up drinking and treat her husband civilly than it was to have him consider her weak, 'hooked', perhaps forever, on an anti-depressant.
But it wasn't working. Mark was gone, and she wasn't sure he was going to come back. And it was all her fault.
Joe Avery wasn't malicious or abusive. Christina didn't want to be over-critical. He had a lot of fine qualities.
But he was driving her nuts.
Joe would go into little routines with mind-numbing regularity to illustrate how, in spite of being a lawyer, he was actually a nice guy, not really a type-A kind of uptight dweeb. Fly fishing, for example – how he was catch-and-release all the way, used only barbless hooks – that way those little fishies didn't feel a thing, probably enjoyed the exercise there on the end of his two-pound test. Keep their HDLs up.
Or the volunteer work with the Sierra Club. See? Even though he made money – and he wasn't ashamed of that, nosiree – he was sensitive to the environment.
Christina did volunteer work herself, so she could back him up here. It was important to have a broad spectrum of interests and involvements. You didn't want to lose sight of the big picture, which was a quality life.
Another of his big phrases – quality life.
Also, he had the habit of saying, 'Look at the facts,' followed by, 'That's very interesting.' Both of which set Christina's teeth on edge.
When she'd first started seeing Joe, she'd been attracted by the sense of sweetness he projected. It had been nearly three years since her professor. And Joe had just happened.
He'd been the TA in her Contracts course. After a few classes, some of the students started hanging around together afterward, going out for pizza, talking the ever-fascinating law talk. And then one night everyone else went home early.
She and Joe had closed the place, in the course of the night leaving Contracts behind them, discovering a mutual interest in backpacking, skiing, the Great Outdoors. Christina also liked Joe's looks, his full head of black hair over a chiseled face. A cleft chin like her father's.
Joe and some friends were going out in the Tahoe Wilderness for five days over Thanksgiving. Would Christina like to come?
No push, no come on. She'd liked that.
After a while, she came to recognize that she liked his manner and his personality in a lukewarm way that occasionally got up to a fair impersonation of heat. That was all right. Maybe it would change – she would wait. She didn't trust too much passion. She also desperately wanted to believe that the 'like' could over time transmogrify into 'love.' It was why she had after all this time picked a nice person, someone whose company was, if not thrilling, then pleasant, livable with.
Joe was now at his desk at four in the afternoon, twirling a pen between his fingers, glaring at Christina, struggling to control his anger.
'I don't know why you're so mad,' she was saying.
'I'm not mad. I just thought we'd already talked about this. I mean, you didn't even mention it last night, and now here you are, dressed to impress.'
She spread her hands in front of her. 'Joe, this is a simple business suit.'
'Yes, but every other applicant for summer clerk or anything else sends in a letter and a resume. Then we review it and decide whether-'
'I know all that. Mark Dooher asked me to come down, so I thought it would be appropriate to dress nicely.'
'Which on you doesn't-' He stopped himself, not wanting to say it, to admit that whether she liked it or not, her beauty was an issue, over and over again. 'I'm… maybe I'm a little disappointed, is all.' The pencil snapped between his hands, and he looked down at it in surprise.
'I don't know why you'd be disappointed, I really don't. Mark said…'
'Mark? You mean Mr Dooher?'
Her lips tightened in frustration. 'He said to call him Mark. He's a nice guy, Joe.'
'He's a nice guy.' Avery reeled himself in. 'I lied,' he said calmly. 'I am really mad.' He looked over Christina's shoulder, making triple sure his door was closed all the way. 'Mr Dooher is not a nice guy. Let's get that straight. Look at the facts. He is a hatchet man. He cut both McCabe and Roth out of here like so much driftwood after thirty years and-'
She was shaking her head. 'Okay. He's tough in business. He's the boss, right? That comes with the territory. But he asked me to come down. What was I supposed to do?'
'I asked you not to come down. How about that? How about how comfortable I am with you going around feeling out the job situation here behind my back?'
'I didn't do that.' The volume went up. 'I told you, I ran into him at church. Jesus, give me a break, Joe. Don't be so – so…'
'So what?' Jumping on her, notching it up.
'So goddamn controlling, is what.'
Avery sat back, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. Trn controlling? If I am, I'm not very good at it, am I?'
'You shouldn't be. That's my point. This is my life and my career and if the managing partner invites me down for an interview, what do you expect me to do? Say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm a modern woman and all, but my boyfriend would be so upset."'
'I'm not upset.'
'And you're not mad either, I suppose.' Though she knew he was furious. 'Damn it, Joe, you don't have any right to be mad at me.' She grabbed up her briefcase.
'Where are you going?'
'I'm going to talk to Mr Dooher.' She hesitated. 'To Mark.'
This got him up, hand outstretched, nearly knocking his chair over behind him. 'Whoa, whoa, wait a minute, Christina. Wait a minute!'
She paused, her hand on the doorknob. 'All right, one minute. What for?'
He crossed around his desk, stopping an arm's length from her. 'Look…' A long breath, getting his own control back. 'Look, I'm sorry. Don't go to Mr Dooher, not like this.'
'Like what? Like all mad at you? Like I'll get you in trouble? I promise, I won't mention you at all.'
'Christina…'
'I don't understand why you don't want me to work here, Joe. I thought you'd be happy. We could be together, see each other during the day, go out to lunch… I thought it would be fun.'
He moved toward her, held her arms gently. 'I know,' he said. 'I know. It would.'
'So what's the problem?'
'It just surprised me, that's all. I thought we'd decided something else, and then just having this sprung on me…'
'This wasn't sprung, Joe. I didn't feel like I needed to ask your permission. I came down and here I am now, telling you. I'm not hiding anything.'
'All right,' he said. 'All right, I'm sorry. I don't want to fight about this.'
'I don't either.'
'Okay, then.' He stepped back. 'Did you bring your resume with you? A cover letter?'
She nodded, crossed to his desk, put her briefcase on it and snapped it open. Handing him the envelope, she asked him where it went now.
There was a look in his eyes that she didn't like very much. Then a half-smile to back it up. He motioned with his head – follow me. On the floor next to one of the bookcases across the room was a cardboard box that had originally held a case of wine.
As the associate in charge of the summer clerk program, Avery received all the hopefuls' resumes, which a four-person committee reviewed once every two weeks. In the meanwhile, Avery 'filed' the resumes in the cardboard box, which currently was two or three inches deep in them.
He dropped Christina's in on top.
'Okay,' he said, 'you're in the hopper. Next it goes to the committee.' He reached out a hand and touched her sleeve. 'After this it gets pretty objective, Chris. We'll just have to see what happens.'
All that to drop her envelope in a box! She had been finessed.
Christina was so angry that she didn't even feel her reaction until she'd kissed Joe goodbye by the elevator banks and ridden the twenty-one floors back down to the lobby that opened on to Market Street. There, she stopped still, her heart suddenly pounding.
Though it was short notice, Victor Trang had been only too happy to come down for an afternoon meeting with Mr Dooher, who was representing the Archdiocese.
As usual, Trang wasn't exactly loaded down with litigation and he was heartened by the almost immediate response represented by Dooher's call. Also, late in the day, he welcomed the excuse to leave his one-room office in the darkened back corner of a turn-of-the-century building near the Geneva Avenue off-ramp of the Junipero Serra Freeway – as bleak a setting as San Francisco offered.
As soon as possible, would he like to come downtown to the no-doubt elegantly appointed twenty-first floor of the One California Building and discuss this matter? Why, yes. He allowed as to how he could find the time.
He'd only brought the matter up with Dooher on the previous Thursday, and thought that this quick a reply boded well for an equally quick settlement, which was why he was in the game.
Mark Dooher wasn't drinking anything, but his secretary came in and served excellent French roast coffee in an almost-translucent white china cup with a thin band of gold at the rim. Trang was sitting before a mahogany coffee table on an Empire-style couch, looking across Dooher's spacious office and out through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The office, hanging here exposed above the city, was intimidating. The message it conveyed was clear – Dooher hadn't gotten here by losing very often. The weather had been dismal all day, and now wisps of dark clouds blew by in the strong wind, alternately obscuring then revealing the view – the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, freighters and tugs on the water. The hills across the Bay, in the distance, were hulking shapes of gunmetal gray.
Trang took a sip of his coffee, nodded, and smiled at his host. He was thirty-three years old. He'd been a U.S. citizen for fifteen years, and was used to Caucasian faces, but this one was unreadable – open, honest, apparently friendly, civilized and well groomed. It was the kind of face that scared him the most, and the man who owned it sat kitty-corner to him, hands crossed, elbows on his knees, leaning slightly forward, getting right to the point.
'First, the Archbishop wanted me to convey to you that there is no intentional policy of toleration toward this kind of behavior in the Archdiocese. If Father Slocum had this relationship with Mrs Diep…
'He did, and with her daughter, too.'
'If, as I say, if this went on with Father Slocum, it was wrong and we deplore his actions. But,' Dooher continued, 'the larger issue – the whole question of officially looking the other way – that's a very sensitive area.'
Trang nodded. 'That's true,' he said, 'but it's equally true that many people have been substantially damaged.'
Dooher winced at the legal phrase. Without 'damages', there is no recovery. Trang was putting him on notice that he was here to talk turkey. 'Some people may have actually suffered damages, Mr Trang. For the moment, I thought we might stick with Mrs Diep. She's your primary client, isn't she?'
Trang put his coffee cup down and smiled. For the first time, he had a sense that this was going to work. And if it did, he would be on his way. 'Only until I file the amended complaint.' Another smile. 'Which I believe you've seen.'
'Yes, of course. That's what I wanted to see you about. Needless to say, we'd prefer you don't make that filing.'
Trang barely concealed his excitement. The Archdiocese was going to offer a settlement! He lifted his shoulders an inch. 'Naturally, if we could reach some understanding here…
Dooher smiled, nodded, and stood. 'Good,' he said, 'I think we can.' He walked over to his desk, where he picked up a leather folder and opened it. 'I have here a check in the amount of fifteen thousand dollars as a settlement for Mrs Diep's claims.'
Trang's stomach went hollow. Ten seconds before, he'd been thinking in the millions, and now…
'Fifteen thousand?'
'It's a generous offer, considering,' Dooher was saying. 'I know Mrs Diep feels that she's been wronged, but let's not pretend that she wasn't a willing participant in this whole unfortunate scenario. This is as far as we're going to go. I know the Archbishop. If I were you, I'd take it. That's honest advice.'
Trang forced himself to remain seated, to keep his voice calm. 'We were asking-'
'I know, I know, but look, Victor – do you mind if I call you Victor? – let's not pussy-foot around. You and I know what you've been doing. You've been out beating the bushes trying to find witnesses or victims or whatever you want to call them, to accuse priests of things that didn't happen, or are very difficult to prove. It's going to get ugly and it's going to take forever and PS you're going to lose. You're going to waste five years of your young life.' Dooher was standing by the windows. 'Come here a minute. Come here.'
Obediently, Trang rose and crossed the room. The height was dizzying. The floor upon which they stood seemed to end, unsupported, in space. Dooher stepped to the window, his shoes nearly touching the glass. He motioned Trang up next to him, stood too close to him, threateningly close.
Dooher picked up the thread of the discussion. 'You know, not a day goes by that I don't stand here looking down over the city reflecting on the frivolity of our fellow men. All these buildings, all this scrambling activity…' He leaned right into the window.'… All that humanity down on the street, tiny and busy as ants, doing so much that is frivolous. You know what I'm saying?'
'You are warning me about the dangers of bringing a frivolous lawsuit.'
A beam lit Dooher's face. 'That's exactly right, Victor. That's what I'm doing. Because I must tell you – this may be old news to you – that the courts are overworked as it is and extremely sensitive to frivolous lawsuits. Extremely sensitive. They smell frivolous and you got fines and even suspensions like you wouldn't believe. Bad stuff, very bad. Especially for sole practitioners such as yourself. Courts have been known to put 'em right out of business.'
Trang straightened himself, moved away from the windows. 'This lawsuit isn't frivolous.'
'Mrs Diep's may have some merit. We agree. Hence the fifteen thousand. Look.' Dooher laid a hand on his shoulder, seeming to push him out over the city. 'I was going to play hardball with you, Victor, and not make any offer. But when I told Jim Flaherty – the Archbishop – that you would be fined and have to pay our fees, and possibly be suspended from the Bar and so on… well, he insisted I convey to you this warning and offer the really generous settlement. Myself, I hate to give away strategy, but His Excellency doesn't want you to suffer, and if you go ahead with this lawsuit, you're going to.'
'That's a bald enough threat, Mr Dooher.'
'Not at all. It's friendly advice. Here, let's sit back down.' Dooher was shepherding him back toward the couch. 'Over the years we've had hundreds of cases with litigants who viewed the Church as deep pockets. Some kid's skateboarding on the steps of one of our buildings and breaks his leg. Dad hits us for liability – okay, we settle, sometimes. But some greedy people have attorneys who don't stop there – they want negligence due to faulty maintenance, punitive damages, that kind of thing. These cases always lose.'
Dooher picked up the check from the coffee table and dropped it in Trang's lap. 'You know why they lose, and you know why your amended complaint will lose? Because if you ask for three million dollars, you enter the realm of bullshit, and bullshit walks in this town, Victor. I've seen it happen a hundred times. Whereas there, on your lap, is fifteen thousand real dollars – you take a third, right? – five grand for your trouble, ten for Mrs Diep, and you get to spend your next five years a lot more profitably.'
Trang felt as though he would be sick. What Dooher was saying just couldn 't be true,, this case had to be a winner. It was the best idea Trang had ever had. If this one couldn't make him some money, he wasn't going to survive in the law. His mouth was sandpaper. Looking down, he saw his coffee cup and grabbed for it. Cold. He swallowed, nearly gagging, trying to think of some response. 'I can't take the check without consulting with my client.'
The buzz at the telephone gave him a moment's reprieve.
Dooher picked it up, nodded, said, 'Okay, let her come on in.' He shrugged an apology to Trang as the door opened and one of those impossible women appeared in the doorway – at least Trang's height, her skin flawless, her teeth even.
One step in, she stopped. 'Oh, I'm sorry. Janey said-. I didn't mean to interrupt.'
Dooher was coming forward. 'It's all right, Christina. Mr Trang and I were just about finished.'
He introduced them. Trang shook her cool and firm hand with his own hot and damp one.
There was, from Trang's perspective, a long and awkward moment, eye contact between the woman and Dooher. She seemed overly self-conscious that she was interrupting, that there was another person in the room. It was clear she had expected a personal moment, and was somehow disappointed.
At the same time, Dooher's bravado faltered. She was obviously one of his young associates, and yet it was clear that he was tongue-tied with her.
No, Trang thought, it was mutual, both of them somehow at risk. 'I could step outside,' he said.
Christina recovered. 'No, really. It's just a short message.' She was back at Dooher. 'I just wanted to tell you that I left my resume with Joe, as promised.'
'Good.'
She shrugged. 'Joe says from here on it's out of his hands.' She deepened the pitch of her voice, put on a stern face. 'After this, Christina, it all gets pretty objective.' A flash of that connection again between them.
'Objective works in your favor, Christina. I'm glad you let me know. We'll talk later?'
Trang thought he caught a note of panic in the question. It was nowhere near as casual as it sounded. Dooher desperately wanted to see her again, needed to see her again. He could put on any act he wanted in their negotiations, but here in this moment Trang was certain he glimpsed an underlying vulnerability.
But she kept it light, said sure, and apologized to Trang again before turning and leaving them.
When she'd gone, Dooher was lost another instant, staring after her. Then, as though surprised to find Trang still with him, he put on his smile again. The animation. 'So, Mr Trang – Victor – you want to use my phone, call Mrs Diep now? Feel free.'
But the woman's entrance had ruined Dooher's rhythm. He wasn't the same power broker he'd been. Suddenly the pushing to settle right now seemed overdone. It gave Trang some hope. Dooher wasn't as tough as the game he was playing. He could be beaten, and certainly Trang would never know if he didn't play it out at least a little further. 'I think Mrs Diep and I should confer in person.'
Dooher shrugged. No show of disappointment. He was back in his persona. 'Well, that's your decision. The check will be here until noon tomorrow. After that, the offer is rescinded. You understand that?'
Trang was standing. 'Yes, I do. And thank you for the warning. I'll consider it very strongly.'
A dim shadow fell across Sergeant Glitsky's desk and he lifted his eyes from the report he was pretending to read. A woman stood, back-lit from the fluorescents overhead. Wearily, he pushed his chair back, glanced up at the clock on the wall. Five to five, and here's a random witness come to the Hall. His lucky day. 'Help you?' he asked.
'I might have remembered something.'
Glitsky had no idea who she was. He stood up. 'I'm sorry, you are…?'
She put her hand out. 'Christina Cairera. Tania Willows? We met this morning at the Rape Crisis Center.'
Glitsky narrowed his eyes. It was possible, he supposed. He really wasn't noticing women these days. The woman this morning wore jeans and a wet jacket and had soaking hair hanging down in front of her face. But he still didn't think he could have picked this woman out of a line-up as the person he'd interviewed in the morning.
He ran a hand across his forehead, assayed a broken smile. 'Keen eye for detail. It's what makes a good cop.' He sat back down, motioned she do the same, on the wooden chair by his desk. 'So what did you remember?'
'I'm not sure it's anything. I was downtown applying for a job. I thought it would be okay if I stopped in without an appointment.'
'It's fine,' Glitsky said, then repeated, 'what did you remember?'
'He has a tattoo.'
In the distant future, Glitsky thought, these days would be remembered as the Age of Bodily Mutilation. Everybody had a tattoo. Or a nipple ring, or at least something metal pushed through some erectile tissue somewhere.
But unless Tania Willows's rapist/killer had a tattoo of his full name with middle initial, it probably wasn't going to be distinctive enough to help Glitsky identify him. But the woman, Christina, was going on.
'I don't know why I didn't think of it this morning, when we were talking.' She touched her head. 'It just wasn't here. There were a lot of other things going on. And then I was thinking about Tania, what had happened – waiting for the bus, and I saw this guy in an ad with a tattoo…'
'Okay.'
She paused a minute, swallowed. 'It was on his penis.'
Glitsky pulled himself back up to the desk, sat up straighten Okay, this might be something.
'On his penis?'
She nodded. 'He asked her if she wanted to see his tattoo, and she said sure, thinking it was… I mean, you know. Not there. She never thought that.'
Glitsky broke a rare smile. 'The old "come up and see my etchings" trick, updated for the romantic nineties. Did Tania happen to notice what it said?'
Christina shook her head no. 'I'm sure she didn't. She would have…' She trailed off, but the pretty head kept shaking, looking down – embarrassed, Glitsky surmised, by the topic. Her eyes came up to his, and he saw that in fact she was trying to control herself, her laughter.
He knew exactly what she was thinking.
'Not Wendy then?'
'It's not funny,' she said. 'I don't mean to laugh. No, it wasn't Wendy, I don't think.'
The Wendy joke: when the man got an erection, the tattoo read: Welcome to Jamaica. Have a nice day.
Suddenly, Glitsky, whose professional life was a litany of violent deaths, who hadn't slept more than four hours any night in the past month, who had little money, three young children, and whose thirty-nine-year-old wife was dying of cancer – suddenly something broke in him, as it had done in Christina that morning, and he couldn't stop himself from laughing. Out loud.
The Chief of Homicide, Lieutenant Frank Batiste, had come out of his cubicle to see if anything was wrong. Glitsky hadn't laughed here in the Homicide Detail in his memory. Maybe nowhere else either.
'You okay, Abe?'
Glitsky had it back under control. He raised a hand to Batiste, looked over at Christina. 'That never happens to me. I'm very sorry.' His eyes glistened with tears. The fit had gone on for nearly half a minute.
'It's okay.' Christina had lost it for a second or two herself. 'It's supposed to be good for you.'
Glitsky wiped his eyes, took in a breath, sighed. 'Whew.' Batiste went back inside his office. 'Sorry anyway,' he repeated. Then, unexpected: 'I don't know what I'm doing here.'
'What do you mean?'
'I don't recognize you four hours after our interview. I crack up over some rapist's tattoo. I ought to take a leave, come back when I'm worth something.'
She didn't know how to respond to such a personal exposure, but felt she should say something. 'You said your wife was sick. Maybe your brain is concentrating on her?'
Truly sobered now, Glitsky reached for the Willows file. 'That could be it,' he said.
'Maybe you should call her? See if she's feeling better?'
He waited, deciding whether he should say it. Denial didn't seem to help, so maybe admission once in a while wouldn't hurt. 'She's not going to get better,' he said. 'She has cancer.'
Christina sat back. 'Oh, I'm so sorry.'
He waved it off, opened the file, stared at it for a few seconds. 'Was there anything else you remembered?'
Outside Dooher's windows, the city lights glowed up through the clouds. He sat in his darkened office, elbows on the arms of his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. In the hallways, he could hear the occasional voice – all of the associates at McCabe & Roth worked late.
Dooher ran a tight ship. His crew – the young men and women who hoped, after seven years, to make partner and thus in theory secure their financial future – were expected to bill forty hours a week, fifty-two weeks a year. This left them no time during the 'regular' 9-to-5 workday to do administrative work, answer their mail, talk to husbands, wives, significant others, eat, take breaks (or vacations, for that matter), go to the bathroom, small details like that.
To bill eight hours, the associates had to work at least ten, and more likely twelve hours every day. If they wanted their two-week vacation on top of that, they could count on working at least ten weekends a year. So at this time every day, the firm hummed along. Mark Dooher, who had overseen the downsizing and belt-tightening that had made the place profitable again, felt a profound satisfaction in what he'd wrought. People weren't necessarily happy, but they put out some serious work.
For which, he reminded himself, they were handsomely rewarded. And nobody had ever said a law firm was in business to make its members happy.
He rose and walked around his desk, stopping at the edge of the windows again to look out. Now, with the clouds, there was no view, merely a sensation of floating.
She'd left her resume!
Telling him it was his move.
Joe Avery was at his desk, plugging away. Dooher knocked quietly at his office door and Avery looked up in surprise. Two visits from the managing partner in two weeks! Unheard of.
'Still at it?' Dooher asked. 'I thought after last night you'd call it early.'
Avery struggled for the proper tone. 'That was a good party, sir. I meant to come up and thank you earlier, but this Baker matter…'
Dooher waved him down. Shut the kid up. 'I'm sure it's in good hands, Joe. I came down to pick up the summer apps file.'
A worried look crossed Avery's face. 'It's not…? I mean, is there some problem?'
'Not at all, not at all.' Stepping into the office, he closed the door behind him. 'We're handing off your summer clerk duties to another associate, Joe. I think you're going to find yourself with more meaningful work.'
'Sir?'
Dooher cut off the expected barrage of questions, raising his hand again. 'I've said more than I should, Joe. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned anything, but you might as well know. The summer clerks are going to have to get by without your involvement. There are bigger items on your agenda, and more than that I really can't say.'
In another minute, he had the wine box full of resumes under his arm.
On his cellphone in the car, driving home, he left a message. 'Christina. This is Mark Dooher. Just wanted to thank you for keeping me in the loop on your application. I'm proud of you. You made the right decision. If you need to talk to me, anytime, the number here in my car is…'
He left his home number as well.
Christina didn't hear Dooher's message. She'd talked to her parents in Ojai when she'd finally gotten home from her meeting with Glitsky, and then decided that her day – which had begun with ashes at 6:30 – was over. She was plain done in.
If the phone rang at this time of night, it would just be Joe anyway, and she really didn't feel like talking to him. So, with the sound turned down on her machine, she was snuggled under her comforter, in bed and beginning to doze.
The doorbell rang, and she heard Joe's voice. 'Christina?' Then a soft knock. 'Christina, you there?'
She knew she could just lie there and pretend she was asleep, but she wasn't able to do it. Exhausted and angry, she grabbed her bathrobe, wrapping it around her. 'One second.'
Unhooking the chain, she opened the door.
'You're in bed already?'
'No. Actually I'm standing here in the doorway. You got a problem with that?'
'No. I just thought we might… what's the matter?'
'Oh, nothing. Not a thing.' She whirled around, crossed the front room, snapped on the floorlamp and plopped herself down on the sofa. 'You coming in or not?'
He closed the door after him. 'Why are you so mad?'
She pulled her robe close around her, glaring up at him. 'See if maybe you can guess?'
He spread his arms, all innocence. 'Chris. We had a misunderstanding, that's all. Your resume's on file now.'
'File… that's good. It really is.'
'That's a fact. It's on Mark Dooher's desk at this instant, as we speak, in fact.'
'In fact,' she repeated.
He went on, oblivious: 'He picked them all up tonight. They're giving the summer hires to somebody else.'
'Why?'
'Because I'm moving up.' He ventured a step closer. 'Come on, Chris, don't be mad at me, not tonight. Tonight we should celebrate.'
'I don't want to celebrate. I don't even know what we'd be celebrating. I don't even know if there should be a "we" anymore, I really don't.'
'Chris…' He sat on the far end of the couch.
'I mean it, Joe. Okay, you're moving up, maybe, and I'm glad for you, but where are we going? Are we getting engaged? Are we getting married? I mean, what is all this? I don't get to apply to your firm because we might be an item someday?'
'We are.. .'
'No, we're not.' She held out her left hand. 'You see a ring there? I don't. We're still trying to decide, Joe, aren't we? We're still looking at the facts.'
He went silent. 'How am I supposed to respond to that, Chris? You know it's-'
'No! You're just getting to where you think that after all the time you've put in on our relationship, it would be nice if it worked out, after all.' She swiped at the angry tears that had broken. 'But the truth is that you don't like how I act, how I am. You certainly don't want me working around you, that's obvious.'
'But I do!'
'Which is why you didn't want me to apply?'
'That's not true. You know there's a rule about-'
'Stop lying to me! That's not it and you know it! We are, in fact, not actually engaged, you realize that? So there's no reason-'
'But we were going to be!'
She laughed. 'Here's how that happens, Joe. Listen up careful now. One person asks and the other says, "Yes." Not too difficult. So how about it -do you want to marry me?'
'Chris, you know-'
'Goddamn it, Joe! It's a yes or no question.'
'But it isn't! You keep saying you don't want kids, ever, and I don't think-'
Suddenly, she bolted upright on the sofa, kicking out at him. 'Get out of here! I mean it, get the hell out of here!'
The lifebuoy in Santa Barbara Bay had a deep-toned bell and it didn't seem to be far off, although the fog was so heavy she couldn't see it. She was trying to save her baby from drowning. And she couldn't see it, either. Didn't even remember if it was a boy or girl, though of course she knew. It just wasn't in her consciousness at that exact moment.
The tolling of the lifebuoy wouldn't stop, though. It was pulling her forward, toward it, through the water, which seemed to be thickening as she moved.
There was the baby, so close, just out of her reach, disappearing into the brine. 'Wait! Wait! Don't…' Sitting up, now, in a sweat. Her eyes opened on the clock next to her bed: 2:15.
The tolling continued – her doorbell. She tossed off the covers and pulled her robe around herself again.
'Who is it?'
'It's me, Joe.'
Still groggy, too tired for any more anger, she sighed, flicked on the overhead, and opened the door, leaving the chain in place. Hangdog, he stood there, his hair damp as the coat of the suit he wore, hands at his sides. He'd been out walking around for a while, perhaps since he'd left earlier. 'I'm a total jerk,' he said.
'That's a good start.'
'I'm sorry.'
She stood looking at him through the crack in the door. Finally, she closed it, undid the chain, and pulled it open. He came forward into her, wet and smelling of wool. She leaned into him, gradually bringing her arms up to encircle him. They remained that way a long moment before Joe let go of her, backed up a step, and theatrically went down on one knee.
'Joe…'
'No. This isn't a joke. I want to know if you want to marry me.'
'Hypothetically, or what?' She didn't mean it to come out so harshly, but this hadn't exactly been the way she'd dreamed it (if in fact she ever had dreamed it about Joe Avery).
He wasn't going to be side-tracked by semantics. 'No, not hypothetically. If I asked it wrong I'm sorry. I'm talking real life here. Will you marry me, Christina?' His hand grasped at the fall of her robe as his desperate eyes came up to her. 'Will you please say you'll marry me? I don't think I could live without you.'
It surprised her that it was not at all pathetic, as it might have been. He'd finally woken up, realizing he was going to lose her. She saw it in his face. He thought, at this moment, that he loved her. Maybe she could work on that, make it last. It struck her that this was the best she was going to do, and it wasn't that bad, not really.
At last, she nodded. 'Yes,' she whispered. 'Okay.'
She reached down and pulled his head close up against her. His arms came around her, clutched her to him.
On the morning of St Patrick's Day, Mark Dooher stood at the door to Wes's apartment and shook his head in disbelief.
'How do you live like this?'
Farrell surveyed his living room, which he persisted in calling his salon. It looked about how it always had since he'd moved in half a year ago, with the books and old newspapers piled on the floor, the television astride the folding chair, the forlorn futon in its unfinished oak frame.
Well, all right, this morning there were a few additions to which the fastidious – such as Dooher here – might object. His boxer Bart had spent a few delirious moments savoring the aromas of one of the used bath towels and had strewn its remains across the rug. And last night, Wes had ordered Chinese food and hadn't quite gotten around to putting away all the little cartons. And, come to think of it, there was the pizza delivery container from two – three? – nights ago on the brick and board bookcase. The paper plate on which Wes had served himself the reheated spaghetti he'd had for breakfast decorated the floor next to the futon, near his coffee mug.
And, of course, there was Bart himself- sixty-five pounds of salivating dog, lending a certain aroma to the digs, sprawling over half of the futon, chewing a nylon bone.
'Hey, do I make fun of your house when I come over?'
'I'm not making fun. I am truly appalled.'
Farrell gave the place another once-over. 'I think it's homey. It's got that lived-in feel. Realtors actually pay people to fix their houses up like this…'
Dooher was crossing the darkened yellow rug, negotiating some ambiguous stains. 'I'm getting some coffee.'
'So, Mr Dooher, tell me again how you found all this out about divorce, one of which you are not getting.'
They were in the kitchen, drinking their coffee by the window that looked out over the early-morning traffic on Junipero Serra Boulevard. The old metal-legged table was pocked with cigarette burns at the edges of the Formica. Bart had come in to join them, settled on the floor under Wes's feet.
'Gabe Stockman.'
'Who is?'
'Who is the official attorney for the Archdiocese.'
'And this just came up in conversation?'
'More or less. Actually, we were on the golf course last week and he started talking about annulment. In the Church.'
'Maybe I could get an annulment,' Wes said. 'Is there alimony with annulment? But why do you care about annulment? When last we spoke, you and Sheila were in a state of bliss.'
'We are.'
'That's not what Lydia says.'
Dooher had his mug nearly to his mouth when his hand stopped with it, turning it around slowly. 'Lydia?'
'We still do speak, you know. Mostly she's digging to find out the secret location where I've squirreled away my last two coins so that she can take them to rub together, but occasionally she does mention something human. And she told me that Sheila thinks the two of you are in trouble, that you in fact might be nearly suicidal which, if that were the case, would make me sad.'
Farrell put aside the wise-guy pose, rested his own mug on the table, his hands encircling it. This was his best friend and Lydia's information had worried him. It was why he'd asked Dooher over this morning to pick him up so they could drive downtown together for a game of squash and get a chance to talk. He wanted to find out if Lydia's information were true, and if so, if there was anything he could do to help. 'Are you all right?'
'I can't say I'm in a state of bliss, but I'm fine.'
'Which is why you're getting all the facts on annulment?'
'I don't want an annulment. I don't want a divorce. And I'm not suicidal.' He pointed a finger. 'Annulment came up and I thought since you and Lydia… I thought you'd be fascinated. I thought maybe it could help you somehow.'
'How?'
'Well, the short answer is it can't.'
'Great. That is fascinating.'
Dooher was smiling. 'Nevertheless, I thought there might be something in it for you, so since Stockman brought it up, I asked. But the bad news is that there's no annulment without a civil divorce. Which of course puts you back where you are.'
'That's okay. Bart and I are happy here, starving and all.' But Farrell the lawyer couldn't let it go, even if it didn't affect him directly. 'I thought the only way you could get an annulment was if you never consummated the marriage, and somehow the existence of my children would cost me credibility there.'
'The other way to get an annulment is if one of the spouses isn't psychologically capable of making a real commitment.'
Farrell sat back in his chair, his hands outstretched. 'Well, there you are! You have just described my soon-to-be-ex-wife. Psychologically, possibly pathologically, incapable of commitment, that's her all over.'
'Wes, you were married for twenty-seven years.'
'Twenty-nine, actually, but-'
'However many, that's going to count as a commitment.'
'A mere twenty-nine years? Where I come from, that's barely going steady. My parents were together fifty-six years. Now that's a commitment.'
'It's beautiful,' Dooher said, 'but twenty-nine years is going to count.'
'Damn.'
They had their three games of squash. Dooher won two, letting Wes take the second, 11-9, before creaming him 11- 3 in the third. When they'd been younger, both had been roughly equal as athletes; they had, in fact, remained a double-play threat through high school. But in the past few years, and especially in the six months since Farrell had been living alone, Wes had put on about ten pounds and, no surprise, it slowed him down.
They walked together down to the Hall of Justice, where Wes was having a meeting with Art Drysdale, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, about a client of his, Levon Copes, who'd been charged in a rape/murder.
Farrell had originally thought the case had a chance to go to trial and, since the defendant was a middle-aged white guy who owned an apartment building, he had money to pay his lawyer. The initial retainer had been $45,000, the check had cleared, and Wes had hoped, if he played it right, that the trial could carry him financially for a couple of years, even with Lydia chipping away at whatever she could.
Since his client's arrest, though, he'd read the discovery – the prosecution's evidence – and concluded that there must have been some mistake. There wasn't nearly enough, in his opinion, to go to trial at all, much less get a conviction. So Wes was going to try to talk Drysdale into dropping the charges altogether. It would be extremely unusual in a case like this, but, he thought, possible.
His success would be the best possible news for his client, if not financially for Wes. But he had no choice. He was a lawyer; if he could get his client off, he had to do it.
Dooher had listened sympathetically to all of this, then left Farrell at the Hall of Justice.
Now he was walking alone uptown the ten or so blocks to his office. The weather continued damnably Irish. The banshee was howling off the Bay only a few blocks to the east, the cloud cover occasionally dipped low enough to become fog, and the soft drizzle ate into his bones.
Dooher was wearing a light business suit and no overcoat, but he didn't feel the cold. For the first time since she'd left her resume, he was seeing Christina again. In fifteen minutes.
The engagement ring infuriated him.
The fucking chintzy little fifteen-hundred-dollar, quarter-carat trinket – he wanted to rip it off her finger, stomp it under his foot, slap her silly for accepting the stupid thing.
But he wasn't going to do that. He was going to smile and say, 'It's really nice, Christina. I'm happy for both of you. Congratulations.'
They were in a cafeteria down Market Street from McCabe & Roth. She'd left a message asking to meet him, and for her own reasons didn't want it to be in the office. She thought it might be awkward. She seemed embarrassed at the explanation, her head tilted to one side, not meeting his gaze. 'I just thought that after our talk, after… everything you did for me…'
'I didn't do anything.'
'Well, I certainly wouldn't have applied without you, and now with me and Joe…' She twisted at the ring, gave Dooher a hopeful look. 'Anyway, now that we are engaged, there wouldn't be much point in going on with the application process, and I thought it would only be fair to come and tell you in person.'
Dooher fiddled with his own coffee cup. 'You know, Christina, not to get too technical, but the rule regarding personal relationships isn't exactly written in stone. It's devised more to discourage the associates. We've had two or three couples in the past.'
He'd fired them, but he left that unsaid.
Forcing his easy smile, though his stomach churned, he risked reaching over and touching her hand lightly. 'But again, I'm giving away the house secrets.'
Her remarkable green eyes sparkled briefly. 'They're safe with me. I'll take them to my grave.'
'It's the only reason I tell you.'
'And I appreciate it.'
Their eyes met and held for an instant. Then Christina shrugged and the smile faded.
'The point is,' he persisted, 'that if it's not a problem for you and Joe personally, I don't think it would stand in the way of you coming aboard, if that's still what you'd like to do.' Not only didn't he think it, he was the managing partner and it was a certainty. He'd see to it. But he was tiptoeing here, afraid to push too hard and scare her away.
'I don't know,' she said.
'What don't you know?'
'Just…' Twisting the ring, round and round. 'Just if I'd want to start with the rules being bent. I'd want to be like everybody else.'
Dooher's chuckle was real. 'Believe me, once the work starts getting given out, you'll feel just like one of the gang. Do you have any other offers yet?'
'No.'
'Well, I'm just saying I wouldn't withdraw yet, on the theory that it's always a good idea to keep your options open until they get closed for you.'
'I know that, in general, but…' A silence, then her eyes lit again, a feeble flame. 'Damn you, Mark.' The face lighting now. 'This was supposed to be easy.'
He sat back in his chair. 'I'm trying to make it easy.'
Shaking her head. 'No, I mean just letting this whole thing go, but then here you are, Mr Reasonable…'
'I'm not trying to stop you from letting it go, if that's what you want. I just want you to be dealing from the facts.'
She seemed to jump in her chair. 'Ahh! Don't say that word!'
'What word?'
'Facts. God, spare me from the facts.'
A little came out about Joe, and Dooher told her, lightly, she'd better get used to it if she was going to marry him. 'When's the happy day, by the way?'
She shook her head, not exactly the picture of hopeful expectation. 'It's not final yet. We thought we ought to wait about a year.'
Dooher let out the breath he realized he'd been suppressing since he'd first seen the ring. A year? Plenty of time.
The world could change in a year.
On the third floor of the Hall of Justice, a gray-blue block of concrete and glass at 7th and Bryant, Chief Assistant District Attorney Art Drysdale was having a discussion with an assistant district attorney named Amanda Jenkins and Sergeant Abe Glitsky regarding a murder case: People v. Levon Copes.
Copes had a tattoo which did not, as it turned out, read Wendy, but, more prosaically, Levon.
Unfortunately for the cause of justice, Levon's arrest had come about after Glitsky had interviewed several residents of the building he owned and lived in (and where Tania Willows, his victim, had resided as well). He learned that Levon's tattoo was no secret – Copes talked about it all the time.
So Glitsky had a pretty good idea of the identity of Tania's killer from the beginning of his investigation. Finding other damning evidence hadn't been too hard. Fibers in Tania's bed that matched with clothes in Copes's closet; the same type of rope that had strangled Tania was in the building's basement, to which Copes had the only key; his hairs were in her bed.
So Glitsky had gone to the DA's office with his evidence. Normally Art Drysdale would have reviewed this and assigned a prosecutor. But Drysdale had been on vacation.
Which left Les McCann to handle administrative matters. McCann, a retired-on-duty drunk with seniority, had assigned the case to Amanda Jenkins, who was on record as saying that sex criminals were worse than murderers. In the Hall, it was common currency that she was perhaps not the soul of objectivity when it came to analyzing evidence in cases like Copes.
She had reviewed the file. She'd had a talk with Abe Glitsky. He told her about the tattoo, which had clinched the fact of Copes's guilt for her. Armed with that knowledge, she had gotten Les McCann's approval to go to the Grand Jury and seek an indictment, and Copes had been arrested.
This morning, though, Art Drysdale – home from vacation – got a call from Wes Farrell, who inquired if Drysdale had taken vast quantities of mind-altering drugs while he'd been away. Because based on the discovery Farrell had seen, there wasn't enough in the way of evidence to support a murder charge on Levon Copes.
What, Farrell wondered, was going on?
This was the question Drysdale now put to Jenkins. Her short dark-green skirt rode high over legs that, while heavy, possessed some indefinable quality that tended to stop male conversation when she sat and crossed them. They were uncrossed now, her feet flat on the floor, hands clasped tightly on her lap as she was explaining to her boss all about the tattoo and her witnesses and so on.
'Okay, but so what?' Drysdale asked. Feet up on his desk, effortlessly juggling three baseballs as he often did, he appeared calm, though Glitsky knew him better and wasn't fooled. 'I can't believe the Grand Jury indicted on this nonsense and I'm doubly disappointed in you, Amanda' – he stopped juggling long enough to point a finger – 'for getting conned into this.'
Glitsky, in a flight jacket and dark blue pants, leaned forward in his chair. His eyes flicked to Jenkins, came back to Drysdale. 'I didn't con anybody, sir.'
Drysdale palmed the balls in one hand and leaned over his desk. He knew all about Glitsky's home situation, was inclined to be sensitive on a personal level – but this was business, and Glitsky was, usually, one of the cops that the DA's office could count on. So he had a gentle tone. 'Figure of speech, Abe.'
'How 'bout this, Art? I didn't get conned, either.' Jenkins' demeanor was severe as a sandstorm. 'Abe didn't get around to the duct tape.'
Silver duct tape had been used to bind Tania Willows's hands to the bed's brass railings, and on the inside, sticky part of one of the strips of tape, Glitsky had found a fingerprint that belonged to Levon Copes.
Drysdale sat back. 'I know about the duct tape, but again, so what?'
'So that proves Levon Copes did it.'
'And how exactly does it do that?'
Jenkins held her lips in a tight line. Furious at this inquisition, she held her voice in a monotone. 'Copes pulls the tape' – she was pantomiming his actions – 'and his fingerprint stays on the inside. This means not only was he in the woman's room, but he was in it when the tape got unwound, which was when she was tied up.'
Drysdale nodded. 'I was afraid that was the answer.'
Glitsky spoke again, again wearily. 'It's a good answer, Art. In fact, it's the right answer.'
But Drysdale wasn't hearing it. 'No. Sorry, guys, but how about if our landlord Copes came in to fix some pipes, started undoing this magical tape and left his fingerprint on it. Then he simply forgot to take the tape with him when he left. The next day, our perp comes in to do what he did, and there is the convenient tape. Why couldn't it have happened that way?'
God, it got tiring, Glitsky was thinking. There was always some other way it could have happened. He knew Drysdale was playing the devil's advocate. None of them doubted that Copes had left an incriminating fingerprint on the inside of the duct tape, but – the point – that wasn't good enough. Drysdale sat back, pondering his options. 'The tattoo is what screwed this all up.'
Glitsky, from a deep well: 'The tattoo means he did it, too.'
'Which is where you guys went wrong. You don't start out knowing that.' He held up a hand. 'Hey, I believe with all my heart that Levon Copes is our man. I don't see how in the hell we're going to prove it, though.'
Suddenly, Glitsky let out a heavy sigh and stood up. 'I thought the duct tape was pretty good. You titans let me know how it all comes out. You need me at the trial, if it gets to trial, I'm there.'
The door closed silently behind him as he left the office. His co-workers sat, stunned, in the ensuing vacuum. Finally, Drysdale blew a little gust of air through puffed cheeks. 'Abe's having a hard time.'
'The duct tape is pretty good, you know,' Jenkins responded.
Drysdale started juggling again. 'You're dreaming,' he said.
Glitsky had to get out of the Hall, out on to the street. He checked in at Homicide – no messages – then walked the wind-blown back stairway out to the city lot behind the building. He always had half a dozen witnesses on other cases he could interview. It was the constant in the job.
So he was driving west through the fog, toward his home – vaguely – and the Bush Street projects where…
He didn't know what bothered him the most, that he'd almost lost his temper in the office, or that Drysdale had been right. You really didn't want to start with a certainty about who'd committed what crime. If you did, as Abe had done in this case, there was a temptation to lose sight of the evidentiary chain – that sense of link-by-link accretion which eventually became the working blueprint that a prosecutor would use to build a case that would convince a jury.
It was, by necessity, a slow and tedious process, where you questioned yourself- your own motives, your preconceptions, your work habits, every little thing you did – every step of the way. And it was best if the things you discovered led you to the only possible correct answer.
He slammed his hand, hard, against the steering wheel.
Glitsky couldn't say exactly why he stopped by the Rape Crisis Center.
There really was no official reason. Maybe it was a human one – maybe he needed to talk to somebody. He told himself he was fostering good community
relations, something the men in blue were always encouraged to pursue.
'Ms Carerra said she would like to be kept up on the progress of things.'
'She's not here right now,' Sam Duncan replied. 'But if it's not a secret, I wouldn't mind hearing about it. The progress, I mean. Would you like to sit down?'
He took the folding chair in front of her desk, turned it around, and straddled it backward. 'It doesn't look very good.'
Sam's shoulders sagged an inch. 'Why doesn't this come as a shock? What's the problem this time?'
'You've been through this before?'
It was not quite a laugh. 'I've been around rape and the law for about ten years. Does that answer your question?' She sighed. 'So another creep's gonna walk?'
Glitsky temporized. 'Maybe not. They might still go ahead. The prosecutor wants to put Mr Copes away, the Grand Jury did indict. I'm going to keep looking.' He paused. 'I think the problem was that I did my job backwards.'
She cocked an eye at him. 'That's funny. I thought I just heard a cop admit he might have made a mistake. What do you mean, you went backwards?'
He explained it all to her – Christina and the tattoo, the evidence that really wasn't admissible. Finally he wound down.
'So this Copes? There's no doubt he did it?'
'Not to me, but that's never the point, as you probably know. The tattoo can't be mentioned. It's hearsay.'
'This sucks. And of course he's got a million-dollar lawyer who's going to make a million more?'
'He's got Wes Farrell. He's good enough, but-'
She interrupted him. 'I don't understand these defense lawyers. I'm serious. I don't understand how any human being can take a case like this. I mean, this man Farrell, he's got to know his client did it, raped and killed this poor woman. Doesn't he? He knows about the tattoo, all of that…'
'Sure.'
'And he still-'
'Best defense the law allows. It's what makes our country great.' Glitsky shrugged. 'Maybe he needs the money. Maybe it's just a job. Murder cases pay.'
'But if he knows … I mean, if you really, truly know for sure, how can you…?'
'It's amazing, isn't it?'
'It blows my mind, Sergeant, it truly does.'
Whistling, Wes Farrell took off his white shirt and tie in the cramped unisex bathroom down the hall from his law office. Farrell often thought he was too easily amused by stupid things, such as the T-shirt he had been wearing under his suit all day – green with gold lettering that read: Take me drunk, I'm home.
Okay. So he was getting divorced, his kids didn't see him much, his career generally sucked, but his life wasn't all bad. He had his health, and that was number one, right? Give or take a few pounds, he still had his body. Lots of acquaintances. And at least one true and great friend, Mark Dooher. How many people could say that much?
Plus attitude. He had attitude in spades, and that's what pulled him through in the here-and-now – that positive attitude, the vision that day-to-day life itself was okay, even fun.
And now, thank God, he had Levon Copes. He loved Levon Copes. Levon was a lank-haired, slack-jawed, sallow-fleshed, hollow-chested, low-life, weak-willed, in-bred and brain-dead sociopath, for sure, but…
'All together now,' he said aloud into the mirror. 'DOESN'T MEAN HE ISN'T A NICE PERSON!!'
Except that Levon really wasn't a nice person.
But Wes Farrell was going to forgive him for that. He wasn't going to forget about the heinous crime he'd undoubtedly committed. But he had to admire one thing about Mr Copes – the man had a serious bank account.
Art Drysdale had not given up on the case, at least not yet. He'd told Farrell this morning that the District Attorney's office was planning a vigorous prosecution, as it did with all indictments, unless of course Farrell wanted to cop a plea.
No, Farrell had responded, he would go to trial on this one, thanks. Because this one was a winner. Farrell knew juries and he knew San Francisco, and you needed a lot more than they had on Levon Copes to convict anybody of murder here.
So he might be going to trial, to a trial that he could win, and a drawn-out murder trial meant that he was going to wind up billing his client a minimum of $ 150,000 before it was all over. And his client would pay it, gladly; it was the price of freedom.
God, he loved Levon!
So now – tonight – Wes was going to celebrate, maybe even get himself some horizontal female companionship for the first time since his separation. There was no denying it: he felt some spark tonight, some sense of life. He wasn't sure where it had come from, but he wasn't going to jinx it by worrying it to death. The ride's here, boys! Get on it or get out of the way!
He was going to start at Ghirardelli Square, for the view, to remind himself of where he lived, of why San Francisco was the greatest city in the Western World. Heading downtown, he'd hit Lefty O'Doul's, put himself on the outside of some corned beef. Then perhaps a stop by Lou the Greek's, the eclectic subterranean bar/restaurant that served the Hall of Justice community, the watering hole for the criminal legal community, of which he was – thanks to Levon Copes – a member in good standing.
What a city on this night! The possibilities were endless. Flush as he was – out of Levon's $45,000 retainer, he had kept $2,000 in cash out of his checking account, before Lydia could even see it to grab – he was going to cab it everywhere he went, bar-hopping – the Abbey Tavern, the little Shamrock…
By 10:15, he'd had himself half a yard of ale, some outstanding mega-cholesterol food, three extended discussions with interesting people about subjects which had been totally engrossing even if now somewhat vague in his memory. His cabbie, Ahmal, was turning into his best friend – Ahmal had already cleared $140. He had parked the cab just around the corner from the Little Shamrock and would wait all night for Farrell's return.
Getting inside the door through the crush of people was a bit of a trial, but Wes persevered. He knew the place well. It was on his way home. Small, well kept, without discernible ferns of any kind, it was the oldest bar in the city – established in 1893! There was often a crowd up front or at the bar, but he knew that in the back there was a mellower area, furnished with rugs and couches and easy chairs – just like a living room, though not just like/us living room.
So he moved steadily, in no hurry, toward the back. They had waitresses working, which was unusual on a weekday – normally you ordered at the bar – and he had a pint of Bass in his hand before he'd gone twenty steps. The jukebox didn't drown out the people here, and especially tonight it didn't. The place was bedlam. Only now could he make out What A Fool Believes over the crowd noise. He thought it was fitting.
And there she was.
Through the jockeying mass of humanity, he saw her sitting on the arm of one of the couches, leaning forward on her arms, sensual curves everywhere, and one leg curled under her. She was a grown-up, which was about as close as he could guess for her age – beyond that it didn't matter.
Something about her was knocking him out.
He looked away, took another sip of beer, checked for signs of how drunk he was and decided not very, then looked back at her. Yep, she still looked good – medium-length dark hair with red highlights, great skin. Her face was alive, that was what it was. Her smile lit up all around her.
He got himself a little closer. She was in conversation with a couple on the couch next to her, and suddenly the woman who was half of the couple got up – it was magic – and went into the adjacent bathroom. Wes moseyed on over.
She slid off the arm of the couch, into the empty place next to the other half of the couple, a good-looking man. Put an arm around him. Uh oh, maybe not… then she looked right at Wes.
'I love your shirt,' she said. Then, 'This is my oldest brother, Larry. He was fun when he was younger.' She patted the arm of the couch and Wes moved up a step and sat where she'd been. 'Wes,' he said, sticking out his hand, which she took and shook. Over her head, he asked, 'How you doin', Larry?'
'Larry's loaded. Sally's taking him home. Sally's his wife. She just went
to the bathroom. I'm Sam. I'm staying.'
As it turned out, she didn't stay all that long. Sam had apparently been waiting at the Shamrock for someone who looked just like Wes to walk through the door and save her from a night of aimless drinking. So another beer later for each of them, they were arm-in-arm outside, and there was Ahmal, parked on 9th where Wes had left him. This made an impression on Sam.
He paid Ahmal fifty more at her place, a downstairs flat on Upper Ashbury, and while Sam was getting out, told his good buddy the cab driver to wait an hour more and if Wes didn't come back out, he could take off, and thanks for the memories.
The door closed behind them on a cosy space – a large open room with a low ceiling, old-fashioned brick walls, built-in and seemingly organized bookshelves, a wood-burning stove.
'You have a dog,' he said.
A cocker spaniel was waking up, stretching in a padded basket next to the stove. 'You're not allergic or anything, are you?'
'As a matter of fact, I myself own a dog.'
'I knew there was something about you…'
'His name's Bart. He's a boxer.'
She leaned over to pet her little darling. 'This is Quayle,' Sam said, 'with a "y", just like Dan. You know, the brains of a cocker spaniel, so I thought, why not? Do you want another drink?'
'Not really. Would you like to come over here?' He held out his arms, and she gave Quayle one last pet, hesitated a moment, smiled, then walked to him.
She came naked through the door of the bedroom, a glass of Irish whiskey in each hand. The funny thing,' she said, 'is I don't normally do this.'
There was a blue liquid lava lamp from the 1960s or 1970s next to the bed. The windows were horizontal, high in the brick wall, at ground-level outdoors.
Wes was under a thick down comforter, hands behind his head. He reached out for one of the glasses. 'I don't, either.'
She handed him his glass and sat on his side of the bed. He thought she was as comfortable with her nakedness as it was possible to be, and also thought that was as it should be. Her body was toned and lush, nice breasts with tiny pink nipples. He rested his hand on her thigh. 'You can tell me the truth,' she said. 'It won't hurt my feelings. I can take it.'
'That is the truth. I was married for almost thirty years. Now this.'
You mean, this is the first time since you were married?'
'That was it. Am I blowing my cover here as man of the world?'
'No, I'm just surprised.'
'Why? It seemed natural enough to me. Pretty great, actually.'
She gave him her smile again.'That, too. Me, too, I mean. It's supposed to be such a hassle to get it right, especially the first time.'
'Maybe not.'
She put her whiskey glass on the side table and slid in next to him, snuggling into his chest. After a minute, he could feel her begin to laugh.
'What's funny?'
'Well, the name thing…'
He thought a moment. 'Your name isn't Sam?'
This made her laugh. 'No, my name's Sam. I'm talking last names. You are at least Wes, aren't you?'
'Full disclosure coming up.' He patted her back reassuringly. 'Wes Farrell, Attorney at Law, at your service.'
She groaned. 'Oh, you're not a lawyer, not really?'
'Realler than a heart attack. We're everywhere.'
'Wes Farrell…' she said quietly. 'I feel like I…' She stiffened and sat up abruptly.
'What?' he asked.
'Wes Farrell!?'
'Au personne, which means something in French, I think.'
But the good humor seemed to have left her. 'You're Wes Farrell? Oh my God, I can't believe this.'
'This what? What are you-?'
'What am I? What are you?'
'What am I what? Come on, Sam, don't-'
'Don't you don't me.' She was up now, grabbing a robe from a hook behind her on the wall. Pulling it around her – covering up – she turned and faced him. 'You're the Wes Farrell who's defending that scumbag Levon Copes, aren't you?'
'How do you know?'
'Don't worry, I know him.' She was fully engaged now, slamming her fists against her thighs, the bed, whatever was handy. 'I knew it, I just fucking knew it. God, my luck. I should have known.'
'Sam…'
'Don't Sam me either!' Walking around in little circles now. 'I'm sorry, but this just isn't going to work. I want you to go now. Would you please just leave?'
'Just leave?' But he was already sitting up, grabbing his pants from the floor.
''Yes. Just leave. Please.'
'Okay, okay. But I don't know why…'
'Because I can't believe you'd do what you're doing with Levon Copes, that's why – trying to get him off. I can't believe this is you. Oh shit!'
'It's my job,' he said. 'I'm a lawyer, it's what I do.'
That reply stopped her dead. Suddenly, the energy left her. She let out a frustrated sigh and whirled around one last time. 'Just go, all right?'
He had his shoes in his hands, his shirt untucked. 'Don't worry, I'm gone.'
It had been more than an hour, and Ahmal had gone, too.
Mark and Sheila Dooher had said no more than a hundred words to each other all night. She had made the traditional New England boiled dinner which he normally loved, but he'd only picked at the food. At dinner, he'd been polite and distracted and then he'd excused himself, saying he felt like hitting a few balls at the driving range – he'd been playing more golf lately, an excuse to stay away from home longer, go out more often. He'd even asked her if she wanted to accompany him, but he really didn't want her to – she could tell – so she said no.
Now, near midnight, he was still up, reading in the downstairs library, a circular room in the turret, under her own office. When he got home from the driving range, he'd come in to say good night, kissed her like a sister, saying he had work to do. Would she mind if he went to the library and got some reading in, some research?
She couldn't take it anymore.
She stood in the doorway in her bathrobe. He'd lit a fire and it crackled faintly. He wasn't reading. He was sitting in his green leather chair, staring at the flames.
'Mark?'
'Yo.' He looked over at her. 'You all right? What's up?'
'You're still up.'
'The old brain just doesn't seem to want to slow down tonight. So I thought I'd just let it purr awhile.'
She took a tentative step or two into the room.
'What's it thinking about?'
'Oh, just things.'
Another step, two more, then she sat sideways on the ottoman near his feet. 'You can tell me, you know. Whatever it is.'
He took a moment. 'I played squash with Wes this morning. Went over and picked him up at the hovel he calls home. You know what he told me? That you'd told Lydia you thought I was suicidal. That our marriage was on the rocks.' He leveled his gaze at her. 'Imagine my surprise to get it from Wes.'
He was being a good listener, leaning forward now, holding both her hands. He couldn't help but notice the hands. They really did age quicker than everything else – you couldn't fake hands. The hands gave her away.
He really wished she wouldn't cry, but she was. Not sobbing, but quiet tears. '… no looking ahead, no laughs.'
'I know,' he said. 'It's my fault, too. I suppose I let your depression get to me. I shouldn't have done that. I should have said something.'
'But you tried, and I pushed you away.'
'I still should have.'
'It wasn't you, Mark, it was-'
'Wait, wait. Let's stop who it was. It doesn't matter who it was. We're talking about it now. We'll fix it starting now, starting today.' He leaned over and kissed her. 'We've just gotten into some bad habits. You feel like a nightcap?'
She hesitated, then decided. 'Sure, I'd like one. One light drink isn't going to hurt me.'
'You're right.'
She held on to him. 'I love you, Mark. Let's make this work, okay?'
He kissed her again. 'It will. I promise.'
Wes Farrell exited the crowded elevator into the familiar hallway madness -cops, DAs, reporters, witnesses, prospective jurors, hangers on.
It was just after 8:00 a.m. and the various courtrooms wouldn't be called to order for at least another half-hour. Farrell knew that a lot of legal business got done here in these last thirty minutes – pleas were agreed to, witnesses prepped, lawyers hired and fired.
This was also the moment when negotiations about plea bargaining got down to tacks. If you were a defense attorney, as Wes was, and you had a losing case, you didn't really want to go to trial. But your client generally didn't like the prosecution's offer of jail-time -only ten years didn't tend to sound like a deal except when you compared it to the twenty-five you'd do if you got convicted. Maybe somebody's mind would change and your client would get off with a fine. Maybe world peace was just around the corner.
So you played the game and hung tough for your client, bluffing that you really would put the prosecutor's office through the time and expense of a jury trial. But at some point – such as now when you were in the hallway waiting for trial – this was when you folded your cards and took the plea.
But that wasn't Farrell's intention this morning. He wasn't here to run a bluff. He was here with the outrageous intention of talking the DA into dropping murder charges against Levon Copes right now or, failing that, deliver the message that Levon was prepared to go to trial. Of course, Levon had already pled not guilty at pre-trial, but that had been more or less pro forma.
This was different.
Wearing a black silk blouse and one of her trademark miniskirts, dark green today, Amanda Jenkins was leaning against the wall enjoying this morning's special entertainment. Decked out in fezzes and robes, a dozen or so representatives of the Moslem mosque were protesting the arrest of one of their members for bank robbery, and were performing a hucca – a ritual dance derived from the old whirling dervishes. They were jumping up and down and chanting, 'Just-us, just-us.' Several uniformed cops were available to maintain a semblance of order, but it probably wasn't going to get out of hand. These things happened every week in the Hall. To Farrell, it was almost more amazing that no one seemed to think it was that odd.
He came up to Jenkins. 'With a couple of instruments, they could take it on the road. It'd really go better with music, don't you think?'
She considered it seriously. 'Accordion and tuba. Alternating bass notes. Oom-pa, oom-pa. It's a good idea.'
They discussed variations on the theme until they located an empty bench far enough away to hear themselves talk, and Farrell went into his pitch.
'You can't be serious?' she said when he wrapped it up. 'You're saying you expect us to simply drop this?'
'Like the hot potato it is. I don't really expect it, but you don't have a case, and your boss seems to know it.'
'I'm sorry he gave you that impression and I'm sure he would be, too. I just talked to Art this morning before coming down here and he is totally committed to this prosecution.'
This was a lie, but Amanda delivered it straight.
'Murder One?'
She nodded. 'With Specials.' Meaning special circumstances – in this case murder in the course of a rape. The state was going to ask for LWOP – life in prison without the possibility of parole.
'So why are we having this discussion?'
Amanda straightened her skirt, pulling it down to within four inches of her knees, a move she was unaware of. It didn't escape Farrell's notice, however. Neither did the clearing of her throat. The woman was a nervous wreck. 'You called Art.'
'True. But then he called me back, said maybe we had something to talk about after all. If your best offer is life, I think all in all I owe it to my client to try to get a better deal.' He paused. 'Especially since you can't convict him, not on the discovery I've seen. He's gonna walk, Amanda, and you know it. Drysdale knows it. You guys fucked up.'
'We drop the Specials. You plead Murder One straight up, twenty-five to life.'
Farrell cast his gaze down the hallway, up to the ceiling. 'How can I phrase this? No chance.'
Amanda was trying to get some satisfaction out of this. Drysdale had told her she was going to have to drop the charges, an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime decision in a rape/murder case. This just didn't happen, ever. Except now, it was happening, and Amanda was in the middle of it.
The only chip the DA wanted to play was to use its slight remaining leverage, if any, to avoid embarrassment in the press. Jenkins, who took this stuff personally, was hoping to salvage a little more.
'Wes, your client killed this woman.'
'My client is innocent until you prove he's guilty.'
'Oh please, spare me. What do you think? Really?'
'I just said what I think.'
Jenkins took in a breath and held it for a long moment. 'Murder Two,' she said at last. 'Fifteen to life. He'll be out in twelve.'
Farrell crossed his arms, gave her a worldly look. 'Amanda, please.'
'What?'
'When's'the last time you went to a parole board hearing? Out walk five people who've read the police report, hate your client, and figure he's done it before. At least one is there from some victims' rights group. Your client comes in, says he's sorry – hell, he's really sorry – and they say thanks for your time, see you in another five years.'
Amanda repeated it. 'Still, he'll be out in twelve on Murder Two.'
'He'll be out in twelve weeks if we go to trial.'
'I guess we'll let the jury decide then. We're not going to simply drop these charges, Wes, and if we go to trial, it's One with Specials. That's putting your client at tremendous risk.'
Farrell nodded, stood up, grabbed his briefcase. 'I'll discuss it with him. See you in ten seconds.' He held out his hand. 'I'll be in touch.'
He'd gone about ten steps when the prosecutor called after him. 'Wes?'
He stopped and turned. He was almost tempted to go back and put an arm around her shoulder, tell her everything was going to be all right. This was just a job, a negotiation, nothing to take so seriously.
A vision of Sam from St Patrick's Day – when it had been personal to her, too. What was with all these women?
Amanda Jenkins's eyes showed her concern, even panic. The woman was deeply conflicted, but she forced a weak smile. 'Nothing,' she said, 'forget it.'
'I had to try, Art.'
'No, you didn't, Amanda.'
'Farrell's going to talk to Levon right now, this morning. Levon knows he did it. He's looking at LWOP if he doesn't plead. We've got some leverage here.'
'We don't have the evidence. Farrell appears to have a pretty good understanding of that.'
'He's got to convey our offer to Levon. If he takes it, we win. It was worth a try.'
Drysdale picked up the telephone on his desk. 'All right, you had your try. You got Farrell's number?'
She argued for another five minutes, but it did no good, so she made the call and told Farrell the People were moving to dismiss the charges on Levon Copes to permit the time for further investigation.
Victor Trang made Dooher drive half an hour out to Balboa Street to meet in some dive named Minh's, decorated mostly in yellowing strips of flypaper which hung from the ceiling.
Dooher hated the smell of the place. His Vietnam hitch had been the low point of his life, and since he'd returned he hadn't put much effort into developing any taste for the culture.
He didn't see Trang right away – Dooher had to walk along a counter and endure the suspicious eyes of the proprietor and of the four other customers who sat hunched over their bowls.
Trang sat in a booth at the back, papers scattered around him, his calculator on the table so he'd look busy. There was a cup of tea in front of him, and some dirty dishes still on the table, pushed to the side. He wore the same suit, the same skinny tie, as the last time they'd met.
Dooher slid in across from him and Trang, punching the damn little machine, held up a finger. He'd be with Mark in just a minute. Finally – a whirr of number-crunching – he looked up. There was a smile, but it lacked sincerity.
He began briskly enough. 'I'll be filing the amended complaint next Monday, which gives us a week to reach a settlement agreement, if you're still interested. If not, I'll go ahead sooner.'
Dooher tried to run his bluff. 'I did tell you that our offer expired the day after we met. When I didn't hear from you…'
'And yet you're here.'
'The Archbishop thought it was worth another try.'
Trang stared at the ceiling behind Dooher. At last, he put down his pencil, brought himself back to the table. 'Here's the situation, Mr Dooher. First, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop insulting me with this talk about the Archbishop's concern for my well-being. I've got a lawsuit that's going to do his diocese a lot of harm and incidentally might smear him with the runoff. He knows it, I know it, you know it.'
'All right.' Dooher wore his poker face. 'I didn't know you. I mean no insult. Some people hear the bluff and cave early.'
Trang seemed to accept that. He shuffled some of his papers around, appearing to look for something specific. Finding it, he pulled the page toward him and read a moment. 'I've got, let's see, twelve names here.'
'Twelve people? You're telling me Slocum was involved with twelve people?'
Trang's self-satisfied smile remained in place. It was getting to Dooher. 'I've got twelve people, so far, who are willing to allege a relationship with a priest in the Archdiocese. Three different parishes. It's a widespread problem, as my amended complaint contends. Clearly, there's a policy of toleration beginning at the very top…'
Dooher took the paper and glanced at the list. 'All of these names seem to be Asian.'
'That's correct. Most are Vietnamese.'
'An interesting coincidence.'
Trang shrugged. 'These refugees came to this country as displaced people. They turned to their spiritual advisers to help them through the many adjustments they had to make, and many of these advisers – these priests – betrayed them, took advantage of their weakness and vulnerability.' He shook his head at the tragic reality.
Dooher had a different interpretation. 'We'd depose every one of these women. You understand that?' – telling Trang what he suspected, that the charges were bogus. Trang had recruited a dozen liars to trade their accusations for a fee – some tiny fraction of the settlement he hoped to get.
But Trang had another card. 'They're not all women.' Another meaningless smile. 'This is San Francisco, after all.' So now Trang had priests seducing young men as well, with Flaherty consistently looking the other way. 'And of course there'd be depositions. My clients would want to reveal the whole truth, if only to warn others who might be in their positions.' He made a little clucking noise. 'This is the kind of story that will be all over the newspapers, though of course we'd try to contain that.'
This, Dooher knew, was the real issue. Trang was running a scam, pure and simple. He was threatening to foment a scandal, and what made it viable was that it wasn't all made up. Undoubtedly, Mrs Diep and perhaps her daughter had been wronged by Father Slocum. Perhaps there was another victim, maybe two.
But twelve! Magically appearing out of the woodwork within the last few weeks…?
Dooher didn't think so, but what he thought didn't matter much anymore. He had to contain this lunatic. It's what Flaherty expected him to do. It's what he got paid for. 'Let's talk about Mrs Diep for a moment, the suit that's already been filed. She's asking for-'
But Trang was shaking his head, interrupting. 'No, no, Mr Dooher. That is in the past. I've uncovered a widespread problem that would, frankly, benefit from a public forum. Your Archbishop may have meant well, but many people have been damaged. And I think as we proceed that many other victims will come forward. Don't you think that's likely? It's the way these things often go.'
Again, the smile.
Dooher knew he was right. Trang's plan was wonderful – he'd prime the pump with bogus victims, then, once the issue made the daily news, everyone who had ever been kissed by a priest was going to stand up and ask to join the party.
'Which is why we would prefer you not to proceed.'
A nod that perhaps Trang believed was dignified, magnanimous. He was going to be a good winner.
Dooher wasn't prepared to be a loser, however. Not to this little upstart gook. That wasn't going to happen. Not now. Not ever. 'The Archdiocese wants to redress the wrongs it may have inadvertently condoned, Mr Trang. That's why we're talking. These people,' he indicated the list on the table, 'now they may feel betrayed, but I don't think there's much of a case that they've been substantially damaged. Mrs Diep, yes. Her daughter, okay. We're prepared to give Mrs Diep her fifty thousand, with another fifty to be distributed among,' he paused, a look of distaste, 'among your other clients.'
Trang sucked on his front teeth. 'If you deduct my fees, that really satisfies no one completely. Thirty thousand among twelve people is an insult for what they've endured. You must know that. And Mrs Diep will still be out nearly twenty thousand in cash, plus the interest.'
Dooher held up a hand. 'We'll pay your fees on top.' This upped his offer to $135,000 or so. This situation was making his stomach churn with rage and impotence. Nearly three times what Trang had been asking only last week and-
And he was still shaking his head no. 'I don't think that figure addresses the seriousness of these charges, Mr Dooher, the sense my clients feel that there should be some punishment so that the Archbishop will think twice before allowing these betrayals to occur on his watch. A hundred thousand is a mere slap on the wrist. He'd never feel it.'
Swallowing his bile, Dooher folded his hands in front of him. 'What do you want, Trang?'
It was a simple question. Palms up, Trang came clean. 'The amended complaint asks for three million.'
Dooher kept his face impassive. This had become personal, Trang playing him like some fish. But he wasn't going to flop for him. He waited.
'Perhaps I could convince my clients that half of that figure would be a reasonable compensation for their suffering.'
A million five! Dooher knew that this wasn't close to what he'd been authorized to offer. And yet if he didn't get to some agreement they'd all have to go to court and the whole thing would become public. Even if most of Trang's clients were invented, the fallout would poison Flaherty. And Dooher would have failed in every respect. He could not let that happen.
'That's too much,' he snapped. He grabbed the paper again, ran his eyes down the list. 'I'll tell you what we will do, Mr Trang. Final offer, and subject to a confidentiality agreement, no press conferences…' He was showing his temper, and paused a fraction of a second for control. This was his last card and he knew he'd better play it. 'Six hundred thousand dollars.'
Trang showed nothing. It was as though Dooher hadn't said a word. He was in the middle of lifting his cup to his lips, and there wasn't even a pause. He drank, put the cup down. 'That is really excellent tea,' he said. Then, as though it were an afterthought, 'Six hundred thousand dollars.'
Dooher let him live a minute with the number. Then he said, 'A lot of money.' He didn't say, 'And two hundred grand for you, you slant-eyed little prick.' Which was what he was thinking.
'It is a lot of money,' Trang agreed, 'but it is also a long way from three million, or even one five. If I may, I'd like to take the offer under advisement. Speak to my clients.'
'Of course,' Dooher said, except he knew that Trang had nobody to discuss anything with. He decided he had to raise the stakes. 'But this offer expires at close of business today. Five o'clock.'
Trang digested that, then began gathering his papers, packing them into his briefcase. 'In that case, I'd better be on my way. It's going to be a busy day.'
The sun had come out for what seemed the first time this year, and that springtime sense of hope in the air prompted Christina to walk into Sam's office.
Her boss was sitting in the hard chair, tilted back, her eyes closed, her arms crossed over her chest, and her ankles crossed on her desk. Sensing a presence in the doorway, she opened her eyes.
'I hate all men,' she said. 'Well, I don't hate my brothers or my father, but all the other ones.'
Christina leaned against the door, smiling. 'How do you feel about volunteer rape counsellors?'
'I don't think they should be men.' Sam shook her head. 'I'm sorry about the other day. Sergeant Glitsky came by here and told me you 'd come down to his office, outside of office hours, doing your job.' She paused. 'I'm a jerk as a person and a lousy boss, aren't I?'
'Which one?'
A nod. 'I deserve that.'
But Sam was trying to apologize and Christina didn't think it was a moment for sarcasm. 'Neither, really,' she said. 'Neither a jerk nor a lousy boss. You care a lot, Sam, that's all. That's a positive thing.'
'Too much.'
Christina shrugged. 'Beats the opposite, doesn't it? I'm going out to get some coffee. You think the office will survive fifteen minutes without us here? Or should I bring you back something?'
Sam considered a moment, then brought her feet down off the desk and stood up. I'll leave a note on the door.'
They waited in line at an espresso place down the street from the Center. Sam's general theme on men had narrowed to the specific.
'Wes Farrell?' Christina was saying. 'Where do I know that name?'
'He's Levon Copes's attorney.'
'No, that's not it. I didn't know that before you just told me. I know that name from somewhere else.'
Sam had omitted the details of her interaction with Wes Farrell, leaving it only that they'd met and she'd given him a piece of her mind.
'Maybe you saw it on one of Glitsky's reports or something.'
'Maybe.' Christina ordered a latte, her brow still furrowed, trying to remember. When they'd gotten served, they sat at a tiny two-seat table up by the window, in the sun. They shared the sill with two cats, and one of them purred up against Christina's arm. 'Anyway,' Christina said, 'I didn't think last week was the greatest time to tell you – just when you were finally starting to believe that I was a real person who genuinely cares about the people I try to help, which I am.'
'I know that now. I see that.'
'Well, but… so now this is a little awkward, but I wanted to give you notice that pretty soon I'm going to have to stop coming into the Center, doing this.'
A long dead moment. 'Because of this Tania Willows thing?'
'No. Really because in about a month I'm taking finals, then graduating, then studying for the Bar and working full-time for a firm downtown, which I hear is about a hundred hours a week. Then taking the Bar. I'm not going to have any time.'
Sam stirred her coffee. Stopped. Her eyes restlessly scanned the street in front of them. 'Damn,' she said finally. This always happens.'
'I know. I'm sorry.'
'It's all right. I just get so tired of it, when it seems you finally get to where you might connect with somebody…'
'Then they leave. I know.' Christina was holding her coffee mug in both hands, trying to keep them warm. 'So you didn't convert Wes Farrell away from defense work?'
Sam made a face. 'I was dumb. I just got mad at him. And it wouldn't have mattered anyway, whatever I did. Copes would just go out and hire another one. Fucking lawyers… oops, sorry.'
Christina waved it off. 'That's okay. I'm not a lawyer yet, and I'm not going to be that kind of one anyway.'
'It's funny, because he seemed like a nice guy otherwise. A great guy, really.'
'Who?'
'Who are we talking about? Wes Farrell.'
Christina looked over her coffee. 'You liked him, didn't you?'
'I don't know. I might have. Maybe I would have. I don't know.'
'Call him up. Say hi. He's got to be in the book. Tell him he's making a mistake with Levon Copes but that you were too hard on him. You'd like to buy him a drink.'
Sam shook her head. 'I don't think so. I don't know if I want to buy him a drink.' Sighing. 'It's not that simple.'
'But wouldn't it be nice?'
The conference room at McCabe & Roth was meant to intimidate. The dark cherry table was twenty-four feet long and the shine on its surface encouraged neither relaxation nor work. It was a table at which to sit. And listen. And be impressed. The subliminal message from such perfection was that to leave so much as a fingerprint upon it was to vandalize a work of art, so briefcases stayed on the floor, notes were taken on laps.
Coffee cups? Paperclips? Drinks? Food? Forget it.
At one end of the room, the floor-to-ceiling windows worked their power-view magic, while the walls were covered with heavily textured, light green cloth wallpaper. Original oils in heavy frames glowered. Sconced lighting kicked in when the black-out drapes were drawn.
After his debacle with Trang earlier in the day, Dooher was primed to win one. He'd had a bad day all around, in fact, with the Archbishop giving vent to his frustration that even his top offer of $600,000 had not been immediately accepted. Dooher still found himself smarting from the carefully phrased reproof. 'It's really not like you, Mark, to let a beginner get the upper hand like that in your negotiations.'
There had been nothing he could say. And now close of business had come and gone and he hadn't heard back from Trang, so the Archbishop's offer was no longer on the table. And Dooher knew it was all going to get much worse.
But for now, this moment, he was going to enjoy himself. He sat at the head of the conference table, and checked his watch – 5:40. The other eight partners should begin arriving any minute.
He found himself smiling, thinking of David and Bathsheba, and of Bathsheba's poor first husband, whom David sent off to war, promoting him so that he would be at the front of the troops, leading the charge against the Philistines, a hero.
Alas, never to return.
'Joe, you may have heard rumors to the effect that the firm has been considering expanding into new market areas. Well, we're all gathered here now to put an end to those rumors. They're absolutely… true.'
A polite ripple of masculine chuckle.
Joe Avery smiled nervously from his end of the conference table. Several of the other men looked his way, nodding and smiling. Dooher continued, 'We've reached the decision that the first satellite office should be in Los Angeles. As you know, we do a lot of business down there – many of the cases you've been working on, as a matter of fact. We've all been impressed with the hours and effort you've put in over the years here, and we'd like to reward you now by asking you to put in some more.'
Another round of club laughter.
'But seriously, and before we get down to the nitty-gritty of what we're expecting down in LA, all of us wanted to take a minute and say congratulations. And, I should add – I'm afraid I've hinted at this to you before' – here Dooher included most of the partners around the table in a conspiratorial wink – 'we kind of rushed your partnership through committee a little earlier than you might have expected.
'We'd like you to take the helm down in Los Angeles, Joe, open the office, get us up and running and put us on the map down there.' Again, an inclusive gesture around the room. 'Gentlemen. I've seen the future of McCabe & Roth and its name is Joe Avery. Congratulations, Joe.'
Heartfelt applause. Joe Avery stood, beaming and basking in his colleagues' approval. And Dooher knew that even if it meant losing Christina, the fool wouldn't let this job get away.
On the next Thursday night, Dooher suddenly stopped his reading in the library on the lower floor of the turret. His eyes raked the shelves quickly, all of his senses alert with an overwhelming prescience. Something was going to happen – he could feel it!
The telephone rang. He knew who it was and he trusted these things implicitly. Besides, the timing was about right – four days since Avery had been promoted. He picked it up on the first ring, resisting the urge to answer with her name.
Instead, he was as he always was. 'Mark Dooher here,' he said. The library doubled as his private office, with a personal phone that he answered in business tones.
A longish pause, then: 'Mark, hi.' Another breath. 'It's Christina Carrera. I'm sorry to bother you at home.'
'Christina!' Heartfelt surprise and enthusiasm. 'It's no bother. I wouldn't have given you my home number if I was going to get mad at you for using it.' Dooher carried the portable phone across the room and quietly pushed the door closed. It was a little after 9:00 p.m. and Sheila was watching television in the kitchen, doing the dinner dishes. The closed door was a signal that he was working – she wouldn't disturb him. 'To what do I owe this pleasure? What can I do for you?'
'I don't know, maybe nothing. I feel very awkward about calling you… but then again I've been awkward about everything lately.'
As he listened, Dooher re-crossed the room, went to his bar and poured a couple of fingers of bourbon, neat, into a brandy snifter. He was nodding, fully engaged.
'… but I didn't know who else I could talk to. I think I need some advice.'
'Advice is my business and my rates are reasonable – well, not completely reasonable. No one would respect me if they were.'
He could almost see the relief in her face, her smile. Their banter – Mark's light touch – put her at ease. He was her friend and she was glad he was here for her. He heard it in her voice. 'Okay,' she said, 'I'll pay.'
'Good. Lunch on you.' Then, more seriously: 'What's the problem, Christina? The job again?'
This time, the silence continued for several seconds. He waited. 'Really it's not so much the job. It's more personal.'
'You're not in legal trouble, are you?'
'No! Nothing like that.'
'But personal?'
'Joe,' shejsaid simply. 'I just don't know what to do.'
He sipped his drink, still standing by the wet bar. 'We can talk, Christina, but if it's Joe, maybe this would be better discussed with him.'
'That's what I'm trying to avoid. I don't want to always be so negative with him. Not when he's so happy with everything.'
'It's the transfer, I presume?'
A bitter laugh. 'I almost want to blame you.'
'For promoting Joe?'
'I know. It's stupid.'
'No, not that. But this move has been in the works a long time. Certainly before I ever met you.' This was not strictly true. The decision to open an LA office had been considered months before, but Dooher's decisions to go ahead with it and then to appoint Avery was finalized over the last six weeks or so. In administrative matters, Dooher rode roughshod over his nominal partners – he ran his firm his way. It was making money and if the partners didn't like his decisions, one of them could try to do what he did – but without him. He and his business would go elsewhere.
'I know. I know that.' She sighed. 'God, I'm such a bitch.'
'I haven't really noticed that. Are you being hard on Joe?'
'Not yet. I think that's why I needed to call you.'
'For my permission for you to be hard on your boyfriend? I don't think so.' He couldn't bring himself to call Avery her fiance. Also, he wanted to deliver the subliminal message – boyfriends were temporary and insubstantial.
'I don't want to be a nag all the time. That's just it. I'm not an unhappy person. Don't laugh. I'm really not.'
'I'm not laughing.'
'But now, I can't seem to accept… if I talk to Joe, everything I say lately comes out like I'm not being supportive of his career. I probably shouldn't even be talking to you.'
'You can stop saying that, Christina. I'm glad you called. I'm just not sure what I can do. The decision's already been made.' The drink was kicking in – he eased himself down onto a barstool, relaxing.
'I guess I'm not asking you as the managing partner, Mark. And I don't know if I'm presuming. But you've been… I feel like you' ve been a friend, is that all right? And I need to have a friend who can talk about this, who can understand both sides.'
'All right, then I'll take off my managing partner's hat.' He lowered his voice. 'I'm touched that you thought of me. And I really don't know if I can be of any help, but I'm listening.'
The good husband, Dooher was finishing a second drink at the table in the kitchen nook, confiding to his wife about the call. 'So the poor kid's in a bind. What's she going to do?'
Sheila was drinking her de-caf. 'This is the really stunning girl from the party, isn't it? Christina?'
'That was her.'
'And she called you?'
He pointed a finger, broke a sardonic grin. 'Actually, the truth is she wanted me to leave you for her. Said she couldn't live another moment without me and I can't say I blame her. But I had to tell her I was taken.' He reached across the table and took his wife's hand. 'Happily.'
'Are you?'
A reassuring squeeze, eye contact. 'Completely, Sheila. What kind of question is that? You know that.'
'I know, but lately…'
'Lately we haven't exactly been flying. Okay. We've pulled out of dives before. We're going to do it again.' He shrugged. 'Of course, she was devastated, but she's young. She'll get over it. Probably.'
Sheila was shaking her head.'To think that someone who looks like she does could have problems…'
'People have problems, She. You did – we did – especially when we were young, trying to figure everything out.'
'But I never looked like her.'
'Not like, but every bit as good.'
His wife beamed and covered his hand with both of hers. 'You've got a half-hour to cut this flattery out. I mean it.' She let go of his hand, picked up her cup and sipped. 'Aren't you glad we're not starting out now, you and I? I don't know how these kids do it. I mean, in our day, if you'd been transferred I'd have gone with you, no questions asked. In fact, I did go. Berkeley, then waited through Vietnam, then LA, then back here.'
'I remember. And you never complained.'
She couldn't stop smiling at him. He was getting back to his old self, the little compliments, the kindnesses. 'Well, complained sometimes, but never thinking I wouldn't go with you. Now – these girls nowadays – I mean women of course, they're women -I mean, she must be in her mid-twenties if she's getting out of law school – we had all our kids by that age, do you realize that?'
'We were unusually wise and mature. Still are.'
'But now look at what this girl is dealing with. And all because she wants her precious career. And what's a career? Who wants to have to work your whole life?'
'She wants to be able to work, Sheila. There's a difference. Maybe she'll need to. It's hard to say nowadays. It's a different world.'
'I think it's a damn shame. I'd tell her to just go with her man, and the rest will take care of itself.'
Dooher's face broke into a conspiratorial smile. 'I don't think I could put it exactly like that. She'd think I was the last of the reactionary pigs. Well, maybe not the last.'
'But you wouldn't be wrong.'
'Maybe not, but I'm afraid in today's social environment it's one of life's little truths that she's going to have to discover for herself.'
'So what's she going to do? What did you advise her?'
'I was punctiliously PC – told her, if it were me, I'd stay here and do a great job this summer, study for the Bar and pass it, be supportive of what Joe was doing. If they're in love, it'll work out eventually, maybe sooner. Lots of people get separated by jobs, by life. The ones that are meant to make it, make it. It doesn't have to be a crisis.'
She took his hand again. 'You know, Mark, sometimes I forget what a romantic you are.'
He shrugged it off. 'I'm just trying to be a good boss. They're both valuable assets to the firm – if they're not happy they won't be productive.'
'Oh, and that's it? All this paternal advice is simply an ingenious management technique?'
'Essentially.' He tipped up his glass. 'Mostly.'
She shook her head, smiling. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm sure.' Motioning to his empty glass, she asked if she could get him another one.
He hesitated. 'I'm not trying to be an enabler here, but would you consider joining me?'
She still wasn't anywhere near telling him about the Nardil, her anti-depressant drug. She didn't think she'd ever get to there. But Mark was relaxed, in a sensitive mood, open to her. She'd gone back to her wine over the past few weeks and there'd been no ill-effects. Now Mark wanted her to join him for a nightcap. If she said no, the mood would be gone, and she wasn't going to risk that.
Midnight.
Sam Duncan sat up abruptly, terrifying Quayle, who'd been asleep in bed with her. The dog yipped twice, then whimpered, and she reached out a hand to calm him, bringing him over the blankets on to her lap.
Petting the dog absently, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She hated it when she couldn't sleep, and she' d made a resolution that she wasn't going to drink even a drop of anything to make her nod off. The last time she'd had a drink was St Patrick's Day, and look where that had gotten her.
To right here.
The couple who lived in the unit above her – Janet and Wayne – were silent now, though from the sound of it, they'd had a hell of a good night. Actually, it had been like one of those scenes in the movies where the couple next door let out all the stops and just completely went for it. Perhaps Janet and Wayne didn't realize that Sam had come home. Maybe they didn't think sound carried that well through the old building. Regardless, they put on some show – pretty much the complete range of the audio spectrum – vocals, screams, thuds, creaking springs, sighs and moans, you name it. In the movies, it was often pretty funny.
For Sam, tonight, it wasn't. It was damn near tragic, she thought.
But she wasn't going to panic. She was a mature woman and if fate had not supplied her with a mate after all this time, she had dealt with it, made a successful life for herself. The men had come and gone, a few steadies, a fiance once for a couple of weeks, but for the past four or five years, she'd simply decided to stop pursuing it, stop worrying about it, concentrate on her career and let whatever was going to happen in her love-life simply happen. The problem was that nothing significant had happened.
Not until Wes Farrell.
She hadn't been with him more than two hours, but in that time – stupidly, without any reason or explanation – she'd felt more alive, simply better, than she could remember. There was just a whole different quality to the way they'd related – complete ease, immediate rapport, sexual attraction, attitude, humor. Of course, she'd been half in the bag. But the half that hadn't been thought it remembered pretty well.
And then he'd turned out to be…
Well, what, really? A guy who did a job she didn't approve of. Didn't it come down to just that? What was so bad about him? It wasn't like he was a mass murderer, a professional wrestler, a car salesman. And the violence of her reaction to what he did – though she hated with all her heart to admit it – might have had just a tad of a tiny bit to do with alcohol.
So she did the wise thing first – went completely on the wagon. Thought about the whole issue soberly and while sober. She was thirty-five. She hadn't been lonely before, but now, damn it, she was. Well, no, not exactly that. What she wanted was another fix of him.
Christina had said to look him up in the book, and after two days of struggling with herself, she had. There was a work number, on Columbus, no home number listed. And the number was there right now on the notepad on her bed-table under the lamp.
'Shit,' she said, flicking on the light.
What the hell, she was thinking. It's midnight. He's at home and I can just talk to the machine at his office, apologize for being such – no, not apologize, don't start on that note. I'd just like to talk with him. And she'd leave her number.
But wait. He knew where she lived, and if it had been important to him, he could have come by, rung the bell…
Except that, no, she'd thrown him out. He'd probably think, with some justification, that she was a nutcase. Even if he was tempted to come back, he'd think twice, maybe ten times – and decide he'd better not. She couldn't blame him. Also, if she was really, as he'd said, the first woman since his marriage, he'd be skittish. And again, she couldn't blame him.
It was going to have to be her.
I've got to find out if his marriage is over, she thought. That's got to come first. I'm not getting involved with a married man. I don't know him at all. This is dumb.
But she was punching the numbers and the phone had started ringing.
'Hello.'
'Oh, I'm sorry. I must have the wrong number.'
She was about to hang up. She wasn't prepared to really talk with anybody, certainly not with him. She was only going to leave a message. 'Sam? Sam, is that you?' It stunned her. He recognized her voice?
She clenched the phone. She should just slam it down. Wrong number. Wrong time. Wrong.
'Sam?' he repeated. 'Is that you?'
She sighed with frustration. 'I wanted to apologize. No! Not apologize, explain. I thought I'd get your machine.'
'You want, I'll turn it on, promise not to listen till tomorrow morning.'
'That'd help. Are you still working, I mean at work?'
'If you ask questions, my machine won't be able to answer. It'll get all confusing.'
'You're right.'
'Also, I think you should know that I got my client – Levon Copes? – I got him off today. If that's what you were calling about.'
'You got him off?'
'They dropped the charges. The DA decided the evidence wasn't going to stick. He's out of jail.'
She took a breath. 'Well, that's not exactly what I called about. Maybe a little, but not mostly.' Another pause. 'Listen, if I promise not to get psycho on you, would you like to meet me sometime for some coffee or something?'
'Sure. I mean okay. I guess. Why don't you tell me when?'
'Would, like, about now be all right?'