The Smart Money

by Lia Matera

  With her Mercedes and her closets full of suits … completely seduced by the trappings. Didn’t she realize it wasn’t important what the curtains here looked like, or whether there were flowers at the communal dinner table? Didn’t she realize the place was no different in its essence, in its function, from the damn veterans hospital?

  Like the doctors at the vets hospital—like every doctor he’d ever met—Laura had given up on him.

  Well, fuck her. Fuck her. He’d been on his own before and he could do it again. And this time he wasn’t going to wait for a bunch of heel draggers to give him their blessing. They told him sixteen years ago he’d need “substantial assistance” his whole life. But the minute they handed him his duffel bag, his walking papers, and (like it was some big honor) his Purple Heart, he’d struck out on his own. Completely on his own, except for a month in jail. And three years with Laura.

  He forced himself to sit up. His stomach was jumpy and his head ached. He felt dehydrated and disoriented in the dark room. The door was where, exactly? He stood shakily and began feeling his way, his left hand skirting the cool papered wall. In a couple of hours the nurse would bring in a wheelchair. The nurses discouraged walking unless it was done in the exercise room under their chipper supervision. Laura probably approved; as a lawyer, she’d appreciate their determination to avoid liability.

  Suddenly his right leg gave out on him, but he caught himself on the wainscoting, his heart pounding as he imagined the racket he might have made. He massaged the leg briefly, reassured to feel hard, well-defined muscle there. His body was in good shape, all right. The problem was his brain. It wasn’t sending the right signals.

  The trick of it, he remembered from the vets hospital days, was to move what you could and pray for momentum.

  Chew off your paw and limp out of the trap.

  He edged closer to the door, using a Formica night-stand for support. A lot of concentration to do what once was automatic.

  He looked out into the corridor. His head ached, and the left side of his forehead was so tender it felt burnt. He’d been wheelchaired up and down this hallway a dozen times. Why the hell couldn’t he remember which direction to go? At one end, a glimpse of decorator couches. At the other, wheelchairs collapsed in an interlocking row, like supermarket carts. Nothing looked familiar.

  He chose to go left, past the wheelchairs. His left hand gripped his right leg, dragging it like a weight strapped to his hip.

  Turning the corner, he nearly collided with a young bearded man. The man blinked at him, obviously surprised. Hal stood there, feeling his heart race, feeling sweat collect in the small of his back and drip down to his waistband.

  He tried to remember who the man was. Someone he knew from the common room? Maybe even his doctor?

  His seventh or eighth month in the vets hospital, he’d had an encounter like this one, a middle-of-the-night showdown with a man in a white smock. It had ended with Hal’s being forcibly returned to his bed, cast into the limbo of sedation. Then a month of Thorazine to “improve” his attitude. It was like being smothered, constantly, slowly smothered.

  Now the bearded man said something to him. It sounded Japanese. Hal had heard a lot of Japanese when he’d done the gruntwork for a landscaper. But he supposed the man was speaking English.

  Hoping for the best, Hal smiled and said, “Yes, that’s right.”

  The man smiled back, then continued down the hall.

  Hal could feel his right leg drag as he struggled down the brightly lighted corridor. He braced his shoulder against the posy-papered wall to take some of the weight off his hip.

  Finally, he reached an open door. The physical-therapy room looked like a hoopless basketball court, with colored lines painted onto a shined wood floor, and mats stacked along the far wall. He’d watched patients shuffle across that floor, trying to keep within lines of a certain color. He’d walked the lines himself, his arm anchored heavily around somebody’s shoulder. He’d lain on his back on a mat, trying to lift his leg, enduring the therapist’s smarmy tape loop of encouragement.

  Oh god, he thought, get me out of this place.

  At the opposite end of the room, sliding glass doors led out to a small patio.

  He ducked inside, panting now. He’d come too far to let them keep him in this hellish bit of cotton batting.

  The room was empty, but so vast that Hal felt dizzy looking across it. He studied the floor like a map. The white line appeared to be the shortest route. He put his left foot on the line, and dragged his right. Without a wall to lean on, he felt suddenly vertiginous. He even considered, briefly, going down on hands and knees.

  “Shit!” he heard himself hiss. He clamped his left hand to his right thigh again, reminding the thigh how to move.

  Across the room, the glass doors framed a pale dawn. He could see a small cement patio circled by a short wall, and he moved toward it, trying to forget the process of walking, trying to walk as others walked, by rote. And his body finally got him there, though he’d veered far off the white line and onto a red one.

  He rested his forehead on the glass door, heaving a sigh of thanksgiving. He happened to notice then that his pants were unzipped, but he left them that way, afraid to take the time to zip them, afraid he’d do something clumsy like smack the glass with his elbow.

  He was relieved to feel the door slide open as he pushed it. He supposed the staff didn’t worry about their slack-faced shufflers trying to escape.

  The cold air felt good on his hot face. Later, he supposed, it would cool his sweat and make him miserable. But he’d survived winters of freezing rain in Washington and British Columbia. And from coast to coast, more times than he cared to remember, he’d awakened to night snow freezing his cheek to a sleeping bag. He’d be okay.

  Judging from the scattered clusters of twiggy treetops beyond the cinderblock wall, the patio was surrounded by a newly landscaped parking lot. Hal stumbled past a rock garden full of bonsaied trees. He looked down at a stunted cypress, his chest tightening with horror. It was only a tree, not a symbol. But a panicked surge of adrenalin helped him pour himself over the wall. He landed hard on his shoulder and side, spitting out grit.

  For a moment he sagged in the swirl of soot where the parking lot met the wall. There were only a few cars in the lot, clustered nearby. Beyond them, where the tarmac ended, a field sprawled gently uphill, gnarled with an occasional oak or clump of coyote brush. A decidedly un-San Franciscan landscape. Where the hell was he?

  He began rubbing his forehead, as if to summon the genie of a reply. Then he stopped abruptly, curling the hand and burying it between his thighs. He’d been a forehead rubber at the vets hospital. The head-injury ward had been a horror show of tics—jaw scratchers, nose tappers, earlobe pullers.

  He stood shakily, noticing a red-brown stain on the arm of his fisherman sweater. He pulled up the sleeve. Blood was leaking from a saturated cotton ball taped to the inside of his elbow. He ripped it off. It made him feel marked; the patient’s yellow star. It fell on a crushed 7-Eleven coffee cup and some dry oak leaves.

  He looked around. The rehabilitation center was behind him, and the parking lot stretched in front for perhaps a hundred yards. At the other end was a long two-story building flanked by square signs, Red Cross symbols, and ambulances. A hospital.

  Immediately beside Hal, where the parking lot ended, were hills shagged with dried grasses. In the first light of morning they were the dull manila of paper bags.

  He remembered driving down from the city with Laura once, passing countryside like this: low, thirsty hills dotted with oak and scrub. They’d come so Laura could shop.

  His mind presented him with an image: the interior of a store, Laura handing a clerk her credit card. He could smell a hundred mingled perfumes and see a flash of sequins as the clerk bagged Laura’s purchase. Whatever the thing in the bag had been, he rem
embered calling it a waste of good money. Laura had replied that good money is the kind cheap people spend. They’d eaten frozen yogurt in a ceramic-tiled courtyard that was supposed to fool hip patrons into thinking they were nowhere so déclassé as a shopping mall.

  Yes, it made sense. City hospitals looked like hospitals. So Laura had taken him south (he remembered it was south), to the place where she bought her party dresses. She shopped at an ersatz park; she would kennel him at an ersatz bed-and-breakfast.

  He moved toward the gravel verge between the tarmac and the grass, his left arm raised as if he were on a high wire.

  He could brood later. Right now he had to get the hell away from here.

  The grass was damply yielding, spattering fine night dew on his boots and the rolled cuffs of his jeans. It was more difficult to walk on the uneven ground, to coax the uncooperative leg uphill.

  He tried to visualize a map, the map in Laura’s car. It showed the curve of land around San Francisco Bay, and to the southwest, foothills colored yellow-green as they flattened into a dozen contiguous cities. There were no words (none that made sense to him) on Hal’s mental projection, but his brain supplied a label: Stanford.

  He stopped, out of breath, his heart pounding. Thank god. He knew where the hell he was. He’d fixed himself in space.

  Stanford.

  He recalled that it was fifty-some minutes south of the city by car. That meant six or seven hours by foot. If a man were well enough to walk it.

  He was lurching downhill now, beyond the horizon visible from the parking lot. Almost out of sight. Close by, in a low-limbed live oak, a scrub jay tapped and jumped from roost to roost. If Hal could make it to the tree and sit a while, he’d be okay.

  He touched his forearm and felt blood still oozing from the pinprick on his inner elbow. His chest ached, and the muscles in his right leg (to the extent that he could feel them) were cramping in jerky spasms.

  He sank to the ground, ten feet short of the tree.

  He’d once known a direction-finding trick involving the sun’s position in the sky. Right now, he couldn’t quite get a handle on it.

  He lay back in the grass, letting the leg muscles twitch. The rest of him felt limp, leaden. He stared up at wispy clouds and brightening sky. Sixteen fucking years. What the hell had set him back?

  He’d been fighting with Laura, he remembered that. The same fight: her conspicuous consumption, her thoughtless waste, the way she relied on others—her housecleaner, her “personal shopper,” her gardener, her caterer—to do her sweating for her. And the next thing he remembered, he was alone on the carpet, half his body dead.

  Oh Jesus. He and Laura had had an awful time. Fighting, stepping on each other. She called him cavalier, cynical, cruel. He didn’t want to remember what he’d called her.

  But this couldn’t be her doing. Could it?

  He twisted suddenly, regurgitating medication. He raised himself to hands and knees, shuddered with dry heaves.

  It wouldn’t be the first time a woman had fucked up his life.

  He crawled a little closer to the oak tree, then he collapsed. His cheek scraped dry leaves and dart-sharp seeds of rye and fescue. The smell of damp ground filled his nostrils.

  He’d awakened face down on the carpet. Alone. No matter how angry Laura might be, no matter what she might do in anger, she wouldn’t leave him like that, would she? (But Jesus, he’d said some things to her.)

  Hal squinted at the grass, rising in thousands of limply intersecting stalks. It was a surreal view, and a cold, paralyzing dread settled over him.

  Maybe he wouldn’t make it this time.

  1

  Dan Crosetti was trying to be smart, and his so-called friends were being bastards about it. Worse, I was supposed to be his lawyer, and I was a mess, running on automatic pilot and last-minute continuances.

  I looked at Danny and felt guilty. Not that it helped him any.

  He’d been to my office looking for me. But Id walked out after starting my day in a showdown with Doron White, senior partner.

  It wasn’t easy for Crosetti to get around—a National Guard truck had taken off both his legs in 1972. Today, one of Crosetti’s radical gofers had driven him to my apartment and helped him teeter up two flights of stairs on crutches and a prosthesis.

  Crosetti’s self-styled “comrade” now stood rigidly beside a bay window, hugging the crutches like Scrooge on Christmas morning. He stood as far from my Baluchistan carpet and down-filled chairs as he possibly could, scowling down at the eucalyptus trees and foggy lawns of the Presidio. The scruffy sliver of a man acted as if my extravagance might taint him.

  Dan Crosetti sat in a giant cloud of a chair, his legs ending before the seat did. The artificial limb looked lumpy and overlong beside twenty inches of empty denim. With his barrel chest and bulging arms, his round face and full beard, he looked far too heavy to maneuver on a piece of molded steel and two wooden triangles.

  Typically Crosetti, he rumbled, “Laura. You’re not okay. What’s wrong?”

  As if he didn’t have enough damn problems, that I should burden him with mine. It didn’t take a hell of a lot to make me cry these days, but I wasn’t going to cry on Danny’s shoulder. Not Danny’s.

  “I’m sorry you had to come all the way across town. I thought I was going to be in the office all day. I—” I what? I haven’t done a damn thing for you yet? “I’m really sorry.”

  He continued looking up at me, concern crinkling the leathery skin around his eyes. I wondered if he could smell last night’s vodka, where it had eaten rings into the end table and dribbled onto the floor.

  If he noticed, he showed no sign of it. Not like my banker clients, who’d have glanced pointedly at the two-finger run in my hose, at my untucked blouse, at the shoes I’d kicked across the floor, at hair that should have been labeled sproing! I looked as if I’d gone hand-to-hand with Doron White. Which would have been better than the politely seething “conference” that left my wings clipped to the skin.

  Crosetti sat forward, his belly doubling over most of his remaining lap. His eyes were milk-chocolate brown, warm with intelligence and empathy. “I thought something might be the matter. I thought we might need to talk.” He extended a hand. “I mean, we’re friends first, right?”

  Friends. I turned away. Crosetti needed advice, he needed a lawyer. He needed to think about himself and quit showing solidarity.

  “Do you want something to drink?”

  “Anything.” His voice was filled with concern. “Whatever you’re having.”

  I couldn’t very well hand him a Stoli, not at ten in the morning. But it would have been my first choice.

  Goddamn hospital swore by its “limited visitation policy”; it was hours yet before I could drive down to see Hal.

  I crossed quickly to the kitchen, trying to avoid the mental picture: the resentful bewilderment in Hal’s eyes, the way he kept opening and closing his hand as if to prove to me that he was whole and well.

  Oh, Jesus.

  I got out three mugs, carefully mismatched to mollify Crosetti’s comrade. If I’d had any with broken handles, I’d have used them. I told myself it was for Crosetti’s benefit; he didn’t need more grief from his “friends” about me. But it was mostly guilt. Crosetti would have found a more utilitarian use for his money than signed crockery.

  I filled the mugs with day-old coffee and microwaved them. I wasn’t up to grinding beans.

  Crosetti took the coffee. The other man waved his away, not deigning to meet my eye. I knew his rap on me: That my use of trendy new defenses to acquit mass murderers had discredited necessary and legitimate defenses; that I’d made it impossible for “politically correct” lawyers to evolve appropriate defenses. It wasn’t that different from Doron White’s complaint, however much the two of them would hate having anything in common.
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br />   But I’d been honest with Crosetti about one thing. Two luridly publicized murder trials had created an association in the public mind: Laura Di Palma was the hired gun for guilty clients, not innocent ones. The antithesis of Perry Mason.

  Crosetti had said, “Then we’ll be good for each other.”

  And maybe we would have been, if I’d kept my act together. “I’ve been doing a shitty job for you, Danny.”

  Behind me, the comrade humphed. Crosetti stopped sipping the sour coffee.

  “Are you okay?” Crosetti’s voice, deep and troubled, twisted the knife of guilt. He cared about me. He’d trusted me with his freedom; and I hadn’t even taken time to make fresh coffee.

  “I’m okay. But another lawyer might …” I thought of the lawyer Crosetti would probably choose, a politics-first soapboxer. It would hurt, watching the case go wrong.

  Making a political statement was fine if you were looking at two months, or even two years, for trespass or destruction of government property. In those cases, publicity was the whole point. But Crosetti was charged with murdering his right-hand man—a man who’d turned out to be an FBI agent.

  Crosetti put the mug down on the end table. His mustache and beard came together in a grim line. “We’ve got time to figure things out.”

  I sank into the couch upon which I’d spent the last six nights. I’d permanently creased wrinkles into the plump cushions. I smoothed them, not sure which way to go with Crosetti. He didn’t need my excuses, he didn’t deserve my problems. It would be unprofessional, and it wouldn’t do anybody any good. Especially not Hal—not as long as it cost fourteen hundred dollars a day to keep competent help around him.

  Fish or cut bait.

  I looked at Crosetti. Round and legless, he looked like some bearish Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men: The federal government had commanded its trucks to roll over protestors’ supine bodies, and federal courts had ruled that Crosetti (the only protestor to remain in the road) had assumed that risk.