by Lia Matera
“I’d have twisted my life inside out to please a sweet girl like Becky Walker. I cry every time I think about her beautiful gold hair caught in that little clip. I couldn’t save her, and I couldn’t even get her a little bit of justice. Not even that.
“I tell you, it tears me apart.”
The poor man looked torn apart. His natural swarthiness had paled to a sickly yellow. His graying hair was disheveled from finger-raking. His dark eyes, close-set above a hooked nose, glinted with tears. Prominent cheekbones contributed to the starved, haunted look of a survivor.
The walls of his small house were cluttered, even encrusted, with charms of various types. Mexican-made saints cast sad eyes on dried herbs and wreaths of garlic, rusty horseshoes were strung with rabbits’ feet, icons of saints hung beside posters of kindly blond space aliens. And everywhere there were gargoyles. Their demon faces scowled down from the rafters, they brooded in corners, squatted on tabletops, leered behind rows of votive candles.
“Did you have a lawyer representing you before or during the trial?” I asked Juan Gomez.
“No.”
“When the police questioned you, did they tell you it was your right to have a lawyer present?”
“Yes.” He buffed the knees of his worn jeans, rocking slightly. “But what was the point? I was too scared to say what happened, anyway.”
“But you feel you need a lawyer now?” The trial had ended in acquittal: The barn door was open, and the horse was long gone. Unless Gomez wanted some pricey commiseration, there wasn’t much I could do for him.
When he nodded, I continued. “I gather this was a big case locally. But I just moved here, so I’m not acquainted with it.” Fired from yet another law firm, this time for taking a too-strange case as a favor to a friend, I was once again on my own. Just today, I’d unpacked a parcel of business cards reading Willa Jansson, Attorney at Law, Civil Litigation & Criminal Defense. I wasn’t turning down anything until I got a little money in the bank.
The move from San Francisco to Santa Cruz had been expensive despite being only seventy-five miles down the coast. And I’d discovered that lawyers in laid-back Hawaii East charged only half the fees of their big-city counterparts.
Now my potential client, whose main selection criterion seemed to be counsel’s willingness to make house calls, leaned back in his chair. It was painted white, like the rest of his plain wood furniture, and arranged on duct tape exes on the floor.
“You never heard of the case? You don’t know about Sean Castle?” He resumed his anxious rocking.
“No. The name seems familiar.” Maybe I’d read about him.
“He’s famous for dream research.”
“Dream interpretation, that kind of thing?”
“Prophetic dreaming.” He continued to look surprised I didn’t know. “Sean could lecture seven days a week about dreams and never run out of people wanting more. There’s a waiting list for his workshops. He’s a brilliant man.”
“What does he teach people to do?”
“Recognize the future in their dreams.”
I shuddered at the thought. Bad enough to deal with the future when it got here. “What did the dead woman threaten him with? What was she going to expose about him?”
He jerked back as if I’d slapped him. “I can’t tell you that.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That was up to Becky.” He winced. “It’s still up to her. I can’t take it away from her.”
“But she’s dead.” Was I missing something?
“A carpet doesn’t stop unrolling just because the ground drops out from under it.”
“Well, but … I don’t know where this carpet’s going.” I did know I’d gone as far as I could with the metaphor. “You say Castle killed her so she wouldn’t reveal some secret. And now you feel vulnerable because of it. Maybe you should share the information, if only for your own protection.”
“You don’t know this because you never met him.” Gomez looked more than merely earnest. “He means what he says, especially threats.”
“You’re afraid he’ll kill you?” At least that part made sense to me. “Or however he put it.”
“I’m not ‘afraid’ he’ll do it, I know he will. Exactly like he said. By inches. It’s already started.” He watched me glance at the gargoyles. “Gargoyles are demons that switched sides. Because of who they used to be, they can see through any disguise evil puts on—it takes one to know one. They keep evil from coming close, like pit bulls in the yard. That’s why they’re all over cathedrals.”
I glanced uncertainly at the snarling plaster creatures, some winged, some with horns and claws. They were daunting, but pit bulls barked louder.
“You need them when you’re sleeping,” he added. “You can’t stay awake forever.”
“No.” I continued hastily, “So why do you want a lawyer?” An exorcist, a shaman, a psychic, even an acupuncturist would probably be more useful for counteracting psychological terror. When he didn’t respond, I said, “Look, I’m no therapist, but it does seem that Sean Castle is playing on your fears. Manipulating them.”
“You’d have to meet him to understand. If he wants something, it happens.”
“Okay. But do you need counsel?” He seemed unclear on the demarcation between legal remedies and mythical talismans. And I still had plenty of unpacking to do.
“The lawyer sent me his will.”
“He’s dead?” I wasn’t going to learn Juan Gomez was afraid of a ghost?
“No, he’s alive—I’m absolutely sure. So why did his lawyer send me the will? Why does she think he lives here? Why did he tell her that? What does it mean?”
“Who’s the lawyer?”
“Laura Di Palma.” He watched me. “You know her.”
“Yes.” I don’t know what showed on my face. But Di Palma had once cross-examined me in a murder trial. She’d tied me into incoherent knots and invited the jury to scorn my testimony. The experience had been akin to being repeatedly stabbed with an icicle. There was a lingering chill long after the pain subsided. “She didn’t explain why she sent the will here? Did she send a cover letter?”
“Just the will. The envelope has her return address.”
“Are you named in the will?” The mention of Di Palma made me more curious than cautious. We shouldn’t be discussing this unless and until we agreed I was his lawyer and talked about fees.
“He wants me to take his ashes to Becky’s cabin and scatter them there.” He blanched just thinking about it.
“You can refuse.”
“No, there’s a reason he did this. He’s trying to tell me something. More than that.” He resumed his neurotic rocking. “He’s trying to trap me, do something evil to me. I need to figure out what. I need you to talk to his lawyer for me.”
“You want me to find out her reasons for sending the will to your address? Or his reasons for wanting you to scatter his ashes?”
“Find out anything, whatever he told her. But don’t talk to him yourself.” He leaned forward. “Don’t put yourself in his line of sight. Don’t let him know you’re against him. Okay? I have enough on my conscience already.”
“Don’t worry about me.” If I could survive another encounter with Laura Di Palma, I was tough enough to face a mere assassin.
“And her, the lawyer. Be careful of her. Everybody that touches him gets some of the good burned out.”
“Di Palma doesn’t give him much of a target.” I hastened to recover some professionalism. “What I mean is, she can take care of herself.”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically. “Against him, nobody takes care. You’ve got to sleep sometime.”
I suppressed a smile, imagining Di Palma wrestling with nightmares. If anybody could get a restraining order against Freddie Krueger, it was her. “Why don’t you let
me take a look at the will?”
He rose and walked to a white velvet box on a whitewashed table. From it he extracted a pair of latex gloves. He put them on, then carried the box over to me.
“Do you want gloves?” he asked. “I have more.”
“No, that’s okay.”
I reached into the box and pulled out a manila envelope. The return label was preprinted with Di Palma’s law firm address. The envelope was addressed in tidy type to Sean Castle … at this address. In block letters above were the words “Juan Gomez” and “c/o,” in care of.
I said, “It might just be misaddressed. A clerical error.”
“I want to wish it could be so simple.”
I slid the will out. It looked like a Xerox or laser print of a standard-format will. I skimmed a page that distributed property and personal effects among a list of people, none with the surname Castle.
Juan’s name appeared in a section about funeral arrangements and disposal of remains. It requested, without embellishment, that Juan take the urn containing Castle’s cremains to “the mountain cabin formerly the residence of our mutual friend, Becky” and scatter them there.
I looked up from the will to find Juan standing as hunched and motionless as one of his gargoyles.
“Who owns the cabin he’s talking about?” I asked him. “Are they going to want these ashes scattered there?”
“It used to be mine. But I deeded it to Sean so he could put Becky in it. She had to be isolated, and it’s pretty far off the beaten path.”
“Isolated?”
“That’s what Sean said. Now I know what he meant, but then, I didn’t think about it. She wanted to live there, so that was that.”
“Did she realize it wasn’t originally Castle’s property? That you were deeding it to him for her benefit?”
He shrugged. “She knew I built it.”
I hadn’t been his lawyer then. This was none of my business. People signed property over to churches and foundations and gurus everyday. Scientologists bought enlightenment one expensive lesson at a time. Mormons tithed inconvenient percentages of their income. My father’s favorite guru, Brother Mike, gladly accepted supercomputers.
“Who lives in the cabin now?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been back. I think of it as empty.” He looked wistful. “If only … It could have worked out fine for everybody.”
I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. It certainly hadn’t worked out well for the dead woman. Or, apparently, for Juan Gomez.
I returned my attention to the will, one of the first I’d studied since the bar exam. “Aside from being addressed to you care of Sean Castle, it’s odd they’d send this out prior to Castle’s death. You’re sure he’s still alive?”
“Yes. I wish he weren’t, but I know he is.”
“Well, it’s not standard practice to distribute a living person’s will, not at all. It raises beneficiaries’ expectations, and that’s unfair all around—the person might change his mind and revise the terms of the will or add a codicil. So I don’t know why he’d want this mailed out now. It doesn’t promise anything, and it invades his privacy. It really might be some kind of mistake.”
“He doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Neither does his lawyer. But a paralegal may have screwed up. Maybe a wrong address in a file or a misleading scrawl on a Post-it. These things do happen.” Bad enough Juan had been asked to scatter a murderer’s ashes. He shouldn’t have to worry about the will containing some hidden threat. “I could find out for you.”
“Yes! But be careful. You don’t know Sean Castle, you don’t know what he does to people.”
But I did know Laura Di Palma. And Juan Gomez was a good example of what she did to people.
“Willa, it’s been years.” Di Palma’s law partner stood in the waiting room of her office, looking mildly surprised. “Are you still practicing labor law?”
I felt a little guilty saying, “No.” I’d gone to law school to join the labor firm of illustrious lefties Julian Warneke and Clement Kerrey. Maryanne More had apprenticed there years before me, going on to the National Labor Relations Board before starting her own firm. But I’d stayed with Julian only two years before the lure of solvency seduced me into an L.A. business firm. I’d done a year of hard time there. Despite my efforts to reinvent myself, I’d remained a hippie at heart, valuing my time above money. From a labor point of view, I’d been one sullen wage slave.
“I just opened my own firm. Down in Santa Cruz. I’d like to pick up a labor clientele, but I’m barely unpacked.”
In fact, that was why I was here now. As long as I was in the city to fetch the last of my boxes, I might as well get in Di Palma’s face.
Maryanne nodded. With her smooth chignon and velvet lapels, she looked like a model in a Christmas catalog. “Are you here to see me?”
I glanced at the waiting room’s dark wood walls, brocade couches, and Old Master oil paintings. All the place needed was a docent. The decor sure didn’t match my impression of Di Palma. I suppose I’d envisioned shark tanks.
“I’ve been trying to reach Laura Di Palma. I’ve left several voice-mail messages and I haven’t gotten a response. I thought I’d drop in and see if I could catch her.”
Maryanne seemed to stop breathing, tensing as if she were listening for something. “I’m sorry, Laura’s taken the week off to take care of some family matters. Can I help you?”
“Possibly.”
Maryanne nodded slightly, motioning me to follow her down a parquet corridor. Halfway down, a door labeled “Laura Di Palma” was ajar. In an office splashed with bright colors, a lanky man sat at a glass desk, holding his bowed head. Maryanne sped up, leading me to an office at the end of the hall.
I settled into a wing chair. Jeez, her office looked like a palace library.
“Laura Di Palma sent a copy of a will to Juan Gomez, my client. Among other things, the will asks him to scatter the ashes of her client, Sean Castle. The envelope is addressed to Mr. Gomez at his house, care of Sean Castle.”
Maryanne shook her head slightly. “How odd.” Neither of us stated the obvious, that sending the will to someone named in it denied Castle the confidentiality he might reasonably expect. “I assume it was misaddressed, and that she intended to send it to Sean Castle. Your client’s name is Gomez? I’m sorry if he was disturbed by it.”
I sighed. “Disturbed is the least of it. He worries about how Castle got the address. He’s basically hiding from the man. And I need to know if this office got the address from Castle, or vice-versa, or what. Find out what’s behind this.”
“Well, I can’t speak for Laura. But maybe I can find out if it was a clerical error.” She looked bothered. Because the office might have to notify Castle? Because she shouldn’t have to clean up Di Palma’s mess?
“I’d like to talk to Ms. Di Palma myself. My client really needs some assurance that Mr. Castle’s not making some kind of veiled threat.” After the creepy tale Juan had told, I could use a little reassurance myself. “You know Gomez testified against Castle?”
“No, I don’t remember that. I really don’t know much about Sean Castle, except that Laura represented him last year. But I’ll ask her to—” She caught her breath, looking beyond me. “Sandy?” Her tone was bracing.
The lanky man I’d glimpsed in Di Palma’s office was now standing in the doorway. A wide mouth and long dimples might ordinarily have been the focus of his thin face. But at this moment, gloom furrowed his brows and narrowed his blue eyes to a wince. He pushed sand-colored hair off his forehead, looking like Gary Cooper in some thirties melodrama.
“Did I hear you mention Laura?” His voice was deep and slightly Southern in inflection. “Anything I can help with?”
Maryanne glanced at me.
He continued standing there, so I said, “I’ve been
trying to get hold of Ms. Di Palma.”
The man entered, taking the wing chair beside mine. “About?”
“Sandy, I don’t think this is—”
“What about?” he repeated.
“Are you an associate of hers?” I wondered.
“Willa Jansson, Sandy Arkelett. Sandy handles our private investigations.” Maryanne’s lips remained parted, as if she were on the brink of saying more.
I watched her uncertainly. Arkelett worked for her firm, this should be her call.
Finally, she told him, “Laura apparently sent Sean Castle’s will to one of his beneficiaries.”
Arkelett’s brows rose.
“Juan Gomez. He’s my client,” I added. “He’d like to know why the will was sent to him. He and Mr. Castle were involved in a case she tried.”
“I know Castle. I did the legwork on that case.”
“Have you seen him lately? Do you know if the will was sent at his request?”
“Laura didn’t tell me about any will.” Arkelett was talking to Maryanne now. “You?”
Maryanne shook her head.
“Could it be a phony?” He reached a long arm across the desk as if to take the will from Maryanne.
“My client didn’t want me to make a copy,” I explained. I didn’t add that he’d nearly come unglued at the prospect of my becoming cursed by it. “It looked like a standard document with a number of bequests. It asks my client to scatter Castle’s ashes.”
“And it got sent to…?”
“Juan Gomez.”
He scowled. “I’ll try and get a hold of Castle for you. Do you have a business card?”
I was a little surprised. It would certainly be more usual to contact Di Palma, wherever she was, before going behind her back to question her clients. Nevertheless, I fished two brand new cards out of my bag, handing one to Arkelett and one to Maryanne.
“Law school murders,” Arkelett said, reading my card. “You were one of the witnesses.”
I felt myself trying to scoot back the heavy wingchair.