Lovers and Lawyers

by Lia Matera

  Or if she was, she’d come by it honestly.

  George felt his skin beneath the taped-on bomb itch as if it were on fire. He’d let himself be seduced by the idea of proving himself wrong. Of seeing Jane again. As if touching her, embracing her, could pull him back through all these hard years to the good times of childhood. His longing was natural. But he blamed these smug officers for exploiting it.

  “George, listen to me,” the negotiator said urgently. “We can put your sister on the phone. We’ve got her, I swear. Just give me a few minutes, you can talk to her.”

  “She wouldn’t understand me.” Sometimes she seemed to catch a few phrases, but usually she looked bewildered and scared by what she took to be senseless chatter.

  “Well, you can hear your sister, whatever she says or whatever sounds she makes. You can hear her voice. She can hear yours. You’ll see she’s on the way, George.”

  But he knew better than to believe the man. They were clearly desperate now, knowing George would soon find out that Jane had crashed. And once that came out, they knew it would be over. George would realize he’d sacrificed his sister’s life just to try one last time to stop believing. How could he live with that? Even if he wanted to live.

  Despair enveloped him. He lied: “If you let me talk to Jane, I’ll wait a little longer.”

  But he heard booted feet on the old-fashioned verandah porch of the barnlike building. They could hear his intentions in his voice, he supposed. Oh, well.

  George had the satisfaction of blowing them up along with the rest of the people cowering and weeping at the Cattle Ranchers Association Hall.

  In the split second it took George to hit the button, he wondered what statement the press would take from this. And whether the beings who killed that cow would understand what he was really saying.

  The men who grabbed Jane spoke a language she didn’t know. Just like the doctors and nurses at the hospital, just like the nurses in the helicopter.

  That’s when Jane realized she’d understood the men who first found the helicopter.

  But how could that be? She hadn’t understood anyone in a very long time. Since she was a child. Since her father went mad and clubbed her. She’d awakened in a hospital bed with bandages over her shaved head, and no one had spoken more than random words or phrases of English to her since. Not ever again. Never till today. Maybe the helicopter crash had jarred something right. Maybe she would get her language back.

  She felt the horrible tension of renewed hope. She tried to speak, to beg these men not to fly her back to the hospital—to drive her, for all their sakes.

  But as always when she made sounds, the response was shaking heads and looks of incomprehension.

  The frustration threatened to lift the top of her head off. She couldn’t seem to breathe, as if she’d gone too deep underwater and suddenly realized she might not get back up in time.

  This must have been how George felt, bolting from home so many years ago. He must have felt like a cork shooting from the bottle, helpless against the built-up pressure. Later, he blamed himself for leaving her alone with her father. She hadn’t understood his words, but she had understood his heart. She had wanted to say she forgave him for running away. What else could he do?

  He had tried so hard to make the neighbors accept the reality of the bloodless cow, accept that it had happened, that they had all seen it, that whatever it meant, it meant it for all of them. But the neighbors had laughed at them, ridiculed them, turned their backs. The neighbors seemed to know instinctively that people who didn’t believe such things, their families stayed together. Their mothers didn’t kill themselves, their brothers didn’t flee, their fathers didn’t go on rampages. No, the neighbors had been smart enough to refuse to believe the unbelievable.

  She hoped George had made peace with it somehow. That he’d stopped thinking about it all the time, like she did. She just couldn’t seem to hang on to newer memories.

  Half walking, half dragged away by the men, Jane wished for the millionth time that she could stop believing what she’d seen. She wished she could choose to be normal, choose belatedly to close her eyes and close her mind and even close her heart if she had to. She would close anything, even the ability to understand. Even the ability to communicate.

  She scanned the sky for a sign that she could still undo it all. But the sky looked as ordinary as ever.

  Counsel for the Defense

  “Counsel for the Defense” was first published in Sisters in Crime, ed. Marilyn Wallace, Berkley Books, 1989.

  “I’m your lawyer,” I reminded him, in much the same tone I’d used in the not so distant past to say, I’m your wife.

  Jack Krauder glowered at the acrylic partition separating us from a yawning jailer. “Howard Frost is my lawyer.”

  “And Howard Frost is my associate—my junior associate. You hired a law firm, Jack, not a person.”

  “I asked for Howard.”

  “He’s in court. I’m not.” And I’m a better lawyer, anyway. “Through the miracle of modern science”—I fiddled with a small tape recorder—“Howie can hear everything you tell me. If you make up your mind to tell me what happened.”

  “You don’t believe me.” His voice was carefully uninflected, a contractor’s trick he’d perfected on angry homeowners and stubborn zoning boards.

  “You lived with Mary Sutter for how long? Six months?” Seven months and nine days, to be exact. “You must know something. More than what’s in here.” I tapped the police report. “Remember how I used to complain about my clients lying by omission? Ransilov, remember him? Leaving me open to that surprise about … Jack?” I slid a sympathetic hand across the gouged metal table that separated us. “Don’t booby-trap your own defense.”

  Jack released the arm of his chair, dropping his hand onto the table like a piece of meat. He frowned at his chafed red knuckles, apparently unable to will the hand to touch mine. Two years of connubial hell will do that to a relationship.

  “Okay, Jack, let’s try this: Mary tries to kill you and kill herself, but something goes wrong. You don’t drink your coffee and she drinks hers. She dies and you don’t.”

  His hand formed a fist. “No.”

  “What’s the alternative? Someone hated Mary—or you—enough to kill you both. Someone close enough to know where you keep your coffee.”

  He looked at the dirty salmon walls, at the mesh-caged fluorescent lights, at the chipped expanse of metal table—at everything in the room except me. His dimpled jaw was tense enough to use as an anvil.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? And you know who did it, don’t you? Don’t you, Jack?”

  He pounded the table once, meeting my eye. “Don’t try to bully me, Janet.”

  “I just want the truth.”

  There it was, the bare bones of the quarrel that had blown our marriage out of the water.

  “Okay, Jack. Your bail hearing is tomorrow afternoon. I’ll make the arrangements—”

  “No!”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? It could be six, eight months until your trial. You can’t stay here.”

  “Dammit, I can if I want to. I’ll discuss it with Howard.”

  “Jack. I know you don’t want to go back to— Look, you can stay at my place.”

  “No.”

  “Or a hotel. Anyplace is better than the county—”

  He stood abruptly, turning his back on me. “Leave me alone, Janet.”

  As the sheriffs deputy led him out of the room, Jack glanced back at me. My ex-husband looked worried.

  Jack’s kitchen table, his counter, his back door were still dusty with fingerprint powder. Traces of chalk defaced the hardwood floor. Judging by the outline, Mary Sutter had died in a heap. Strychnine. The coroner said she’d convulsed violently enough to break two bones.

  Howard Frost sighed de
eply, polishing his camera lens. I’m a better photographer than Howie, but I didn’t offer to take the pictures. Not this time.

  “Lived here yourself once, did you?” Howie’s English-accented voice was bland, as usual. A handicap in court.

  “All this crap?” I indicated the cozy Americana, the maple table, the enamel-topped hutch, the rocker in the corner. “I picked it out.”

  “Mmm.” He put the camera to his eye, twisting the focus, leaning closer to the graphite-dusted table. A cross-hatching of clean squares showed where police tape had lifted prints.

  I turned to the hutch. The drawers had already been rummaged. Old contracting bids, wholesalers’ receipts for sheetrock, receipts for Mary’s art supplies, unmailed Publishers Clearing House envelopes, one of them addressed to me. “I wonder if the cops know this thing has a false bottom.” I cleared the jumbled papers to one side, feeling for the catch.

  Behind me Howie mused, “Poisoning coffee right in the canister.” A tinge of outrage, the most I’d ever heard in that well-modulated voice. “Bloody reckless. Suppose they’d had company?”

  “Jack’s lucky. I’ve never met a bigger caffeine addict. What are the odds of him being late for work and having to skip his morning cup—” The false bottom came loose. “Jesus, Howie. Look at this.”

  I held up a photograph. It showed a young woman lying splay-legged beside a swimming pool, her hair wet and her eyes lost behind big sunglasses. At first glance the woman appeared to be Mary Sutter, but Mary’s hair had been waist-length. In the photo the damp straggles barely reached her shoulders. Also, Mary had been gaunt and proud of her wrinkly, sun-baked hide. The woman in the photo had a plumper, more youthful figure.

  There were two men with her, one lying down, one squatting. Both of them rippled with beautiful muscles. Young, Latino, dark hair and eyes, possibly brothers. All three wore suggestive smiles and nothing else. They might have been sunbathing, or they might have been doing something more interesting.

  Howie stepped up behind me. “Strange the police missed it.”

  I let the false bottom fall back into place. “Just like in the movies. Only I wonder …” I considered the photo. “A younger Mary Sutter? Wouldn’t it be great if someone was blackmailing her? Talk about injecting reasonable doubt into the prosecution’s case.”

  “Dunno. Pretty tame stuff, this. And no reason Jacko should keep quiet about somebody blackmailing Mary. Not anymore.”

  I turned to face him. His baby-smooth skin was unusually pale as he regarded the photo.

  “Jacko” had recently joined Howie’s soccer team. It had been something of a trial, these last months, hearing my coworker praise Jack’s “trapping.” (Howie was my associate, my friend. Bad enough Jack got the house and the furniture.)

  “I wasn’t married to Jack Krauder two years too many without knowing when he’s holding back. There’s more to this.” I put the picture down on the powdered enamel. “The picture makes me nervous, Howie. Like I’m standing over a trapdoor.”

  “Janet? I really would be happy to talk to him. Tonight? Or before my trial tomorrow?”

  “I’ll take care of it.” How many times did I have to explain? “If we want information, we’re going to have to shake it out of him. Jack needs management not friendship.”

  I’d never liked Carole Bissett, not from the moment she’d moved next door to me and Jack. An aerobics instructor, just my luck. Jack’s luck, rather: Fortune always surrounded him with beautiful women. (I had been the exception.) I couldn’t prove it, but I suspected Jack had been sleeping with Carole through most of the last year of our marriage. She was one of the reasons I’d let him keep the house: I loathed the sight of Carole’s shiny spandex.

  She dabbed her glowing cheeks with a terry wristband and pulled two bottles of Evian water out of her refrigerator. “Poor Jackie. I wish I could help him.”

  I took one of the bottles, wishing it had about three fingers of whiskey in it. “Maybe you can. Did you notice anything unusual next door, odd comings and goings, people you wouldn’t expect to see?”

  Carole wrinkled her darling little nose. “Well, you know artists. Lots of Mary’s friends were kind of weird.” Then, remorsefully, “I shouldn’t talk bad about her.”

  “Any drugs?”

  A tolerant smile. “Nothing hard, but sure. Mary smoked a little and did a few lines. Jackie doesn’t—you know him.”

  “Where did Mary get it?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “Jack’s in a lot of trouble.” Carole’s brain was certainly her least used muscle. “Was it those two good-looking Chicano guys—what were their names?”

  “Jaime and Andy?” Her face contorted with the effort of thinking. Come on, I urged silently, no pain, no gain. “Maybe.”

  “Know where I can find them?”

  “Try Stacy. They came over with her most of the time.”

  “Stacy?”

  “Mary’s kid sister.”

  Once again I stared at Jack across the metal table. Square of face, green eyes, black hair spilling over his forehead like Superman’s—so damned handsome. Too bad about the divorce. Look where it had gotten him. Look where it had gotten me, for that matter.

  “I know about Stacy now, Jack.”

  His expression grew wary. “What about her?”

  “Nice try … Jackie. But I’ve been to see her.” Been to see her and been turned away at the door by a harried woman in a nurse’s slack-suit. Apparently Stacy Sutter was taking her sister’s death hard. Maybe she had good reason. “I thought I’d better follow up on the snapshot I found in your hutch drawer. Under the false bottom.”

  “What snapshot?”

  “The little orgy by your pool, naked kids and some unclassic coke.”

  His lips compressed to a white line, his eyes narrowed to glinting slits.

  “Want to know what the picture says to me? One of two things: Either you and Mary were paying blackmailers to keep the negative private—and no one would want a picture like that made public, not even someone like Stacy Sutter.” Jack’s nostrils began to flare. Good: I was getting to him. “Or, second possibility, pornographic thrills for you. Nude girl young enough to be your daughter.” He was almost angry enough now. I added, “Then there’s the drug angle. Stacy’s addicted to cocaine. The two men in the picture are pushers.”

  I thought I had him, but he choked back what he meant to say.

  “Look, Jack, you can protect Stacy Sutter if you want to. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you that she killed Mary and tried to kill you. But I wonder what you did to make her so mad? Or was sleeping with both sisters enough?”

  He stood, his chair toppling backward. His face mottled, his hands shook.

  The jailer immediately ran in, pinning and cuffing him.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” Jack said from the doorway.

  I paced around the office in my stocking feet. Howie lay on my couch, eyes closed.

  “Here’s my theory,” I said. “Jack’s sleeping with Stacy Sutter. She gets morbid about cheating with her sister’s boyfriend and tries to kill both of them. Jack feels responsible and decides to keep his mouth shut for Stacy’s sake.”

  “Bit of a stretch. Hard to imagine Jacko—or anybody—being so chivalrous.”

  “Not chivalrous, conventional. Conventional enough to feel like he’s got it coming for sleeping with both—”

  “You never seemed to find him too, um, ‘conventional’ when you were married to him.”

  Tactful Howie. “If you mean faithful, no. I’d never accuse him of that. But he’s definitely a home-and-family kind of man. Marrying me when we thought I was— Buying that house for us. There’s a big difference between sleeping with a neighbor, which is a traditionally macho kind of thing to do”—I made a conscious effort to eliminate bitte
rness from my voice—“and sleeping with your lover’s baby sister. And, Howie, you should have seen his reaction when I asked him about it. The veins in his neck practically exploded.”

  “No doubt.” Howie rubbed his knuckles over a clean-shaven cheek. “But where does it leave us? Assuming Jack won’t admit it and the baby sister won’t, either?”

  “Jaime and Andy.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “The two men in the picture with Stacy Sutter. They supplied Mary with drugs. They were obviously in Stacy’s pants, and maybe in her confidence too. Odds are they knew about Stacy and Jack.” I crossed to my desk. “The trouble is, drug dealers are damned lousy witnesses.”

  “Easily impeached,” Howie agreed.

  “Vindictive too.” Last time we’d subpoenaed a coke dealer, he’d put our client in the hospital.

  “You don’t suppose…?” There was an uncharacteristic hesitancy in Howie’s voice. “You’re thinking Jacko’d rot in jail to protect a woman. Have you wondered if he might be guilty?”

  I slipped my pumps on. “Can you imagine a more acrimonious divorce than ours, Howie? If Jack didn’t kill me …” I shrugged. “He doesn’t have it in him.”

  Howie blinked up at me. “Funny he’d want you to represent him.”

  “Well, he does.” Too defensive. I looked away. Outside my window, a billboard advertised KATY’S KOFFEE KUP, KOUNTRY BREAKFAST AND MMMM MMMM KOFFEE.

  Let Howard learn the truth from Jack, later. By then I’d have Jack out, maybe have things resolved.

  “See, Howie, when we were married, I used to toot my own horn all the time. Tell Jack I was the best criminal lawyer in the state. Just to impress him, you know how it is.”

  “Mmm.” I heard a whisper of amusement. Howie knew I believed it. “And the, um, history doesn’t … disturb him?”

  “Oh hell, of course it disturbs him.” I began checking the contents of my briefcase. “He’s guarded with me. Prickly. Probably thinks I still resent him leaving me for Mary.” I bit my lip, rearranging my papers. “And maybe I do, a little.” I let the briefcase lid slam down. “But Jack can’t do any better than me, and at some level he knows it.” Why else would he ask for my junior associate? They were friends, sure, but my name came first on the letterhead. “What I’m really afraid of?” I rubbed my throat. It was hot in the room, hard to breathe. “He doesn’t want to post bail, Howie. He won’t even discuss it.”