Beach Lawyer (Beach Lawyer Series)

by Avery Duff

  She waved at Jerome, mouthed, “Thank you.” He waved back.

  “He said we can go ahead and transfer twenty-five thousand dollars into each of your new accounts. With checks this large and with them being local, he couldn’t see the bank holding up all of your funds for ten days. Like I told you before, I want your business.”

  “I can live with it,” Robert said. “Alison?”

  “I’ll make it work,” she said, squeezing his hand again.

  Leslie handed them new-account counter checks.

  Robert said, “Alison? Any questions?”

  She shook her head, and Leslie handed Robert their two receipts.

  Robert looked them over. Each had been initialed by Leslie and by Jerome at his request. Each had been debited by the bank to show $25,000 cash in each checking account. He tried to hand Alison her receipt.

  She said, “You keep it. I’m too nervous.”

  “All right, then,” he said, standing.

  Leslie gave each of them her business card. “I’m so glad for the opportunity to work for you. If either of you have questions, you can reach me at that number,” she said, pointing to the card. “And I wrote down my personal number, too. Call me day or night, at home, whatever, I’m serious.”

  Robert was a little surprised by how professional Leslie came across when she wasn’t stealing things or going down on Gia. “That’s it, then,” he said.

  “Thanks for everything, Robert.”

  “Don’t mention it, Leslie,” he said, looking at her till she nodded.

  “Got it,” Leslie replied. “I definitely won’t.”

  As Robert and Alison started to leave, Gia strolled in wearing white jeans and a dark blue blazer behind classic black Ray-Bans. An hour ago, Robert had made sure Gia finished her business with Leslie before he and Alison approached Leslie’s desk. He wondered why she’d come back.

  Straightaway, Gia walked up to Robert and said, “Missed you earlier, Mr. Worth.” Then she looked at Alison without speaking.

  Now he understood. Robert introduced the two women. “Gia Marquez, I don’t think you’ve met Alison Maxwell.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Gia said, without bothering to remove those Ray-Bans. “Alison.”

  “Gia,” Alison said, her expression flat.

  The women almost shook hands, then didn’t.

  Gia asked Alison, “You two together now?”

  Without answering, Alison took Robert’s arm. “We better get going, Robert. When are the movers coming?”

  Before he could answer, Gia told Alison, “Guess you already know, you’re with a really, really great guy.”

  “The best,” Alison said.

  As Robert and Alison left the lobby, Leslie noticed Jerome standing up behind his desk, waving at them. Leslie steered Gia toward the exit nearest her desk.

  “Let’s book,” she told Gia, “before Jerome starts drooling on you again.”

  Out on Ocean Avenue, Alison stopped Robert beside his car. “Not even with you a week and I’m already being a bitch.”

  “Gia worked at the firm,” he said. “She’s the one I told you about way back. Jack fired her.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, getting it. “Did you two ever . . . you know?”

  “If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. But we didn’t.”

  “That’s helpful,” she said, smiling now. “They’re both so beautiful, that’s all.”

  “Leslie, I don’t know that well, but Gia, she’s a little troubled, I think. I don’t know if you’d call us friends or what.”

  “Hot and troubled. Much better.”

  “No, no, I think the two of them are with each other, off and on,” he said.

  “Hot, troubled lesbians? Keep digging, lawyer man,” she said, but she was laughing now.

  She asked, “The lawsuit—do I need to know more about what happened?”

  “Your call, but here’s how I see it. The less you know, the less you can reveal, and the less risk you run of disclosing anything about it to a third party. Then again, I’m not your lawyer anymore.”

  “What are you exactly?”

  “The guy who wants to get you back in bed. Kidding aside, do you want to know more about it?”

  “Not really.” They started to get inside his car and she told him, “I trust you.”

  In Palisades Park, quivering Mexican palms kissed the sky as Gia and Leslie took a seat on a green metal bench. “Can you believe it?” Leslie told her. “Jerome said they’re gonna enroll me in executive training at UCLA.”

  “Give yourself some credit, baller. It’s not every day new clients drop four-point-five million on your desk.”

  “Hells, no! Today I’m the LeBron James of banking.”

  “Where’s your headband, bitch?”

  “Swear to God, I’ll buy one at lunch and wear it all day.”

  They leaned back, gazed out at the ocean.

  Gia asked, “What about Alison Maxwell? Learn anything about her?”

  Leslie gave her a serious look. That didn’t often happen. “I can’t say anything about a client. My new banking leaf, it’s turned over for real.”

  “Right, I shouldn’t ask.”

  “Why do you want to know about her?”

  Gia shrugged.

  “You do have a thing for him. Why didn’t you go for it before, G? He was wide open.”

  “I told you, it wasn’t like that with him.”

  “You know her or what?”

  Gia shook her head.

  “What’s the deal, then?” Leslie was getting confused.

  “I don’t trust her,” Gia said.

  “But if you don’t know her—you messing with me or what?”

  “Listen, this past year, hanging out all the time, hooking up, that was great, right?”

  “It’s still great.” Gia looked away, and Leslie said, “Oh, I thought we were, you know, getting somewhere.”

  “We were having fun, okay, so do something for me, would you?”

  “Sure, I guess.”

  Gia lowered her voice. “I talked you into cashing the firm’s checks, all right? So it’s great you’re putting that part of your life behind you. Do yourself a favor, Leslie, and find a decent person to hang out with. And to be with.”

  “But I was gonna throw us a party and everything.”

  “Anybody but me. I mean it, and Dougie, he’s bad news. You gotta stay clear of him.”

  Before Leslie could say anything, Gia handed Leslie her Healey keys and registration. “I signed the roadster over to you. No liens, and I know how much you love it, so keep it, sell it, it’s yours.”

  Leslie looked at the Healey keys, her eyes brimming. “Thanks, G. I’m gonna miss hanging with you.” Then she added, “We both know I’m not the smartest guy around. Not smart like you, but if I lost this job, I’d wind up getting dialysis down at County. My promotion, now the car? It’s all killer and you made it happen. You’ll always be the shit to me, G.”

  They stood and shook hands, then Leslie watched Gia strolling away, across the burned-out grass.

  CHAPTER 30

  “Can we do something besides engage in all this sexual intercourse?” Alison asked Robert. It was their first night in the beachfront condo. He was pretty sure she was joking, but just in case, he rolled her body off him.

  Their three-story corner unit was on the sand, one of four in an otherwise-unoccupied building. Downstairs, the movers had stacked their boxed belongings in the living room, along with his filing cabinet and their furniture. Exactly where all of it still lay. An enormous glass slider led from there onto a front deck, and eight feet below that was the beach.

  Both of them had seen Last Tango in Paris and remembered the pad where Marlon Brando’s character and his lover got down and dirty and occasionally talked. They quickly nicknamed the new place Last Condo in Paris.

  They got away with paying the owner $6,000 cash for two months, no deposit. Rent was usually three times that and called for a o
ne-year lease with a two-month deposit. But the owner’s contractor issues brought this sweet deal their way.

  It was quieter down on the Peninsula than up in Venice. The boardwalk foot traffic stopped twenty blocks north at Venice Pier, so at night they slid open the windows, listening to the ocean pounding and letting the breeze flow over their bodies.

  Finally, they had time to hang out, get to know each other. Real time without the eight-hundred-pound lawsuit in the room. Turned out, each of them had been alone, pretty much, the last few years. Him because of work and her because of family turmoil, especially Brian.

  Straightaway, she wanted to pay off the hospital. By paying cash now with a counter check, they worked her bill down to $3,000 from twice that.

  “I have the money,” she told him. “They helped me, and I owe them.”

  Robert had been surprised she’d been unattached when they met, and she told him, “Problem is, the guys were all alike. All obvious. I mean, we’d go somewhere, and they’d throw money around and wink at me like, Hey, baby, check that out. Ready for sex yet? I’m not a prude or anything . . .”

  “No,” he said, “you’re not.”

  “But it was always the same—the guy, I mean. Didn’t matter if they were agents or actors or businessmen or what. They were all boring—to me, anyway.”

  “No bikers?” he asked, teasing, but it turned out she knew about bikers from living up in Topanga with Brian.

  “Bikers, they’re mainly two groups. Druggies—anything you ever thought you wanted—and posers. Brian usually hung with guys in a small third group: real men, but they were married with kids. Brian, he wasn’t a saint, but you’d have liked him. He smoked a cigarette every once in a while, and he’d take a drink, sure, and rode a Harley that was always in the shop. Played guitar, too, whenever he got a chance. Good at it,” she told him, “but nowhere near LA good.”

  Most days, Robert and Alison hung out. One day they noticed a five-story billboard on a boardwalk building: DOS EQUIS’ MOST INTERESTING MAN IN THE WORLD. That inspired a game: Most Interesting Day in the World, inspired, too, by the half brownie each they’d eaten, courtesy of a nearby marijuana hospital.

  Rules were simple. Each of them would pick four storefronts in a row and make that into a hypothetical interesting day. Loser had to wear a boardwalk T-shirt of the winner’s choosing.

  After a half hour of research, they met up at Breeze Avenue. Her day: buying a monogrammed glass crack pipe, learning her Egyptian name, checking into Phoenix House for crack addiction, and eating an entire funnel cake, whatever that was. He countered with: buying two pairs of genuine Ray-Bans for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, eating two dozen fried Oreos, getting his nipples pierced, and putting a henna, garlic-clove tattoo on his ass. It was close until she showed him her real Egyptian name on a genuine papyrus scroll. Rest of the day, he wore the I’m Her Bitch T-shirt she picked out for him.

  Those days were good ones. Hitting the beach; a few movies; hiking the Santa Monica Mountains; walking, sometimes running, the Santa Monica stairs; drives up the coast; breakfast at the farmer’s market in town, at Mercedes Grill by the pier; jazz brunches on Abbot Kinney; lunches at Gjusta and Tacos Por Favor; dinners at Gjelina and Joe’s, Chaya Venice, and Komodo on Main.

  These were the days they just wandered and talked. He recalled the first time they made love in the Bronco, how she told him she’d wanted him for so long.

  “For how long?” he asked.

  “Ever since you told me about Rosalind,” she told him. “At your apartment,” she added. “The day I signed that power of attorney.”

  She wondered the same thing about him. Joking around, he told her he had no impure thoughts until withdrawing as her attorney. Then: “Truth is, it was earlier that same day. When you came out of Sonya’s yoga class.”

  “Why then?” she asked.

  “I could tell you were over it. You were strong. For the first time, I could see you.” Then again, there were those shorts she was wearing.

  “Sure you’re not gay?” she asked, smiling about what he’d just revealed. For the next few hours, he did his best in bed to answer any questions about his sexuality.

  As the days passed, he learned how Alison felt trapped the last three years. First, there was her mother’s automobile accident back in Florida. It was partly her mother’s fault, and the settlement was small. What killed her mom, though, wasn’t the accident but the infection she picked up, Alison believed, in the hospital. After dropping out of the University of Miami to take care of her, and a year after watching her die, she still couldn’t find a lawyer.

  “Hard to blame them,” she told him. “Who wants to spend the next five years going after a big hospital on contingency?” She was ready then to split the Florida Panhandle, when her father’s store went belly-up. “So I helped my dad until he worried himself to death.”

  Finally, she moved out to LA, into the San Fernando Valley for the cheap rent.

  “Then it was Brian’s turn?” he asked.

  “My family died fast,” she said, “like rock-and-roll drummers.”

  He couldn’t help laughing. She did, too.

  “I loved them. I miss them, but c’mon. All of them in three years, seriously?”

  She asked about his family, too, and he told her about his grandfather, Big Worth, who settled a big spread in Gilroy, and his grandmother, who wanted to be a movie star until she met Big Worth. They had two boys who were expected to stay and work the farm, and each son had one kid apiece.

  “One of Big Worth’s grandchildren was a boy,” he told her. “He was strapping, smart, well hung, and handsome.”

  “Wait—you had a brother?” she asked.

  “Pay attention. He was named Robert Logan Worth,” he told her.

  “Was it hard, the work?” she asked.

  “It started at dawn, chores, helping Luis and the guys load irrigation pipes on trucks, shovel fertilizer. When I was a kid, back before machines made a lot of sense, we planted and harvested by hand. So from elementary school till I went away to high school, I’d help out. So did Rosalind,” he told her. “Just how it was.”

  “You picked garlic?”

  “Why I’m so strong,” he said. “Really glad I did it and glad I don’t do it anymore.”

  “Me, too,” she told him.

  With a seventy-inch flat-screen hanging on the master-bedroom wall, she helped him catch up on pop culture. He’d never seen Game of Thrones or House of Cards and had pretty much dropped out of cable after the last Sopranos reruns. He admitted to seeing the last episode of Sex and the City, didn’t know about Modern Family, was unaware of Black Mirror, and thought he remembered the Mad Men pilot.

  One night they caught HBO Boxing. When he was a kid, he told her, lots of times he hung out after work with Luis and the largely Latino workers. Their favorite fighter, and so his, was Julio César Chávez, El César De Boxeo. In the boxing ring set up in Luis’s backyard, all the Latino kids, Robert among them, would try to imitate Chávez’s style when they fought one another.

  “The greatest fighter of all time, huevos like basketballs, fists of granite, the heart of ten lions.”

  Relentless aggression, thudding body shots that dropped opponents to the canvas in agony. To this day, he loved Chávez and had always booed Oscar De La Hoya replays because Oscar was born in America, not in Mexico.

  “That makes no sense,” she said. “You’re American.”

  “Not when it comes to boxing.”

  “Okay, Roberto,” she said, “put on some clothes.”

  They hit the Brig over on Abbot Kinney, and they danced and sweated and made out and slammed shots. Even ran into Leslie outside with her wasted friend, Dougie, the dude Robert remembered from the racetrack bleachers. Leslie was drinking soda water, gave each of them another business card, and promised to call them again—like she’d done twice already.

  If Robert and Alison hadn’t been making out as they left the Brig in their
Uber Prius, they might have noticed Stanley. On a stoop across the street, drinking a fruit smoothie, he watched them split the bar. But neither of them was paying attention then or the next morning, nursing hangovers at Mercedes Grill, squinting behind shades at the human parade flowing past.

  “Did Strand Security call back yet?” he asked, staring at his cold coffee. Strand, their condo-security providers.

  She checked her phone. “Not yet. Think I might throw up.”

  “I beat you to it,” he said. “Go for it.”

  As Alison stood up for the bathroom, Stanley cruised past in a wide-brimmed straw hat, wearing a backpack and looking like John Q. Citizen, he thought. Right after that, he ducked into the Korean market, hoping to score a box of Larks before getting back to condo surveillance down on the Peninsula.

  CHAPTER 31

  People are easy to figure when you’re not using, Stanley was thinking after he refused to settle for Parliaments with the Koreans. After that, he’d driven south on the Peninsula and meter-parked at the cut, where leisure craft exited the thousand-slot marina before making open water.

  Not in a hurry as he strolled up Speedway. The lovebirds were still eating, and he knew where they lived. He’d been onto them way before they moved into their new condo.

  At first, he figured their move to the Peninsula from Venice was a bad development for him. Up on Ozone, the boardwalk was a huge tourist draw, right behind Disneyland. That gave him a built-in excuse to be anywhere he wanted near the lawyer’s place: lost, hanging out, whatever lie came to mind. But the boardwalk ended where the Peninsula started. Only one mile long, the Peninsula was three, four hundred yards wide, and its walk streets and beach were typically near-deserted. That made hanging in a car or wandering around on foot bad news. Before too long, someone was bound to ask if you needed help. As in: State your business.

  But that Peninsula condo actually wound up making his life easier. A week earlier, Stanley watched the subjects meet a guy who drove up in a white Navigator and keyed them into a corner unit using its Speedway door. An hour later, the garage door onto Speedway rolled open, and all three stepped outside. As the garage door came down, a condo key changed hands.