Advice of Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 1)

by Trueman, Debra

  I drove him back over to Stacy Trent’s high-rise condo and the two of us rode the elevator up to the penthouse. Stacy answered the door wearing a big T-shirt and she and Niki kissed, which instantly made me think of Landra.

  “Oh my God! What happened to you?” she said, checking out his ripped shirt and his red jaw. She looked over at me and I didn’t look much better. There were grass stains on my shirt and pants and my knuckles were red and swollen. “Did you hit him?” she asked, and her accusatory tone took me by surprise. I felt like a kindergartner who had just been caught fighting by the teacher.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking to Niki for support. It wasn’t forthcoming. He was going to let me squirm under the scrutiny of his girlfriend . . . no . . . fiancée, who launched into me like a Pit Bull.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” She turned to Niki and put her hand to his cheek, then she started unbuttoning his shirt. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  She peeled his shirt back to expose a vicious purple scar that I assumed was the bullet wound. So much for making it up.

  “I didn’t know,” I said lamely.

  “Well, what are you doing going around fighting him, anyway. I thought you were supposed to be friends,” she said angrily, examining the scar.

  I looked at Niki again for help and this time he burst out laughing at the discomfort that his fiancée was inflicting on me.

  “It’s not funny,” Stacy said, turning on Niki. “He could have really hurt you!”

  “He can’t hurt me,” Niki laughed. “We were just playing.” He looked over at me and said, “She’s mean as hell isn’t she?” and he picked her up and squeezed her.

  While I was in total agreement, I wasn’t about to say so. I knew he was baiting me again to get me in deeper trouble. I decided to change the subject.

  “How’d you get shot anyway?”

  Niki kind of waved his hand in dismissal and said something vague about Stacy’s kidnapping incident. She’d disappeared for the moment but returned with two icepacks, one for Niki’s jaw and one for my hand.

  “Come sit down,” she ordered, and she slapped the icepack on the back of my hand, then placed my other hand on top of it to hold it there.

  “Thanks,” I said sheepishly.

  “So what were you delinquents doing when you got into a fight?” she asked. She intentionally directed the question to me and I could see Niki smiling out of the corner of my eye.

  “We were breaking into an office building,” I told her. Why I told her the truth, I have no idea. It just seemed like I shouldn’t compound my delinquent behavior by lying about it.

  She got a shocked look on her face and said, “You’re an attorney. If you got caught breaking and entering, you’d lose you license.”

  “That’s why I hit him.”

  Stacy laughed and looked over at Niki. “Obviously it was your idea?”

  “Obviously. Sammy’s not going to come up with a brilliant plan like that. And it was brilliant wasn’t it?” he said, looking over at me.

  I had to admit I was pleased with the outcome. Either way, Maddie and I were going to win big. If we actually went to trial, it would be an absolute circus. There was no doubt we’d win big time, it was just a matter of whether Maddie was willing to endure the publicity that went with the circus. On the other hand, if I played my cards right, I figured we could settle for a nice sum and avoid actually going to trial. There was no way Datacare would want what we had discovered that night made public through a court proceeding. It had the potential of ruining them. No . . . Datacare would fork out big time to keep this scandal quiet.

  Chapter 8

  A bitter cold front came in Saturday morning, dropping the temperature well below freezing. I had a fire roaring in the fireplace and I was sitting back in the fortress reading the paper when the Siamese scratched at the back door. A huge gust of cold air blew in when I opened the door to let him in, and I realized Mrs. Howard might decide that it was too cold to be tromping around the neighborhood with my muffins. It was only 7:30, but I knew she would have already been up for hours, so I bundled up and trekked across the street, leaving the Siamese inside by the fire.

  I rang Mrs. Howard’s bell and it took her forever to come to the door. Meanwhile, I was freezing my ass off outside in the cold. I could hear her fumbling with the lock and when she finally got the damn thing open, she gave me her toothy grin. The smell of freshly baked goodies wafted outside, but much to my dismay, the muffins were still in the oven. And rather than have me come back in 20 minutes, Mrs. Howard insisted that I come in and wait. She must have had the heater set on 85° and it was like going from Siberia to the Sahara, and I broke into a sweat almost immediately. I peeled off a couple of layers of clothes and laid them on a chair in the living room, then followed Mrs. Howard back to the kitchen. It was bright and cheerful, but it hadn’t been updated since she bought the house 40 years earlier. It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen, which hadn’t changed in all the years that I’d been going there.

  Mrs. Howard directed me to a chair at her kitchen table, which was so old that it was back in style again, and she poured me a cup of coffee without even asking if I wanted one. I didn’t, because I like my coffee good and strong and old people always make weak coffee. I took a sip just be polite and I literally gagged, it was so strong.

  “Good grief, Mrs. Howard! That’s disgusting,” I said, pushing it away from me. I felt like I needed to wipe my tongue. “How do you drink that?”

  She laughed at me like I was a novice. “Is it too strong for you?” she asked innocently. “Landra says the same thing.”

  Since she’d brought her up, I took the opportunity to do some fishing. “Did you know Landra’s husband?” I asked.

  Mrs. Howard’s eyes narrowed. “He was a terrible man. I never liked him from the beginning. I warned Landra about him when she first started dating him, but she doesn’t listen to me,” she said, shaking her head. “Never has.”

  “What didn’t you like about him?”

  “What was to like! He was worthless. And he took advantage of Landra’s youth and almost ruined the poor girl.”

  I’d never seen Mrs. Howard mad before, and I decided I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.

  “What about Drake Reeds?” I asked. “Did you know him?”

  “Didn’t like him either!” she said, waving her hand in dismissal. “If there’s one thing I could fault in that girl, it’s her taste in men.”

  She didn’t exclude me from the list, so I had to assume she either felt the same way about me or she didn’t think of me as one of Landra’s men. Either way, it made me feel like I had to prove myself to Mrs. Howard, and that was something that didn’t sit well with me. If she knew she had insulted me, she didn’t care. She kept right on belittling the men in Landra’s life, or at least the two that Landra may have bumped off.

  “Drake Reeds was a good-for-nothing bum. Never worked a day in his life. Had the world handed to him on a silver platter. His looks were the only thing he had going for him, and when you looked close, even those weren’t that good. His eyes were too close together – like a dumb dog’s.”

  She was on a roll, but the phone rang and she got up to answer it. I walked across the kitchen while she talked on the phone and I was about to open the oven door when Mrs. Howard swatted my hand away with the oven mitt.

  “Just a minute, Landra,” she said, then she covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked me in an accusatory tone.

  “Checking on the muffins.” Duh.

  “Go sit down,” she said, shooing me back to the table like I was a little kid. “You never open the oven door when you’re baking muffins,” she scolded.

  Even as a kid, I never liked being told what to do. Mrs. Howard had taken her hand off the mouthpiece and was about to say something to Landra, but I couldn’t resist a smart-ass juvenile comeback.

  “Well if you never open the door,
how are you going to get the muffins out?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face.

  Mrs. Howard stared at me for a second and then she burst into her toothy grin and pointed her oven mitt at me. “Your Sam is over here,” she told Landra. She was smiling at me with a gleam in her eye when she said it, and right then I knew I had her. Why it was important to me that I rated Mrs. Howard’s approval where Landra was concerned, I have no idea, but it was.

  “Let me talk to her before you hang up,” I said.

  “He wants to talk to you, dear,” Mrs. Howard said, and she brought the phone over to me.

  It was one of those old rotary phones that attached to the wall and it had a really long cord that could reach all the way across the kitchen. She patted me on the shoulder affectionately, then she walked back to the oven and took out the muffins and set them on a cooling rack. They smelled really good and I couldn’t wait to eat one, but I knew better than to approach the stove. She probably had some rule about leaving them in the tins for a certain amount of time, or letting them sit for a given period before touching them. Heaven forbid that I intrude again on Mrs. Howard’s muffin ritual.

  “What are you doing over there?” Landra asked.

  It was good to hear her voice. I wanted to ask her what she was wearing, but I decided it wasn’t a good idea with Mrs. Howard right there.

  “Waiting for my muffins. Have you been outside? It’s freezing.”

  “No. I just woke up. But I can hear the wind blowing.”

  “When are you coming over? You can do my walls today.”

  “Your walls . . . is that the only reason you want me to come over?” I could tell she was smiling – she was playing with me again.

  “Well, yeah. What other reason is there?”

  Landra laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a relationship with a woman who made me smile so much, but at that moment I couldn’t get the stupid smile off my face. I hoped that Mrs. Howard didn’t turn around, because she’d realize instantly how much I liked Landra. I could just picture her picking out names for our children.

  “Why don’t you come over now? I’ll share my muffins with you,” I tempted. Mrs. Howard turned around and smiled.

  “I can’t. I told Sara I’d come over there this morning.”

  No problem. “Mrs. Howard, Landra wants to know if you really need her this morning, because if you don’t, she’d like to spend the whole day with me,” I said.

  “Don’t tell her that!” Landra said.

  Mrs. Howard smiled. “I suppose there’s nothing that can’t be put off,” she said. “You tell her that I said that she should take the day off and spend it with you.”

  I turned back to the phone. “Mrs. Howard doesn’t need you after all.”

  “You’re such a jerk!” Landra said laughing.

  “When are you coming?”

  “I’ll be there in 30 minutes.”

  “Good. I’ll see you then,” I said, and I hung up before she could ask to speak to Mrs. Howard again. Mrs. Howard had taken the muffins out of the tins and they were on the cooling rack. She refilled her cup and sat back down at the table.

  “Landra didn’t really say that,” I told her.

  “I know,” she smiled. She took a sip of coffee. “You and Landra are good together, Sam. You make a fine looking couple. And I can tell that you don’t let her boss you around. Landra has a tendency to do that, you know.”

  “She likes to be in charge – I’ll say that.”

  “Yes, she does,” Mrs. Howard said laughing. She got up and loaded a basket full of muffins and closed the cloth napkin up around them. “These are ready!” she said cheerfully.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Howard. It was nice to visit with you.” I normally would have said it just to be polite, but in this case it was actually true.

  “Yes it was. Thank you, Sam.”

  She walked me to the door and I layered up again. I had my gloves in one hand and the basket of muffins in the other and I opened the door to a blast of freezing air. It had started to sleet and the grass was covered with a thin layer of white that looked almost like snow. Mrs. Howard stepped outside to check it out and she must have missed the last step, because she went teetering off to the left and was falling, headed straight for a wrought iron post. Luckily, she regained her balance just in time, but evidently she overcompensated, and it sent her tottering off in another direction, this time towards a big potted plant in the corner. I fumbled with my gloves and the basket of muffins and lunged to catch her, when without warning she changed directions yet again and teetered off in a whole different direction altogether. She looked like a drunk old man stumbling all over the place. She had stumbled out of my reach and this time, she was headed right for a 3-foot drop off, and I was helpless to do anything. The whole thing from when she missed the step to when she started over the edge happened so fast, but from then on, things went in slow motion. She seemed to hang in the air forever as she fell, and when she landed there was a sickening thud. How I heard it over my yelling, I’ll never know, but it was a sound that I’ll never forget.

  “Mrs. Howard!” I dropped the basket of muffins and my gloves and jumped off the porch to see how bad it was. The ground was wet, so that was some consolation, but there was no grass to cushion the fall.

  “Mrs. Howard!” I was kneeling down beside her and my heart was pounding like a drum. She had landed on her side and she rolled over onto her back and looked up at me with a shocked expression on her face.

  “Well, how did that happen?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. What hurts?” I said, looking her over.

  She lay there thinking about it. “I’m not sure. Help me up and I’ll let you know.” I hooked my arm around her and helped her to her feet and she just kind of stood there, I think trying to figure out if she was hurt.

  “Did you break anything?”

  “I don’t think so. My shoulder hurts, but I think it’s okay.”

  “Let’s get you inside,” I said, and I scooped her up and started carrying her back to the house.

  “Put me down, Sam!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to hurt yourself!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I can walk on my own! Put me down!”

  “Pipe down, Mrs. Howard. You’re going to stir up the whole neighborhood and they’re going to think something’s going on between us. Then Landra’s going to get all jealous . . .”

  She laughed, but continued to protest until I got her inside and set her down on her couch. Her hair had come out of her bun in a couple of places and there was mud all over her. She looked like a wild woman, and if I hadn’t been so worried I probably would have laughed out loud.

  “Man, you’re a mess,” I told her, trying to wipe some mud off of her arm. “Can you move everything?”

  She systematically checked to see if everything was working, ending at the shoulder she had complained of earlier. “My shoulder’s pretty sore.”

  I took the muffler I had wrapped around my neck and tied the ends together and made a sling out of it, then I helped her get it over her head and rest her arm in it. “I think we better take you to the emergency room,” I told her.

  “No. It’ll be fine,” she said. She was putting on a brave face, but I knew that she was flustered badly. Hell, I was flustered badly, and Mrs. Howard was 80 years old – she had to be.

  We argued back and forth whether she should be checked out by a doctor and finally agreed to call Landra to get her opinion on the matter. I caught her walking out the door to come to my house and I explained what had happened as objectively as I could. She hung up and was on Mrs. Howard’s doorstep in less than three minutes.

  “She fell off that?” she said in disbelief. “Oh my God! She could have killed herself.”

  “No shit. You should have seen it,” I told her. “She was all over the place.”

  I retraced Mrs. Howard’s steps and showed Landra how she went from one end of the porch to the other
before taking the plunge over the edge, and she stood there with her mouth open shaking her head. We went inside and Landra went straight over to Mrs. Howard and sat down beside her. Mrs. Howard looked embarrassed.

  “Are you okay?” Landra asked, looking her over.

  “My shoulder hurts, but other than that and a bruised ego, I think I’m fine. You might check on Sam though. Bless his heart, I scared him to death.” They both looked at me and smiled.

  We stayed there for the next hour while Landra helped Mrs. Howard get cleaned up. The old woman refused to see a doctor, in spite of the fact that both Landra and I thought she should, so Landra gave her something to take care of the aches and pains that were already setting in. By the time we got out of there I felt like I needed a sedative myself. We left Mrs. Howard lying in her bed resting with Landra promising to check on her regularly, and went back to my house. I’d forgotten all about the Siamese, but he was sitting on the hearth right where I’d left him.

  “Oh,” Landra said surprised. “Have you and Siam become friends?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “I only let him in because it’s so cold outside.”

  She came over and put her arms around my waist and kissed me. “I think Mrs. Howard has a crush on you.”

  “Grooooss! Don’t tell me that!” I unwrapped her arms and pushed her away, and she laughed and pulled me back and kissed me again.

  “I have a crush on you too,” she said.

  “Well, that I can handle.” I picked her up and carried her back to my fortress and sat down on the couch with her in my lap and I gave her a good long kiss that I hoped expressed how much I’d missed her. And I had missed her. Undeniably. I held her face in my hands and looked at her. “You are so pretty.”

  “You’re not getting sentimental on me, are you Sam?” she said smiling. She traced the outline of my face with her finger, then gave me that really light kiss that always got to me.