Unlucky in Law

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  He scratched his head, heedless of the dirt. Okay. Open the freakin’ bag. He took out his buck knife and slit through three layers of black plastic, and…

  An arm fell out. He shined the light on it, saw what it was, and stumbled back against the dank soil wall he had dug, half in and half out of the grave.

  “Shit!” he shouted. He looked anxiously around but saw nobody. Wind flowed in from the sea and lifted his hair.

  The thin female arm, ending in painted nails, wore a plain watch with a black leather band. Crouched right there, a foot from the bag, Stefan looked at the arm for a second. She might be alive! He reached out gingerly to touch the cold, dirty hand. He lifted it, feeling for a pulse.

  He was ready for the thing to start twitching, to grab at him. But the hand was dead, and so was its owner. He pushed the button on the watch and the backlight flashed on, ticking, time accurate to the minute.

  Now he should slit the bag and look at her, but he did not want to see her face, maybe see the evidence of some wasting disease or car-crash injury. He didn’t want to dream of a dead face for the rest of his life. She was none of his business! No-he was none of hers!

  Momentarily stifling his fear, anger flashed through him. Somebody was playing with his head. He should go right now, gather up his stuff and just bolt.

  He reconsidered. Maybe the gravediggers often threw someone in on top of another coffin. Weren’t there double tiers sometimes? The cheap seats. The bunks. He didn’t smile at the thought. He had gone through all that worry, dug until his back was killing him, and now, by God, he would find the old man and get what he came for.

  All the hard work was done. He pulled his gloves up tight, then lifted the body in the trash bags. Her body, heavy, flopped around like a beat-up stuffed toy. He found it hard to hold on. Horribly, her arm fell against his chest as he laid the body on the ground beside the hole. He cried out.

  She’s dead. She doesn’t care, he told himself, jumping back into the hole. In staccato, powerful thrusts, he struck the ground with the pointed tip of his shovel, rapidly opening up a narrow trench. For some time he didn’t think at all. Another hour went by. She became company, his silent witness, rolled over a few feet away and sleeping. Did souls hang around after death? What would her soul look like?

  Would he just feel it like a worm wiggling into his ear? Damn these chills running up and down under his parka-he was going to have to quit, he felt sick with fear…

  “Shit!” Hurting his shoulder, he hit something. He dug harder, deeper, like a crazy man. Not much farther down, the top of a mahogany casket showed up, exactly what he had been told to expect.

  “There you are, you damn dead Russian,” he grunted.

  The clasp, so firm looking, was not locked. Wiping off the dirt, he closed his eyes and opened it.

  Swamp air. As squeamish as a tourist on a tossing boat, old food rising in his esophagus like a tide, he opened his eyes and looked at the remains of Constantin Zhukovsky.

  Thank God. Just bones in rags. Not enough humanity left to say, Get away from my casket, you son of a bitch.

  Pulling the duffel in, Stefan breathlessly stuffed the bones in, everything falling apart as he packed sloppily, like he was going on a little vacation to Hell. Feet. The skull, with hair, the hat falling off. Bits of clothing clinging to the skeleton fell away as he picked up the ribs.

  Something small and hard fell into the coffin, and he rooted around until he found it. In the dark he couldn’t see very well what he had, but it was made of metal. He ran a grimy fingernail over the blackened surface and saw a golden gleam. The haunts were everywhere, all around him, outside and inside, and his thoughts had gotten disorganized. Fingers trembling, he stuck the metal object into a pocket. Quickly, he pushed the duffel out of the hole and slammed the lid of the casket. Then he climbed out, filthy, not caring, just wanting it to be over.

  The dead woman lay in her plastic shroud on the gravel, pitiful, frightful. “Sorry,” he mumbled. He felt her wrist one more time-the lifeblood not pumping-tucked her arm back in and rolled her over to the lip. He let her drop and heard the thud. Then he shoveled dirt until his heart pounded with the effort and sweat flicked off his face.

  He tried hard to repair the surface so the gravel wouldn’t look too bad. He couldn’t see well enough to know if he had succeeded. The edges could probably use something to make the merge between the intact and the disturbed earth invisible, but all he could do was stomp the ground and riffle around with the toe of his shoe, hoping things would look okay when daylight came.

  Bones, it turned out, weren’t so heavy, but they didn’t lie neatly in the duffel. They seemed reluctant to give up their structure. He couldn’t zip the bag all the way. He carried the partly open thing over his shoulder across the grass and stones, under the dripping trees, then threw it over the fence, climbed over, and skulked back to the car, looking around the whole time, seeing things that just couldn’t be there, eyes in the bushes, dark forms of ghosts hiding behind trees.

  Trying to open the trunk, he fiddled with his keys, but his hands shook so much, the usual jiggling didn’t work. He laid the duffel in the back seat, on the floor, stuffing it down and covering the remains with a blanket.

  All he had to do now was drive up Highway 1 and drop the duffel into a Dumpster behind the self-store place in Marina. The guy who had hired him would take it from there, and mail Stefan another five hundred the next day.

  Driving slowly along Pearl Street, he struggled with himself, sweating in the cold. Who was the dead woman? Was he meant to find her? Why? On Aguajito he turned at a dignified speed. A few other cars, lights, people. He felt comforted being around the few night stragglers still on the streets.

  He turned on some music and sank in to the driver’s seat, let out a big breath. All good. He fingered the little Buddha around his neck.

  At the corner of Sixth, a red light erupted behind his car, just the silent, turning red light, but he knew right away that it didn’t matter that he had driven perfectly.

  He should have known. He never got away with anything.

  He pulled over.

  Telling the story had drained him. “ Erin dumped me. She only came to see me once, to tell me she dropped my stuff at my mom’s.”

  “That’s rough,” Nina said.

  “Her parents were already iffy on me because of me being in jail a couple of times before.”

  Nina nodded sympathetically.

  “That’s the worst part, losing Erin. But here’s what I’m thinking. I go on the stand-whatever you call it when you get up in court to testify-and I tell the jury what happened, the whole thing, spit it out. What do you think are the chances that they’ll believe me? Because if they do, she has to. I know she’s hurting, too.”

  “It’s an interesting story.” He did tell a good story, but then many of her clients did. They all had such excellent motivation for lying, and months in jail to perfect their yarns. If a lie bought you freedom, and telling the truth bought you imprisonment, well, the choice was a no-brainer for most of them. “I’m going to go back to it in a minute to ask you some questions. But I ought to say right now, Stefan-you won’t be telling any of this to the court.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s very unusual for a criminal defendant to testify. You have the right not to testify, and a jury isn’t allowed to draw any negative conclusions if you don’t. If you do, all kinds of havoc can break out. In your case, you have two prior convictions. The prosecutor will make a very big deal out of them if you testify, which automatically makes you look very bad to the jury. Sometimes that’s fatal.”

  “Yes, but how will the jury know what happened if I-”

  “The witnesses and the hard evidence have to do the job for you.”

  Then Nina took him through the whole thing again.

  3

  Monday 9/1

  NINA PARKED A BLOCK AWAY AND WALKED PAST THE FLOWERS AND art galleries of the quaint tourist mecca
of Carmel to the offices of Pohlmann, Cunningham, Turk. She arrived at the white wood-frame office on the corner of Lincoln and Eighth by eleven-thirty, buoyed by her talk with Stefan Wyatt. The early morning fog had burned off and she had made good time from Salinas, consolidating her thoughts all the way.

  Innocent or guilty, at least she liked the client. Some clients were so angry, so distant, or so disturbed that they were an ordeal to sit next to at all. Stefan was a cooperator. The jury wouldn’t dislike him on sight. She reminded herself to try to get some young women on it.

  Walking up the white-brick stairway to the law offices, she remembered herself in her thick-soled athletic shoes bounding up these same stairs during her law clerk days. Somehow she had managed to take care of Bob as a single mom, work at the Pohlmann firm, and go to the Monterey College of Law at night. None of her subsequent incarnations, as an appellate lawyer in San Francisco and as a sole practitioner at Tahoe, had been as harried, yet she remembered those days, when she had been deeply immersed in learning new things and raising a little boy, as happy and rewarding.

  Back then she had assumed that the financial need, her single life, and her direction in law would all be resolved by now. Well, marrying would be a resolution of sorts, but she had lived enough to know that a good life didn’t resolve. It offered satisfying moments, new beginnings, and more irresolution.

  Nina wasn’t completely lacking in self-consciousness, but she found thinking about her own life confusing. Other people’s lives never bored her, though-their lies, their capitulations, their bad luck, their fates. Other people’s situations made her skin vibrate, her heart beat louder, her blood pump harder. She could do practical things, applying her intelligence and rationality to their lives in ways she never could for her own. She could make a difference, and what else was there to live for before you ended up moldering in a coffin, bones, like the poor man in this case?

  Love? She held up her left hand and looked at the glittering diamond on her finger. It had a sharp, definite look about it.

  Near the top of the stairs, hurrying too much, she paused by the window. One of the secretaries had kept a delicate flower garden going out there in the old days, and the white building that had started its life as a house had blue irises, red geraniums, and a hominess that didn’t seem present anymore in the practical juniper bushes and clumps of tall grass waving in the soft gray air.

  Nodding at the receptionist, she walked down the short hall and opened the door to her new office.

  Nina’s secretary from Tahoe, Sandy Whitefeather, filled the brown chair in the compact front office like a lion balancing four legs on a tiny stone. Today she wore a down vest over a black turtleneck over a long denim skirt and burgundy cowboy boots. Sandy ’s long black hair was pulled into a beaded band that fell down her back. Behind her, a mullioned picture window looked over a courtyard full of stalky weeds and wildflowers.

  She hung up the phone, saying, “About time. I see you have new shoes again. You’re gonna break your neck one of these days, wearing those torture heels.”

  “You have new shoes, too. Don’t tell me those narrow pointy toes are the shape of your foot. I’ve seen your feet. I bet they’re killing you.”

  “Yeah, but I like what I see when I look down.”

  Nina sat down and kicked off the high heels. “Okay, we’ll both get bunions. Peace pipe?”

  “Hmph. The Washoe people don’t use peace pipes. Get your stereotypes straight.” She studied Nina. “New shoes,” she said, “and jewelry, too. A whole new you.”

  Nina felt obscurely embarrassed, but she held out her finger for Sandy ’s scrutiny.

  “Big,” Sandy said. She wasn’t looking at the ring. She was looking at Nina.

  “It was his grandmother’s.”

  “Tradition is good.”

  “No need to fall out of your chair celebrating or anything.”

  “Congratulations, of course.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s a big step.”

  “Forward,” Nina said firmly.

  “How did Bob take the news?”

  Bob had spotted the ring the minute she picked him up from her father’s house. She tried to explain, but he put up a hand. “I know what a ring means, Mom.” His reaction had been mixed, not altogether positive, but not harsh, to her relief.

  “He’ll need time to adjust to the idea,” she told Sandy, realizing she was using Paul’s words.

  “So you’ll be staying here. With the golfers and the retirees.”

  More assumptions. “We haven’t worked out the details.”

  “Hmm.” Sandy turned back to the paperwork on her desk. “I made up the files and left a list of the D.A.’s office and other numbers on your desk. Mr. Pohlmann says the firm’s taking you to lunch. He dropped off some of his files for you.”

  “Great.”

  They had a month to work through everything, including the upcoming trial. Although Nina had succumbed to Klaus almost immediately, she hadn’t actually committed to Stefan Wyatt’s case until she had found out Sandy wasn’t just available, she was eager to take a break from Tahoe. Solid, matter-of-fact, and smart, Sandy was a friend too, for all her crankiness and obstinacy. With her along for the ride, Nina felt strong and supported.

  After finishing up a job in Washington lobbying for more Washoe ancestral lands, Sandy had come down to Monterey County with her husband, Joseph, and established herself immediately with some old friends who ranched near Big Sur, where her son, Wish, was already staying. As she explained it, one of her daughters had shown up unexpectedly a month before at their ranch near Markleeville, kids in tow, husband glaring.

  Sandy didn’t go into what had brought her daughter home, she just said the tepee up in Alpine County, actually a small horse ranch she and Joseph owned, was feeling mighty cramped these days. Joseph was recovering from surgery and needed fresh air, riding, and “no more of what that girl of ours has to give at the moment.” She had accepted Nina’s offer of a temporary position at the Pohlmann firm without bothering to ask a single question.

  If Nina stayed here in Carmel with Paul, she would lose Sandy. Sandy was rooted to Tahoe deep as the white pines and ancient oaks on her property. The idea made Nina quake. She needed Sandy.

  “How did it go with Wyatt this morning?” Sandy asked.

  “It’s a long story.” Nina gave her an abbreviated version. “Could you get my interview notes into the computer today?”

  “Sure. Guilty or not?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Didn’t you form a first impression?”

  “He looks harmless.”

  “But then so did Jeffrey Dahmer. I heard Stefan Wyatt went to school at CSUMB for a while before he got arrested,” Sandy said. Her son, Wish, had also attended California State University at Monterey Bay that summer, picking up more credits toward a degree in criminal justice. “You know their thing, right?”

  “No,” said Nina. She picked up the top file Klaus had left and scanned it.

  “Holistic studies,” Sandy said, her voice passing stern judgment.

  “Okay.”

  “Good place for kids with bad attitudes who can’t cut it in the real world.”

  “Wait a minute. Your own son goes there. Wish says he has terrific teachers.”

  “He’s not doing that holistic stuff. He’s on the vocational side.”

  “I think it sounds interesting. And it sure fits Wyatt’s style. He’s young, loose, in the tearing-down phase politically.”

  Sandy, shifting in a borrowed chair, black eyes narrowed, expressed the mood of the displaced and dispossessed, saying, “Other people have to be practical about what they study so they can get along after college. Other people settle down, pay a mortgage, keep a business going…”

  “Without gallivanting around the Monterey Peninsula, grabbing diamond rings, when they should be back practicing law at Tahoe with their long-suffering secretary. Is that what you’re saying?”

>   Sandy put on her poker face.

  “I’m not sure I need a hard time from you this morning, Sandy.”

  “You call this a hard time? Where’s the groom?”

  “Paul’s due in a few minutes. I called him on my way in from Salinas and told him about my interview with the client.”

  “That Dutchman’s a bad influence on you.”

  “Yeah?” Nina said, putting one report aside and picking up another. “Seems like you always used to promote him as the solution to my problems.”

  “Did not,” Sandy said.

  “What are you working on there?”

  “Paperwork, to do with your temporary employment here, health insurance forms, tax info. As usual, you generate more stuff to be assembled than a four-year-old at Christmas. Meanwhile, take a look at this.”

  Nina took the file. “What have we here?”

  “When Stefan Wyatt first retained the firm, Klaus hired a detective. This is his report. Read it and weep, while I finish copying the rest for you.”

  Nina went into her temporary office. Yellowing oak bookshelves covered three walls, mostly full of California codes. The stately blue leather compendiums of yore were quickly becoming obsolete in law firms. She could rely on her computer for most of her research these days.

  One wall held a big window to the courtyard with its beach fog, bees, and weeds. She sat down at the unfamiliar desk, into a chair molded to fit some other body. She opened a drawer in the desk she had been loaned for the duration. Inside, lint, dust, and moldy mints had accumulated. Not allowing herself to think of her bright and pleasant office at Tahoe, now in the hands of a young lawyer friend, she shut the drawer, picked up the file, and began to read with concentration this time.

  “So?” Sandy asked from the doorway a few minutes later.

  “Aside from its brevity,” Nina said, “what surprises me most about this report are Klaus’s notes about it.”

  “What notes?”

  “Exactly. There aren’t any notes. No follow-ups. No signed witness statements. The report itself-this investigator interviewed witnesses, but he gave Klaus a couple of no-content paragraphs on each interview. I question whether he talked to these people in person or just gave them a quick call. Why did Klaus hire this guy anyway? He’s known and used Paul for years. Why didn’t Klaus call Paul?”