“A partnership?”
“Bear approached me about it.”
“That would be good.”
She twisted the ring, which seemed so tight tonight. “That would make Tahoe an impossibility, all right.”
He picked at a splinter he had gotten leaning on the railing. “I like having you close.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t watch-I mean worry about me so much.”
“Why shouldn’t I try to protect you? You get in the most god-awful messes.”
“I can handle my own messes.”
“No, you can’t.” He said this with brutal conviction.
Nina raised her voice. “You’re so damn protective, Paul. How long will it be before you try to get me to stop practicing criminal law?”
He unwound his arm from around her waist. “Stop it,” he said. “Susan and I are not seeing each other. All right? Get that through your noggin.”
“Let’s forget it,” she said, and she should have apologized again, but she was too angry about too many things and all of them were not about Paul. The best she could do was take his arm.
“What’s next?” Paul asked, keeping his voice low with an effort Nina appreciated.
“Sandy set up appointments for you with Alex Zhukovsky; Stefan’s girlfriend, Erin; his mother, Wanda; and his brother, Gabe. They’ll all be on the stand in the next few days. She faxed you a list of my special concerns about what they might say. And you’ll probably want to talk to Klaus’s investigator.”
“I meant what’s next for tonight.”
“Oh. We find your car and call it a night.”
He nuzzled her hair. “Bob could stay with his grandpa again. He likes staying there.”
“Not tonight.”
“We need to be together. I’ve barely seen you, and I’ve slept with you exactly twice in the past two weeks.”
“Don’t get mad, Paul.”
“I hate sleeping alone. I want you tonight.” He pressed against her and she almost changed her mind. But she didn’t.
“Soon, I promise.”
Saturday morning, before driving Bob to the train, Nina stopped in to see Sandy at the office. She proofed and signed each paper Sandy shoveled toward her for the next half hour.
“When does Bob go?” Sandy asked.
Nina consulted the clock on the wall. Like everything else at the Pohlmann firm, it had a distinguished but dusty venerability. Outside, a few renegade wildflowers still waved between the weed sprouts of late summer. “His train’s at around ten-thirty from San Jose. I wish I could go with him. I could check up on your daughter.”
“No need,” Sandy said. “We know what’s happening. She calls Joseph every night.”
How nice that Sandy’s daughter liked talking to her father. Nina imagined Joe in the kitchen of their borrowed house at Big Sur, drinking a beer, maybe looking out at the pasture full of horses, the phone to his ear, emanating warm, loving vibes for his troubled daughter. That was the way it was supposed to be with fathers and daughters.
She couldn’t remember it ever being that way with her and her father, Harlan. Her mother provided the shoulder while her father straggled behind her, a backdrop to her vitality. He beautifully provided all the practical things-the house, the cars, the bacon-while keeping his distance from her and Matt. Maybe his heart was squeezed tight already by their mother. At the end, when their mother was so sick and he had spent so much time nursing her, when was there time for two needy kids? Especially if you considered his girlfriend, Angie, must have been occupying him, too…
“He keeps his mouth shut and lets her vent,” Sandy said, speaking of her husband. “Says it’s time for her to decide some things for herself.”
“Sounds like a good relationship. Too bad your son isn’t a big talker.”
“I wish Wish would tell me more. I never know what he’s up to. Thinks he’s all grown up.”
“Boys are hard.”
“Bob stopped by the other day while you were in court.”
“Oh?”
“He’s not doing so good at the high school.”
No doubt he had unloaded his closest secrets on Sandy. When had being a parent translated into being a pariah?
“I should go,” Nina said, consulting her watch. She picked up part of a stack of paperwork on Sandy’s desk and set it down again. “You go home now. Your work’s done. We’re okay. You need your weekend.”
“What time will you be back?” Sandy said, rearranging the stack Nina had upset.
“Twelve-thirty?”
“Meet you here.”
Back home, on Aunt Helen’s porch, the bald happiness on Bob’s face made Nina feel better about her decision to let him go alone. She pulled up to the cottage, but he had run down the front steps and short pathway in front to meet her before she even turned off the car.
“Ready!” he said.
“So glad,” she said.
He ran back and hauled his suitcase off the porch. Hitchcock made a frantic good-bye sprint through the orange poppies and overgrown grasses in the front yard before hurling himself toward the back seat.
She had to go inside to make sure the place was locked up. Bob had done a good job. He had remembered to turn off the fan in the living room and lower the thermostat. Even the windows were shut and locked. Sometimes, he was fourteen going on thirty. That would be when he wasn’t fourteen going on two, she laughed to herself, finding a heap of wet towels forming a white scar over the hallway’s lovely aged oak boards.
North of Salinas, she started to speed to seventy or seventy-five. But she had forgotten the traffic narrowing from two lanes to one for construction, which caused everyone to slam on their brakes and jerk left simultaneously. The Bronco, tippy and therefore not the best car to maneuver, gave them a minor carnival-ride scare, righting itself just in the nick of time.
Tall pink oleander bloomed on the sides of the road, blowing in the hot summer wind. Her usual driving style, to haul it uphill but drive the speed limit on downhills to avoid lurking patrol cars, wasn’t really an option in the heavy weekend traffic, so she had time to admire the yellow mountains in all their splendor. The traffic got bad again in San Jose, at the junction with 280, and they crawled the rest of the way to the station.
She tried to imagine Paul making the much longer drive from Monterey to Tahoe over and over to help her on her cases, as he had so often in the past.
She waited with Bob until the train to Sacramento arrived, then waved him off. He would have to change there, and had to listen to many instructions about what to do if there was a problem. She rode back to Monterey wondering what the hell she was doing, sending her boy up to their home in the mountains while she remained stuck like dried salt along the coastline.
11
Saturday 9/20
PAUL WOKE UP ON SATURDAY IN A ROTTEN MOOD, NOT HELPED BY the nightcaps he had drunk the night before.
He had slept alone on the thick new foam pad Nina had bought to soften up his stiff bed. Tossing, unable to sleep, he decided he didn’t like the heat the pad created or the cozy embryonic illusion of comfort, so he ripped it off and threw it to the floor. Damn woman, coming in here, changing everything to suit herself and then moving out!
He did not like uncertainty. He lived by rules, such as the first rule he had established when he went into business: if someone was going to get hurt, that someone would not be him. He had just gotten used to her living with him, to her scent and a particular softness of hair. Then her kid arrived, and before he could blink she had gone.
What use was it, having her in Pacific Grove, ten miles away? How was that getting together?
Now, very early, cup of coffee in hand, he stood on the deck watching the sun filling in the morning shadows, the distant line of ocean in the west, and the blue jays flitting around in the eucalyptus trees. He listened to the radio news while he ate, then made the bed and threw the foam pad into the condo Dumpster. He checked his e-mail.
Damn,
but the house was quiet and the morning was long.
Wish showed up at Paul’s office at eight.
Sandy’s son, Wish Whitefeather, towered over everyone, even Paul, and weighed one-forty on a feast day. Twenty years old, he walked into the room with the insouciant glowing health only youth possessed, even if he had spent the night on a pal’s floor. His hair was getting long again, just touching the collar of his wrinkled green polo shirt. He was all bone, with a long face with a high forehead, a jutting nose, and a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed as he swallowed the last of his caffeine fix.
“Let’s do it, good buddy,” Wish said, adjusting his sunglasses. He was wearing his trademark Doc Martens and brown khaki shorts, drinking from a cardboard coffee vat. Evidently Sandy was leaning too hard, because he launched into his problems with his parents, and how he could never escape their watchful eyes. “I leave Tahoe to come here and be on my own, you know? And they follow me!”
“All for a good cause. You’re going back soon, anyway,” Paul said, picking up Dean Trumbo’s shitty investigative report on Alex Zhukovsky and locking his office door behind him. On the landing he glanced down below at the Hog’s Breath, always on the lookout for a pretty girl to start the day off right, but the courtyard below was deserted. “You’ve got nothing to squawk about. You don’t have to stay with your parents.”
“That’s the whole problem. My mom hates letting me out of her sight.” He sighed deeply. “I stay with friends and she really kicks.”
“Where are your folks staying?”
“With old friends in Big Sur. They got to know each other when my dad was doing truck driving. They’re starting an abalone farm off the commercial pier in Monterey.” Wish took the stairs down two at a time, and barely seemed to be working at it, saying, “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to farm abalone.” Paul followed at the more sedate single-step pace. “Actually,” Wish went on, “since I’m taking a bio course this fall, they’ve been able to help. They know a lot.”
They got down to the street. “We’ll take my car,” Paul said, leading to the red Mustang parked by the curb.
“Can I drive?”
Paul tossed him the keys.
Wish lectured Paul about the wild ways of abalone, which Paul had heretofore only known as sizzling breaded objects on a plate, all the way up the cottage-lined streets of Carmel. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’m still into criminal justice. Bio’s important these days because of DNA.”
“DNA’s our worst problem in this case. You know Stefan Wyatt’s blood was found at the scene.”
“Yeah. The case.” Wish blinked and came back to their mission of the day, the interview of Alex Zhukovsky, Christina’s brother.
“If you were on a jury and heard that, you’d think he did it, wouldn’t you?” Paul asked.
“Well, it wasn’t enough to nail O.J. So Stefan’s got that going for him. But between you and me, Paul, ya know, she threw a glass that broke, right? And his blood was on the glass, right?”
“The tests are even more reliable than in O.J.’s heyday,” Paul said.
“Nina thinks he’s innocent, so we go with that, right?” Paul did not answer, because he wanted Wish to maintain his zeal, but the truth was, Nina hadn’t expressed an opinion about Wyatt’s guilt or innocence. That could be because she wasn’t sure, or thought he was guilty, or he had confessed to her and that was confidential, or simply because she was a lawyer and not stupid.
“What’s the first thing to think about, when you want to know who killed her? A single woman, forty-three, not bad looking?” Paul asked instead.
“The love life,” Wish said promptly.
“Yes. I go there first myself.”
“You lose a woman you supposedly love, well, man, better go kill her! Don’t you just love male logic? Oops,” Wish said, running over a curb as he made the turn into the college.
“I can’t believe you just did that to my Mustang.”
“They made this turn too tight.”
“No, you took it tight.”
They passed under a large brown structure bearing a sign that read, WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY MONTEREY BAY. LUNCH IS BACK AT THE GENERAL STILWELL COMMUNITY CENTER.
“Speed limit’s thirty here, Wish.”
Wish slowed down. “I know. Don’t forget, I’m taking an Administration of Justice course here. Just started last week.”
Another sign said, WELCOME U.S. ARMY ORD MILITARY COMMUNITY.
“It’s a strange association,” Paul said, “a college and the military. I’ll never think of Fort Ord as anything but a base. Fifteen years ago Seaside and Marina were military towns. Monterey depended on the soldiers. Saturday night at the movies, every skull had a buzz cut.”
“Well, they had this huge military reservation, and all these buildings, and when the military mostly left, they had to do something. I think it’s great.”
They passed a thrift shop, and a few signs praising the Otters, apparently the university’s athletic alter ego. A drab beige corrugated metal building had another sign announcing that it was a “future complex.” All around, as they continued along the road into the school, noisy orange machines, expansive dirt lots, dirt piles, holes, and orange fencing hinted at an inscrutable future. A construction guy was lying in the back of his pickup truck on a folding lounger, eyes closed, taking in a little sun on his break. It was cool, though, with fog and ocean never far away along this stretch of coast.
They drove by a field of yellow flowers and trees, striped with pitted strips of asphalt that ended arbitrarily after a few hundred feet. What looked like native coastal scrub stretched east into the far flat distance except for the dirt roads snaking through it. A sign read NO TRESPASSING, and Paul wondered how much live ammo was still out there. He pictured young men and women in uniform, the rumble of tanks, sand flying.
A concrete wall studded with graffiti art celebrated multiculturalism along with FIELD ARTILLERY, and another sign warned visitors to watch out for wildlife. A few girls in shorts walked in a pack toward one of the new buildings, a science center.
“Thousands of military people have passed through here, getting physically and mentally ready to go to war,” Paul said. “Now there are these green kids, ready for just about anything else. It’s a little like fresh skin growing over a wound.”
Weeds popped the asphalt in vast, empty parking lots. They passed by an abandoned guardhouse, and Paul had to look twice at where a faux window had been painted, from which a painted sentinel, wearing a wide-brimmed, World War I-style khaki hat, smiled out.
Wish inclined his head toward the painted guard. “He’s the ghost of military guys past.”
These students were operating in the midst of an ongoing military attitude. Although the place had the quiet of desuetude, something new and vibrant was sending tendrils here and there, as bright bikes whizzed by and a student waved and shouted at a friend. “Is there any competition between the remains of the military here and the university?” Paul asked.
Wish shook his head. “I haven’t noticed any. I would bet most of the military people like what’s happening here. There’s no more shooting or scrambling through the brush. They’re all techies and administrators. Look, this is the building my class is in.”
“Looks like a circus tent.” The renovated buildings wore coats of raspberry, terra-cotta, yellow ochre, and teal on different sections, a fanatically modern architect’s ideal. Stucco covered in strange paint combos apparently meant campus; gray or white clapboard meant military.
Paul decided he liked the place. Tall dunes across Highway 1 hid the ocean, but the air held a sea zest, and the clash of colors, architecture, and cultures suited him.
In spite of Wish’s knowledge of the campus, they had a hard time finding the administrative hub. The purpose of some of the buildings remained unknowable. They asked two sets of people before locating a place with a map of the campus. Then, after picking up a parking permit, they
set out to find Alex Zhukovsky.
They parked near a temporary building that housed classes in Russian along with several other languages. As they walked over, Paul noticed how quiet the place was. Bugs chittered in the fields around, and almost no cars were parked in the barren lots.
Zhukovsky’s office was located in front. He must have seen them coming, because he met them at the main door, which he unlocked.
Deano’s report hadn’t described him, except to say he taught languages. Zhukovsky was a little younger and shorter than Paul, late thirties, with red-rimmed eyes in a soft face marked by a fine, straight nose and an unhappy expression. He had the well-trimmed beard of a stereotypical academic and the belly of a sedentary type, but might be fitter than he looked. The brown hair was already receding into a V. He wore a white dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves, belted jeans, a big emerald ring on his left pinky.
They introduced themselves and exchanged business cards, and he nodded impatiently. Instead of inviting them inside, he pulled the door shut behind him, saying, “Follow me. Let’s not waste time sitting around inside.”
The three set off, turning up the hill nearby. Zhukovsky’s pace was relentless, no trouble but faster than suited decent conversation. They didn’t have far to go. He stopped at the student center, and motioned toward the outside tables. “It’s better here in the sunshine,” he said. “A teacher spends too much time indoors.”
Once they sat down, Zhukovsky’s foot started tapping. He kept raising and lowering his shoulders, a strange tic. He was hyper, probably. How did he get through his classes? In his own youth Paul had found it unbearable to be stuck at a desk with a soothing voice droning somewhere in the distance, the equivalent of a warm summer day in a flower field, insects buzzing, sun shining, bored out of his skull and sleepy into infinity.
Of course, the instructor could pace around in front, even if he was in the cage, too. And maybe Zhukovsky’s fidgeting was a function of nerves. Paul studied him through his sunglasses and decided to be friendly.
Unlucky in Law Page 14