Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  “Gaylord is a nine,” said Nicholas. “I’m a five.”

  “Nicholas is a five and I’m only a two?”

  “Well, keep out of trouble,” said Gaylord, “and maybe you’ll rise. We can teach you how to see it, if that’s what you really want. There are novice meetings in our temporary headquarters every Wednesday night at eight.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, tossing it into the clutter of my desk. “That’s all, I guess,” he said, slapping his chair armrests and standing. Nicholas stood too. “Be a good boy, Victor, and maybe I won’t have to use the sword once again. It is so wasteful when we are forced to relive the calamities of our past lives over and over again. We’ll be in touch.”

  With a nod from Gaylord they turned and walked out of my office. I sat and watched them go. Then I picked up the card. “THE CHURCH OF THE NEW LIFE,” it read and underneath it “OLEANNA, GUIDING LIGHT.” There was a Mount Airy address and a phone number and fax number and an e-mail address. The Church of the New Life.

  I had always been a little leery of churches, being Jewish and all, but what really gave me the creeps was Church Lite. I could fathom the power in the somber Romanesque visions of the Catholic Church, the stained glass and incense, the passionate story of sacrifice and redemption. But there was something creepy about those pseudomodern, calorie-reduced, image-cleansed, whitewashed churches that were springing up left and right. Glass cathedrals selling salvation and tee shirts. Betty Crocker as Madonna, Opie as child. And then there were those super-cleansed New Age halls, so scrubbed and shined that God had been washed right out of them, leaving crystals and pyramids and channeled entities from the fourteenth century to take His place. That was where I figured the Church of the New Life belonged. My new pals Gaylord and Nicholas were even creepier than I had thought. And none too bright either.

  I mean, why would anyone bother to threaten someone off a case? Why not just put up a neon sign that flashed, “LOOK HERE FOR GOLD?” If I had still had doubts that there was something of interest to be found in Jacqueline Shaw’s death before my run-in with the apostles of the Church of the New Life, I had none anymore. And as I thought about the meeting and about my two new friends, the suspicion that had been hounding me, the suspicion that there was my very own way into the Reddman fortune, suddenly burst into the open and snatched my attention out of the air in its teeth and wrestled it to the ground. The route had been so obvious, so clear, that I hadn’t seen it. And now that I did I felt something ethereal flow through me. I grew light, almost light enough to float. I could barely remain seated in the chair as I felt myself suffused until bursting with the giddy sensation of pure pure possibility.

  12

  WHEN I HAD TOLD GAYLORD I took a keen professional interest in other people’s tragedy, it hadn’t been just banter. I am a lawyer and so tragedy is my business. Riches lurk for me in the least likely of places, in that dropped package of explosives at the railway depot, in that cup of drive-through coffee that scalds the thighs, in the airplane engine that bursts into a ball of flame mid-flight. Think of your worst nightmare, your most dreaded calamity, think of injury and anguish and death and know that for me it represents only so much profit, for I am your lawyer, the alchemist of your tragedy.

  I had seemingly forgotten this, forgotten that one case can make a lawyer wealthy, one client, one fact pattern, one complaint. In delving into the death of Jacqueline Shaw I had belted myself too tightly inside the trench coat of Philip Marlowe and had forgotten that I was a lawyer first and foremost and that a lawyer, first and foremost, looks after the bottom line. You can make money charging $185 an hour, as long as you work like a dog and keep your expenses low, good money, but that’s not how lawyers get stinkingly rich. Lawyers get stinkingly rich by taking a percentage of a huge lawsuit based on somebody else’s tragedy, and that’s exactly what I meant to do.

  Caroline Shaw thought someone had murdered her sister, Jacqueline, and had hired me to find out who. After looking it over it seemed to me that she might just be right, and if Jacqueline was murdered I could figure out the motive right off—money, and lots of it. Why ever would you kill an heiress if it wasn’t for the money? Caroline Shaw had only hired me to find the murderer, but I had other ideas. A wrongful death action against the killer would take back whatever had been gained by the killing and whatever else the killer owned, with a third going to the lawyers. All I needed was for Jacqueline Shaw to have been murdered for her money and for me to find the killer and for me to get Caroline to sign a fee agreement and for me to dig up enough evidence to win my case and take my third of the killer’s fortune, which in itself would be a fortune. Long shots all, to be sure, but that never stopped me from returning my Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entry twice a year.

  I was on my knees picking up tiny shards of glass and placing them on a piece of cardboard, thinking it all through, when Beth showed up.

  “Redecorating?” she asked.

  “Just some friendly visitors from the Twilight Zone trying to scare me off the Jacqueline Shaw case.”

  “Are you scared off?”

  “Hardly.”

  I stood up and dumped the glass fragments into the trash can where they tinkled against the sides like fairy dust.

  “Think on this, Beth. Eddie Shaw’s money situation seems to have eased right after his sister’s death. And Jacqueline herself told her fiancé that she was afraid one of her brothers was trying to kill her. And somewhere there was a load of insurance money, so said Detective McDeiss. And when I had suggested to Caroline that maybe a family member had killed her sister she had snapped that her family had nothing to do with the death, protesting far too much. I’m not sure how the two losers who threatened me are involved, but what if Eddie killed his sister to increase his income and his ultimate inheritance? And what if we could bring a wrongful death action against the bastard and prove it all?”

  “A lot of ifs.”

  “Well, what if all those ifs?”

  “You’d wipe him out with compensatory and punitive damages,” she said.

  “With a third for us. McDeiss estimated the total Reddman fortune at about half a billion dollars. The brother’s share would be well over a hundred million. Let’s say we prove it and win our case and get everything in damages. We’d earn ourselves a third of over a hundred million. That would be about twenty for you and twenty for me.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  “Yes I am. I’m dreaming the American dream.”

  “It probably was a suicide.”

  “Of course it was.”

  “And if it was a murder, it probably wasn’t the brother who did it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It was probably some judgment-proof derelict.”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  “There’s nothing there. You’re just chasing a fool’s dream.”

  “And yet when the pot was sixty-six million you bought ten lottery tickets.”

  “So I did,” she said, nodding her head. “Twenty million. It’s too gaudy a number to even consider.”

  “I’ve dreamed bigger,” I said, and I had. That was one of the curses of wanting so much, whatever you get can never top your dreams. “How are you on the meaning of life?”

  “Pretty weak.”

  “Are you willing to learn?”

  “Like you have the answers,” she snorted. “Don’t you think karmic questions about life and meaning are a little beyond your depth?”

  “You’re calling me shallow?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Well, sure, yes, but there’s no need to rub it in.”

  “Oh, Victor, one thing I always admired about you was your cheerful shallowness. Nothing’s more boring than Mr. Sincere droning on about his life’s search for spiritual meaning in that ashram in Connecticut. Just shut up and get me a beer.”

  “Well, maybe I don’t have any answers, but the Church of the New Life says it does. Novice meetings are
held every Wednesday night in the basement of some house in Mount Airy. From what her fiancé told me, this was the same place where Jacqueline Shaw meditated the day she died. Somehow, it seems, their connection to her didn’t end with her death. They wanted me to come, but I think I’ll stay away for obvious health reasons. Maybe you can learn something.”

  “Why don’t you just have Morris give them a look?”

  “I don’t think this is quite right for Morris, do you?” I said, handing her the card.

  She studied it. “Maybe not. Who’s Oleanna?”

  I shrugged my ignorance.

  “Sounds like a margarine. Maybe that’s the secret, low cholesterol as the way to spiritual salvation.”

  “You never know, Beth. That something you’ve been looking for your whole life, maybe it’s been hiding out all this time in a rat-infested basement in Mount Airy.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and then she looked at the card some more. She flicked it twice on her chin before saying, “Sure. Anything for a few laughs.”

  Good, that was taken care of, and now I had something even more important to do. What I had was a hope and plan and the sweet lift of pure possibility. What I still needed was Caroline Shaw’s signature on a contingency fee agreement before I could begin the delicate process of spinning the tragedy of Jacqueline Shaw’s death into gold.

  13

  I CLEARED OFF MY DESK before she came, threw out the trash, filed the loose papers whose files I could find, shoved the rest into an already too full desk drawer. Only one manila folder sat neatly upon the desktop. I straightened the photographs on my office wall, arranged the client chairs at perfect obtuse angles one to another, took a plant from Beth’s office and placed it atop my crippled filing cabinet. I had on my finest suit, a little blue worsted wool number from Today’s Man, and a non-Woolworth real silk tie. I had spent a few moments that morning in my apartment, globbing polish onto my shoes and then buffing them to a sharp pasty black. I buttoned my jacket and stood formally at the door and then unbuttoned it and sat on the edge of my desk and then buttoned it again and stood behind my desk, leaning over with one hand outstretched, saying out loud, in rounded oval tones, “Pleased to see you again, Ms. Shaw.”

  It was so important to get this right, to make the exactly correct impression. There is a moment in every grand venture when the enterprise teeters on the brink, and I was at that moment. I needed Caroline’s signature, and I needed it today, I believed. With it I had a chance, without it I held as much hope as a lottery ticket flushed down the toilet. That was why I was practicing my greeting like a high school freshman gearing himself to ask the pretty new girl from California to the hop.

  “Thank you for coming, Ms. Shaw.”

  “I hope this wasn’t too inconvenient, Ms. Shaw.”

  “Have a seat, Ms. Shaw.”

  “I’m glad you could make it this morning, Ms. Shaw.”

  “God, I need a cigarette,” she said, giving me a wry look as she sat, no doubt commenting on my tone of voice, which sounded artificial even to me. She drew a pack from her bag and tapped out a cigarette and lit up without asking if I minded, but I didn’t mind. Anything she wanted. From out of my drawer I pulled an ashtray I had picked up from a bric-a-brac shop on Pine Street specifically for the occasion. Welcome to Kentucky, it read. She flicked a line of ashes atop the red of the state bird.

  She was wearing her leather jacket and tight black pants and combat boots. On the side of her neck was the tattoo of a butterfly I hadn’t noticed before. She looked more formidable than I remembered from that morning outside the Roundhouse when she pulled her gun on me and then collapsed to the ground. Even the stud piercing her nose seemed no longer a mark of desperation but instead an insignia of power and brutal self-possession. I felt, despite my finest suit and newly polished shoes, at a distinct disadvantage. It was interesting how things between us had changed. When she first came to me she was the one begging for help, but I guess a hundred million dollars or so can shift the power in any conversation.

  “Couldn’t we have done this over the phone?” she asked, exhaling her words in stream of white smoke. “It’s a little early for me.”

  “Well then, I appreciate your punctuality. I thought it best we meet in person.” I didn’t explain that it was impossible to get a signature over the phone. “You’ve disposed of your gun, I hope.”

  She gave me her sly smile. “I flushed it down the toilet. Some alligator’s probably shooting rats in the sewers as we speak.” She took a long drag and looked around nervously.

  “That butterfly on your neck,” I said. “Is that new? I didn’t notice it before.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, suddenly brightening. “It’s from a designer collection, available only at the finest parlors. DK Tattoo. Do you like it?”

  I nodded and looked at her more carefully. She said in our prior meeting that she was in fear of her life and so the first thing she did after hiring me was to go out and get herself tattooed. If not exactly an appropriate response it was certainly telling, though I couldn’t quite figure telling of what. As I was looking at her she took out another cigarette.

  “Do you always smoke like this?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like a New Jersey refinery.”

  “Just in the morning. By the afternoon I’m hacking too much. So what have you learned about my sister’s death, Mr. Carl?”

  “I learned that you haven’t been entirely candid with me.”

  “Oh, haven’t I?”

  I stared at her for a moment, waiting for her to squirm a bit under the power of my gaze, but it didn’t seem to affect her. She stared back calmly. So what I did then was reach into my desk drawer and pull out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills and slap them onto the desktop with a most satisfying thwack. Caroline flinched at the sound. Ben Franklin stared up at me with surprise on his face.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “The full amount of your retainer check. Take it.”

  “What are you talking about?” she said, flustered and suddenly devoid of her slyness.

  “I’m returning your money.”

  She stood up. “But you can’t do that. I bought you. I wrote the check and you cashed it.”

  “And now I’m giving it all back,” I said calmly. “You’re going to have to find someone else to play your games. I don’t represent clients who lie to me.” This itself was a lie, actually. All my clients lie to me, it is part of the natural order of the legal profession: clients lie, lawyers overcharge, judges get it wrong.

  “But I didn’t lie,” she said, her voice rich with whine. “I didn’t. What I told you about my sister was true. Every word of it. She didn’t kill herself, I know it.” There were tears of shock in her eyes as she pleaded with me. It was going rather well, I thought.

  “I believe you’re right, Caroline. I believe your sister was murdered.”

  “You do?” she said. “Really?” She fell back into her chair, crossing her legs and hugging herself tightly. “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Didn’t you think it significant that I know your sister was a Reddman? Didn’t you think that would have impacted my investigation?”

  “My family had nothing to do with her death.”

  “That’s what you hired me to determine.”

  She looked at me, her eyes still wet. “I hired you to find out which mob bastard killed my sister and to convince him not to kill me too. That’s all. I don’t need anyone digging up my family graveyard.”

  “If I’m going to find a murderer I have to know everything. I have to know about your family, about the family fortune, about this Church of the New Life that sent its goons into my office threatening me off the case.”

  Her head lifted at that and she smiled. “So that’s it. The chant-heads frightened you.”

  “Why would they threaten me?”

  “You want to have a blast? Throw a brown paper bag in the middle of one of their medi
tation sessions and yell, ‘Meat!’ ”

  “Why would they threaten me, Caroline?”

  Pause, and then in the most matter-of-fact voice: “Maybe because their church was the beneficiary of Jackie’s insurance policy.”

  I looked at her and waited. The room was already dense with smoke, but she took out another Camel Light.

  “We all have insurance policies, to help pay our estate taxes should we die. The trust covers the premiums and the family members are named beneficiaries, unless we decide otherwise. Jacqueline decided to name the church.”

  “How much?”

  “God, not much, I don’t think, not enough to cover even half the tax. Five.”

  “Thousand?”

  She laughed, a short burst of laughter.

  “Million,” I said flatly.

  She stared at me for a bit and then her mouth wiggled at the corners. “Are you married, Mr. Carl?”

  “No.”

  “Engaged or engaged to be engaged or gay?”

  “I was once.”

  “Gay?”

  “Engaged.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “They never do, Vic. Can I call you Vic?”

  “Call me Victor,” I said. “Vic makes me sound like a lounge singer.”

  “All right, Victor.” She leaned forward and gave me a smile saucy and innocent all at once. The effect of this smile was so disarming that I had to shake my head to get my mind back to the vital business at hand.

  “Didn’t you think, Caroline, that a five-million-dollar life insurance policy was important enough to tell me about? I can’t work in the dark.”

  “Well, now you know everything, so take your money back.”

  “No.”

  “Take it.”

  “I won’t.”

  It was almost ludicrous, arguing like that over a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Any other situation I would have knocked her to the floor while grabbing for it, but this wasn’t any other situation. She stared at me and I stared at her and we were locked in a contest of wills I would win because I wanted something ever so much more than she. It was time to lay it out for her. I fought to keep my nerves from snapping.