Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  Shannon barked a hard laugh. Laurie sat up from a heretofore slouch. And I choked on my coffee.

  Vince stubbed his unsmoked cigarette out in the ashtray. Then he looked directly at me again as he lifted Shannon’s matches from the table. “What’s this?” He pretended to study the matchbook cover. “The Fez? Is that what this says?”

  “I got it from a defendant in lockup,” lied Shannon.

  “You’re all pushing my envelope,” he said. He kicked his chair back and stood, rattling the table settings. “Just remember, I can fire the lot of you.” He lumbered away.

  “He’s never said the F word before,” whispered Laurie. “Do you think Jeff told him already?”

  “Nah,” said Shannon. “We’d have been fired and fucked before he even sat down. The question is, do we show that little prick Jeff our soft underbelly and beg him not to tell Vince? Or do we just leave it be and see what happens?”

  I knew the answer clear as rain: Tell Vince ASAP. Lay out our vulnerabilities on direct to save ourselves from a fatal cross-exam wherein we’d be serving time for obstruction of justice while the freaking murderer went free after a mistrial.

  But instead I said, “Let’s tuck in our shirts and wait a bit.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Beaten to the Punch

  BACK AT THE OFFICE, with a renewed feeling of resolve I flipped open the Hastings file, ready to call the detective assigned to the case and go over the evidence with him piece by piece. I picked up my phone and began dialing the station when Vince’s face appeared in my doorway like the Ghost of Christmas Future.

  “My office. Now,” he said without looking in my eyes.

  I replaced the receiver gently as Vince marched away. Like a soldier ready for inspection, I grabbed my blazer and followed Vince to his office down the hall.

  When I arrived he was already sitting at his desk looking down at a closed file folder.

  “Sit,” he said.

  I eased myself into one of the four burgundy leather chairs flanking his eight-foot desk and fingered the brass upholstery tacks as Vince took his time getting to the point. This make-them-sweat routine was not Vince’s style. He usually got right to the punch, literally and figuratively, when he was laying on bad news. And this tête-à-tête, I knew, was not a convivial hi-how-are-you visit.

  “I liked you, Meloni. I really did.”

  I instantly noted his use of the past tense.

  “I thought you could be one of my stars, because you had something the others lacked. A certain . . .”

  “Flair? Style?” I was smiling. Vince wasn’t.

  “But I should have known when you silenced that e on your last name you thought you were too good for us here at the AG’s office.”

  “Vince—?”

  “Shut up and let me finish.” He took a deep breath but he still wouldn’t look me in the eyes. If I were a defendant and he were my jury, I’d be looking at serious jail time.

  “Jeff just left here. Where were you the night Hastings was murdered?”

  There was no point in lying. People like Jeff Kendall don’t get rejected by someone like me without serving up a healthy dollop of hot revenge.

  “All right. Okay.” I breathed deep, relieved that I could finally confess to Vince, but scared as hell because I knew I should have told him sooner.

  “I saw Hastings get dumped. A second later the SUV slams into the body and it flies across the street into the parked car. It was dark and happened so fast that I couldn’t even tell you what color the car was.”

  “What the fuck were you thinking!” He exploded. “Why didn’t you call the cops? Or me? Or even your girlfriends? Christ almighty, even the paralegal Beth would have advised you not to run. But what do you do? You go home and hope no one finds out.”

  He didn’t know about the girls.

  “And where were they anyway? You’re never without your panty crew.”

  “I don’t answer for anyone but myself.”

  “Is that so? Then you’re all fired.”

  “Wait a goddamn minute—” I sprang from my chair, fed by the fury I was feeling for Jeff Kendall. “We can get through this, Vince. We can.”

  He waited in silence while I tried to figure out how to dirty the truth with another lie.

  “I worked late. I was hungry and didn’t feel like going home to eat alone, so I went to the Fez. There aren’t too many other places with their kitchens open after eleven. I had a quick bite and was on my way back to my car at the lot when Hastings happened. I got scared. I was actually trying to protect this office—and the case. And I swear, if I had seen anything the cops could use to find the guy, I never would have run. I’ve been over it a million times in my head—Christ, I’ve been having nightmares about it—I didn’t see a damn thing that could help the case. Nothing!”

  “So it was late and you were hungry and you picked the Fez to eat at. Haven Brothers trailer is open till two, but . . . oh, wait . . . Haven Brothers doesn’t have a liquor license and you probably needed to satisfy your four-drink-a-night habit too, right?”

  “Well . . . that was the other reason I didn’t stick around . . . I’d had a few drinks . . .”

  Vince stood, kicking his chair out from behind him. “You are really pushing my buttons, Meloni.”

  He was quiet for a minute. Then he asked, “What happened with Carlyle last night?”

  Was he changing gears? Could I actually get past this without much flak?

  “I did what you wanted. I gave him my numbers and told him to call me. I think he got the idea I’d help him out any way I could. He was pretty nice actually.”

  “So he bought it? That you’d betray me for him?”

  “I think so, Vince. But then I thought Jeff Kendall liked me, and he betrayed me, so I’m a lousy judge of character, aren’t I?”

  “Jeff didn’t betray you. He showed me more loyalty than you did by running from the scene of a crime.” He began pacing behind his desk. “I want you to take some time off, Meloni. I’m putting you on unpaid leave.”

  Vince wasn’t much of a kidder, but I gave it a shot anyway. “Vince, that’s not even funny.”

  His pacing stopped. Slowly he lowered himself into his chair and then refused to look at me as he spoke softly. “When’s the last time you knew me to be a comedian?”

  “Unpaid leave until when?”

  Vince leaned back in his chair calmly. Much too calmly.

  “Indefinitely. I’ve got to think this thing through.”

  “Come on, Vince.”

  He bolted up straight, angry that I was even trying to put up a defense.

  “An Italian girl from good solid parents who give you a home and a good education, and what do you do? You spit in their faces and try to Anglicize your name by dropping the last vowel. I should have known you’d spit in my face one day too. It’s all about loyalty and respect. And you have no respect for me because you respect wet dicks like Carlyle and Jeff Kendall.”

  “Spit in your face? No respect? You told me to play nice with Carlyle. I did what you wanted.”

  “Too well, I think. I’m done for now. You can leave.”

  “Vince, this is my job we’re talking about. My career!”

  “You want some career advice? Go talk to nice guy Carlyle. Maybe the dean can give you some career advice. And while you’re at it, maybe he can tell you who killed the Hastings girl.”

  “What’s this about? It can’t just be about Hastings and a few drinks at the Fez. I don’t believe this.”

  Vince shot up from his chair and threw a volume of the Rhode Island General Laws across the room, just missing me by a thin page. “You left the scene of a crime—a murder! And even after you knew Jeff saw you, you still didn’t come straight to me. You put the integrity of this entire office in jeopardy. Now get out of here. And on your way out, send Shannon in. She’s getting the Hastings case.”

  It took a few seconds to unfreeze and move but when I finally trod out of Vi
nce’s office he was asking his secretary to call Shannon in. I headed her off at the pass.

  “Jeff told him. Admit nothing. I swore I was alone. No point in all of us taking the hit. He suspended me without pay.”

  Shannon started to laugh until she saw the sick look on my face. Then she twirled to the wall and slammed her fist hard against it. “Oh fuck, Mari. Fuck!”

  “I’ll tell Laurie and Beth. Then I’m going to see Jeff. We’ve got to make sure he shuts his mouth about the rest of you.”

  I made a pit stop with Laurie and Beth and then went to Jeff ’s office.

  Uncharacteristically, he was in early. Jeff didn’t usually saunter in until ten unless he had the rare court appearance. Perhaps he had set his alarm early that morning to have his chat with Vince and then witness my subsequent hanging.

  He was hunched over his desk reading the New England Law Journal.

  “Good morning, Jeff. Are you still trying to nail down that fine distinction between murder one and jaywalking?”

  He looked up, expressionless, and then went back to his paper. “What do you want?”

  I stared at this man, trying to recognize something familiar in him. After all, hadn’t we been lovers? Then I realized that I didn’t like myself when I was around Jeff Kendall. He made me question my own worth.

  “Jeff, tell me. What’s it like to be an asshole? Because I’ve always aspired to be one but I could never master it as well as you.”

  He sat back and laughed. “Years of inbreeding,” he said. “Sensitivity becomes a recessive gene and then you drown the softhearted ones at birth.” He was still smiling. “I had an obligation to inform my boss about one of the cases this office is prosecuting. Anything else, Counselor?”

  “And you knew he might fire me over this? You knew and yet you still told him without coming to me first.”

  With the emotional intensity of dry ice, Jeff didn’t raise a cool eyebrow. “He fired you? Actually I’m surprised he went that far. He’s always had a certain familial affection for you.”

  “I’m suspended without pay. And for the record, the others were not with me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Marianna, I didn’t really see anyone else. Vince can call them in and ask them whatever he wants. I did what I had to do, and I’m done with the whole affair. And with you.”

  WHEN I RETURNED to my office Shannon was sitting with her long legs hiked up on my desk. At my arrival she whipped her legs down and waited for my opening statement.

  “Jeff doesn’t care about the rest of you. It’s only me he wanted to screw. So I guess you’re safe for now.”

  “Okay. Don’t do a thing. Let me talk to Vince when he calms down.” She tousled her spiked head. “I can’t believe he really did it. Shit, shit, shit on a stick.”

  “I just had breakfast. You’re making me a little nauseous.”

  “Go home and watch a few thousand episodes of CSI. I’ll knead him around a bit and maybe he’ll soften and rise to the occasion like a man instead of collapsing under pressure like a goddamn wet noodle.”

  I flopped into my chair. “I really feel sick.”

  “You’ve got a few moguls to ski right now, that’s all. While I work on the Hastings case, I’ll be working on Vince too. Don’t worry, sweetie, everything will be fine. I promise.”

  “Shannon, when you start sounding all sweet and solicitous like Beth, I know I’m in for the giant slalom.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wonder Bread

  I HAVE TO ADMIT, I’d thought my suspension was one of Vince’s torture tactics, a temporary ruse to teach me a lesson, but after two weeks with no pay, he was still holding his ground. He still hadn’t outright fired me, but he wouldn’t let me back either. I was beginning to think Vince was hoping I’d quit and save him the bad press of public explanations (and severance pay).

  By the fifteenth day of my unpaid leave, my anxiety and agitation had quelled into something akin to posttraumatic stress, whereby I’d returned to the safety of the nest and was hiding out at my parents’ house to continue my wait for his call.

  It was a Saturday morning, and I arrived at their humble home armed with treats from the neighborhood bakery. My mother’s kitchen smelled, as it always did, of dinner the night before. My father, an Atwells Avenue cobbler, had made his American version of Pasta Putanesca: Bumblebee Chunk Light Tuna dropped into a saucepan of bubbling, garlicky tomato sauce. In anticipation of my visit, my parents had left a note on the refrigerator door informing me that they had left early that morning to attend Cassie’s soccer game. They would all be home by noon.

  Strange how it always felt safe in my parents’ house, so unlike my own apartment. Maybe it was my perennially empty refrigerator, which even during flush times held a jar of instant coffee, Post Grape-Nuts cereal, and a quart of lactose-free skim milk purchased mainly because of its long shelf life. My linen closet was always jam-packed with cleaning items, all unopened or used only once. I bought cleaning supplies the way other people bought the latest workout equipment: It looked great on display and I’d definitely start using it tomorrow.

  Some would say my reluctance to open a can of Ajax and my loss of appetite in the face of any dish I cooked was a rebellion against my mother’s obsessive sterilization of our childhood home and her fervent love of cooking. But it wasn’t that at all. As a perfectionist, I just wanted to leave cooking and cleaning to professionals like my mother. Tearing her away from a dirty stack of dishes was like pulling a five-year-old off a carousel in the middle of a ride.

  Under her sink my mother kept her well-used bottles of Clorox, Windex, and Comet Cleanser. Shredded cleaning rags salvaged from my father’s stock of old T-shirts were doused and drained in a plastic bucket, brimful with witches’ brews specially mixed for various household surfaces. In her cooking my mother used only fresh herbs from her garden and farm vegetables in season. Even in the frost of winter she grew parsley and oregano indoors.

  Nestled among the clay pots of my mother’s windowsill greenhouse was my father’s dented metal cup from “the old country,” his precious Rome. Dad never referred to himself as Italian. Not because he was embarrassed at being Italian, but because he was prouder of being Roman.

  I had just kicked off my shoes and opened the morning paper when through the kitchen window I saw my father carefully guiding his midnight-blue Oldsmobile up the narrow driveway alongside the house, a beaded crucifix swaying from the rearview mirror. I pulled open the back door to greet them.

  My mother angled herself out of the passenger side of the giant Olds wearing polyester pants that rode several inches above the top of her nylon ankle stockings. She wore flat loafers—a discount-mart copy of J. P. Tod’s driving shoes—and the vinyl handbag she carried was covered in C’s, ambitiously aspiring to both Coach and Coco Chanel. The discounted originals I had bought her were wrapped in tissue on the top shelf of her closet, saved for special occasions.

  My sister Cassie swung open the rear car door. Her head was white-wired to earbuds that were hidden in a rebellious mess of brown curls corralled with an elastic band and falling in a heavy ponytail to her waist. Cassie resembled my father’s side of the family, wavy-haired and olive-skinned, whereas I, in contrast, was more my mother: northern Italian with pale skin and hazel eyes, my hair a light brown artificially sun-streaked to a golden blonde.

  “MA! YOU GOT THE DONUTS?” Like an Italian fishmonger’s wife’s, Cassie’s voice now shattered the air, her impregnable expression telling me the iPod attached to her hip was cranked to the max.

  “Cassandra!” my mother shushed as she circled around the car. “Take those things out of your ears! You’ll be deaf by thirty.”

  Cassie (as we had been ordered on pain of death to call her) splayed her fingers over her hip and made a fake show of spinning down the volume. From her midriff-baring blouse Cassie’s belly button protruded as insouciantly as a baby’s. Her exposed navel was so “cool” she didn’t give a damn ab
out sucking it in to flatten her soft, round belly. Defiance made her more American. She swore that one day she would legally change her name to Sara or Brooke or Elizabeth or, possibly, something even whiter, totally devoid of vowels. Since poor Cassie quailed at the idea of being seen in public with her old-fashioned, Medicare-aged parents, letting them attend her soccer game today was a selfless gesture.

  “Why did I have to come home?” Cassie whined as her car door slammed shut.

  I took another step through the open doorway so they would notice me. My father spoke up first.

  “Marianna! How is my little bambina today?”

  I shook my head and smiled. I was two inches taller than he, and he hadn’t called me bambina in years. Only my mother still referred to her daughters as her little babies. I held the door ajar for my parents and they wiped their feet too many times on the outside mat before entering. Cassie, bolting indoors in front of them with her head down, had missed the mat completely.

  “What’s the deal?” Cassie earnestly complained to me, underscoring her sacrifice. “Why are you here again?” She threw her duffel bag behind the door.

  “I’m temporarily unemployed and an outcast among my friends and legal colleagues. With any luck my boss will just fire me and not report me to the Bar Disciplinary Committee where I will be immediately stripped of my license to practice law anywhere.”

  My father leaned over the kitchen table and dropped the box of donuts in the middle.

  I sighed as I put a teapot on the stove and rotated the knob to high. I’d brought along two special treats—espresso from the upscale market Venda’s, on Atwells Avenue, and a dozen almond biscotti perfectly flavored for dark roast coffees and espressos. My parents could remain true to their ethnic heritage in America if they wanted, but I’d be damned if they couldn’t be a little classy about it and stop boiling Maxwell House coffee in a saucepan.

  I mixed the black powdery grind with the boiling water and then filtered it directly into our cups until the sludge settled to the bottom of the filter. I briefly daydreamed about how it might taste with a soft, honey-glazed Dunkin’ Donut. Then I quickly popped a piece of sugarless gum in my mouth from my private stash in the kitchen drawer.