Prodigal

by T M Heron

  My desk phone starts beeping. I ignore it. It goes through to answerphone, then starts beeping again. I punch the forward-on button harder than I need to. Put an elbow on the desk and push my forehead into the palm of my hand.

  Eliza’s little revelation worries me. But I tell myself it’s just secretarial gossip. The mass conjecture spawned of a group of infantile airheads and age-soured battle-axes. Hardly the sort of thing the police take seriously.

  ◆◆◆

  At 5.30 p.m. Eliza shows Detective Aubrey Pacitto into my office. He thanks her by name and takes a seat without waiting to be asked.

  I stare him out. He ignores me and shines one of his cufflinks against the shirt of his opposite arm and I see the beginning of a tattoo. I wonder if he ever regrets it, now he thinks he’s important.

  “Where’s Detective Grayson? On doughnut duty?” I say.

  “Original,” says Pacitto. “Strange, don’t you think, that here we are again?”

  Is he smirking at me?

  “It’s not really again. Not without the rapier-sharp input of Detective Grayson.”

  Pacitto yawns, stretches himself better into his chair. “How about some late afternoon tea?”

  “I’m a busy man,” I say, fury inadvertently building. “I’m not sure what you want here. Given you’ve interviewed half the firm, there’s probably nothing I can add.”

  Pacitto drums his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Explain for me, then, why you threatened to kill her with your bare hands.”

  “I didn’t. How would that conversation even go down?”

  “You tell me.”

  “No, you tell me.”

  Pacitto rests his elbows on my desk. He links his hands together, leans forward and rests his chin on them. The action seems purposely intrusive. Plus it’s slovenly. I want to hurt him.

  “According to several of Jo’s friends here, it went down after you were investigated for Belinda Goodluck’s homicide. When Jo came back from leave. That’s what her friends are saying.”

  I laugh. “Jo didn’t have friends here. Half the firm despised her.”

  “Everyone I speak to seems to think she felt physically threatened by you.”

  “I can’t imagine why.”

  “You’re denying you threatened her life after she reported the paint-throwing episode?”

  “Jo had a flair for the theatrical. I never threatened her. I gave her a warning when I probably should have sacked her. What you’re getting right now is overblown rumors among the admin staff. And worse, you’re believing it. This is one shitty investigation you’re running.”

  I’d like to add that the last one, Belinda’s, was shitty as well, to the point where they got the wrong guy.

  “I’m still not convinced you didn’t kill Belinda,” says Pacitto, as if he’s read the thought straight off my face. “Charging Perry wasn’t my call. I was overridden. I liked you for that from day one. Just like I like you for this.”

  “Well, as great as it is that you know so much, you should probably actually investigate instead of rushing in and targeting the nearest scapegoat. Small wonder your decisions get overridden.”

  “I’m not in any rush,” says Pacitto. “I’ve put bad men away before. I know bad when I see it. It isn’t always poor, and it isn’t always ugly.”

  “Good luck with that theory. And good luck keeping your job, coming in here with that attitude.”

  “I’m not dancing around you this time,” says Pacitto. “I want you to know that. I don’t care who you are.”

  I raise an eyebrow as if he’s boring me. But I’m beyond stunned at the way this interview is turning out.

  Pacitto sits there looking as if he already knows everything. Which he can’t. So I match his confident look with a condescending one of my own. He’s the one with the tattoo, after all.

  “Get out,” I say finally.

  27

  It’s Friday the 13th, the day after Pacitto visited me, and Anthony Hartman doesn’t mince words. “The police view you as a person of interest. They haven’t ruled you out yet. It’s a process. Unfortunately for us there’s no one else on the list.”

  “Pacitto’s an arrogant prick with an inferiority complex,” I say. “I want to make a formal complaint about him.”

  “Just suck it up for now. No point in making a move from a position of weakness. But apparently the husband’s interview did you no favors. He knew the dynamics between the two of you. Then there’s all that past crap muddying the waters. They don’t like the coincidence.”

  “I’m not liking it myself. But it’s spurious. Ultimately I’m not that worried.” (Big lie. But at $1500 an hour Carla Diaz knows what she’s talking about, and she’s not worried.)

  “We’re not worried either.”

  My heart sinks. When Anthony says “we” he can only be speaking as the head of Bakers’ management team. This being the case, his statement will be followed by a “but”.

  “But we want you to lie low for the moment.”

  Carla’s words. They’ve talked to Carla. I wonder if she told them I talked to her. She won’t have. It was on the clock.

  “We need to put your partnership on hold, just until this is over.”

  This isn’t happening.

  “You can’t. I’ll look like a complete idiot. I’ve just been offered a directorship with Ray Investments. The whole firm will look stupid.” I slam a fist down hard on his desk before I can stop myself.

  Anthony smooths his tie in an attempt to conceal his disconcertion at such erratic behavior. “Whoa. It’s not the end of the world. And Ray Investments is your family. They know exactly what’s going on.”

  No, they don’t.

  “I’ll look like a bloody fool to the business community.”

  “No you won’t. We haven’t made any announcements yet. We’re not going to say to anyone that you’re not a partner. We’re just not going to officially say just yet that you are. All our partners know you’re going to be partner.”

  “There are going to be photos of the party my mother threw in the society pages.”

  “No there aren’t. Bernadette called in a huge favor and asked to have them pulled. Jackson, anyone who’s anyone will understand the situation. You’re still going to be partner. It’s just on the backburner until this is over.”

  “I assume I’m going to be paid as a partner.”

  He gives a small shake of his head. “We have to be consistent. We can’t pay you as a partner until you are one. But once that happens, we’ll back pay you to when Ray Investments came on board. So you won’t be missing out, effectively.”

  I try to breathe. I force myself to stay seated. To not stand up. If I stand, I’m going to tear Anthony’s office apart with my bare hands.

  Anthony, ignorant of this, continues with more management team decisions. They think it best I don’t attend the funeral. (Good.) But they’ve scripted a letter for me to write to the family. It reeks of the correctness that is Bakers and manages to say plenty without saying much at all. It expresses my sorrow at the loss of Jo despite the fact we hadn’t always seen eye to eye. It will be accompanied by a medium-sized bouquet of cream lilies, which it turns out are Baker’s official flower of choice for funerals.

  Oh, and the funeral, which I’m not allowed to attend, will be delayed because Jo’s parents are holidaying in Scotland and can’t yet be reached. As if being murdered isn’t a big enough deal Jo can’t even do death efficiently.

  I stride back to my office seething. Nodding courteously at staff I don’t know, smiling at those I do, and hating every person I lay eyes on.

  ◆◆◆

  I sit in my office looking hard at the door I’ve just slammed. The walls are closing in. I want to get out of here and go somewhere private where I can think. But I have another appointment due.

  Also, Pacitto might somehow be watching my office. So I force myself to not blunder into a mindless knee-jerk reaction. To sit and think my way out
of this as befitting someone with my superior cognitive abilities.

  Carla’s going to tell me it’s hearsay. That the police have no more real hard evidence than they did yesterday. But I’m unable to shake the sinking feeling I’m headed for deep trouble. That there’s more riding on this than a delay of my partnership. I feel it to my core. I’ve never experienced this feeling before. Of possibly being in real trouble.

  And nagging at me is the fact they got the wrong person in Kaleb Perry — and Pacitto knows it.

  ◆◆◆

  I take a quick walk down to Carla and tell her about my earlier interview with Pacitto.

  “It’s still circumstantial,” says Carla. She pushes what she was working on to one side. “But as of ten minutes ago you potentially have a problem.”

  For a moment I expect her to start discussing the discovery they’ve made that one of the double murder victims was one of the Park Rape Team. Why not? She seems to know everything else.

  “About two months ago Jo approached one of our solicitors about drawing up a special circumstances doc.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “And?”

  “She spent most of the meeting discussing material-exposure clauses.” Carla gives me a meaningful look.

  “What the hell’s a material-exposure clause?”

  “In the event of an individual’s untimely death it’s information to be forwarded on to someone else. Like the press, or an MP. In Jo’s case it was the police.”

  “But this is great,” I say. “What was in it?”

  “She only spoke in hypotheticals. She didn’t give any details. She said she’d be lodging it with another law firm, not with Bakers. It was just the legal information she was after, thankfully.”

  “Thankfully?” I slump in my seat. “So how is any of this a potential problem?”

  Carla tilts her head as if finally realizing the level of stupidity I function at. “It proves she was genuinely scared of someone, maybe someone in the firm, doesn’t it? It implies she thought someone had sufficient motivation to kill her. Depending on whatever else crawls out of the woodwork, it looks bad on you.” There’s a heavy pause. “If she discussed the intended contents of that clause with someone at another firm, or had actually gone ahead with it, and they come forward . . .”

  We stare at one another blankly. Seconds pass, which feel more like minutes.

  In the end Carla says, as if she’s talking to a genuine retard, “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me.”

  It takes a few seconds to interpret this and when I do, I’m furious. “That clause would have had nothing to do with me! I didn’t, didn’t, kill her. How the fuck am I meant to feel safe when my own lawyer doesn’t believe me?”

  Her face remains blank. I sense, within the confines of my obvious stupidity of course, this is her look for bad people. People she’ll defend even though she knows they’re guilty. People who have cheated, stolen, raped, killed.

  She’s sick of me by now anyway. She’s saying, “Okay. That being the case, we’ve no need to worry about an exposure statement surfacing. Which brings us back to what I’ve already said. There’s no solid evidence tying you to Jo’s murder, no eyewitnesses, your prints aren’t on the knife, if they’ve even got the knife. At this moment they have literally nothing that will stand up in court.”

  At this moment. It’s as if she’s expecting trouble. As if I mean trouble. Her attitude is just one iteration removed from Finch’s. And here I am about to be a partner at this firm. An important partner. A major earner. I sit there fuming. Feeling helpless.

  She slides the piece of work she’d previously been studying back in front of her. It’s a blank page.

  “What now then?” I say, hating myself for being in such a subservient position.

  “You wait. You wait for them to find the right person. But know that they’re still looking at you. They’ll be going through your finances. Checking your phone calls. They’ll probably get a warrant to look at your work and home computers.” Carla’s face turns pious and blank. Her cue for me to leave.

  “My finances? My home computer?” I say. “This is out of control.”

  “Don’t go trying to delete anything like porn, if you’ve got it on the home one,” says Carla. “Nothing’s truly erasable unless you’re a pro. It’ll just make you look like you’ve got something to hide.”

  “This is preposterous,” I say mildly. But my mind is still churning over what I said a moment ago. This is getting out of control.

  Control. Or my lack of. I have no control, and no faith the police will get it right, and no faith my lawyer believes me.

  “They’ll find him,” says Carla. Not so much a reassurance but more in the hope of expediting my departure. She presses a button, and someone hurries in with a glass of something green and disgusting looking. Carla looks at it thoughtfully, takes a sip.

  “I don’t feel good about this,” I say. “I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  I look at Carla’s Swarovski clock. Money is hemorrhaging out of my bank account with every fall of its spidery second hand. “What about all my bad history with Jo?” I say. “And the incident with that paint-throwing psycho. They looked at me for her murder too. It’s tainted me for this entire investigation. Even I can see why they might be thinking, where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

  “I’m grossly overworked right now on real cases,” says Carla. “Real clients potentially headed for real jail. And I just don’t have the reserves to reassure you.” She sighs. “You didn’t do it, and even if you did I’m your lawyer. That’s as much as I can give you.”

  ◆◆◆

  Savannah takes a long hot shower to warm up after hockey practice. She’s doing a conditioning treatment tonight and I wait patiently. Sipping my bourbon.

  My phone vibrates. It’s Mother.

  “Are we still on for Sunday?” she wants to know.

  “Of course we’re still on. I’ve been looking forward to it all week.”

  Although in reality what I really really need right now is a couple of days to get my head together. Without worrying about Pacitto, without worrying about my partnership delay, without worrying about being abused by my sister, without having to be the perfect son, without having Ava in my house.

  “What is happening with the partnership?” my mother wishes to know. “We can’t have a senior associate as a director.”

  “That’s coming along fine,” I tell her. “These things take a little time.”

  “Even with a client like us?” Her astonishment is perfectly warranted. She sounds peevish, like a spoilt rich woman. Which she is, bless.

  She’s right. It’s insulting.

  Savannah is out of the shower.

  I’m the one with the multimillion-dollar client. I’m the one who should have all the control. But control is the last thing I’ve been experiencing lately. I can’t make my lawyer properly listen let alone respect me, and I can’t even get a goddamn cop to watch his mouth. I do not have control in my world. Correspondingly everything feels wrong and dysfunctional.

  Even Jo is refusing to physically be gone in a neat and tidy manner. Her stupid parents have finally been reached but now Scotland and parts of Europe are experiencing airline-staff strikes and no one is going anywhere. The funeral, which would be closure for me, is delayed until the unknown date when her parents return.

  I watch Savannah drying and moisturizing and dressing and I’m not even getting a kick out of that. From a physiological perspective, nothing is happening.

  Then, final straw, I realize I’m anxious at the back of my mind that her stepfather is going to come in and abuse her again. I’m getting so used to worrying it’s become my default setting. Savannah is my port in the storm right now and I can’t have him doing this to her.

  As if conjured up by my thoughts, Savannah’s stepfather suddenly appears. Bursts through the door. I knew this would happen again. He snatches up a fistful of hair and shakes her with it then slap
s her face. His expression is calm, devoid of expression. Without letting go of her hair he pushes her face down onto the bed. For a moment I think something sick and unnatural is about to happen. Then I realize he’s smothering her.

  I can’t breathe. Until he finally releases her. Still no expression. Strides out leaving the door open. When she stands up her face is purple. She stumbles over to the door and closes it. Then she does the whole going into the bathroom and vomiting thing, holding back her long damp hair with a practiced hand.

  I’m going to stop this, I promise her silently.

  How can you have any influence over her life when you can’t even control your own? The thought comes unbidden. And in the darkness I have an epiphany. It is my fault that I have lost control!

  Yes. It is all my fault. I’m a powerful man. I have a powerful client. I have a powerful family. And what is the point of being in said family if I’m not going to wield said power?

  No, I have all but given my power away. To a managing partner and a menial PR consultant. I decide there in the dark, as Savannah dries her face, sobbing into the towel, that come Monday morning I’ll be taking back control. Come Monday morning, Anthony Hartman is going to experience not calling all the shots. Why should he? When I have so many cards up my sleeve. How dare he? It’s a blatant slap in the face to me and to RIL.

  I do have influence, Savannah. It got temporarily lost in the fray. There’s been a lot going on. And I won’t only take care of my partnership, I’m going to take care of your problem too.

  Not to disparage any of the others but Savannah is the most soothing girl I’ve ever found. Spending time with her is somewhat of a salvation for me. She’s classy and sexy and special and that doesn’t begin to do her justice. If only Ingrid goddamn Claire was half as kind. But I’m not going to let thoughts of her ruin the ambience. I need to enjoy this moment.

  Feeling calmer than I have in a long time I relax back with my bourbon. My lower regions are finally responding appropriately.