Compelling Evidence

by Steve Martini

  Talia was, I think, at least in that moment when light hit Mr. Kodak’s emulsion, heavily into appearances. She has made the front page. Her face shrouded by black lace, her mourning suit by Armani, she is the chic picture of stoic sorrow. She stands three steps up on the cathedral stairs for the world to see, head held erect, a slight breeze ruffling the lace about her face. All that is missing is the toddler at her knee dressed in long coat; saluting the coffin. Under the picture a bold lead for the cutline: WIDOW GRIEVES. Talia knows how to set a scene.

  I sip my drink and remember our last meeting. A dim hotel room across the river, ensconced in a once posh tennis resort now turned to seed.

  I rolled to her side of the bed and felt the cold wetness of my own passions, a small portion of which had pooled in the creases of the sheets beneath where her loins had rested.

  She moved about the room a picture of indolent calm, gathering wisps of lacy underthings. Silence seemed Talia’s special refuge after passion.

  In my own time I came to understand that Talia was an innocent, in the way that rich men’s daughters are often innocent, as if they are somehow immune to the usual social conventions. In the months that we met, following my separation from Nikki, whenever we registered at a hotel I huddled under a broad-brimmed hat behind the heavy collar of a long coat in the winter or oversized dark glasses that concealed a good part of my face in the heat of summer. I used more aliases than there are characters in a Tolstoy novel.

  But with Talia, what you saw is what you got. To my chagrin she was soon on a first-name basis with the clerks at the myriad of no-tell motels and roadside hostelries we frequented. To her, discretion was a word without meaning.

  “How’s Nikki?” she asked. “And your daughter. How’s Sarah?”

  “We agreed not to talk about them, remember?”

  “She’s so cute.”

  Talia’s interest and concern were genuine. She had helped me on two occasions make support when my take from the firm, my bonus after salary, was a little light. These were short-term loans, which at the time I attributed to our relationship. Now, in retrospect, I wonder whether they were so much for my benefit as Sarah’s, for Talia possesses the universal maternal instinct. She lacks all capacity to harm small animals and children.

  “They’re fine,” I said.

  She turned and noticed that I was staring wide-eyed at her from the bed. “A penny for your thoughts,” she said.

  “Is that all they’re worth?”

  “Won’t know “til I hear them.”

  She was standing at the foot of the bed, a sheer teddy gracing her body, facing away from me, gazing into the mirror as she arranged her hair, long brunette locks in a mock bun high on her head. Her left foot was raised—resting on the low stool in front of the vanity, the muscles of her thigh flexed in an athletic pose. The filigree of lace trimming the right leg was cut high on the hip and pulled into the crack of her buttocks. Her stance revealed the erotic and distinct crease separating her thigh from the gentle hillock of her ass. I remember the surge of desire. That is how it was, always, with Talia—instant arousal. Moments after spending every ounce of my manhood locked in her embrace my eyes were again drawn to her long legs and tapered waist, the delicate wisps of hair at the nape of her neck.

  “Well?” she said. She was waiting for some deep revelation, some mirror into my inner being.

  “You really want to know what I’m thinking?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “I’m thinking about jumping you one more time before you can get out of this room.” I strove for a little wickedness in my smile—a touch of Jack Nicholson captured in the squint of my eyes. Watching her there in the dim shadows of that room, I was a bundle of lust.

  She giggled. “Sorry, can’t. Have to meet Benjamin.” Talia insisted on using his full Christian name in their social circle. It was, at first, one of those things they cooed over in public. But as with so many older men with younger women, it had begun to go sour and now rubbed like a burr under his saddle whenever she called him by name.

  “He called me this morning before I left the office. Some dark, brooding secret,” she said, her eyebrows arched in mock suspense.

  There was an instant knot in my stomach, the kind that accompanies dark prophecies. “What did he want?” I ask.

  “Who knows? You know Benjamin. If he’s of a mind, he can breathe intrigue into last week’s grocery list.”

  “Maybe we should discuss a little business,” I said. “These are supposed to be business meetings.”

  But instead of concern, I drew indifference from Talia.

  “You do remember? Business?” I said. “What if he asks what we’ve been doing twice a week for the past four months? Wants to know why we haven’t finished putting the limited partnership together?”

  In his own way, Ben had cast the die that led to this thing between Talia and me. He felt that she needed a little legal talent to lead her through the morass of fine print in a couple of real estate transactions. I knew little enough about real estate. But the duty fell to the junior associate, Ben’s trusted protégé. Talia held a real estate broker’s license, but Ben made the deals, fed her the commercial clients that kept her in business, that allowed her to buy her own pearls and run the Mercedes through a corporation that Ben had set up in her name.

  “Don’t be so uptight. Lighten up. Remember,” she said, “you are getting paid by the hour.” Then she laughed.

  It fed some prurient fantasy in Talia, in the shell game that was Potter’s system of accounting for my time with her, that at least on the books I was pulling down $175 an hour. In one of my less satisfying performances when I peaked too early, when passion erupted a little too quickly, she sat frustrated at the edge of the bed, turned, looked at me: “You oughta be ashamed,” she said, “billing in minimum increments of every six minutes.”

  But on that day, as I lay in the bed watching her dress, Ben’s furtive meeting with Talia had my full attention. I was not going to be put off.

  “What are you gonna tell him if he asks?” I persisted.

  The vision of this woman in that moment is fixed in my mind like a cast bronze. She stood there with this vacant stare. I knew it—she had nothing prepared. Great, I thought, if Ben hits her with a question she’s gonna wing it. After what seemed like an eternity, she looked at me, winked, and said: “I’ve got it. I’ll just tell ’im what you lawyers always say when you sell a piece of property. I’ll tell him I was busy ‘conveying a little fee tail.’ “ She bent at the waist, her back arched, flattening her hands on the stool, and gazed lustfully at me over her shoulder and hitched the tight globes of her buttocks in a pert wiggle for my benefit—and then did that schoolgirl giggle she does so well.

  In her words and antics there was a distinct fragrance. I could not place it at the time, but in retrospect I can now identify it with clear precision. It was the aroma of my career going up in smoke.

  It was one of Talia’s less endearing qualities, her unquenchable penchant to face life and all of its drama with unfaltering whimsy. She could never fathom that I am of that vast generation for whom the drug of choice is now Maalox.

  “This is serious,” I say. “What are you going to tell Ben?”

  She had straightened up, arching her back, the fingers of one hand feathering the fringe of lace at the crease of her thigh. My nether-part was at full attention, under the sheet.

  “You know, you really are an ‘A’ type,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “An ‘A’ type personality. A lot of undirected hostility, purposeless time urgency—the whole nine yards.” She’d been gathering jargon like kindling from her analyst again.

  “You weren’t complaining five minutes ago.”

  She turned, looked at me, and smiled. “Can I help it if I like a good, compulsive fuck?” She didn’t laugh, for there was some truth to this, but she did show a lot of flashing teeth—even pearls of whiteness against her count
ry-club tan.

  In the months that I had known her, she carried me to a level of erotic excitement that I, in the early throes of middle age, had never before experienced. Dealing with Talia was a sojourn, which I am now convinced I will never again experience—one of those periods of your life that in later years you replay in your mind like the movies of your childhood.

  Without warning she was on her hands and knees at the end of the bed, crawling toward me, the scissoring, slender, bronze globes of her behind, the crack ruffled by lace, reflected through muted light in the mirror behind her.

  She looked at me—large, round, dark eyes—and giggled. Then without warning her head sank beneath the sheets—toward my rising prominence, toward the art of persuasion that surpasses all reason.

  CHAPTER

  7

  ON my way to the University Club I pass Saint Ann’s, the place of Ben’s funeral. It’s a Greco-Roman edifice that in any other setting might inspire respect if not awe. Here it is merely an architectural redundancy, dwarfed by the copper-domed state capitol with its white cupola and golden sphere scarcely a block to the south. I set a brisk pace along the mall, which on this noon crawls with busy bureaucrats, scurrying secretaries, and loquacious lobbyists all moving like maggots on the remains of some half-devoured meal.

  By evening, the “K” Street Mall will be given over to its other occupants, an assortment of vagrants, winos, and the scattered homeless. They will wander through the city center on an aimless sojourn between the squalid liquor stores of “J” Street and meals at the rescue mission a dozen blocks to the north. I burrow into the standing crowd stalled at the signalized intersection on Tenth Street. A panhandler works the captive audience at the light with the fluidity of a maestro, his quarry driven by an uneasy embarrassment to a state of feigned inattention. The light changes, the crowd moves, and the beggar drifts off under the shadowed awning to the littered doorway of the five-and-dime to await the next, inevitable cycle of traffic.

  The University Club is housed in a majestic white Victorian. Built as a residence for a railroad magnate during the last century, the structure has served over the years as a private home for wayward girls, a restaurant, and more recently, a funeral parlor. It was rescued from the wrecker’s ball two years ago by the University Club and its board of directors, and now hosts the regular meetings of a raft of civic organizations including the Capitol City Bar Association. Attendance at the bar’s meetings is practically mandatory, an opportunity to rub shoulders with the judges and glean referrals from other attorneys.

  It’s a packed house, standing room only in the walnut-paneled parlor that now serves as the bar. I wedge my way through the crowd, a half-dozen drink tickets in hand.

  There’s a little elbowing and jockeying for position. I order and retreat from the bar, a drink in each hand, to settle into a cushioned club chair in the lounge.

  “Missed ya at the funeral.” It’s a gravelly voice. I look up. Tony Skarpellos was Ben’s partner, and for all purposes now stands to inherit Potter’s influence, the balance of sway in the firm.

  “Tony, how are you?”

  “Didn’t see you there, the funeral,” he says.

  “How could you miss me in that sea of humanity?” I say.

  “Ah.” He nods.

  “How you holding up?” I ask.

  “Peachy,” he says. “Just peachy. My partner blows his brains out, reporters and cops crawlin’ all over the office for a week, and this morning I get a call from this asshole in New York. He’s with the news, one of the networks. They’re callin’ for the deep scoop, you know, the novel approach. The national angle. Sure-shot nominee to the Supreme Court kills himself. What an asshole.” Skarpellos repeats the charge, this time with added conviction. “First question out of the box: ‘How do you feel about it all?’ I tell him, “Well, hell, except for the hair and little bits of gray shit all over the ceiling in the office, it wasn’t bad at all.’ Sonofabitch,” he says.

  In the images of this crude narrative, my mind dwells on the thought that with Ben’s death the firm of Potter, Skarpellos has lost more than its driving force. It is without question missing a vast measure of style.

  Skarpellos comes around to the front of my chair wringing his hands in typical southern European fashion. His high forehead is etched with deep furrows lost in a perpetual tan. He wears an expensive worsted pinstripe suit, artfully tailored to give the illusion of a trim torso. Skarpellos’s wardrobe is always meticulous, proportioned to maximize every inch of his five and a half feet of stature. Lifts in the heels of his shoes do the rest.

  I wonder where he’s left his entourage, for Tony is seldom seen alone. Invariably he trails a wake of indentured subordinates, young lawyers on the move, whose sole mission with the firm, it seems, is the palpitation of the Greek’s ego. Fate shined on me, for Ben spared me this duty during my time with the firm.

  Without asking, Skarpellos drops his body into the chair across from mine. Tony played Eliza to Potter’s Higgins through most of his career. The son of immigrants, he’s a proud man, and in his eyes at least, he has clawed his way to the top—on his own. He’s a natural glad-hander, more adept in the political arena than in a courtroom. It was, in fact, his abilities and influence with parochial governing boards, planning departments, and the myriad city councils in the area that from the beginning secured his place with the firm. Tony has the Midas touch when it comes to real estate. For the right fee he can produce zoning variances like the poor propagate children.

  We pass a few pleasantries; it’s an awkward context for small talk. There are the obvious regrets, the universal human emotion following any suicide—some expressions of self-recrimination for what we might have done to prevent it. For his part, it soon becomes a litany of reminiscences—nostalgic tales of him and Ben as young men struggling in the jungle of a provincial and crude local judicial system to carve out civilization.

  He stops in mid-sentence, looks at me as if some matter of high consequence has just crawled in from the subconscious.

  “What the hell happened between the two of you, anyway? One day you’re there and the next you’re history.”

  It is as I expected. Ben kept his own counsel in the matter of my affair with Talia. True to form, he was a man much possessed of appearances, and pride. In the eyes of his closest confidants, my departure from the firm continues to be viewed as the result of some falling-out over an obscure matter of business.

  “It was between the two of us,” I say. “One of those things that happens sometimes between friends.”

  “You make it sound like you were pokin’ his wife.” He laughs, turns, and snaps his fingers for a drink. For an instant I think that he’s been talking to an oracle. The waitress is on us before he can look back—before he can read the confession in my eyes. When he finally turns to face me again, his expression is a vacant smile. I breathe a little easier now, confident that Skarpellos, after all, has no special talent for clairvoyance.

  “Let me buy ya a drink,” he says.

  “Got two already.” I hold up a full glass.

  He orders a double bourbon and returns to the subject of the firm and my leaving. I make a mental note to use a different line if asked the reasons for my departure from the firm in the future.

  As it turns out, Cooper was right. Two days after our conversation at the Emerald Tower I was visited by the cops, a quiet FBI agent in tow. They asked me about my conversation with Potter at Wong’s. I bit my tongue and lied, a little white omission. I told them of his disclosure to me, the fact that he was destined for the court. I left out our heart-to-heart about Talia. They finally got to it. They wanted to know why I left the firm. Any disagreement, hard feelings between Potter and me? I denied it roundly and capped our conversation with Ben’s offer to have me serve as the trustee of the Sharon Cooper memorial fund. This was something they could check with the law school, a little corroboration. It lasted less than ten minutes. They seemed satisfied as they lef
t.

  “What the hell was it? You guys argue over a case or somethin’?” says Skarpellos.

  “Something,” I say.

  “You know, you should’ve come to me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I had a good amount of influence with Ben. He respected me.”

  I say nothing but our eyes meet, and this time he reads my mind.

  “No, it’s true. Ben did respect my judgment.”

  I wonder what the Greek’s been smoking.

  “We’d been together too long not to have developed a good degree of mutual respect,” he says.

  I remove the smirk from my face, turn serious, but say nothing.

  “There was no reason to lose talent like yours. I’ll bet I could’ve patched it up between the two of you.”

  “Well,” I say. “One thing’s for sure.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?”

  “That’s true,” he says. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  There’s a translucent quality in his eyes. I can sense that he’s searching for something lyrical, a little poignancy to be remembered later, repeated to others, a message from Ben’s partner to the world. Verse dies on his lips as the waiter arrives with his drink. He takes the glass, and by the time he looks back he’s forgotten what it was he was searching for.

  “Been meanin’ to call ya,” he says. “Somethin’ we need to talk about.”

  I look at him—a question mark.

  “It’s a little delicate,” he says.

  This has never stopped Skarpellos, I think.

  “You got a client—the Hawley girl?”

  I nod, wondering what interest he could have in Susan Hawley.

  “A good piece of tail, from what I’ve heard.” He gnaws on a little ice.