“Like this?” She holds one up.
“That’s it.”
“How many do you need?”
“Two.”
She brings them over to me. “What’s that?”
“I think they call it a handheld device.”
“Shuur. I know that. But what’s the little thing on top?”
“It’s a cell phone.”
“Cool. Where’d you get it?”
“It belonged to a friend.”
“He let you borrow it?”
“Sort of,” I tell her. “Do you know anything about them?”
“Some of the kids at school have them. Theirs aren’t that nice.” Sarah’s looking over my shoulder, big brown eyes checking out the device. “What do you want to know?”
“How to change the batteries.”
“Oh, Dad. Here, give it to me.” She reaches for it, but I hold it away.
“I can’t take a chance on losing the information stored inside.”
“Maybe it has a bubble memory,” she says.
I’ve heard of bubble gum and bubblehead. But bubble memory is a new one.
“If it does, then everything’s stored inside, on a chip or something. We learned about it in technology. Even if you disconnect the power it stays there.”
“How do I find out if it has one of these memories?”
“You could look online. Something that cool must have a site. How much does it cost?”
“I don’t know.”
“My birthday’s coming up,” she says.
“I’m buying you batteries,” I tell her.
She gives me that look of mock exasperation, something of her mother’s to remember her by.
“Can I see it? I won’t break it. I promise,” she says. Reluctantly I hand it over.
“Hey, this little button on top. It’s the cell phone.”
“I know. Don’t touch it.”
“Relax,” she says. The same thing Nick told me before they shot him. “Why can’t we just turn it on? See if it works.”
“Because it may drain the batteries.” I don’t tell her that the cops have probably landed on Nick’s cell phone account by now. If so, the service provider will have a trap on the line so they can isolate the cell by location if any signals go out from the phone, even if it’s just looking to go online.
“If there’s a site on the Internet, do you think you could find it?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I could look.”
It takes her less than five minutes. Sarah works her nimble fingers over the keyboard and rolls the mouse, using Yahoo! to check sites. On the fourth one she hits pay dirt, a logo that matches the one on the device, two curved crossed slashes with a dot between them at the bottom, Handspring. com.
We scan the page for half a minute or so.
“I don’t see anything that looks like directions. Do you?” she says.
“No. So what do we do?”
“Gimme a second.” She punches the button on the page for customer support. An e-mail message screen pops up.
Sarah types out a message, telling them that we’ve lost the directions and need to know how to change the batteries. And asks whether we’ll lose any stored data.
Ten minutes later there’s a reply. Attached are a set of instructions for operation. The e-mail message itself advises us to sync the device to a desktop computer and then change the batteries. It tells us that if we can’t do this, we have only one minute once we start removing the old batteries to replace them with new ones. After that the device will crash and we will lose any data inside.
“Looks like there’s no memory inside,” she says, “unless there’s batteries.”
Without the hot-sync cradle to attach to the computer and the software to run it, we can’t back up the device by syncing it to the desktop.
“You want to do it or do you want me to?” Sarah’s talking about changing the batteries.
“I’ll do it.”
Armed with the two new batteries and the printout from the Internet, I lift the battery cover off the back once more with my fingernail. My hands are shaking as if I’m defusing a bomb. I pull one battery and quickly slide a fresh one into the slot. I pull the second. I pop the other one in, then realize I’ve gotten it in backward. I almost drop the device on the floor. Sarah grabs it before it can hit the carpet. She holds it while I turn the battery around and slip it in the right way. Then I look at her. “You think we got it?”
“I don’t know. Turn it on.”
I snap the battery cover back in place, flip the device over in my hand, and hit the green button on the bottom. When the screen pops up, the battery indicator hasn’t moved. It’s still where it was before, near empty. Oh, shit. An instant later it flickers. The shaded area suddenly slides across the image of the battery, all the way to the right. It is now fully charged. I let out a sigh.
“Gee, Dad, you really ought to calm down. This stuff really gets you uptight. It’s just a little computer,” she says.
“Yeah. Right.”
“Here, let me see it.”
I hand it over and try to catch my breath.
Sarah starts tapping the screen with the stylus. “You can do graffiti on it too,” she says. “Do you want me to show you?”
“No. No graffiti,” I tell her.
“Dad, it’s not the kind of graffiti you think. Look,” she says. “You can write letters on this section of the screen to call things up. See?” She orders up Nick’s address book and makes the letter “c” in a small window at the bottom of the screen. Suddenly the book jumps to the section with names starting with “C.”
“Got it,” I tell her.
She shows me how to call up the calendar, the To Do List. “This one even has e-mail, but you have to turn the phone on,” she says. “Why don’t we do it? The batteries are fresh.”
“Not right now.”
“Oh, gee,” like I ruin all her fun. “This is really cool. The kids at school would go nuts.”
I’ll bet. Calling people in London and leaving messages for Joe, then calling them back and telling them it’s Joe and asking if there’s any messages.
“Can I take it to school tomorrow?”
“No. And do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody about it.”
“Why not?”
“For the moment it’s our secret.”
She looks at me like “why would I want to do this?” Something this cool and she can’t tell anybody about it. Then she shrugs and says “Sure,” and hands it back to me. She returns to her homework, settles into the chair with her book and the Star Trek reruns, the endless generations.
“Sarah.”
“What?” She looks up at me.
“Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
She fights it, but finally there’s a beaming smile that slips out. “Anytime,” she says.
I settle back into the sofa and look at the small device. I’m wondering if Nick had software and a cradle and whether he downloaded it onto his desktop at the office or home. If he did, the cops have it. They have seized his computers at both locations; with the firm I’m sure going toe-to-toe with them over client information that may be stored on the hard disks. If he didn’t sync it, the only copy of whatever the device holds is in my hand.
I put my feet up on the coffee table and start to surf using the stylus.
It takes several minutes to scan the address book. There are forty-three names and phone numbers, not nearly as many as I would have thought, knowing Nick and the contacts he had. Most of these are just names, without any addresses or other information.
Some of the area codes are San Diego. I recognize the 415 as San Francisco. The phone book tells me that the only other two area codes for names in the address book are for Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
I recognize a few of the names as lawyers at RDD in San Diego. Nick has made entries under “Title” for some of the people in the other cities. Most of these involve one-word entrie
s: “Litigation,” “Licensing,” “M amp;A,” “Govnt. Affairs.” I don’t recognize any of the names attached to these.
Except for an entry made by the vendor who sold the device to register the warranty, there is nothing on the To Do List.
But the Memo Pad has what appear to be street addresses, three of them, followed by letters, SF, NY, and DC. Three of the four cities listed in the address book. There is also an entry under a separate note, something called Antiquities Bibliotecha, with what look like a series of numbers following it, what could be an overseas or international phone number. I make a note.
By midnight, Sarah is long since in bed, and part of the mystery is solved when I call a few of the numbers and confirm my suspicion, all the numbers ring at Rocker, Dusha offices in the cities listed.
What is puzzling is why the device doesn’t contain more numbers. Nick knew a thousand people in San Diego alone. None of them are in the address book. There is nothing for the courts in any of the four cities, no addresses, phone numbers, and no court appearances in the date section, just meetings with some of the lawyers in the firm’s various offices.
The first of these shows up in early April in San Francisco. There are several meetings, in New York and Washington in the early summer. These continued through the summer. The last meeting was in San Francisco nine days before Nick was killed.
At first I suspect that Nick was only practicing with the device, unwilling to toss his Day Runner in the trash until he had mastered all of its functions. But its true purpose surfaced with the discovery of another name. A single cryptic entry marked on the same day, repeated each month, the twenty-fifth at eleven A. M. Next to the time and the notation-“Money for Laura”-is an icon for an alarm so Nick wouldn’t forget. Next to this is another tiny icon, like a dog-eared piece of paper. I tap it with the stylus and a note opens. Laura’s name, first and last, along with her mother’s. There is an address and phone number.
This is not something Nick would have ever committed to a written calendar or address book in his office, where prying eyes might see it.
Laura would be almost four now, the result of a brief liaison with a young secretary Nick met outside the firm in the months before Dana, when his marriage to Margaret was crumbling. It was a tryst with an unhappy ending. The night Nick told me about the child he was drunk. His eyes filled with tears of regret for what might have been. He had asked the mother to marry him, but she declined, telling him he had no obligations. They kept their secret. She never sought support. Still, Nick visited the child several times a week at night after work. And each month there was an envelope with cash. He told me his daughter knew him only as Uncle Nick. He never told Margaret or Dana.
Why he told me I don’t know. Maybe it was the booze, the blinding clarity of failure offered by drink. Whatever it was, that night I became Nick’s confidant. It was like so much of Nick’s life, a talented gamester full of risk and hell bent for leather on a rocky road paved with luckless choices and a lot of pain.
CHAPTER SIX
In combat it is called “survivor’s guilt”-the fact that people who have witnessed a traumatic event, and lived to talk about it, will often embrace guilt rather than confront the more agonizing reality that matters were beyond their control, that they were helpless.
Since that day, the moments leading up to Nick’s murder have played in my mind like an endless loop of videotape. But the one I focus on, the most unfathomable, was the result of a momentary social impulse.
It is not the fact that I kicked Metz and his case back to Nick. Metz lied to me about money laundering and probably other things as well. I suspect Nick knew what he was shipping over when he sent me the case.
What bothers me is something far more innocuous. It is the fact that I didn’t make more of an effort to call to Nick out on the sidewalk that morning. I have thought about it at night before I sleep and in those endless hours before dawn, seeing my movements, analyzing them as a choreographer might review the sequence of steps in a dance.
To anyone not carrying the burden, hearing the shots or seeing the images of carnage on the street that morning, it might seem inane. But not to me.
I had yelled to Nick, only to be cut off by the bus as it drove between us down the street. I suppose I could blame the driver and his diesel engine, the transit authority, or the traffic. But after the bus passed, when I saw him standing there on the sidewalk next to Metz, I stopped. I could have called out again, but I didn’t. If I had and if I’d held up the device for him to see, Nick would have crossed over. He would have been standing with me on the other side of street when the shooters came by. But for my failure to act, Nick would be alive.
So why didn’t I call out? I’ve asked the question a hundred times, and every time I get the same answer: for the same reason we all dodge people we don’t like, the petty desire to avoid an uneasy moment, this one with Metz. Having spurned his case, it was more comfortable to avoid him and to return Nick’s handheld at a later time. So I slipped it into my pocket and walked away. I could not have known at that moment that a seemingly inconsequential omission-my failure to follow up, my distaste for Metz-would cost Nick Rush his life.
I’m sure any psychiatrist would tell me I was faultless. But a lawyer, a man trained to sharpen the point on guilt, might view it otherwise, as I do, as a proximate cause of death.
Survivor’s guilt, maybe. But it trumps all the other reasons for Nick’s death that I know, because it was the one I could have controlled. And until I know who shot him and why, it is certain to eat at me.
I wait a few days before I contact Dana, a respectful period, and place the call late in the afternoon. It is May, and the number may be new, but the phone system isn’t. It’s one of those voice-programmed things that give the caller options. “If you want to talk to Nick, press one. If you wish to speak to Dana, press two.” The eerie part is that the voice used to program it is something from the grave. It is Nick’s voice.
I press the number for Dana and wait for her to pick up.
It is answered by another woman, I assume a maid as Nick told me that Dana had hired one. There are intonations of a Mexican-Spanish accent.
“I will check to see if Mrs. Rush is in. Who is calling?”
“Paul Madriani.”
“One moment please.”
The phone goes to chamber music, a little NPR, as she puts me on hold. A few seconds later, the strings of Mozart are broken.
“Hello, Paul. It’s so good to hear from you.” Dana’s voice comes over the phone a bit breathless. I can visualize her flipping her pixie-style blond hair out of her eyes with a wag of her head as she speaks.
“I did want to talk with you, but I’d rather not do it over the phone. I wonder if you have time to come by the house?”
“Sure. When?”
“Can you make it this evening, say about six-thirty or seven?”
I look at my calendar. “Why not.”
“Good. I’ll look forward to it.” She hangs up.
From my office, the Cays are a skip and a jump, just a few miles from Coronado, down the Silver Strand. It is one of the more desirable locations to live, your only neighbor to the north being the navy’s amphibious training base, miles up the beach. It is close to the city for commuting. Some of the newer houses, mostly renovations, tip the scales at five million dollars a pop.
What makes it pricey is not only the vistas across the bay, but the fact that it is one of the few places left in California where you can own a private dock in your own backyard. The Cays offer direct access to the harbor and from there to the open Pacific, and some of the private pleasure craft moored here rival small cruise ships.
Dana has left my name on a list at the security kiosk out on the Strand, so when I arrive I am waved through the gate. Her place is situated on Green Turtle Cay. I have been here on a few occasions for social outings, the last being a bar association fund-raiser for some cause I do not remember.
I d
rive over the bridge and hang a left. The house is sheltered from the bay behind another man-made island called Grand Caribe Cay. As I pull up in front of the house, it is dusk. The view is a display of lights from across the water, the brilliance of the setting sun reflected off shimmering skyscrapers, an image of the mythical City of Oz, with the twinkle of houses in the hills behind it. I suspect it is part of the reason Nick bought the place, that and the fact that Dana tanned so well in her bikini out on the flying bridge of his boat in summer. He once told me he would lull under the giant aircraft carriers moored at the naval base on the north end of the island and watch as Dana untied the top to her bathing suit while she sunned herself lying facedown on the deck of his boat. Nick got a charge watching the sailors drool over the railings. Why have a trophy wife if you can’t enjoy it?
I step from the car, slam the door closed, and lock it. When I turn, I see Dana framed in the open doorway of the house, waiting for me. She is shoeless in dark nylons and a black dress that at the moment is well above her knees as her arms are stretched above her head bracing her lithe figure in the open door as if framing a picture.
She turns it on me as I walk up the path toward the house. Her hands remain on the doorframe as she tosses her head to one side to flip her hair from her eyes.
“God, I’m glad to see you,” she says. “I saw you at the funeral, but I just couldn’t deal with all the people.”
“I understand.”
She takes me by one hand and pecks me on the cheek. “I don’t know what I would do without friends,” she says. “You and Nathan.”
“That would be Mr. Fittipaldi?” I say.
“Emm.” She nods. “You wouldn’t believe how good he’s been.”
“How long have you known him?”
“I don’t know. A year maybe. He’s on the arts commission with me.”
“He’s a member?”
“Emm. Very influential.” She leads me into the house and closes the door behind us. “Nathan has galleries all over, in Beverly Hills, New York, Europe.” She guides me toward the living room.
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