The Undertaker's Widow

by Phillip Margolin

  "Hi," Quinn said as soon as they were connected. "I just wanted to make sure you got in okay."

  "No problems here. How was your flight?" Laura asked.

  "The flight was fine."

  "Does St. Jerome live up to your expectations?"

  "Yeah, it does. It's even more beautiful than I thought it would be. The resort is unbelievable."

  "You know I want to be with you, don't you, Dick?"

  Quinn wanted to tell Laura that she would have turned down her new clients or had someone else from the firm handle the business if she really wanted to be with him, but he did not want to start a fight. So he said, "I know, honey." Then he added, "I really miss you," which was true.

  "I miss you, too. Maybe we can get away together soon. Just the two of us."

  Quinn wanted to remind her about the Crease trial and his other cases, which would eat up most of the year, but he didn't.

  "That would be great," he answered with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. "I love you."

  "Love you, too," Laura answered before she hung up.

  Quinn replaced the receiver and lay back, staring at the long-bladed ceiling fan that spun slowly overhead. It dawned on him that he had not mentioned Andrea Chapman or their plans for the next day. Quinn wondered why it had slipped his mind. He felt vaguely guilty about not mentioning Andrea, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

  Quinn walked onto the balcony again. He missed Laura terribly. There were so many happy couples frolicking on the beach. The sight of them made Quinn feel worse. He wished he were with Laura lying in the sun, reading a trashy novel and getting smashed on banana daiquiris. But Laura was working and he was alone.

  Chapter 13.

  The heat and light of the sun woke Laura Quinn. It was a pleasant change from the alarm clock that usually shocked her out of bed in Portland. She stretched and turned so she could see the clock on the hotel night-stand. It was eight-thirty. Laura could not remember the last weekday when she had been in bed at this hour.

  Laura rolled onto her back and contemplated a lazy morning. Her client had left a message saying that she would be contacted at ten. That left her time to shower and have a leisurely breakfast. She got out of bed wearing the T-shirt and panties she'd slept in. It was hot in Miami, but Laura had switched off the air conditioner so she could enjoy the warmth after the cold and gray of the Oregon winter.

  Laura found a space on the hotel carpet that was wide enough for her to do some stretching and proceeded to go through the routine she followed every morning at home. Repeating the familiar exercises made her think of Quinn, who was usually shaving and showering while she worked out. She missed her husband, and her good feelings were replaced by pangs of guilt.

  Laura completed fifty crunches and twenty pushups. The Florida heat and the exercise had covered her in a thin sheen of sweat. She stripped and went into the bathroom. Quinn had sounded so lonely during the call from St. Jerome, but it was his reaction when she told him that she could not make the trip to the island that haunted her. He had sounded betrayed and abandoned and, she admitted to herself, he had every right to feel that way.

  Affection for Quinn had crept up on Laura. Bushwhacked and ambushed her. It was something she never anticipated when the two of them were teamed to work on the Remington litigation. Quinn was someone who rarely entered Laura's thoughts before the Remington case. He was nice-looking, but not handsome enough to moon about. He was also shy and clumsy. Laura knew that Quinn had been a varsity basketball player in college, but she still had trouble imagining him playing with grace. Of course, Quinn was very smart, even brilliant at times, but so were most of the lawyers at Price, Winward. You didn't get invited to join the firm unless you were a superstar in law school and you didn't make partner unless your talent sparkled in the real world.

  Laura turned off the shower. While she toweled off, she thought about the first time she and Quinn had made love. It had been in a hotel room. They were staying at the Adolphus in Dallas while they took depositions in Remington. She had a small room, but Quinn was a partner, so he was staying in a suite. It was the end of a grueling fifteen-hour workday. They were in the living room of the suite under a wide skylight going over their notes of the depositions they had conducted from nine to five at the offices of Remington's attorneys. The night had been clear and Laura remembered a moment when she had leaned her head back against the couch and stared up through the skylight at a swirl of stars and a bright, white quarter moon.

  Quinn had been brilliant that day. He had broken Remington's CEO and they were both excited. Laura remembered feeling like a timber wolf circling a terrified calf as she watched the CEO's expression change slowly from disdain to despair. They could both taste blood when they packed their attache cases and left the offices of Remington's attorneys. Hours later, Quinn and Laura, exhausted by the long day and tipsy from the wine they'd drunk at dinner, were sitting next to each other on the couch when Laura said something that had struck them both as funny. What normally would have merited a good chuckle made them giddy in their weakened state. When their laughter was spent they found themselves pressed together. Laura remembered Quinn looking at her with such longing the moment before their lips touched.

  The morning after their first sex, Laura had been in torment. Quinn was not a particularly good lover, but he did love her. That much Laura knew. As they lay together in the dark, Quinn had confessed the feelings that had exploded in him during the past year. He told her how he had come to care for her but had been afraid to tell her. He was a partner and she was an associate. He was concerned with appearances, worried about the difference in their ages. But he was also helplessly in love with her, he admitted, laying himself open for rejection.

  Quinn's honesty impressed Laura, but intimacy terrified her. Laura's father had adored her and her mother, or so Laura had believed. Then he had left them. How could Laura trust Quinn's feelings? How could she trust her own? Laura had slept with men, but she had never let herself expose her emotions to a man. Quinn wanted that. He needed it.

  Laura had told Quinn that she did not want to rush into a serious relationship. Quinn backed off. She could read the pain in his eyes. The sag in his shoulders reminded her of the defeated CEO. It upset her to think that she had hurt him.

  In the week after their return from Texas, Laura thought long and hard about her feelings for Quinn. She had learned to admire and respect Quinn during the time they'd worked together, but did she love him? What was love, anyway? Her emotions were so jumbled by the life she had led that she wasn't certain that she would ever be able to answer that question. If love existed, she knew that it did not last forever. Her mother had loved her father, and her father said he loved her mother, but neither loved the other now. Laura was convinced that love could be a lie. Still, she did feel something for Quinn that she had never felt for another man. He was gentle and considerate and he respected her legal abilities. She felt safe and comfortable when she was with him. Was that the way someone in love was supposed to feel?

  Laura suggested that they spend time together. Quinn agreed eagerly. He did not pressure her and he seemed to understand the difficulty she had committing herself emotionally. When Laura thought about their future, she imagined herself and Quinn working together with the same verve and success they'd had in the Remington case. Only, in her thoughts, she, too, was a partner at Price, Winward. When she agreed to marry Quinn she was still not certain that her feelings for him were love, but they were what she thought love was supposed to feel like.

  Laura took the elevator to the lobby and treated herself to fresh-squeezed orange juice, cold cereal and coffee in the hotel restaurant. As she ate, she wondered what had happened between her and her husband. There had not been anything dramatic. No affair, Quinn did not drink like her father or suffer from depression. He was the same man she had married, but somewhere during the past seven years, the marriage had started to die.

  Who was to blame? Laur
a thought that their problems started with Quinn's ascension to the bench. When Quinn told her that the governor had approached him about the appointment she had been stunned. Laura knew that Dick was Patrick Quinn's son. Everyone knew that. She knew that he was basically an intellectual who enjoyed the law because of its mental rigor and not because of the money and thrill of combat that drew her to its practice. What she could not understand was how anyone could achieve her dream of making partner at Price, Winward and abandon it for the bench. As an associate, she was making almost as much as an Oregon Supreme Court justice. When she made partner, their combined salaries would be more than $300,000 a year. How could Quinn throw away the prestige and financial security of his present position? Laura tried to understand her husband's motivation, but she could not accept what he wanted to do. Should she have tried harder to understand Quinn's feelings? The thought nagged at her. Had she lost respect for Quinn simply because his job paid less than hers? Was that fair?

  Laura returned to her room. Her client had not called by ten-fifteen. She took out the letter in which the retainer check and first-class plane ticket had been enclosed. The letter had been Fed-Exed to the firm and there was a phone number on the letterhead. Jerome Ross, the man she had spoken to on the phone, had also signed the letter. She reached for the phone, then stopped herself. Ross would call when he was ready.

  Laura walked to the window and stared out at the ocean. Since Quinn's ascension to the bench, and her promotion to partner, Laura had increased her workload. Was she working hard to establish a reputation and to prove her worth to the firm, or was she hiding in her work? One thing was certain, she and Quinn were growing apart and she had to decide what she wanted to do about it. There were two choices: seal the rift or separate.

  At ten-thirty, Laura dialed the number for SeaCliff Estates. The phone rang twice. Then a recording told her that the number she had dialed was not in service. Laura redialed, assuming that she had misdialed the first time. She heard the same message again. There was a phone book in her end table. Laura could not find a listing for SeaCliff Estates or Jerome Ross, so she rang the front desk.

  "This is Laura Quinn in room 517.1 have a reservation for five nights. I need to call the company that made it for me and I've misplaced the phone number. Did they give it to you when the reservation was made?"

  "Let me check, Mrs. Quinn."

  A moment later, the desk clerk read her the same number that was on the letterhead.

  "You're certain that there aren't any other phone numbers for the company?" Laura asked.

  "That's the only one."

  "Thanks."

  "Uh, Mrs. Quinn. Did you say that the reservation was for five nights?"

  "Yes. I'm supposed to fly out Sunday."

  "We only have you down for two nights. Yesterday and today."

  "There must be some mistake."

  "That's what I have here "

  Laura thought for a moment. Then she asked, "Have I received any messages?"

  "Your box is clear."

  Laura hung up. She called Portland and asked for Mort Camden, another partner at Price, Winward. They talked for a few minutes, then Camden told her he would get back to her. Jerome Ross had still not contacted her when Camden called twenty minutes later.

  "This is fucked, Laura. The retainer check is drawn on an account in a Miami bank that was opened a week ago, but there's only one hundred dollars in it."

  "One hundred! The damn retainer is twenty thousand."

  "I don't know what to say, but something stinks. I think you should hop on the first plane back to Portland."

  "What do you think is going on, Mort?"

  "Beats me. Maybe someone is playing a joke on you."

  "It's one expensive joke. The first-class round-trip ticket and the hotel reservations cost several thousand dollars."

  "I don't know what to say."

  Laura threw her file on the floor. She was livid.

  "I'm checking out. I'll see you tomorrow."

  As soon as Camden hung up, Laura angrily jabbed out the number of the airline. The phone rang. She planned to ask for a seat on the next flight from Miami to Portland, but a thought occurred to her and she hung up the phone. She had hurt Quinn when she chose a business deal over a vacation with him. It was only Wednesday morning and St. Jerome was not far from Miami.

  Laura's arm dropped to her side. Quinn had given her seven good years. The hurt in his voice when she told him that she could not go to St. Jerome was proof that he still cared for her very much. If she wanted her marriage to survive, she had to act. Laura dialed the airline and asked for a seat on the next flight to St. Jerome.

  Chapter 14.

  Andrea was right about the difference between the resort side of St. Jerome and the other side of the island. The Bay Reef and The Palms were palaces where the wealthy, dressed in the latest fashions, dined on lobster and caviar, played golf and sunned themselves while sipping cool drinks by the pool. Puerta del Sol, the brightly colored capital city, was filled with fashionable shops and upscale restaurants. The buildings were freshly painted sunny yellow, happy blue and festive red, and the shop owners greeted everyone with a laugh and a smile. Poverty had been banished from the immaculate streets of the capital by order of Governor Alvarez. True, the taxis were dilapidated and there were some beggars who managed to evade the ever-present police patrols, but this was local color, the source of quaint Third World stories that could be told back home for the amusement of neighbors and friends.

  The far side of St. Jerome was another story. The island's only paved highway was an oval that passed through Puerta del Sol, then swung around behind the hotels on the way to the airport before curving back to the resorts. Seven miles past the capital, a dirt track branched off toward the far side of the island. This road was the only open space in a jungle of towering trees whose branches interlocked to form a dense, dark green canopy that blocked out the sun and cast thick shadows over the narrow highway. The air was filled with the sweet smell of flowering plants and the wet, fetid smell of rotting vegetation. Quinn passed only a few people during the forty-minute, cross-island trip. More than once, he nervously checked his fuel gauge, having no desire to be stranded in the dense jungle.

  At the suggestion of the concierge, Quinn rented a Land Rover and soon discovered why the recommendation had been made. The road was not well maintained. Quinn felt his kidneys suffer each time the Rover hit a pothole, and the billowing dust clouds kicked up by the thick tires completely obscured the scene in the rear-view mirror.

  The jungle thinned, then disappeared when the road descended toward the ocean and into a civilization quite different from the one most St. Jerome tourists saw. Scattered along both sides of the road for half a mile were rusting shacks constructed from corrugated tin and a few more-substantial buildings made of concrete blocks. Some of the structures had colorful curtains strung across the doorway. None had glass windows, but some of the more solidly constructed buildings had louvered shutters. An emaciated goat was tethered to one shack and scrawny chickens wandered among many of the buildings pecking at the dusty ground.

  A group of children was playing soccer with a tin can in a dirt field. They stopped when they heard the Rover and watched it drive by. An old man with nappy gray hair smiled and waved at Quinn and Quinn waved back. The old man's teeth were yellowed and decaying and there were gaping holes in his mouth where some teeth had rotted out. His T-shirt and shorts were in the same state of decay as his teeth. The clothing worn by the children who were playing soccer was also torn and tattered. All of the people he saw as he passed by the shacks were barefoot. A group of women in colorful skirts and blouses, their hair covered by multicolored scarves, walked along the road balancing tin basins filled with fruit on their heads. They also stopped to watch the Rover pass. Except for the old man with the rotting teeth, no one smiled.

  Quinn drove through the village and around a curve that put it out of sight. The road straightened out.
Quinn noted the location of the village on the map Andrea had drawn for him. According to her notes, four miles after the village a narrow dirt trail branched off toward the sea. Quinn looked up from the map and saw a jeep with two soldiers closing fast in his rearview mirror. The jeep pulled around Quinn to pass, then slowed when it was next to the Rover. The soldier in the passenger seat studied Quinn. His expression was hard and he cradled an automatic rifle. Quinn flashed a nervous smile at the soldier, but the soldier did not smile back. His cold appraisal was intimidating and Quinn looked away. After what Andrea had told him, Quinn was not certain that tourists were safe on St. Jerome. The land on either side of the road was flat and sandy and totally deserted. If something happened to him here, there would be no witnesses.

  The jeep drove parallel to the Rover for a few seconds more, then cut in front of it and sped up. Quinn did not relax completely until the jeep was out of sight.

  The dirt trail to the cove was right where Andrea's map said it would be. The sandy track was flat for a short distance. Then the Rover climbed upward to the crest of a hill and the road ended. Quinn stopped the car and got out. He was on the edge of a high cliff. Below him was the sea, which the cliff surrounded on three sides. An overhang blocked Quinn's view of the beach except for a strip that was adjacent to the ocean. Quinn looked for Andrea's car but did not see any other vehicles. He checked his watch. It was only a few minutes after four.