A lightbulb went on. Or maybe what she experienced was more on the level of a bomb exploding.
Someone should pay for her dying.
Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Provide for Matt and Nina and her beloved grandson and extract some justice out of the darkening world from which she was being cut off a little more each day.
CHAPTER 4
NINA STOPPED OFF THE NEXT DAY AT FISHERMAN’S WHARF for a fish-and-chips lunch wrapped in newspaper. She dribbled malt vinegar over the steaming fried food and ate it while leaning over the pier, head down in the breeze, worrying about Bob’s bedtime questions last night. “Who was that man you hit, Mom? You told me never, ever, ever—”
Had he witnessed something indelible, something that would haunt him later, if Richard proved his fatherhood and got visitation? She looked north, where balmy Santa Cruz glittered like Xanadu thirty miles across Monterey Bay. Nothing calmed her like the ocean, and she could use soothing. She hadn’t slept the night before. She really needed to talk to someone about Richard. She tossed leftovers to the noisy sea lions and headed back to work.
On the way in, she passed Jack. No court today, and he wore a green polo shirt and beige khakis. Not tall, he made up for it with a muscular build and a blaze of reddish hair. He fixed his eyes on her and said, “Whoa, you’ve got a load of books. Need some help? Don’t tell me that’s all for my stuff?”
“No, these are for Lou. Tax research. He dreams he can talk me into going into tax law.”
“Steady money.”
“Too much arithmetic, I think,” Nina said. “Maybe I’d rather make real estate deals and settle personal-injury cases over the phone. Like you, McIntyre.”
“I make it look too easy, obviously.”
Nina laughed. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Follow me.”
She walked into his office, dumped her books on a chair, and waited for him to sit down.
She told him about Richard, the bare facts, and asked his advice.
“You refused the papers?”
“I know. I was served in spite of having to kick the idea around a little first.”
“Hmm. Let me make some calls, okay? Find out what’s cooking. I’ll call Perry for you, too.”
“I appreciate it.”
“You know I’ll—we’ll do anything to help you, Nina. If it comes down to a custody fight, I’ll take it to court for you. I did family-law cases now and then at my first job. It’ll be good practice.”
She thanked him and left, remembering a remark she had once overheard when Jack was complaining about that first job to Lou: “I hated family law. Too many people crying.”
Feeling more cheerful than she had since her run-in with Richard, Nina said hello to Astrid, who had a phone nesting on her shoulder, picked up her messages, hustled down the hall to her cubby, opened the next house-on-fire file, and drew the phone to her ear.
She dealt with Lou’s case in an hour, then turned to one of Jack’s that interested her more.
Jack’s client’s daughter had been hit by an ice cream vending van in front of her house, an event his client had not witnessed. Nevertheless, the mother felt entitled to damages for negligent infliction of emotional distress, since her son ran inside screaming, and she then ran outside to observe with horror her daughter’s bloodied body. The little girl survived without permanent injury. The mother didn’t really have a good shot at winning—Nina had done some preliminary research and found a recent First District Court of Appeals decision confirming that the plantiff had to be a percipient witness, had to have seen the accident with her own eyes.
“Did you hear a thump? Did your daughter cry out? What exactly did you see?” Opposing counsel had sensibly asked these questions at the deposition. Not good.
The one-year statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit was coming up, and Jack had told Nina this was a poor case to litigate. He wanted badly to settle for something better than nuisance value, because he didn’t want to have to file the lawsuit, but if he didn’t settle, he’d have to file it to protect the mother’s right to take it to court.
But the L.A. lawyer didn’t know how badly Jack wanted to settle.
Nina’s phone buzzed and Jack said, “Have you got a minute? The lawyer for the insurance company in the ice cream case is calling me back in five. Good training for you to hear this call.”
She gathered up the files, feeling psychic, and by the time she went into Jack’s office, he was already on the phone trying to settle the case, the speakerphone blaring out the guy in Los Angeles. Jack waved her to a chair and continued his spiel.
“Look, let’s consider this from a strictly cost-effective point of view.” While Jack talked, he watched a video of MC Hammer on the VCR he kept in the office. “U Can’t Touch This”—sex in the air, a fuck-it-all mood that was so right for this conversation.
“My client will not settle for nuisance value. She was absolutely convinced her daughter was killed and she had to go through months of counseling—you have the bills. True, the daughter’s better now, but that also took months…. C’mon, she’s not about to drop this. She was made aware of the accident almost instantly. Though she didn’t have a contemporaneous observation, she was notified immediately and saw the results within a very short time. If you lose this, you’ll lose big, you know that. Why not take this one off your plate?”
They had heard it a million times, but Nina knew this sort of talk always made insurance lawyers nervous. “It’s going to cost you fifty thousand dollars at a minimum just to try the case. If you win, it’s worth zero. My client has authorized me to accept one hundred thousand dollars as a full settlement, but if you can give me a hard offer of seventy-five thousand dollars I will talk to her about it.” His client wanted $75,000 if Jack couldn’t do better. The offer should tempt the insurer to get off so cheap.
Nina thought hard about the ramifications of the case. Who was right? She felt as jerked around as a juror as she listened.
Now Jack turned away from his VCR to give her one of those great big shit-eating smiles she liked so much, but she tried not to take it personally. She had seen the way he’d looked at Remy Sorensen just yesterday, when he probably had no idea he was being observed.
Today must be a day of psychic connections, because Remy chose that moment to walk past the doorway to Jack’s office, and Nina had the full view as his eyes lit up and he breathed deeply to see if he could get a whiff of her. Remy moved like a flag in the wind, sleek and undulating, down the hall, her calves sharp-cut under the pencil skirt. His eyes followed the calves like small green heat missiles.
Nina felt an unwelcome jab of envy. She considered Remy a mentor. Along with her physical attributes, the ones that made Jack’s eyes burn in his head, Remy had the professional brawn of a woman who has it all figured out. She knew her law and she held most of the important locals in her charismatic thrall. A Klaus Pohlmann recruit and protégé, Remy had impressed everyone in the Carmel legal community. She steamrolled any opposition so dexterously nobody felt hurt. She brought in a surprising amount of new business and old money. People in Carmel liked her. She had a level head and didn’t push the sex angle. Nina didn’t hope to become someone like Remy—she herself was too short, too edgy, too…much, and on top of that, not the pack animal the pols loved, but she wanted to suck up every bit of insight she could from this ultra-successful woman.
She could learn a lot from Remy. How to make a man pant. How to get her way. And, most urgently, how to beat every professional enemy senseless.
“You think you can get summary judgment on the lack of contemporaneous observation on this, you file your motion,” Jack continued, but now he looked impatient to be finished.
Nina tried to imagine the other lawyer’s state of mind right about now. He hated giving out his company’s money, and Jack was wringing him for every dollar. He felt squeezed in his tight tie, scratchy in his starched shirt, and pissed to be stuck inside his
high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard and not outside in the sunny Southland, frolicking at the beach.
“I’m sure you’ll like our judges up here,” Jack said in his most genial fashion. “I like them. They like me. Maybe they’ll like you, too.”
He dug at the faraway voice. “And of course if we do lose, we will appeal and make it perfectly clear for the next generation of claims against you guys.”
“Forty thousand,” said the L.A. lawyer on the speakerphone.
“Sixty-five,” Jack allowed, controlling his enthusiasm. “She won’t take less.”
“Fifty. That’s all we’ve got on reserve. That’s how we assess it. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll talk to her, but I don’t think my client will go for it.” But Jack gave Nina a thumbs-up. The client would.
Remy came through his door, nodded at Nina, and stood by Jack’s chair. Jack looked as though he was resisting an impulse to put his arm around her waist and pull her down onto his lap. He disconnected the call and favored Remy with a dopey grin.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Remy said.
Besides the narrow skirt, she wore a dark orange silk blouse that brought out the gold in her pulled-back hair and her pale eyes. Tall, slender, and cool, she made Nina think of Cybill Shepherd.
They had both forgotten Nina’s existence. “Before you say anything,” Jack said, “remind me we’re still having dinner at the Pine Inn tonight. Eight o’clock.”
“Of course,” Remy said, her voice light, “our usual table.” They exchanged a look and Jack relaxed. “I just came in to tell you Klaus had a doctor’s appointment. He has a few things he wants you to deal with.” She handed him a list, then stood for a moment as if relishing his attention.
“See you tonight,” Remy said, looking back over her shoulder at Jack as she walked out. “Wear that aftershave you’re wearing right now. Oh, and, Nina, could you please stop in my office when you are finished here?”
Just before five, when the secretaries were starting to pack up and he was signing his letters, Jack discovered a phone message from Paul van Wagoner. He punched the number.
“Van Wagoner? What the hell are you doing in San Francisco in weather like this, man? Fall’s a great time of year at Pinnacles. I could meet you there. I could return your camera. Then you could take pictures of me beating your ass up the rock face.”
Jack had met Paul in Cambridge when they were both going to Harvard and they had remained friends ever since. When Paul switched from Harvard Law, moving over the bridge to Marlborough Street in Boston to attend Northeastern and take a master’s in criminology, and Jack had continued in law, they saw less of each other, but always made time for climbing trips to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
“Thanks for calling back, McIntyre. I was just about to call you again. Yeah, you want to go up one of those crumblers, I’ll race you. Might happen sooner than later.”
“What’s up, Paul?”
“Laura and I are splitting up.”
“Ooh. You okay?”
“Sure.”
Jack knew bullshit when he heard it. He knew Paul was angry, felt betrayed, and couldn’t believe he had failed yet again.
“But the really big news is that I’m moving down to Monterey.”
“What a shame,” Jack said. Like Paul, Laura was a detective for the San Francisco Police Department. Jack didn’t much like her, but that wasn’t relevant. “So what happened?”
“Monterey County sheriff’s department offered me a job in the Coastal Investigations Division down there. I took it—I needed the change. I’ll be working out of the courthouse down there. A little less money but—”
“Cut the shit. You know what I’m talking about when I say what a shame. You were so wild about her—”
“I tried to be faithful. For three years I was faithful, but we were both gone so much and there’s so much crazy-making in my line of work—you know what I’m talking about—I got mixed up with someone. A witness in one of my homicide cases. My mistake. It was over in two weeks. Anyway, Laura found out, and, God, Jack, she’s fucking adamantine, done with me. Won’t talk.”
So Laura had finally gotten tired of forgiving. “Stay with me until you find a place. That shouldn’t be a problem, although I just have the one lumpy, dog-scarred couch. Let’s see. It was that Swiss chard and anchovy on semolina you liked so much, right?”
“Spaghetti and a shitload of garlic bread.”
“Name your day,” Jack said.
“A few weeks from now. The fourteenth. I’ll bring a case of Anchor Steam.”
“That’ll get us through dinner.”
“Two cases,” Paul said. “And, Jack? How about giving me a break from your latest girlfriend, whoever she might be, okay? I want to fish, hunt, climb, and forget about women.”
“I can do that. You’re really moving down here?”
“I am.”
“That’s sensational, man.”
When he hung up, Jack pulled Paul’s broken camera out of the bottom drawer of his desk and set it in front of him. He would get Astrid to drop it off tomorrow. Two weeks ought to be plenty of time to get it fixed.
He left the office by 5:30 p.m. Everybody else had already left. Great working conditions, exquisite scenery, low pay, he thought, locking the front door. He had just enough time to drive down the coast to the cabin in the Highlands, shower, get ready to drive back up to Carmel for dinner with Remy. He’d change the sheets just in case she chose to get all hot and reckless and go back down there with him, and God how he hoped she would.
He was excited. This could be the night. Jack’s mother had recently given him a book of local poet Robinson Jeffers’s works for his thirty-fifth birthday, and a phrase sprang to mind: A woman from nowhere comes and burns you like wax.
Jeffers must have met Remy Sorensen in a previous life.
CHAPTER 5
NINA PLUNGED INTO THE OCEAN ONE LAST TIME, STRUGGLING for air as a shallow, foam-topped wave smashed into her. This Saturday morning the sets were small, but she paddled out and floated on her board for a few minutes more, rolling on soft swells. Her chin was frozen—she had felt so macho she hadn’t bothered to wear her hood—but the Billabong 4/3 neoprene wet suit kept her torso warm and the bootees saved her feet from the water. A few other surfers, some of whom she recognized from a long way off, sat removed and timeless farther down the break.
In idle moments of floating, waiting for a good one, she tried to predict which kind of wave would come next: one that rose like a mountain, then tumbled in a swift, long slide; the promising but short ride that petered out halfway along; or a bomb that might catch hold of her and drag her under.
She paddled fast into a six-footer, stood up, heart racing, breathing in the spray, balancing madly, rode it in without taking a single breath, then instead of kicking out, fell onto the board and let the swell carry her in. Shaking water off her wet suit, she walked quickly back to her car, clasping her board to her side, examining the hills of sand and the boardwalk overlook for signs of Richard. She saw none.
Stripping off the suit, she wrapped a yellow towel over her bikini, twisted a frayed cotton scarf over her wet hair, rolled down the top to her MG, and inclined her board in the seat next to her. Heart still pumping with excitement, she toggled the heat to high and drove the few blocks to her house.
Swinging up her own street, she thought, I do not want to leave this town. But someday, necessity might demand it. Many people here were highly educated, competitive, and determined to stay, and success in law might be iffy for a young person like her without dazzling credentials. Maybe she’d end up in San Fran, or even Lake Tahoe. She had such complicated and somewhat painful memories of that place, but the mountains definitely pulled at her.
She couldn’t decide what kind of law she would practice, and she needed to focus her studies better and make that decision soon. After that, things would fall into place. She would have grass instead of concret
e in her front yard, and a house with paint that didn’t peel. She would wear foot-mutilating shoes in court, the better to kick hell out of her opponents. She and her brilliant, devoted lover would buy a second home at Lake Tahoe, where she would learn windsurfing and read psychology books.
She would be in love, and she would be loved equally. Or loved even more!
She laughed, remembering a cartoon that had tickled her. Charlie Brown wished for friends. No, by gosh, he wished he had even just one friend. Lucy asked the round-headed boy, “While you’re at it, Charlie Brown, why not wish for a million dollars?”
She pulled up to the curb in front of her house. Straight ahead where the sidewalks converged, downhill, she could see the familiar line of blue. From the house, she could only see the sliver of ocean from her kitchen window.
She parked and ran next door to pick up Bob.
Bob had a cheese sandwich and celery for lunch. He ran for his bedroom, where he plunked a plastic keyboard, humming along, mouth full. While he ate, she watched his pudgy fingers and listened to him chatter, then finally went around to the little table where he sat, stroked his hair and gave him a hug.
“You need a shower, Mommy. We’re going to a party.”
“I promise to dress up if you do.”
“Oh, shoot.”
Her present concerns crystallized around Bob’s birth certificate, the one she might be compelled to produce in court.
She had been all alone with her baby at Community Hospital when the volunteer came by to collect the information for the birth certificate. After her breakup with Richard she had decided to raise Bob entirely on her own, to make enough money so that she wouldn’t need child support. Richard had always told her he wasn’t ready for a child; he wanted a Romeo and Juliet relationship. That relationship hadn’t ended well either, but in the haze of her lust for him, she had thought only of the romantic comparison.
The day the hospital insisted she fill out the forms, out of anger at Richard, out of wishful thinking, out of exhaustion and foolishness and pain, she wrote another name for the birth certificate, someone else she could not put out of her mind.
Show No Fear Page 4