Unfit to Practice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “I know but…”

  “You run out on me, then waltz in here and tell me you’ve been mixed up in a murder!”

  “I’m not waltzing.” Brandy folded her arms, too. “And I tried to reach you but you left your phone at home!”

  “My phone’s broken, so I left it behind. And, in case you’re wondering why I’m here and not home, it’s because your campground friend came around to my office and scared the hell out of my staff.”

  His staff? Paul thought. She must be some dazzling part-time receptionist. “Cody Stinson came to your office?”

  “That’s the name he gave.”

  “What did he say?” Paul asked.

  “First off, he was loaded on something and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Second, he’s not the type we get in our offices usually. Not an easy man to talk to. He said that we were trying to get him thrown in jail for something he didn’t do. Well, when he got to the part about not strangling someone, I cut the conversation short. I got him out of there and came to stay at Kirby’s until things settled down. That seemed like a logical response, considering a very strange person with a scary story had shown up in my office.” He turned back to face Brandy. “I called Angel’s, assuming you were there, but I got the machine.”

  “Sam’s out of town with the kids,” she said.

  “Then I called your mobile, and got more mechanical messages. You need a decent message system! You’ve got to keep that thing charged up! I’ve been frantic, worrying about where you were and what was going on!”

  “Bruce, I’ve been trying to call you everywhere! I went to meet that guy, thinking it was you!” By now, Brandy was in tears.

  “Brandy, this is awful,” Bruce said. “No more fighting. C’mere.” He held out his arms, and she walked into them. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  “We need to talk in private,” Brandy said, sniffling, to Paul and Wish.

  Paul and Wish returned to the car to wait.

  Wish took out his notebook and took his lip between his thumb and pointer finger. “So what have we learned so far?”

  “We found him. I guess that makes her glad.”

  Brandy stayed inside for a long time. Through the glass of the Mustang’s front window, Paul and Wish could easily follow the overall thrust, if not all the details, of the argument.

  “Brandy is saying that she hasn’t been fair with him,” Wish reported, leaning his head out of his open window to hear better. “Bruce wants her to come back, but she’s not willing to live there again unless-unless they don’t sleep together anymore. Bruce hollered when she said that.”

  “What does she say?” Paul had jazz on low, trying to obliterate the background brawl, which reminded him of moments in his two past marriages he preferred not to revisit.

  “She says-she says she just won’t do it.”

  “What does he think of that?”

  “He says he’s not clairvoyant. He wants to know what the heck does she want from him? She says-ah, it’s pretty private.”

  “Come on, Wish, spit it out. Nothing’s private to a private investigator.”

  “She says she never wanted to hurt him, she loves him, but she thinks they better cancel the wedding. She won’t tell him why. That makes him insane, basically.”

  Oh, that girl, Paul thought, hoping for Wish’s sake she reconciled with her man, and fast. What a handful.

  “Now he’s really mad,” Wish said unnecessarily. He turned the music up. “I’m going to buy you some new music,” he said. “Something newer than thirty years old.”

  “This stuff never ages, Wish. It’s classic.”

  “A fancy word for obsolete. By the way, what was so private in his date book you took away from me?”

  “Appointments.”

  “There is another woman?” Wish guessed.

  “He’s working like a dog. He lives at the IRS office and tax court. There’s no other woman. Listen, I think it’s time we bow out on Bruce and Brandy. There’s been enough intemperate sharing of information in this case already.”

  “He’s young to have big sex trouble, isn’t he?”

  “I hate to speculate.”

  “Yeah, it is pretty disgusting, thinking about another man’s sex problems.”

  “Right.”

  “On the other hand, I’m going to sleep good tonight, hoping that. What could be wrong with his approach, do you think?”

  “Settle down, Wish.”

  “She could like me, if she dumped Bruce.”

  He was such a messy mix of mournful and hopeful, Paul almost laughed. “She’s almost a married woman. You ain’t got no business there, to misquote Sippi Wallace.”

  The blue front door to Kirby’s house flew open. Brandy stepped outside, pulling the door shut hard behind her.

  “Things didn’t end well,” Wish almost chortled.

  “I reiterate, we don’t get involved with clients,” Paul said. “It’s unprofessional, plus it could get you in real trouble.”

  “Okay, Rocky,” said Wish.

  “I’m going back to Tahoe,” Brandy informed them.

  Wish, grinning broadly, jumped out to open the back door for her.

  Around Vacaville, Brandy finally started talking again. “I told him I’m going back to Angel’s for a few more days. He’s very mad at Nina for bringing all this trouble our way.”

  “He’s mad and he’s a lawyer,” Paul summarized.

  “Beeg trouble for Moose and Squirrel,” said Wish.

  Friday-night traffic up the freeway to South Lake Tahoe made the long trip an infinite exercise in stop-and-go and imposed patience. The usual four-hour drive took them six. For dinner, to appease Wish and Brandy, Paul stopped in Placerville. They carbo-loaded at Mel’s Diner, a chrome-trimmed restaurant on the main drag. Paul left them to it and went out to the car to use his phone. Reaching Nina at her office, he was happy to hear Bob had been invited to sleep over at a friend’s house, which meant they would have the four-poster bed and the yellow comforter to themselves for the entire night. Elated, Paul hung up and went back to the table.

  Watching Wish as he talked with Brandy, Paul stuck to iced tea, amazed that the gawky kid’s social gaffes and big elbows did not seem to register with her at all. Brandy ate like the hungry girl she was, oblivious to the effect she was having on the big lunk. Meanwhile, Paul did what he could to urge things along. He wanted to get to Tahoe.

  Unfortunately for him, there was an unavoidable delay. In a ritual that probably originated with the first language, Brandy and Wish needed to exchange life stories. Brandy talked first. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours, thought Paul, exasperated, trying not to study his watch too openly. But Wish, Paul observed, was having the time of his life, listening intently as Brandy talked about her childhood, flirting in his oddball Washoe way. After she reported extensively, Wish told his own story in fits and starts, glossing over college, launching into asides about Sandy and Joseph, their marriage, divorce, and remarriage, their ranch near Markleeville, their activism in Native American causes.

  “Your life is so exotic, Wish,” Brandy said after he finished his narrative of his vital legal investigations for Nina’s office.

  “It is?”

  “You know, Native American people and heritage, such fascinating roots in a culture struggling to maintain dignity and identity in a new, complicated era. Your mother sounds cool, too.”

  “Oh, that describes Sandy to a T,” Paul said, slipping out of the booth, meditating upon the mincemeat Sandy could make of a Wish-Brandy alliance. “And on that ominous note, I think we’d better hit the road again.”

  Back in South Lake Tahoe, Nina prepared for Paul’s arrival. After packing Bob off to Taylor Nordholm’s-driving him there herself just for the reassurance that he was, in fact, exactly where he said he would be-she ran through the cabin with stern determination, shoving kitchen piles into drawers, kicking loose shoes and laundry into Bob’s room and shutting the door, and cutting s
tems off three bunches of flowers she had bought to splash around the place. Roses in three-colored bunches, yellow, pink, and red, were arranged loosely in vases, placed and replaced on tables and in corners.

  Then she examined her handiwork and decided things looked unearthly neat, so she messed a few magazines around on the coffee table. As if Paul cared. But the work was automatic and inexorable, as important as a court appearance to her on this night. She wanted everything beautiful and harmonious.

  She missed him every night. She loved him so much! She wanted to be with him forever. Or something!

  In the kitchen, she laid out ingredients as directed by Andrea to be swiftly boiled, blanched, and assembled later: fresh rigatoni, Swiss chard, toasted crumbs, anchovies, newly grated Parmesan. She tossed sliced tomatoes, slivered carrots, and two kinds of lettuce into a bowl, covered it tightly, and put it into the refrigerator. She would add homemade tomato-basil croutons and dressing, her specialties, later. A frosty bottle of champagne rested on the middle shelf, lonesome. She inserted a second beside it.

  After lighting a pyramid of orange and blue candles on a side table in the living room, she threw a fresh log on the fire.

  She took Hitchcock out for a brisk trot up the road, and then, murmuring words of apology, she tossed a big bone into the laundry area and shut him up inside for the night.

  Upstairs, she changed the sheets on her bed and gave the yellow roses a pat. Checking the clock, she stepped into the shower. Hot steam forced her to shut her eyes. She stayed under the waterfall for a long time, until her skin was pink and shining, all the sins of the days and weeks drained temporarily away. Back in her room, she settled on a silk nightie with a matching silk robe loosely tied at the waist. She brushed her long brown hair, despaired of controlling it, and let it fly.

  The phone rang. She started toward the bedside table.

  The doorbell rang. She let the phone go to the message machine, racing downstairs to answer the door. Paul walked in the door, grabbed her, and trundled her into the warm, vanilla-scented living room, his mouth all over her neck, shoulders, and breasts, lips cold with the outside. Within minutes, he removed his shirt, her fine silk.

  Everything.

  Bliss, or fatigue, or mutual satisfaction must have knocked them both out, because a strange sound woke Nina, the sound of a key jiggling in the front door.

  But how could that be? Why wasn’t she in bed, with this long, hairy arm across her breasts covered demurely by a down comforter? Why did she feel so exposed?

  The fire must have kept them warm, she thought groggily, realizing they had never made it to the bedroom. Paul, who lay all over and around her in an intimate clutch on the living-room rug, snored softly. Before she had time to heed the situation further or form a plan to stave off impending disaster, the front door opened widely.

  Bob stepped in. “Mom?” he said. “Taylor’s grandma’s sick. I tried to call-” His voice fell away.

  Closing her eyes, Nina played asleep, trying to keep her breathing regular, just like Bob used to do when he was little and was caught late at night reading by flashlight.

  “Mom.” This time, Bob said the word more softly. He stood there in the entryway for what seemed like months, then tiptoed past them and crept up the stairs to his room.

  “Wake up,” she whispered to Paul when she felt convinced of the thoroughness of Bob’s absence from the room. She tried to lift Paul’s heavy arm off her, but the arm, awakening slowly, had other things in mind. She repeated herself a few times, watched the lazy hazel eyes open wide at last, and fended off his hands, which had gone exploring. “I have to get up. Let me go!”

  Something in her voice worked. He removed his arm. “What’s the matter?”

  “Bob came home,” she whispered.

  “So?”

  “Are you awake? He caught us lying here.” She moved her leg out from under his leg and stood up.

  “God, you are so pretty from this vantage point.”

  “Paul, get up!” She took his hand and tried to get him to his feet. “Put something on.” She handed him his shirt, which he obligingly put on. She handed him his pants. He pulled them over his legs. “Now button that shirt,” she commanded.

  “What’s the rush?” He fumbled with buttons. “He’s on to us. There’s no going back now.”

  Trembling, she picked up her nightgown and robe. She put the robe on and climbed the stairs to her room. “Shh. I’ll be right back.”

  She returned fully dressed in a sweater and long knit skirt. Paul sat at the kitchen table in front of a beer and half-empty glass. Nina went directly to the refrigerator and pulled out the champagne. “We might as well open a bottle of this,” she said, and she knew how she sounded, sick at heart, horrified.

  “Sure,” Paul said, ignoring all that. He popped the cork. She handed him two crystal flutes, which he filled.

  “To us,” he said, clinking. “Bob will take it all right.”

  She nodded and drank.

  “Dinner?” Paul said, pointing his glass toward the full countertop.

  “Yes, except Bob hates anchovies. You mind if I leave them out?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You can’t stay over tonight,” she said. “Taylor’s grandma’s sick.”

  Before Paul could respond, Bob’s door opened. “You guys decent now?” he called down the hall. “Can I come out?”

  “Come on out,” Paul said.

  “What will I say to him?” Nina asked.

  “Say it’s time for dinner. You’re delighted he decided to join us after all. Say you’re sorry about all that. Ask him if you can put anchovies in my half of the pasta.”

  Lacking a better idea, she did.

  18

  O N SATURDAY MORNING, despite the pressure Nina and Paul felt to work, they both dropped everything when Bob extorted his way into their plans.

  “The only thing that’s going to make it up to me is a hike up to Cave Rock, Mom,” he told Nina slyly, after she offered awkward apologies for the previous evening’s living-room debacle. “I’ve been wanting to go there all summer, and now winter’s coming and we still haven’t gone.”

  Nina called Paul to tell him. Paul invited himself along. “Let me check with Bob,” Nina said.

  “Sure,” Bob said, “let’s invite Paul. He’s such good company. But I guess you know that.” Chuckling, he took off to find his boots.

  Although Nina was clearly still worrying about Bob, he seemed untraumatized enough to Paul when he picked them up. They drove past Zephyr Cove to Nevada State Park, parking in the lot below the tunnel, Bob talking nonstop about why he needed to see the famous cave. “Wish told me there are spirits here and if we don’t make any noise we’ll hear them.”

  When Bob let up for a few seconds, Paul listened to Nina tell about her conversation with Jack, and how Jack felt she was in the clear. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, as if daring him to say something different. He kept his skepticism to himself. He also kept himself from making one single crack about Jack.

  The parking lot abutted Lake Tahoe, ending at a boat ramp, and the two or three other cars all had empty boat trailers. Flights of gulls punctuated the delicate sky, which looked as if it might destabilize into a storm during the afternoon, but the lake lay passive and cool beneath.

  In a triumph of functionalism over history, Highway 50 had been blasted through the bottom of Cave Rock as a WPA project. Cars roared through the tunnel as they climbed up the hill in light scrub. Bob sat on the edge of a wall overlooking the lanes until Nina, nervous, called him back.

  “The Washoe used the waters below this cave for their sacred burial area,” Bob lectured, climbing on ahead, Paul behind, Nina on his heels. “I asked Wish to come along, but he said he has too much homework, which is too bad, because he knows a lot more than I do about it.” They came very quickly to a flat area marred with concrete and broken glass with an enormous natural archway entry into the rock. Within the gloom
they made out a hundred years of graffiti on the walls. Stacked bits of granite, feathers, and twigs, offerings of mysterious origins, decorated the large slabs of granite at the far end, where the rock narrowed into a V.

  “There is a cave like this on Oahu,” Nina said. “Bigger, but with that same narrowing at the back. It’s still an opening, but it seems to continue down into the earth at that point. The Hawaiians say it’s where their race was born.”

  They walked back into the light and poked around. Bob set off, climbing beyond it onto a hillside of loose shale. Nina, who had been sitting cheerfully on a rock overlooking the lake getting her picture snapped by Paul, got up grudgingly to continue on with him.

  “I’ll wait here,” Paul said, checking out the steep rock walls, noting the places where climbers had attached fixed holds. After they left, he walked around until one particular line on an outside wall of the cave attracted him. Cave Rock might be a sacred place to the Washoe, but to the profane rock-climbing community it was a vertical park.

  Pulling his climbing shoes and some chalk for his hands out of his pack, he quickly readied himself for some free climbing, scoped the line out some more, eyeballed some handholds, and pulled himself into the ascent.

  How he loved to climb. He loved the stretch of muscle under his skin, the adrenaline rush, the cold edges of rock that nicked him as he felt for handholds. He ignored the pitons left by more cautious roped-up types. After a while, he settled into a slow rhythm, taking no chances on the holds, which were, true, not too reliable, just enjoying himself in the moment, doing what his body was meant to do, his eyes six inches from Mother Earth, his hands holding her tight.

  He reached the top fairly fast and sat down to enjoy another fantastic view of the lake and surrounding peaks, clouds massing in the east, a sliver of moon ghostly in the thin morning air. His reverie was interrupted by a shout, followed by a second shout, followed by his name.

  He scuffled down the gentle backside of the rock face, toward the voices. There he found Nina kneeling over Bob, who was sitting at the bottom of a long rockfall, blood gushing from his knee. A bruise was beginning on one cheek, and scrapes on his arms told Paul he had taken quite a tumble.