Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  “Was your lawsuit successful, Mr. Post?”

  “There were cracks you could put your hand into, and this is a three-story house, with a view of the whole Bay Area. A view like a jewel box. But the first serious rain and the structure was going to slide.”

  “Mr. Post,” said Carver, with a little laugh. “Could you answer my question?”

  “The construction company settled out of court,” said Mr. Post.

  “What was the amount of the settlement?”

  “The entire house had to be jacked off its mooring, the old foundation broken up. It was our dream house, my wife and I planned that place our whole lives.”

  “If you could tell us the amount of the settlement, Mr. Post.”

  “Five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “When did you receive this payment from the construction company?”

  Mr. Post found it difficult to say: “I never did.”

  “Did you ever receive any explanation for this?”

  “A zillion explanations.” The witness did not want to look at anyone, gripping the wooden arms of the chair. “Every time I called Mr. Chamberlain, he said the company still hadn’t sent the check. For two years, he said the construction company was sitting on the money.”

  Jack sat beside my father, his head in a medical turtleneck. With every question my father’s attorney seemed to grow a little taller in the chair.

  “What did you do?” asked Carver.

  “After so much time, I couldn’t wait any longer. I got on the phone myself, made some calls, to the president of the construction company. He said they had sent a check to my lawyer, Mr. Chamberlain, for the entire amount, right after the settlement had been reached.”

  Jack hitched himself to his feet, objecting.

  Georgia craned her neck as Mrs. Jovanovich found her way to the witness stand. “It’s dear old Mrs. What’s-her-name,” whispered Georgia in a tone of surprise.

  It took a long time for her to cross the courtroom with the help of two metal canes tipped with white rubber. Finally, a bailiff, with his holster and his badge, offered her an arm, and she made it to the witness stand at last.

  She is the kind of woman you imagine as an empress, elderly but in full command of both her army and her navy. When she speaks, though, you are reminded of the inroads age has made on her powers.

  “And what legal help did you seek in managing your estate, Mrs. Jovanovich?” Carver was asking.

  “I couldn’t begin to collect the rents and deal with the tax documents, and then when one of my properties had fire damage, and an apartment building suffered in one of our earthquakes, I had so many pieces of paper it was bewildering.”

  Carver met the judge’s eyes. “Just take your time, Mrs. Jovanovich,” he said, gently, but speaking clearly, “and answer the questions slowly. We all want to hear what you have to say.”

  “And please speak right into the microphone,” said the judge with the sort of kindly smile people give frail people.

  Mrs. Jovanovich crooked the mike a little closer, with something like a practiced touch, and her voice resounded. “I asked Harvey Chamberlain to help me, and he said he would.”

  “He acted as your attorney?”

  “He was my legal and financial advisor. In collecting insurance money, pursuing money owed to me, and in helping sort though my expenses. I have so much to do, and I can’t do it all anymore, Mr. Carver. Mr. Chamberlain is always such a pleasure to be with. He is so full of life. My late husband and he used to play golf together, although I do believe Mr. Chamberlain let my husband win.”

  Carver slumped a little. “Could you estimate for us, Mrs. Jovanovich, the size of your estate, in terms of dollars?”

  “I should have brought my financial records with me,” said Mrs. Jovanovich. “I’m so terribly sorry—”

  “Just roughly, to the best of your recollection,” said Carver.

  “Oh, I’m afraid I deal with hundreds of thousands of dollars, Mr. Carver. I have to apologize, because I know some people have so little.” Her face wrinkled into a kindly apology, as though ashamed of her relative wealth. “My husband and I worked hard to build up a considerable amount of property.”

  “Could you tell us, please, how you began to question the professional services Mr. Chamberlain was providing?”

  “You phrase it so politely, Mr. Carver,” said Mrs. Jovanovich. “You’re being very kind, and I appreciate it.” She lifted a finger to silence Carver, and continued, “I discovered that Mr. Chamberlain was deceiving me. He was robbing me.”

  Jack climbed to his feet, said something in an exasperated tone, but before the judge could address the witness, Mrs. Jovanovich’s amplified voice was saying, “Mr. Chamberlain is a thief.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Whenever the microphone shifted away from her voice, Mrs. Jovanovich gripped it and got it right back where everyone could hear what she was saying. Dad sat with his hands folded at his lips, making a tent of his forefingers. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew he was gazing upward at the blank wall above the judge.

  Georgia folded her arms, one of my mother’s postures. The courtroom began to get warm. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, the colors were even more vivid than before, the egg-yellow collar of the man sitting in front of me, the glittering cuff link on Carver’s sleeve. I wondered if I could slip past the spectators, to the door, and out into the corridor.

  Sometimes when I closed my eyes the floor of the courtroom seemed to yaw beneath me, swing down and away, and I was falling. I gripped the edge of my chair. I reminded myself I was fine, right beside Georgia. Sometimes the judge slipped off her glasses, and her eyes looked small and vulnerable, a pink dint on either side of her nose.

  The judge announced a two-hour recess for lunch, and Georgia and I tried to swim toward Dad, upstream against the flow of spectators. Dad put his arm around Cindy, caught my eye and gave a little shake of his head, like a boxer making light of a hard punch: Not even close.

  I gave him a brave lift of my chin, unable to force through the crowd. “Later,” mouthed Dad.

  He turned to Jack and the two of them looked wrapped in lawyer/client privilege, Dad nodding as Jack confided to him. I got close enough to hear, “Vietnamese on Jackson, or we could go for the veggie burgers across the street from the Paramount—”

  “Just so long as there isn’t any garlic,” said Cindy. Dad kept a grip on her arm, like she was about to faint, or escape.

  Jack saw me and gave a wave of his hand, like a man clearing away gnats, the charges against my father so many tiny bugs. Jack’s cross-examination had consisted of prompting Mrs. Jovanovich to admit that my father had provided a nurse, employed a tax accountant, and fired a gardener who passed out under the Chinese elm. Mrs. Jovanovich’s attitude had been one of genteel correction: Yes, Mr. Chamberlain had helped, for a fee, but he had also opened the mail, forged her signature, and, allowing herself a touch of slang, he had “maxed out my credit cards.”

  Georgia and I didn’t talk for a while, but Georgia has an ability to make you feel included in whatever she is doing without actually using the power of speech.

  She paused meaningfully outside a door marked MEN, and continued her search. Everywhere we looked on the fourth floor we saw corridors full of videocams and smartly dressed men and women talking into tape recorders. My sister and I were both dressed like secretarial students, dark skirts, unsexy white blouses, mine with demure pinstripes. My sister was at the point she might consider losing a few pounds when she got back to Eureka, or at least try a more slimming exercise than chopping cordwood.

  The women’s room was nearly empty. I looked wan, my eyes like two holes, and I considered wearing the beret over my face. Georgia said she wasn’t very hungry, her first actual English sentence in quite some time. We shared a stick of Doublemint. But we couldn’t stay in the lavatory forever. A husky sheriff’s department deputy leaned into her image at the mirror, working a cold sore with
her tongue.

  The courthouse has narrow hallways for such a big building, and floors the color of goose-liver paté. We passed by an espresso/cappuccino stand in the lobby and stood outside, blinking in the sunlight, saying it was really stupid to forget sunglasses on a day like this.

  Downtown Oakland is a landscape of Kinko’s copiers and One-Hour Martinizing, interspersed with hotel lobbies, cool, dark interiors exhaling decades of cigarette funk. Georgia and I avoided the potholes and the neat stacks of pallets in the warehouse district.

  At last the masts of the Marina gleamed. A Coast Guard cutter purred slowly outward, toward the open bay. We strolled along the gangway, sailboats and motor yachts nuzzling their moorings, and I felt hope begin again, the salt air and the sun having a cheering effect on both of us.

  The Queen Athena was not in her berth. The gray-green bilge of the marina lifted and slowly fell as the wake of the Coast Guard vessel reached this far. Georgia and I leaned on the rail and gazed into the empty mooring.

  I tried to imagine Jack and Dad racing here, plunging onto the deck, starting up the Queen’s engines, and powering her out to the open harbor, a nautical lunch break. But the lazy, gently disturbed surface of the water made this unlikely. No boat had stirred this water in hours.

  “Dad’s selling the boat,” said Georgia, squinting in the reflected sunlight.

  “He told you that?” I asked, startled.

  “No.” The wind was rising, a rope rhythmically slapping a mast. A flag fluttered in the distance, a dove-tailed yacht club pennant. “He wouldn’t let me in on anything,” my sister said.

  Georgia was quiet, shielding her face from the light with her hand. Then she said, “Did he tell you he was innocent?”

  I didn’t like the way she asked.

  We ordered spring rolls, and the waiter brought out a small haystack of bean sprout appetizer, bowls of rice, and a pot of tea too hot to touch. The chopsticks slipped from their paper sleeve, wooden utensils stuck together. You tug them apart, but the break is never clean, and I worried at the tear with my fingernail, smoothing a splinter. The green tea was still too hot. There was a flock of customers eager to pay at the cash register.

  “He’s liquidating everything,” she said. “Putting his money into objects he can sell fast when he has to.”

  “You don’t know this.”

  Georgia agreed. She didn’t really know anything. “Dad wouldn’t talk to me seriously. He just said everything would work out, and got me talking about the classes I’m taking in the fall. Cindy did some talking when I helped her load the dishwasher. She said whatever a person did, she had to plan ahead. She also said the time in New Orleans wasn’t anything like the break they needed, she’d love to see Seattle, Aspen, Key West.”

  “Jack’s expensive,” I suggested, still unsteady at the thought of Dad without his boat.

  For a while there was no further conversation. The spring rolls arrived, tubes of crisp batter and vegetables. For an instant a thought electrified me: Dad would escape, with a briefcase full of currency, to Ixtapa, Belize, Tonga.

  “He married Cindy so they could take advantage of spousal privilege,” Georgia said. “After all, she was his secretary. She can’t be forced to testify against him.” Her voice was soft, her hands cradling a cup of tea.

  “You’re making this up.”

  Georgia said, “He’ll never practice law again.”

  It didn’t sound like me, a harsh voice. “Who’s been lying to you, Georgia?”

  She took her time before she said anything more. “Last night before I went to sleep, I knocked at Mother’s door.”

  She hesitated, giving me time to say I didn’t want to hear this.

  “I asked her what she knew,” she continued. “And she said, ‘Ask your father. Ask him what happens to an attorney who rips off his clients. Ask why the partnership broke up, why Adam David refused to share an office with your father anymore.’”

  The restaurant was nearly empty now, dishes clattering in the kitchen, a place of sudden crowd, sudden quiet.

  “As though I could ever talk to Dad,” said Georgia, “about anything.”

  I put my elbows on the table. Long in, I reminded myself, long out.

  “Don’t be angry with Mother,” said Georgia. When, I wondered, had she stopped calling her Mom?

  I wasn’t going to say anything until I was ready.

  Georgia tasted the tea. “You’re the only person who can ask him to tell the truth.”

  My emotions were under control now. I spoke emphatically, spacing out the words. “I cannot believe I am hearing this.”

  I considered several ways to express my next thought, like someone translating from a foreign language. “You know what word occurs to me right now?” I asked. I sounded a little like Dad.

  “What word?” asked Georgia at last, in a small, weary voice.

  I got up and left her there, barreled out into the sunlight and kept walking.

  I didn’t return to the courthouse that afternoon. I suited up and did my dives in the academy pool. After an hour of somersaults I was hanging onto the side of the pool, breathing hard. Miss P asked me how I was doing.

  Betrayal.

  I swam laps for a long time that afternoon. I freestyled until I could barely move my arms and legs. Even then I didn’t want to leave the water. I sat dangling my feet in the water, while the pool gradually stopped quaking and reflected the windows above.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  When I got home Georgia was sitting in the front seat of her Ford Ranger, the engine running. I asked her how the afternoon at the courthouse had gone, and she said that Cindy sucked white-and-green peppermints all afternoon. “She put the cellophane wrappers in her purse,” Georgia said.

  I was late, Mom and Georgia finished with good-byes, Mom on the porch, the farewell ceremonies over, except for me. The streetlights were on, and the neighboring houses hummed with evening, television, quiet voices, a sprinkler on down the street, glittering drops of water.

  “It’s okay,” Georgia said, meaning it was all right, me leaving the restaurant.

  I wonder how many important conversations my family has had, an engine running, someone ready to head for the freeway.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” I said, my voice so soft she might not have heard me.

  She gave a tilt of her head, quick acknowledgment. “They didn’t set a court date,” Georgia said. “But the judge said there was sufficient case to warrant a trial.”

  I hadn’t wanted to come out and ask.

  I couldn’t forgive Georgia for her feelings about our father. I could only remind myself that she was married to a guy who loved the elasticity of concrete and was always picking up a virus, nasal infections, earaches. I used to hope Georgia would be a journalist or a world traveler, a woman with a briefcase. “Jack should have torn those witnesses to pieces,” I said.

  She left a space in the conversation, where she would have said what she thought about Jack, and about the case against Dad. She wished me luck with Miss P. That’s how she put it, not wanting to say Good luck with the diving, knowing how athletes feel about saying certain things, how words can cause misfortune.

  She patted my hand, having to reach out of the car and wave her hand in the air for a moment before I realized what she wanted. I held out my own arm, and she touched me, gave me a squeeze. Then she was gone, waving up and down, like someone flying with one hand, until I could not see her car any more.

  I didn’t even have time to tell her, “Say hi to Sweetie.”

  A couple of days later I dropped by Dad’s house and ran into LaTanya, the temp from Dad’s office, picking up the mail and putting a fat, pale rubber band around the throwaway ads. “Mr. Chamberlain’s taking a vacation,” said LaTanya with a sympathetic, regal air, car keys tinkling.

  I bicycled past the house when I had a chance, and jogged by each dawn.

  The lamps in my father’s living room ran on a timer, so the front
drapes lit up faithfully at seven-thirty and glowed until dawn. I made the place the destination of my morning miles. I stood breathing hard, flexing my legs, stalling. Hoping the lights would come on again, a silhouette on its way to make coffee.

  “I used to worry, the way you do now,” my mother said, up to her elbows in planting mulch. “Where he was, who he was with. Where the money was coming from.” The tropical peat was rich, clinging, like coffee grounds. She prodded the lopsided Y of a ti plant root into the mulch. “Until one day I realized he was going to take me down with him.”

  I kept quiet, sprinkling a few scattered crumbs of soil into the pot. I couldn’t help recalling what she had said when I told her Dad had been arrested. You need to think about you.

  I wonder if Mom had given her own past some thought, her own secrets. “Maybe I still feel a sort of loyalty,” she continued. “Maybe I looked the other way so long I can’t say anything, if I wanted to. I’m not the one who can answer your questions.”

  I almost said, I don’t have any questions.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Rowan ran with me that morning, huffing along, more and more out of breath.

  I ran backward, in no hurry, calling encouragement while he dodged the red plastic space guns and tricycles, the toys kids leave on the sidewalk. “Go on,” he would gasp, and when I jackrabbited ahead I could hear him far down the street, breathing hard.

  Rowan wasn’t in such bad shape. It was me—I had never been in better condition. I ran easily up Dad’s street, the morning sun in my eyes, and when I saw him I couldn’t be sure who it was.

  I was sure, but I didn’t want to be disappointed. The sun behind him was so strong it seemed to cut him in two, a bleary image I squinted to make out.

  “Champion!”

  I stopped in the middle of the street, hands on my hips.

  He was wearing baggy shorts and a silk shirt with hibiscus blossoms, a man on permanent vacation. I walked up the lawn and he gave me a hug, although I was embarrassed because I was a little sweaty, a spot or two of perspiration soaking through my academy T-shirt.