"Sure," Nina said.
"And I’d like to know how much you would charge."
"Twenty-five thousand dollars as an initial retainer, billed against my usual hourly rate of two hundred dollars per hour. Plus expenses," Nina said. "Including the investigator’s time."
"I’m sure you can understand we need to talk to Michelle about this," Tengstedt said.
"You know, she can also request a public defender. You aren’t obligated to pay for her attorney," Nina said. "And it appears she may have some funds of her own." If she could get into Anthony’s bank account.
"No, no, we can help her. We just ... need to know where she stands. You say she has already asked you to represent her. Do you think that’s a good idea?"
"I don’t have the same amount of felony trial experience as, for example, Mr. Riesner. But other factors in a particular case may balance that out. For one thing, your daughter has expressed confidence in me, and—"
"She hasn’t got a clue about people," Carl Tengstedt said. "Look who she married."
"Let me finish," Nina said. "I believe that she has told me the truth, at least as she understands it, about the events surrounding Mr. Patterson’s death."
"So?"
"Some of the things she has told me are, frankly, hard to believe. And another lawyer, who does not believe her, might be inclined to handle the case in a very different way than I would."
"So?"
"I think it is important to her case that her ideas and feelings not be disregarded. We have established rapport— that could mean the difference between success and failure in a situation like this one, where there’s a lot of confusion to clear up."
Tengstedt’s frown had been deepening as she spoke. "Sorry," Tengstedt said. "You’ve lost me. We’ll talk to her and get back to you."
"Please keep in mind that I have not agreed to represent her yet. I told her I will let her know tomorrow. There is a bail hearing coming up and I would suggest that I at least cover that for her, since I’m familiar with what’s going on."
"That would be helpful," Tengstedt said, seeming to soften slightly. They talked about the no-bail recommendation for several minutes.
"Fresno is three hours’ drive from here," Nina said then. "If I do represent your daughter, I’ll need to ask you to come up again very soon to meet with me."
"I run an auto dealership specializing in four-wheel-drive vehicles. I’m my own boss. I can come up anytime," Carl Tengstedt said with some pride. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind.
"Me too," Misty’s mother said. She looked down at her hands. "I have arthritis, and I don’t drive anymore myself."
"My mother had an arthritic condition too." Nina said. "Thank God for aspirin."
A deep silence greeted this pronouncement. Nina remembered, too late, that the Tengstedts were Christian Scientists who usually did not take medications. "I understand Michelle lived in the Philippines until she was ten," Nina said hastily.
More silence.
"She spent her adolescence in Fresno?" Nina had the feeling each question she asked offended them in some way.
"She used to be a pretty good student when she was little," Mrs. Tengstedt said, kneading her hands. "It certainly is cold in here."
"She got into some trouble with boys," Tengstedt said suddenly. "We told her, we tried to protect her, but by the time she was sixteen she was sneaking out her bedroom window. Up till then she had been such a good child."
"What caused that change in her personality? Do you think it was just adolescence?" Nina asked. Carl Tengstedt shot his wife a warning glance. What had she said that was so threatening? Nina could understand why Misty could not just ask her parents about the past.
"Hard to say," Tengstedt said. "Now we got to go find a place to stay tonight before we go back to see Michelle."
"You know, you haven’t asked me anything about Anthony’s death," Nina said.
Again, the hard military man and his wife sat rooted in their chairs. They were holding themselves together with great effort, Nina realized. Her questions, which seemed so innocuous, were adding to their pain. At length Mrs. Tengstedt said, "Whatever Michelle did—was involved in—we are going to stand behind her."
Nina thought about her words for a moment. "Mrs. Tengstedt, Misty told me two hours ago that she is innocent of this crime. You seem to have some doubts. Can you tell me why?"
"This is our daughter’s life, Miss Reilly," Carl Tengstedt said. "Not some movie with a surprise ending. Michelle had her reasons, that we do not doubt. I’m not going to disown her. Maybe we protected her too much, drove her too much the other way. She ran off with the first animal to break open the gate. And in the end he got what he richly deserved."
"Don’t be so quick to assume your daughter killed her husband, Mr. Tengstedt," Nina said. "I don’t make that assumption."
"She’s vulnerable," Tengstedt said as if he hadn’t heard her, "to so many influences." He wound his thick watch-band around his wrist. "We forgive whatever she has done and we believe Almighty God has forgiven her too. She’ll take her punishment, but we’ll make sure it is tempered with mercy. Did she tell you we had Anthony checked out before she married him? He was with the Fresno Police Department. They fired him after two years because he was crooked. The worst kind, one of those creatures that strong-arms small business owners in return for ’protection.’ Punished the ones that couldn’t pay him off with broken arms."
"She didn’t tell me that, no. This is very helpful," Nina murmured when he stopped.
"When we told Michelle everything we found out," he went on, his face betraying great emotion, "she took off. We never expected that. God knows what’s been going on here."
"Carl knows about stress," Mrs. Tengstedt said. "He was a prisoner of war in Korea, shot down in his plane in the South China Sea. And he held on to his navigator in seas ten feet high until they picked him up. He’s a war hero." She spoke as if she had memorized the lines. "Then he was caught by the North Koreans, and they—"
"Please, Barbara, enough," Carl Tengstedt said.
"But you were a hero!" she said, and now her voice beseeched him. What was she begging him to say?
"Let’s go now, Barbara," he said, not looking anymore at Nina, looking inward at some private pain she could not begin to comprehend. His wife rose obediently. Carl Tengstedt offered his hand this time, and Nina remembered to prepare for the grip.
She walked with them to the front and asked Sandy to help them with a motel a grade above the Lucky Chip and to give them Mel Akers’s phone number in case they decided to call for a reference. She also provided Jack’s phone number at work. Maybe they’d have better luck reaching him. She knew he would say he had a high regard for her professional capabilities, if nothing else.
Her stomach was cramping with hunger. She ate a tuna sub and stopped by the Baths, a casino across the highway from Prize’s. She passed into the timeless red-carpeted smoke, changed a twenty into quarters, and played the quarter slots. The cocktail waitresses here wore tiny white Roman togas that, as always, emphasized their secondary physical characteristics. They managed to look bored and anxious at the same time.
At two-thirty she was at the courthouse on another case she had just taken, entering late in the game for a small businessman who had been representing himself. The settlement conference went on all afternoon, because there were a half dozen Sacramento insurance company lawyers wrangling over who should have to pay for the damage in the warehouse fire that had destroyed her client’s business. The client had told her to settle it and had given his parameters. By some miracle, and the heavy hand of the visiting Alpine County judge, a ferocious ranch owner named Amagosian, the case was settled.
Her client had been waiting outside. When she told him it was all over, at a figure he had said would be acceptable, he nonetheless expressed doubt about the settlement. He knew it was just; he knew he had let the main policy lapse a few days before the fire; he knew he was
lucky to recover anything from his insurance broker; but he still hated taking a loss. "It’s a good settlement if everybody comes out mad," Nina told him. She knew after he calmed down he would be relieved to still be solvent, and sure enough at six o’clock he stopped by with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. He popped the cork and Nina and Sandy helped him celebrate his deliverance from the legal system.
Before leaving, Nina drafted another letter of apology to Jack, which she added to the other yellow sheets in the wastebasket. She drove by the lake heading back to Matt’s, admiring the starry night in spite of memories it inspired, which she moved fast to quash.
At home at last, she hugged Bobby before changing into jeans. The living room, warm and redolent of garlic, olive oil, and wood smoke, enfolded the family in its atmosphere, muting the children’s voices, and the song of their mother, who made up words to an old tune, with the children’s names featured prominently. Matt greeted her, then went outside for wood, saying this would be their last fire of the season. "Summer’s coming," he announced. "Green sky at sunset."
"Is that really real, Uncle Matt?" asked Bobby, who was working on a page of multiplication problems on the floor.
"Good question, Bobby." Matt stroked his chin. "Brings up the issue of real reality versus virtual reality. Save that one for your mom at bedtime."
Nina’s plan had been to say nothing. Instead, she unloaded a censored account of her day on Andrea, who stirred hot noodles, strained them, and snapped fresh green beans in between sips of hot apple cider.
"Here you go again, Nina."
"I wish everyone would quit saying that. Bobby is starting to patronize me too. He’s started saying, ’Figures,’ when I ask him to do anything, like brush his teeth. I don’t think I’m so predictable. I surprise myself more than I care to admit."
Andrea smiled and passed her a noodle. "Too soft, huh? But the kids like them this way." She dug around in her cupboard for a can of tomatoes. "I have to make one batch for them, without any visible ingredients, your basic white noodles and smooth red sauce, and one for us, the lumpy, clean-out-your nose, spiced-up version." She pulled some sausage out of the refrigerator and chopped it. "You said you were going to work four days a week, start slow, leave lots of time for a rich and fulfilling personal life."
"I did say that, but not as eloquently."
Andrea poured oregano, chopped onion and garlic, pepper and salt into the pan where the sausage hissed and spit.
"This case will receive some attention, establish my practice. The money will set me up for a while."
"You could go at that more gradually," Andrea said.
Nina chewed on a breadstick. "I’m not the gradual type. Besides, I’m already in it. She wants me, whether her parents do or not. I hear Riesner’s competent, but this girl has a special problem."
Andrea handed her a pile of mismatched knives and forks and motioned her toward the dining room. "Which is?"
"She’s too fucking beautiful, if you’ll excuse the expression. She’s existing in sex-object limbo, with only male relationships. She would do better with a woman lawyer who could see past her body."
Andrea called from the kitchen, "What I would have given for such a problem in my salad days. But don’t you try to avoid tangling psyches with a client? I mean, you can’t fix everything. All you have to do is the legal part, right?"
"You know from the Tahoe Women’s Shelter how that works, Andrea. Poverty, divorce, support, mental illness, physical disability, employment problems, truant kids, aged grandmothers, bounced checks, alcohol, self-hatred—you name it, the social problems women have are always intertwined with their legal problems."
"But it’s too overwhelming to take all that on. Each of us professional helpers steps in to fix one little part of it, so we don’t end up all together in the psycho ward."
Nina sat down at the table, remembering a custody hearing a few years before. Just before the case was called, she had been arguing vehemently with the opposing counsel that her client, the mother, should have physical custody. After a couple of minutes the lawyer, an imposing, elderly man, had stepped back from her and said in an accusatory tone, "Why, you’ve become completely personally involved!" So what? Her client was about to lose her kids! But back then, all she had felt was shame, the shame of acting like a human being when she was supposed to be acting like a lawyer.
"I care enough about her to want to fight a legal battle for her. She’s got her own rounds to go, starting with her father."
After the spaghetti was wiped off the three smaller faces and Popsicles were inserted in their mouths, Matt pushed himself back from the big plank table he had built for his family. "Ever notice—"
"Don’t say it, Matt."
"How murder fascinates you?" he finished. In the silence that followed, Nina could feel her heart beating, fast.
"I hate it when you get so dramatic, Matt," Nina said to her brother.
"Murder fascinates you," he repeated. "The appeals you did in murder cases got you involved but kept you at a nice, safe, intellectual distance, but this is different. You’ll be dealing with the people and the raw emotion."
"I’m a big girl," Nina said.
"Wouldn’t it be wiser to take the conservative path here?"
"I expected it, but I’m still surprised at you, Matt." Nina reached to push the curtain back on the window and sighed.
"Oh, just being brotherly. Talk to Jack yet?" Matt asked. "Not that it’s any of my business, but on the one hand you say you want to work things out with him, and on the other hand you move to Tahoe and leap into what looks to be a long, heavy case." Andrea gave him a look that silenced him.
"No, I haven’t. You’ll be the first to know."
"What the hell," he said. "I never did a safe thing in my life." He tugged his wife’s hair and smiled. Raising his voice so that the children could hear, he cried, "I’m going outside to look for the moons of Jupiter. Moons of green cheese with goats to eat it." Children ran for coats and gloves while Andrea shook her head.
"Nobody’s ever going to believe you if you keep that up," she told him while he maneuvered the telescope toward the French doors leading to the patio.
He stopped on the way out to rub tomato sauce from a finger onto her cheek and then kiss it. "What’s life without little mysteries?" he said.
Nina took some plates into the kitchen, stacking them too high and holding them too tightly. Matt and Andrea were afraid for her and it was catching. She didn’t want protection, she wanted support.
Standing there at the sink, yawning while she waited for the hot water, she realized one reason why she wanted the case. Misty trusted her. This time, she wouldn’t betray that trust.
8
NINA AWOKE THURSDAY morning to rain drumming on the metal roof. Carl Tengstedt called during breakfast. In a formal tone, he asked her to represent Misty. Just as formally, she agreed.
Misty had won. Now it began.
She drove Bobby and his cousins to school and arrived at the courthouse early. Misty’s bail hearing and arraignment had been scheduled together for 9:00 A.M. With twenty minutes to burn, she climbed the stairs to the second floor.
Nina peeked through the glass in the door of the main Superior Court courtroom and saw that court was in recess before entering. Collier Hallowell was joking with another man in a suit, his back to the door.
"Sorry to interrupt," she said. "I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Nina Reilly. I have the Patterson case."
Collier Hallowell turned, and she had an impression of kind eyes in a tired face. "Hi, Nina," Hallowell said. "Good to meet you. Do you know Jeff Riesner?" She shook hands with both men in turn, while Riesner’s eyes moved as furiously as an electric screwdriver through her. She wished she were wearing toweringly high heels. Their bodies, between her and the light, shadowed her. Both men had dressed their part. Hallowell wore an inconspicuous gray suit that looked like it had come off the rack of the Men’s Wearhouse, downplaying the terr
ible power of the State. Riesner was resplendent in tailored blue pinstripes and an Armani tie, to show judges and juries that the defendant had persuaded a man of substance to accept his story.
"Ah, the famous criminal lawyer from San Francisco," Riesner said. "Gracing us with your presence. I’ve certainly enjoyed hearing the phony stories you’re putting out to try to rope in some business. You’re quite a little self-aggrandizer."
"Shucks. I guess that means you don’t want to do lunch after all," Nina said.
"Don’t mind Jeff," Hallowell said. "He’s our resident dickhead."
"I wonder if could have a minute of your time, Collier," Nina said.
"I guess I’ll be running along downstairs," Riesner said. "Oh, one last thing, since I have your attention: Stolen any new clients from me recently?"
This time Hallowell did not come to her rescue. "They’ve all been over," Nina said, "but I have my standards."
Riesner smiled a smile so hollow it sucked up the air. "You’re in way over your head on the Patterson case, deeper than the dead guy. Maybe your client will get that in time."
"Good-bye, Mr. Riesner."
"See you around," Riesner said. "You betcha."
After Riesner left, Hallowell sat down on the counsel table and folded his arms. "You look at home," Nina said.
"With what the county pays me, it’s about all I can afford." She saw now that the tired eyes were friendly gray ones with an engaging smile for follow-up. Women jurors would like his style. "It’s true, I spend my days here."
"How many deputies are there here at the Lake?"
"Four, soon to be down to three in the next round of budget cuts. One for Child Support, one for Muni Court, one for Superior Court, Judge Milne’s bailiwick. That’s me. If we need to we can borrow from Placerville. Where are you from, Nina?"
"San Francisco for a few years, and before that, Monterey."
"You like pretty places."
"Yes, I do. How about you?"
"Born and raised in Tahoe, except for law school at Boalt. It’s a good town, if you can stick it out the first year or two. Quite a few lawyers come up the Hill for a season and decide to move on."
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