Writ of Execution

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  The trick was to take one small solid step forward on each case, dictate a letter, return a phone call, rev up Lexis and look up a legal point. The court cases moved jerkily forward in a back-and-forth with opposing counsel, the speed contingent on many things out of her control. All she could do was take the next step on her side as soon as possible.

  The afternoon passed and the sun went down in a flight of gray and purple clouds over the mountains. No fax.

  One last check of the daily calendar. Jessie’s check was safely deposited. At eight-fifteen the next morning Nina would be in court on another matter. Jessie at ten. Alex and his mother sometime before lunch. A hearing on a custody case in the afternoon. Nina stretched, hands folded together behind her head, pushed her chair back, put her socks and Nikes back on, packed up, and pulled open the outer door.

  The fax! It began to produce Jessie’s paperwork with excruciating slowness. She was due home and her eyes were shot. She stuffed the papers in her case to read later and ran out the door and into the parking lot.

  A man waited by the Bronco, a platinum-haired hooligan inadequately disguised by a broad smile.

  “I recognized your car,” he said. “You’re the lawyer.”

  The accent was English. Nina didn’t beep the truck, but she kept her hand on the beeper, which with the right press of the finger would set off the alarm in the truck and bring somebody running. The man’s bleached-white hair had been buzzed practically to the scalp, but with long close-cut sideburns. He had an anciently busted nose and deep creases around the eyes. Heavy-duty black jeans, black T-shirt, and muddy thick-soled boots with chains on them . . . he was a skinhead from a foreign clime, exotic even in this town full of travelers.

  They were alone in a darkening lot, with distant yellow pools from the streetlights across the street the only illumination.

  “I’m a lawyer, yes,” Nina said. “But I don’t have time to talk right now.”

  “It’s a rush,” the man said. She heard mockery in his tone and didn’t like it. He wore a buck knife in a pouch hanging from his waist. She didn’t like that either.

  “I’ve lost something very important and it’s urgent that I get it back,” he went on.

  She pulled out a card and gave it to him, saying, “Call me tomorrow. I can’t talk to you right now.”

  A couple of fast steps forward and he was blocking the driver’s-side door. “Millions of dollars,” he said. “Now, don’t you think that’s worth chatting about? I had that seat saved, and that was my machine. Your young lady took my seat without my permission and now she’s stolen my jackpot. It’s that simple.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Balls. Jessie Leung. Should I talk to her instead of you?”

  That was an alarming idea. “No,” Nina said. “You can discuss your problem with me. You had the seat before Mrs. Leung sat down?”

  “Dead right, and that husband of hers promised to save the seat. I was gone less than five minutes. See the problem?”

  “I see that you’re very upset. It’s a lot of money. If you want to talk to me about it, though, it has to be during regular business hours.”

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” he said in an exaggerated falsetto, mocking her again. “Oh, I know you’d like me to. But this can’t wait.”

  “What is it you want, Mr.—”

  “I want half of it. Just half. A private deal, no publicity, and I go away. Simple, easy, everybody happy. Sale price, today only, since the bitch—I mean, since the young lady managed to slip it over on everyone and she gets something for that.”

  “You want half the jackpot,” Nina said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Or?”

  “Or what?”

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “The fucking alternative is too drastic for me to elaborate on at this fucking time. Get me?”

  “I’ll tell my client what you said,” Nina said. She wished she was a black belt. She wished she carried a machine gun. She wished she wasn’t afraid, but she was in this deserted parking lot and all she wanted was a way out in one piece. “I can’t make any promises.”

  “Tell her now. You got a mobile. All lawyers do.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “She’s hidin’ over in Alpine County with a bunch of Indians,” the man said. “The husband is nowhere around. I know just where she is, but I’m trying to be nice, talk to her mouthpiece, make a reasonable offer.”

  “I don’t know how to reach her,” Nina repeated. “It’s going to have to wait.”

  He pursed his lips, pretended to think about that. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you about eleven tonight and you give me an answer. Don’t worry, I got your home number.”

  “And just how did you get that?”

  “Your number? How hard do you think that is?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Charlie Kemp,” he said. “The pleasure’s mine.” A sarcastic smile.

  “Mr. Kemp, with this size claim, you need a lawyer. You need to know what your rights are and whether your claim is likely to prevail—I need to talk to my client, and I can’t get hold of her by eleven.”

  “I will call you at eleven, sharp. Drive down there and talk to her. You got time.” When she didn’t move and he didn’t move, he made an elaborate show of stepping away from the Bronco. “Oh, pardon me. So sorry. I seem to be in the way.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Kemp.”

  “Don’t blow it, love,” Kemp said. He reached out and chucked her on the chin, and Nina stood there, face burning, knowing she could get a lot worse if she fought back. He moved off jauntily toward the sidewalk. Nina waited until he was fifty feet away, then beeped the Bronco, threw open the door, jumped in, and locked herself inside.

  Then, soaked in cold sweat, she breathed. All that was left was the sick taste of her humiliation, her physical helplessness, the fact that she had been forced to talk her way out instead of telling him what she really was thinking and pushing her way by him. She thought, I have to do something. I have had it with this physical menace from men.

  But as soon as she got home, she called Paul.

  Paul arrived at Nina’s house at ten. Scouting the neighborhood, he walked around the yard with Hitchcock and looked under the house. He was thorough and he was armed. Bob, oblivious, played ear-splitting music in his bedroom.

  Nina made a fire in the orange Swedish stove in the living room. “Thank you for doing this,” she said as he stamped back in. “I’m going to wire the house.” He took off his brown bomber jacket and hung it on the banister.

  “Good idea, but it won’t help tonight. I guess we wait,” he said. “I’ll take the call. He won’t bother you with me around.”

  “It really got me that he knows where Jessie is, and that he has my home number. I have no doubt he knows where I live.” She had told Paul Jessie’s first name.

  “Relax. The Man is here.”

  “Would The Man like a beer?”

  “Might take the edge off. So I’ll pass. Coffee, if you don’t mind.”

  Nina couldn’t sit, so she loaded dishes into the dishwasher. Paul seemed to have gotten over his anger at her, or maybe he was just being professional? She wondered if she really was stringing him along, keeping him in Tahoe, because she needed him so much.

  “Kenny said he did promise he’d hold the stool for him. I asked him tonight before I came over,” Paul called to her from the living room. “So aside from his bad attitude, what kind of case would Kemp have if he went after Jessie legally?”

  “He has no legal right to one cent of that money,” Nina said. “He knows it. That’s why he’s trying to extort it, but he hasn’t said quite enough yet for me to go to the police. The one who pulls the handle wins the jackpot. He had no right to ask Kenny to hold the seat.”

  “But Kenny said he would, and said he’d take a hundred bucks for it.”

  “But Kenny didn’t hav
e the power to hold the seat, so that agreement was invalid from the start.”

  “Can’t blame him from one point of view,” Paul said. “I myself might behave badly under the circumstances.”

  “Not this badly. I suppose I should have expected something like him to wriggle out from under the pine needles, but I’ve never had a case like this. I think he’s only the first.”

  “We could tape him.”

  “Inadmissible in court since he didn’t give permission. I could even be charged criminally like Linda Tripp.”

  “The police could get a wiretap order. Or we could try to put him off again.”

  “Give it a shot,” Nina said. “But I suspect he’s going to take it as a no, and then I don’t know what he’s going to do.” Paul had stretched out on the couch and turned on the TV with the sound muted and somehow found ESPN, which she had long ago deprogrammed. There was a golf match on. The players were standing around in their pastel shirts, staring at another player who was getting ready to putt.

  “Well, at least she has a gun,” Paul said. “Maybe.”

  “Paul?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I really ought to talk to this jerk myself. My self-respect is suffering, thinking of how easily he leaned on me in the parking lot of my own building.”

  “Why? I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Because I’m disgusted with myself. I do criminal law, the people get rough sometimes, and I have to run and hide the minute there’s even a hint of a physical altercation. I’m telling you, I’m sick of it!”

  “Take a class in self-defense,” Paul said. “You could be a real Tasmanian devil.”

  “Maybe I should. You really think I could ever get confident enough to take on a guy a foot taller than I am? I was thinking mace, or even—”

  “No,” Paul said. “Forget guns, Nina. You wouldn’t kill him, and he’d get it from you. Mace? You’ve still got to have that physical confidence to get it out and hurt somebody.”

  “I can imagine doing it but I’m not sure I could do it.”

  “So you keep me by your side. On the couch, at the office, in the bed.”

  “Too expensive,” Nina said. Paul laughed, and gave no sign of irritation. He was there on business, the business of protection.

  “How’s it going with the cocktail waitresses?” Paul asked. Nina had just associated in with a Nevada attorney named Marlis Djina in an employment discrimination case against all four of the big gambling clubs at Tahoe.

  “Cocktail servers,” Nina said, correcting him.

  “As if there ever was a male cocktail waitress,” Paul said. He laughed again. He was actually in a good mood, because he was getting ready to out-muscle somebody, and this now began to irritate Nina. “That’s why it isn’t discrimination, that they have to wear high heels. All ‘cocktail servers’ do, so where’s the discrimination?” he went on.

  “You think the Kiss My Foot campaign is pretty funny, don’t you?”

  “Well, when they all got together and burned their spike heels on a mock fire for the press—that made them look silly,” Paul said. “Like the bra-burning.”

  “That never happened. Some guys’ wishful thinking. And these women didn’t really burn high heels. They staged a symbolic protest. Some of them have to carry heavy drink trays in three-inch heels,” Nina said. “It’s torture.”

  “I’d do that before I’d work in a coal mine, or weld heavy machinery, or be a sewer worker,” Paul said.

  “Have you ever tried it?” Nina said. She went upstairs and found a pair of Manolo Blahnik spike-heel sandals with Roman lacing. “Put them on,” she commanded.

  “I’m not looking for the prince,” Paul said. “Like you women. Besides, you are a world-class spike-heel wearer. What hypocrisy.”

  “The difference is that I don’t have to wear them. I never wear them if I’ll be standing up for very long. Those women walk miles and miles each shift. Sometimes they go home with blood in their shoes. Why should they have to suffer physically for men’s visual pleasure? The job is to deliver drinks and take orders.”

  “The job is to get the men in and keep them in,” Paul said. “The men still have more money to blow.” His smile had faded.

  “The clubs don’t need it,” Nina said. “Gambling is a big enough draw. They don’t need the sex.”

  “They need to use sex along with everything else to draw the suckers in. Anything to take the men’s minds off how badly the gambling is going,” Paul said. “Topless dancers, free booze, shiny cars as special prizes, sports bars, prostitutes . . . so the waitresses have to wear high heels and smile and look sexy. Big deal.”

  “Women in physical pain aren’t sexy no matter what they’re wearing.”

  “Okay, Counselor,” Paul said. “You win.” He turned up the sound on the television. The hushed voice of the golf announcer noted that Tiger Woods had missed his birdie putt and was going for par. “Sorry,” Paul said. “I have two hundred bucks riding on this tournament. I’m betting that Tiger Woods will win by more than ten strokes. It’s only the first round.”

  “You’re betting on a golf game?”

  “Look, Nina. Let’s start over. Come here and sit down. Take it easy.” He watched the tall, broad-shouldered young player putt from six feet. The crowd sighed as the ball rolled just past the cup to the right.

  “Well, I’ll be. He’s going to bogey. There goes that bet,” Paul said, and after Tiger did just that, he went back outside for another of what he called his “perimeter surveys.”

  Nina went to organize Bob into bed.

  Eleven o’clock came. They sat there with the phone in Paul’s lap and waited. Eleven fifteen. Midnight.

  “I can’t believe this,” Nina said. “I have court tomorrow at eight-fifteen.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Go to bed,” Nina said. “I still have some legal papers to go over before I’ll be able to get to sleep.” In answer Paul pinched the phone cord and pulled it out of the phone.

  “Let’s call it a night,” he said. “You have to pace yourself. You’re supposed to show up in the morning ready for anything. What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  “Kemp could come here.”

  “That’s covered. I’ll stay.”

  “What if he goes to Jessie’s? The process server found her. I know Sandy warned her, but . . .”

  “Trust me, he’s bluffing. Kemp doesn’t know exactly where she is in that neighborhood, unless he’s Washoe himself. And somehow I doubt, from your description, he’ll pass for a neighbor and get lots of information out of the locals.”

  Nina thought of the bleached hair and Brit accent and said, “Not unless he’s a very peculiar Washoe.” She yawned.

  “Now the sole remaining question,” Paul said, “is— where do I sleep?”

  “Oh, Paul. We can’t. Bob wouldn’t—it wouldn’t be right.” She looked at the couch. “I’ll bring you some bedding.” Bob came out at that moment in his oversized T-shirt and baggy shorts, collected a Fruit Roll-Up from the basket on the counter, took a sharp look into the living room and surveyed the situation, then said, “ ’Night, all.”

  “He’ll take good care of you in a few years,” Paul said after Bob had gone down the hall. “What is he now, fourteen?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Seeing much of his dad?”

  “I doubt Kurt will ever leave Germany. I heard he was engaged, but I don’t know anything about her.” Nina had three or four major regrets in life, and Kurt Scott was one of the biggest. She didn’t regret her first precious love affair, and she sure didn’t regret the son that had resulted, but she had handled things badly, denying both Kurt and Bob a relationship they deserved for many years.

  “What does Bob think about getting a stepmother?”

  “He pretends it’s nothing but I know he’s nervous. He doesn’t want to be number two.” Anxiety came up in her. “What kind of game is this jerk Kemp playing with me, P
aul? Why doesn’t he make the call? What could he have to gain by putting me and Jessie through all this anxiety for nothing?”

  “Not enough information to tell,” Paul told her. “Run along to bed, now.” She bent over him and kissed his mouth. He held her close and made her do it again, until the kiss took on a life of its own and threatened to drown them both. She pulled away.

  “Hurry,” Paul told her. “Or I won’t be responsible.”

  Jessie’s faxed papers lay on the bed. Nina, however, had come to the end of her personal marathon. She picked them up and made her eyes move mechanically around on the top sheet, but her brain refused to follow. Sleep rolled under her and bore her away.

  She dreamed that she was in a department store looking at a marvelous sleeping bag for professional women who had to spend the night on the job, very neat and official-looking with various compartments. When you pulled on the string, the bag opened out like a chifferobe into a hinged apartment. On one side, which was as big as a room wall, there were drawers for an office, bunk beds, and hanging stairs leading to a complete hanging bathroom, all decorated in Danish Modern.

  Finally! How she wanted to move in, but she was out of time, she had to get to court. Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor. She saw an iron and ironing board. She picked up the iron and started furiously ironing her skirt, trying to get those wrinkles out.

  10

  “WELL, WELL,” SAID Jeffrey Riesner as Nina walked into the law and motion session on Tuesday morning. “What a charming surprise.”

  She hadn’t had coffee yet. Her skirt was wrinkled in spite of the dream and her hair was flipping into anarchy. Jessie’s papers were still sitting unread in her briefcase. Her client, Hector Molina, wasn’t needed and she was expecting a quick impersonal in and out. They were in the upstairs Superior Court and Judge Amagosian hadn’t arrived yet. Three or four male lawyers, all of whom Nina knew, clustered around Riesner.

  He came right over and took her arm like he owned it. She shook it off. Dominating body language was his specialty. He smelled like a Parisian hair salon and his tie was Hermès. Infuriatingly tall, the hair ever thinner above permanently raised eyebrows, he was extremely successful at his work, which was representing insurance companies and well-heeled defendants in criminal cases. Today his face bore a rancid, mocking look she knew well. “Now, don’t be coy, Nina,” he said. “We need to talk. Or haven’t you seen the papers?”