The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  I step from the car, slam the door closed, and lock it. When I turn, I see Dana framed in the open doorway of the house, waiting for me. She is shoeless in dark nylons and a black dress that at the moment is well above her knees as her arms are stretched above her head bracing her lithe figure in the open door as if framing a picture.

  She turns it on me as I walk up the path toward the house. Her hands remain on the doorframe as she tosses her head to one side to flip her hair from her eyes.

  “God, I’m glad to see you,” she says. “I saw you at the funeral, but I just couldn’t deal with all the people.”

  “I understand.”

  She takes me by one hand and pecks me on the cheek. “I don’t know what I would do without friends,” she says. “You and Nathan.”

  “That would be Mr. Fittipaldi?” I say.

  “Emm.” She nods. “You wouldn’t believe how good he’s been.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “I don’t know. A year maybe. He’s on the arts commission with me.”

  “He’s a member?”

  “Emm. Very influential.” She leads me into the house and closes the door behind us. “Nathan has galleries all over, in Beverly Hills, New York, Europe.” She guides me toward the living room.

  “I saw his card,” I tell her. “What is it exactly that he does? I mean besides being a friend.”

  She looks over her shoulder at me, the kind of sultry grin that tells me I could get on that list too. Be her friend.

  “He’s in art acquisitions, for important clients. Private collectors, large museums, that sort of thing.”

  “It sounds impressive.”

  “He is,” she says. “But let’s not talk about that right now.”

  So I turn to another topic. “How are you doing?”

  “You can’t imagine. No one could,” she says, “until it happens.” Then she looks at me, hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “What for?”

  “I forgot you lost your wife.” I don’t know if this is her ham-handed way of reminding me that I am available. With Dana you never know.

  “Nikki died some years ago,” I tell her.

  “Nikki. That was her name?”

  I nod.

  “Still, it was thoughtless,” she says. “What was I thinking? Of myself obviously. My mind. It’s not all there. Nick told me about it. What did she die of? I forget.”

  “Cancer.”

  “That’s right. And you have a daughter?”

  “Sarah.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Fifteen. I remember that,” she says. “What an age. And I’ll bet she steals the hearts of all the boys too. You’ll have to bring her by sometime so I can meet her.”

  “Sometime,” I tell her.

  “I suppose it is a little different. I mean Nick being killed and all. And your wife dying of natural causes. You must have had some time to prepare.” Dana has switched gears again, perhaps a measure of her state of mind.

  “Not that that eases the pain, I’m sure. But this. It was the shock as much as anything. One minute he’s here, the next he’s gone. And the press. You don’t know what it’s like until you have to deal with those people. They have absolutely no respect for anything. One of them actually rented a boat and motored up to our dock for pictures. The police had to haul him away.”

  “I saw a couple of them out by the gate, parked in their cars,” I tell her.

  “They’re animals,” she says. “Well, at least the TV cameras are gone. I mean I couldn’t even drive out. They had the exit blocked. The homeowner’s association had to call the police twice to get them to move. It’s like a bad dream. I keep waiting for Nick to come walking through the door. But I can’t wake up. It doesn’t go away.”

  “You’re right,” I tell her. “I can’t imagine.”

  “I don’t know what to do.” She looks up at me.

  I have no answers, but as she steps toward me and puts her arms around my neck, resting her head on my chest and pressing her body against me, it’s clear that Dana does. She’s trying a new set of shoulders on for size.

  The smell of perfume, odors of sandalwood and Indian jasmine, wafts up to seduce me.

  “Somebody killed him, Paul. And I don’t know why.”

  I shake my head. “Somebody killed him, but it was an accident.”

  “An accident.” She tilts her head up and looks me in the eye.

  “I’m sure whoever did it wasn’t shooting at Nick.”

  She doesn’t say anything. Certainly this thought must have entered her mind before now. The papers have been filled with the theory that Metz was the target. “I never thought of it as an accident,” she says.

  “Nick was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” I tell her.

  I’m not sure this eases her mind, but we uncouple and she steps away, new thoughts obviously running through her head.

  She leads me toward a table where a silver tray has been laid out with coffee in a china pot and two cups. She offers me some and prepares it.

  “Sugar?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Cream?”

  I shake my head.

  “Please sit down,” she says.

  I settle into the large tufted sofa. She hands me a cup, then places her own on a table next to an armchair and sits down. One leg is curled under her so that the dark stocking-covered knee is exposed, showing a run in the nylon. She sees this and covers it with a hand as she smiles—that cute schoolgirl grin that she has patented.

  “I must look a mess.” She bites her lower lip.

  “You look fine.”

  “You’re just being nice,” she says, then runs her hands through her hair in an effort to straighten it. This only musses it a little more. She glances down at the bodice of her dress to make certain that everything is in place.

  “I’m a wreck and I know it. I haven’t been able to sleep since it happened.” The redness of her eyes confirms the fact. Her dress is creased as if perhaps she had been lying down before I arrived.

  “I suppose I should explain to you why I asked to you to come over. You were one of Nick’s best friends.”

  “I was a friend.”

  “No,” she says. “You weren’t just a friend. You were a good friend. And Nick didn’t have many of those. I know.

  “The partners at the firm. They didn’t socialize with us. Oh, they made a big show at the funeral, but outside the office they didn’t want anything to do with Nick.”

  “That’s not what Nick told me. He told me that some of the partners wanted to put him on the firm’s management committee.”

  “Nick was dreaming.” She ignores my protest. “They were all, you know, big business lawyers, civil litigators.” She slurs the word a little so that I wonder if maybe she’d had a few drinks before I arrived. “You know they made big promises to Nick to get him to go over there. And then they didn’t follow through. Adam Tolt,” she says. “He rolled out the red carpet to get Nick. Told him they would work him into civil cases, move him upstairs. Then Nick got there and found out it was nothing but lies. They took the money he earned, but they didn’t want anything to do with Nick or his clients. But you, you were different. You were his friend.”

  “Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we had the same kind of clients.”

  “Except you wouldn’t do drug cases,” she says.

  When she looks up from her coffee cup at me, she can see that this stung.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean it that way. Actually I respect you for having standards. It’s something Nick could never do. I told him he was better than that. But I don’t think he ever believed me. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if you’d taken the case, Mr. Metz, that Nick would be alive and you’d be dead. You shouldn’t think like that.”

  Obviously Dana has thought of it.

  “You can’t blame
yourself,” she says. “If anybody’s to blame, it’s me.”

  “You?”

  She nods. “I was the one who brought Metz to him. I was the cause of Nick’s death.”

  “No. That’s not true.”

  “It’s true enough,” she says. “If I hadn’t known him from the arts commission, none of this would have happened.”

  How do I tell her that the cops believe Nick was in business with the man?

  “He would have gone to some other lawyer with his problem and some other poor dumb bitch would have a dead husband.” She begins to cry, just a little. “Damn it,” she says. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this. She catches a single tear with a napkin as it runs down her cheek. “Nick was such a sad case,” she says. “All that work. That’s all he had.”

  “He had you,” I say.

  “Yes. Me.” Dana rises from the chair and turns her back to me. I can’t tell if she’s trying to compose herself or think of what to say next.

  “I knew you would feel bad about what happened,” she says. “And I—I simply wanted to tell you that there’s no need—no reason that you should feel that way.” She talks with her back to me.

  “I thought he was such a nice man.” She shrugs her shoulders and turns toward me, the little girl, looking down at me like a frazzled pixie. “Mr. Metz, I mean. He was always a gentleman. He talked about his family. He had grandchildren. Did you know that?”

  Most of us do if we live long enough. I shake my head.

  “How could someone do that to him? And to Nick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I keep telling myself I had no way of knowing, but it doesn’t do any good,” she says. “I feel responsible.” She sinks down on the sofa next to me with a sigh.

  I ask her if she’s had any counseling, perhaps a therapist, someone whose business is to deal with grief.

  “Right now I don’t know if it would do any good.”

  “You don’t know unless you try. Do you have any friends in the neighborhood? Other women?” I ask.

  “I’m not going to get into that,” she says. “The lonely widow.”

  I yearn for one of the chairs, farther away. I’m thinking perhaps all of Dana’s emotional gyroscopes are out of kilter at the moment. Still, I sit here, next to her on the sofa. She holds my hand in both of hers.

  “I try to put a brave face on it. Yeah right,” she says. “Look what happens.” She smiles, and we both laugh.

  “I had to talk to you because the police said you were the last person to talk to Nick.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Did he talk about me?” she says. She looks up at me, haunting eyes, seeking release from something I don’t understand. Then it hits me. Stupid man. She wants to know if he loved her, and if he shared this with me.

  I begin to wonder how well she really knew him. Nick might talk about a lot of things with other men, including sex swinging from a chandelier with his wife. But he would never discuss the intimacies of love. It takes me a second to get the question in focus. In that time I can see that she takes this for a “no.”

  “He talked about you all the time,” I tell her. “You were the most important thing in his life.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Did he talk about me that morning?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean did he mention my name?”

  “Sure. Several times.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That you were the best thing to ever walk into his life.” He may have said it with a view from behind, describing the sculpted round landscape of her tight little ass, but in one way or another, Nick said it.

  “Really?”

  I nod, raise three fingers like a scout, hoping they don’t rot before her eyes and fall off.

  Before I can take my hand down, she takes it in both of hers. We sit there for a couple of moments. Me looking at the table, the coffee cup, anything but Dana’s blue eyes. She’s looking for something, whether it’s to be consoled or for information, I’m not sure.

  “I’m trying to understand why it happened,” she says. “You met with Mr. Metz; Nick told me you did. Why would anyone want to kill him?”

  Dana’s now entering forbidden territory, items I can’t discuss. If I do and she repeats it to the cops, they would have me on the carpet for a good grilling, arguing that I had trashed any claim of privilege. With the client dead and no other interest to be served, it would be evidence of a waiver.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He must have told you something. I know it had to do with some business he had down in Mexico.”

  “He told you that?”

  She nods. “Before he went to see Nick. We talked after one of the commission meetings about his problem.”

  “How much did he tell you?”

  “Not much. He told me that he didn’t do anything wrong, that he needed a lawyer, and so I told Nick. What was it about? I have to know.”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Listen, you’ll know soon enough. The police will find the people who killed Nick. Then it’ll all come out. Be patient.”

  “You tell me to be patient. I’ve lost my husband,” she says. “I want to know why. Was he involved in something?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I can tell in this instant she wishes she hadn’t. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just me. I haven’t been myself.”

  That’s not true. This is the Dana I know.

  “It’s just that it’s hard to be patient. To wait, not knowing what happened.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Then he didn’t tell you anything that would give you a clue. Metz, I mean?”

  I shake my head. It’s a lie, but at the moment it’s the best I can do. Whether she believes me or not, she accepts this.

  “There was another reason I called,” she says. “I needed to talk to you about something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s—I’m afraid this is going to sound awfully crass,” she says.

  “Try me.”

  “It’s the insurance on Nick’s life.”

  I look at her quizzically.

  “I mean if Nick had a policy of life insurance, at the firm, the fact that he was shot, murdered—I’m not—I mean I’m not sure what to do.”

  “You want to know whether that would affect your ability to recover on the policy?”

  She nods. This is Dana the helpless, blue eyes and silky skin, the veiled complexion. Sitting here holding my hand.

  “Was there a policy?”

  “I think so. Nick told me about it once. Something I think he called a key policy.”

  “Key man?”

  “That’s it. Do you know what it is?”

  This is something a firm like Rocker, Dusha might have. Hefty life insurance on each of the partners, so in the event of death the firm wouldn’t be strapped to buy out the partner’s interest.

  “It’s not exactly my field,” I tell her.

  “I know, but I trust you. You were Nick’s friend.” Dana now wields this like a sword.

  “Do you have a copy of the policy?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did Nick have a safe, a safety deposit box?”

  “The police took the safe,” she says. “We had a safety deposit box at the bank, but it’s sealed until they can go through it. I can’t even get the papers to the house. The mortgage,” she says. “To see what we owe. How much equity I have.” She may be helpless, but she’s not stupid.

  “So, no policy?”

  She shakes her head again, looking at me sort of breathless, waiting for answers.

  “This must sound heartless,” she says. “The grasping widow.”

  “If there’s a policy and you’re the beneficiary, then you’re entitled,” I tell her.

  “I haven’t told anyone else
about this, but Nick left me in, well, what is not exactly a good situation,” she says. “Financially, I mean.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “No one did, including me,” she says. “I think it was some investments he made. I read in the paper that he was supposed to have four thousand dollars in cash on him when he was killed. I don’t believe it,” she says. “Nick told me the market tanked, that we’d lost a good deal of money. The house isn’t paid for, I know that. I’ll have to sell the boat,” she says. “That was Nick’s pride and joy. I may have to look for something more modest. I mean a place to live, if I’m going to have anything to live on.

  “You know Nick. Life on the edge is a badge of honor.” She talks as if he were still alive. “And as long as he was taking care of things I never asked questions. But now,” she says.

  “I understand.”

  “That’s why I called you. I knew you would. And Nick trusted you.”

  Dana knows how to turn the knife.

  “I can make a few phone calls,” I tell her.

  “Oh, thank you. You don’t know what a relief it is to be able to turn all of this over to somebody else.”

  My expression tells her this is not what I said. Dana chooses to ignore this.

  “To have somebody who knows what they’re doing.” Suddenly her arms are around my neck, leaning toward me on the couch, her warm face planted against my chest so that I have to use my hands to keep from falling over backward on the couch. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she whispers.

  My thought at the moment, given the situation, is not something I would expect. It concerns Dana’s speculation regarding Sarah and boys, and the certain knowledge that Dana has been polishing these skills since she was fifteen. I make a mental note to have a conference with my daughter.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning as I come through the office door, Harry is picking through pink phone message slips with an eye on one of the morning talk shows bleeping from the television set in the lobby. His briefcase is on the floor next to his feet, his coat still on, so I assume he has just arrived or is heading out again.