The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  “The money I understand. Looking for answers as to who shot him and why is something for the cops.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t see them busting their hump looking.”

  “Could it be they figure Nick got what he deserved?” says Harry.

  “One criminal defense lawyer more or less is not something high on their list.”

  “You think it’s going to end up in the file of unsolved cases?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Then maybe that’s where it belongs.”

  “And what if you were his daughter?”

  “I’m not, and neither are you. Besides, what if you go looking and you don’t like the answers you find? What then?”

  “Cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  Harry shakes his head. “If it’s something you’re doing for Nick, you can forget it. The man’s beyond sentiments of appreciation.” Harry gulps a little tea.

  “You know, Harry, I hope if somebody shoots me dead on the street, you would at least take a passing interest.”

  “Is that what you’re doing? Well. God forbid,” he says, “but if somebody shoots you, I’d probably shed some tears. I’d bury you in style, say some moving words over your grave. I’d do what I could to look after Sarah. Or at least see that she was cared for. I’d think about you a lot, and I’d get on with my life.”

  “Hard-nosed,” I say.

  “On things I can’t control, you’re damn right. We made a decision,” he says, “a long time ago. We take no drug cases. We agreed. For good reason. There’s too much time spent coming up to speed on the decisional law, the flow of appellate opinions on the subject being on the order of a ruptured sewer over Niagara. Besides, there are some things you just don’t want to do. Like climbing up on the legal stump for organized crime. You can end up finding out about things you’d rather not know. Stuff that keeps you up nights wondering if you hooked all the chains and turned all the bolts on your doors and whether you have enough bars on your windows.”

  “That’s why I didn’t take Metz,” I tell him.

  “Right,” says Harry. “Because we agreed. So why don’t you blame me that Nick got his ass shot off? I can live with it.” With this he turns and heads out the door, down the hall toward his office.

  For several minutes I sit there looking at the newspaper article, the name Miguelito Espinoza, and wondering what Metz would want with border-crossing visas.

  Then I go out to the reception. Marta is there catching up on filing. I open one of the file cabinets, the drawer labeled M through O.

  “Can I find something for you?” Marta looks up from her desk.

  “Think I found it.” I pull the file on Gerald Metz.

  “How’s your day going?” I ask.

  “Good.” She smiles brightly.

  Within ninety days, in her efficient way, Marta would have closed this file, there being no billing activity. She would have placed it in archives, in one of the cardboard boxes stored in the bungalow two doors down. And if she is still with us in a few years, she would toss it, have it hauled to some landfill, the ultimate archive of American culture.

  Quietly I retreat to my office with the file. There isn’t much in it, the few letters given to me by Metz that morning in my office, along with my notes, scrawled on some pages from a yellow notepad. There on the third page written out and underlined twice is the name Miguelito Espinoza, with an address and telephone number in Santee. It was the name on the rat-eared business card given to me that morning in my office by Metz. Espinoza had acted as the go-between with the two brothers down in Mexico on their supposed development scheme with Metz.

  I haven’t seen Margaret Rush in more than three years, so when she opens the front door, she gives me an expression that says she recognizes the face but can’t quite fix the name.

  “Margaret, it’s Paul Madriani.”

  A moment of hesitation and then: “Oh yes.” She smiles, struggles to arrange her hair with the back of one hand. There is dirt under her fingernails. She is wearing a pair of jeans with smudges of mud at the knees.

  “I’m afraid you caught me gardening,” she says.

  “I wonder if I could come in for just a moment?”

  She hesitates, caught between concerns for security and a social blunder, then fumbles with the latch on the screen door. “Of course.”

  “It’s been a long time,” I tell her.

  “It has.” I can tell she is still not entirely certain who I am. She recognizes the name, the face, but can’t quite place the setting in which we met.

  “I think we saw each other last on that bay cruise. The county bar reception, a few years ago,” I tell her.

  “Oh. Yes.” Recognition lights up her eyes. “You were a friend of Nick’s.”

  “I was.”

  Her expression tells me she now regrets letting me in. “I really don’t have much time,” she says. “I was just getting ready to head out.”

  “I won’t take but a minute.”

  “What is it you want?” she says. “You’ll have to make it quick.”

  “How have you been?”

  “Me? I’ve been fine.” She stands in the entryway. “Can I ask what this is about?”

  “Can we go in and sit down?” I ask.

  “I suppose. But I only have a minute.”

  She turns toward the living room and I follow her. The room is small, on the order of the house itself, a single-story rambler on a street of well-groomed strips of front lawn, lined with established Japanese elms. There is a sofa against one wall facing the front window and the street. Feminine knickknacks of china and crystal and a small antique tea set line shelves that are high on the wall and surround the room. There is a beveled glass china cabinet against one wall and a single wingback chair in the corner next to the fireplace. She sits in this, leaving me to take the couch.

  “I didn’t see you at the funeral, but then there were a lot of people.”

  “Nick’s funeral?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “I wasn’t there. That part of my life ended some time ago,” she says. “What is it you want to talk about?”

  It seems we are not going to do any small talk.

  Her hair has gone gray since I saw her last. Wrinkles envelope her face around the eyes. The tense expression on her face tells me that she may have washed Nick out of her life years ago, but thoughts of him still occupy dark recesses of her mind.

  “How’s your son, Jimmy is it?”

  “James,” she says. “He’s fine.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about Nick.”

  “What about him?” she says.

  “It’s actually about his estate.”

  “Oh, yes. Now I understand. They called from the firm a couple of days ago and told me. It’s the insurance policy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, the key-man policy,” I tell her.

  “Did she send you?”

  “Who?”

  “Who,” she says in a mocking tone, the creases around her eyes focusing the anger in her voice. “You know who I mean. Dana.”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To avoid a problem,” I tell her. “To resolve a potential dispute. Maybe to do what I think is right.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Nick is dead. He’s out of everyone’s life at this point, yours, hers. There may be aspects of this policy that benefit both of you.”

  “You sound just like Nick, just trying to make peace, fix everything for everybody. Oh, by the way, I’m screwing my interior decorator and I’d like a divorce, but it’s nothing personal.”

  “You have every reason to be angry.”

  “You bet I do.”

  “But in your anger, you don’t want to hurt yourself,” I tell her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve received a copy of the policy?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know your na
me is on it as the beneficiary?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re also aware that there was a property settlement agreement at the time of the divorce?”

  She looks at me but doesn’t respond. She knows this is the issue.

  “I take it you’re represented by a lawyer in this matter?”

  “Why should I have to tell you that?”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything. If you are, represented by a lawyer I mean, that’s good. If so, I should be talking to him.”

  “It’s a woman.” She says it in a tone that makes me think male lawyers are not to be trusted.

  “If you’ll give me her name, I’ll take it up with her and she can communicate with you.”

  “Her name is Susan Glendenin.”

  “She works for the Petersen law firm downtown?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I know her.” A stroke of good luck. Susan Glendenin is a good lawyer; more important, she is a voice of reason in a bar increasingly peopled by lawyers who pride themselves on taking no prisoners and who operate on the maxim “screw reason, let’s go to war.”

  “What’s important is to understand that this is a threshold legal issue, the question of who is to be paid under the insurance policy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the way it’s structured, the insurance company has to pay somebody. They don’t particularly care who it is, just as long as they’re out from under when it’s all over.”

  “And?”

  “There may be a way for both of you to win.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Paul Madriani.” I reach into the breast pocket of my suit coat, find the small stash of business cards, pull one out, and hand it to her.

  “Let me tell you, Mr. Madriani, so that you understand. I will take two million dollars and not a dime less,” she says. “You can go back to your client, that harlot, home wrecker,” she says, “and tell her that as far as I’m concerned she can go to hell. Fuck her, fuck you, and fuck the horse you rode in on. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have things I have to take care of.” She gets up out of the chair.

  “I have one question,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you mean it when you say you’ll only release your claim to the insurance policy in return for two million dollars?”

  She looks at me through mean little slits, the anger of a lifetime welled up in her eyes, bitterness and betrayal. “You can bet your life on it,” she says.

  CHAPTER TEN

  This morning Dana is wearing a pair of silk pajamas, black and slinky, bare-footed, sitting up straight on the edge of a wingback chair in her living room, one leg curled under her, trying to explain how she found Nick’s copy of the insurance policy but forgot to call and tell me.

  “I swear to you, Mr. Madriani. I got busy. It slipped my mind.”

  “Call me Paul,” I tell her.

  “All right. Paul. I found it after we talked. It was up in his safe, in the study.” Dana looks at me over a haggard smile, desperate to be believed, innocent, beseeching, sitting next to the fireplace.

  “You do believe me?” She flashes her long lashes in my direction. The body language is good, the shiver in her voice authentic, so if I didn’t know her better, I might even buy this. She sent me on a goose chase to the law firm to get a copy of the policy when she already knew what was in it.

  “Please believe me,” she says.

  I stop looking at her. Instead, seated on the couch, I turn my attention to one of those kinetic toys that Nick had strewn around his office. This one is on the coffee table, the kind with five shiny steel spheres on strings, clicking against one another as they transfer energy through a cycle. I let her listen to this for a second or two before I ask: “How did you get the safe open?”

  “I found the combination.”

  “Where was it?”

  “It was in one of the drawers. In Nick’s desk upstairs.”

  “Maybe we should look and see what else is inside the safe. There could be other important documents.” I start to get up off the couch.

  “No. That’s not necessary,” she says. “I’ve checked everything that was there. There’s nothing else.”

  I look at her. She refuses to return my gaze. “You know, you’re pretty good. You’re not the best, but then you haven’t had a lot of practice. At least I hope you haven’t.”

  “Practice at what?”

  “Lying.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You expect me to believe that Nick would go to all the trouble of locking his private papers in a safe and then leave the combination in his desk drawer where any after-school roustabout teen who broke into his house could find it? Maybe you were married to a different Nick Rush than the one I knew.” I start to get up off the couch like I am going to leave.

  “All right.” Now the pleading tone is gone from her voice, replaced by an edge. Her posture sags in the chair, as she looks down, smoothing the soft wrinkles from the silk fabric on one thigh. “Fine. I had the insurance policy all the time.” Then in a softer, weaker voice, the kind she uses for feminine persuasion, she says, looking up at me, “But I didn’t know what to do. I saw her name on it and I panicked. I was desperate, broke. I had no one to turn to. You do understand? You don’t know what it’s like not having someone . . . Well you know. Someone to rely on.”

  “Someone like Nick?” I say.

  “Well, yes. He handled everything. Our finances, taxes, the investments. I had no idea. I thought we were secure. I don’t know anything about that stuff.”

  “Then how do you know you’re broke?”

  She takes a deep breath, sighs, looks away from me at a blank wall. “I, I had Nathan look at our finances. After Nick died.”

  “Fittipaldi?”

  She nods.

  “It’s good to know you weren’t entirely alone,” I tell her.

  She doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “I had to turn to someone. What did you expect me to do?”

  “Why didn’t you turn over the insurance policy to Mr. Fittipaldi?”

  “We talked about it. He didn’t know what to do either.”

  “Ahh-uhh.”

  “I figured you were a friend of Nick’s. I thought . . . I thought that since you’d known Nick before we were married, that perhaps . . .”

  “You thought I’d go over to the firm, find out that your name wasn’t on the policy, that I might feel sorry for you, and that maybe I would go over and talk to Margaret Rush, is that it?”

  “Well.” First she looks at the ceiling, then back to me, batting her lashes a little. “Yes. I thought you might know her. That maybe you were a friend.”

  “You thought I might be able to intercede, is that it?”

  “Was I wrong?” she says.

  “No. Maybe a little naive,” I tell her, “but that was more than made up for by your seamless manipulation of the situation. I mean it was worth a try, friends being friends and all.”

  “Yes. I thought she might listen to you.”

  I laugh and click the little steel balls on the table one more time. “Actually I’ve only met her once. But even if we were bosom buddies, you’d have to think very highly of friendship to believe that Maggie Rush or anybody else would give up a claim on two million bucks based on that.”

  “So she refused?”

  “In words that I wouldn’t want to repeat in polite company,” I tell her.

  Dana is up out of the chair, turns her back to me, the nails of one hand to her mouth as if she’s going to bite them to the quick. I gaze at her reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. She stands there, nibbling, pupils searching an invisible horizon as she contemplates her next move.

  Suddenly she turns, looks at me, and says: “What do we do now?”

  Before I can say anything, she’s sitting on the couch next to me, pushing the kinetic toy out of reach so that she has my undivided attention. S
ilk rubbing against the worsted wool of suit pants.

  “I suppose you should call Nathan and give him the news,” I tell her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Probably go back to the office and get some work done.”

  “You know what I mean,” she says. She reaches over and takes my left hand in both of hers. “You will help me, won’t you? You talked to the woman. You know how she feels toward me. She hates me. You know that Nick didn’t intend to leave her all that money. They were divorced.”

  “That’s true.” I start to get up off the couch.

  “You’re not going?” she says. “Please don’t go. You’re the only one who can help me. You talked to the firm. You know they treated Nick unfairly. You would think they would want to help now.”

  “I talked to Adam Tolt.”

  “And?”

  “It seems he’d rather not get involved. As far as he’s concerned, it’s between you and the insurance company.”

  This ratchets up her anxiety so that she squeezes my hand until the blood leaves my fingertips.

  “You were Nick’s friend. You wouldn’t let them do this. I mean not to your friend’s wife. Tell me you wouldn’t.”

  “You need to get a good lawyer,” I tell her. Harry would be proud of me.

  “I’ve got one,” she says. “You.”

  “No, I mean a lawyer who knows how to find his way around an insurance policy. Trap all those little wiggle words, nail down the exclusions, screw the definitions to the floor so the insurance company can’t move them around on you. And that settlement agreement Nick had with Margaret. I hope he had a good lawyer draw it up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because that’s the key,” I tell her. “If that wasn’t drafted properly, well, let’s just say no lawyer, especially a good one who knows insurance, is going to want to waste much time on it.”

  “You don’t think I have a chance?” I’ve seen people accused in capital cases with less apprehension etched in their eyes. “Have you looked at it?” she says. “The settlement agreement.”