The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  “Yesterday,” I tell her.

  “Gimme a day or so,” and she hangs up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I have put this off as long as I can. Adam Tolt is expecting a call from me before the end of the day. So this afternoon I call Dana and tell her I have to see her, here in my office. She asks if it’s about the insurance. I tell her that’s part of it in order to get her here. Then I tell her there is also something more serious we need to discuss.

  It’s a quarter after three, and she’s late. When she finally comes cruising into reception, she’s not alone. Nathan Fittipaldi is with her.

  I am on the phone with a client, the door to my office only partly closed so that I can see them through the opening. They are both decked out, dressed like two college preppies headed to a party.

  Fittipaldi has on a pair of tan slacks and a pullover shirt with Ralph Lauren’s polo rider tattooed over one tit. The sleeves of a white sweater are draped over his shoulders and tied loosely around his neck. He is running a comb through dark hair, parting it in the middle, looking like some over-the-hill heartthrob off the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

  Dana is in a pair of white tennis shorts, tight enough that they leave little to the imagination, along with a blue sleeveless top that shows a lot of freckled and browned shoulders. She has on a white tennis cap, one of those visors with an adjustable strap and nothing but blond hair for the top. Her eyes are shaded in a pair of designer sunglasses that I suspect have set her back a good four hundred bucks.

  She takes these off and holds one earpiece casually between her front teeth as she doffs the cap, drops it on our counter out front, and arranges her hair, holding a little mirror from her purse in one hand. “I must look a mess.” She giggles.

  “You look great,” he says as he comes up behind her and snuggles.

  When she turns this way, she sees through the crack in the door and spies me sitting in my office, phone to my ear, talking. To Dana this is an open invitation. Before I can tear myself away and close the door, she reaches it. Leaning over, smiling at me like she’s playing peekaboo through the opening, she pushes it open all the way and waves, giving me the full benefit of her pearly whites beaming in my doorway.

  Fittipaldi walks up behind her, standing a good foot taller than Dana and gawking at my office. He is buffed up, stretching out the shoulders and chest of his shirt, looking very fit.

  “Paul, you know Nathan, don’t you?”

  With the phone in one hand, I hold up the palm of the other, letting them know that I like to finish one conversation before starting another.

  “Oops.” Dana laughs. Covers her mouth with one hand. Silly me.

  She turns to Fittipaldi and mouths the words: “You two know each other,” so that I can read her lips from across the room. Then she nods, a kind of self-assuring bob of the head to reinforce that I am part of the in crowd.

  “Oh yeah, sure.” He smiles, nods toward me, hands in his pockets now.

  Deprived of the gene of discretion, Dana just wanders in. She waltzes around in my office with her hands clasped behind her back like Leslie Caron playing Gigi. She studies all the pictures on my walls, my license from the State Supreme Court, the framed wall certificates from the Southern District of the Federal Court, and one next to it from the Ninth Circuit.

  While she’s doing this, Nathan is standing in the open door, checking the place out. I sense from his expression that my office is not up to gallery standards.

  “No, I understand. I know what you want. I don’t know that it’s possible, but I can try.” I’m trying to keep the conversation with my client cryptic and confidential, a local businessman facing four felony counts of fraud and embezzlement.

  Dana turns toward Fittapaldi and whispers: “I hope this isn’t going to take too long.” This is loud enough for me to hear, since she is standing only four feet from my desk. The woman waiting for a two-million-dollar insurance check, buying groceries out of her dead husband’s client trust account, is in a hurry.

  Then out loud she says: “It really is a beautiful car, Nathan. I just love it. I can’t wait to get going.” Knowing Dana, she wants the money. I can keep any bad news.

  I’m forced to cup one hand over the mouthpiece in a futile effort to keep her voice from bleeding over the line to my client.

  “Is somebody there?” he asks.

  “Someone just walked in,” I tell him.

  She turns and looks at me. Motions with a finger back toward the other room, questioning the obvious, that I might like her to leave.

  I shake my head. I’ll have to continue the phone call another day.

  Dana is flushed, her cheeks red, pixie hair turned to corn silk by the summer sun.

  “Listen, I’m gonna have to call you back. Why don’t I give you a call tomorrow? Are you going to be in the office?”

  He tells me he is.

  “I’ll call you in the afternoon.”

  With a female voice in my office swooning over a car, he’s afraid I might have better things to do, that I might forget, so he presses for a further commitment.

  “Yes. No. I’ll call you before three.”

  Before my receiver can hit the cradle, Dana bubbles all over my desk. “I thought you wouldn’t mind if I brought Nathan along,” she says. “We were just out for a ride. He was showing me his new Jaguar KX.”

  “XK,” he says.

  She laughs. “What do I know about cars? I mean, I just know it’s beautiful.” She turns to Fittipaldi as if to reassure him that he isn’t riding around town in some pile of crap.

  “You really have to see this car,” she tells me. “It’s a kind of midnight blue, brand-new.”

  Fittipaldi stands in the doorway beaming, as if he’s just given birth.

  “We came up the Strand with the top down. And let me tell you, this thing moves. Not like the Mercedes Nick drove.” The way she says it makes it sound as if it’s not only Nick’s car that caused him to come up short against Nathan. “We were going to head up the coast for dinner. Nathan knows this great little place up in Del Mar.”

  “Really?”

  The first word I’ve been able to get in.

  “You really have to see this car. And feel the seats. I mean, I just sat there in the passenger seat and turned my face against it. It felt like a cloud.” She says this all dreamy with her eyes closed.

  About now, this is beginning to sound like a plan. Go outside, toss my lunch, and rub my face all over Nathan’s fine upholstery.

  “And I doubt if you’ll believe this, but they’re authentic jaguar,” she says. “And sooo smooth.” This time she adds a little motion to the words, rubbing her bare thighs just below the hem of her shorts with the flat palms of her hands. Of course this requires her to stick her little tush out. It’s a kind of Marilyn move, which Dana has so perfected that she now owns it.

  None of this is wasted on Fittipaldi as his eyes suck up the full motion.

  “Not everyone could do this,” she says. “But Nathan had it special ordered through a dealer in Manhattan. He had the interior redone by them.”

  She turns to look at him, dropping the dark glasses into her purse. “Where are they, darling? A block from your gallery back there?”

  “Two blocks,” he says.

  “Really? I can’t imagine a car dealership springing for the square footage in Manhattan. To say nothing of bagging jaguars to line their seats.”

  “Well, they’re just down the street from Nathan’s gallery.”

  He clears his throat a little. “The jaguars were killed and skinned near the Guatemalan border.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think they had any in New York,” I tell him.

  “They were taken by Mexican poachers,” he says. “The government caught them.”

  “Lucky for you,” I say.

  “They’re not usually sold.” I assume he’s talking about the skins, not the Mexicans. “But these were auctioned off for a good cause.”


  “Of course. To cover your seats.”

  He laughs, though I can tell by his look he’s not amused. “To expand wildlife habitat,” he says.

  “And you should see how he did the dash,” says Dana.

  “I don’t think Mr. Madriani would be interested,” he says.

  I have seen Dana enough times to know that she can project a dozen different personalities. She can change these with the frequency of her wardrobe and usually does. I have seen her do nothing but shrug a bare shoulder in a crowded restaurant and watch as a hundred guys run for sweaters.

  Today she knows I have something more serious than insurance to discuss. So she has turned on just enough of the helpless bubblehead, probably hoping it will soften the delivery of any bad news and perhaps bring me riding on my steed to the rescue.

  She gushes over the car for a few more seconds until she finally runs out of breath and is forced to confront the fact that this is not the reason I called and asked her to come in.

  “Oh, listen to me going on,” she says. “I suppose you want to talk about the insurance. This is about the insurance, isn’t it?” Dana’s life is one long quest in pursuit of gratification. Give me the good news first. Don’t give me the bad news at all.

  She drops into one of my client chairs, puts her tennis hat on top of her purse near her feet, then looks at her watch. Cocktail hour in Del Mar.

  I glance toward Fittipaldi.

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about Nathan,” she says. “He knows all about it. I mean he’s the only one I’ve been able to talk to. Besides you.” She adds this as an afterthought.

  “Wonderful.” I smile

  “I don’t know what I would have done without him,” she says. “I mean without the two of you, I’d be lost. You two do know each other?” Furrowed brows over her big blue eyes.

  “We’ve met,” I say.

  “Sure.” Fittipaldi offers me his hand and a smile. Welcome to Club Dana.

  We shake.

  “Well, what kind of an offer did they make?” she says. She is fishing through her purse, comes up with some lip gloss, and before I can answer turns to Nathan again. “Have a seat.” She pats the arm of the chair next to her.

  As he sits down, she turns back to me. “They did make an offer, didn’t they? You said this was about the insurance.”

  “Only in part.”

  “What then?”

  “I think it would be best if we discussed it in private,” I tell her.

  “I can just wait outside,” he says.

  “No.” She says this in an emphatic way. It catches him starting to boost himself out of a chair that hasn’t even gotten warm yet.

  She’s glossing her lips, holding up a little hand mirror. “Anything you can tell me, you can tell Nathan,” she says as if it is a point of principle. She interrupts the glossing. “After all, he’s been the only one who’s stood by me through all of this. I can’t tell you how many friends, or maybe I should say people I thought were friends, have deserted me since Nick died. You never know people until something like this happens. I mean they see me coming in a store, they ignore me. No. I want Nathan to be here, to hear whatever it is you have to tell me.” She’s back to the lip gloss now.

  He looks at me, tilts his head and smiles as if to say, “her call.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I tell her.

  “Why not?”

  “To tell you that, I’d have to tell you what it was, in front of Nathan.”

  This has her thinking. She looks at me, trying to read my mind. Then she guesses wrong.

  “They turned us down, didn’t they?” All of a sudden the bubble and fizz are gone. She stops glossing her lips and puts the mirror and gloss on the edge of my desk.

  “If it’s bad news,” she says, “just tell me.” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. “I get it. They don’t want to pay.” She looks away, having made up her mind that this is it. The sparkle in her eyes is replaced by a look of determination. “I knew it,” she says. “I told you, didn’t I?” This is directed at Fittipaldi.

  She is up out of her chair now. He stays seated, looking at me with a painful expression, like “How did I get in the middle of this?”

  “Didn’t I tell you, Nathan?” Before he can answer, she turns back to me. “I told him yesterday the insurance company would screw me over. I knew it when I first saw that man. That . . . that Luther guy. What’s his name?”

  “Conover?” I say, “Yes. Conover,” she says. “I knew when he looked at me that he didn’t like me.” The bubbly little pixie is gone. To Dana it is now personal. She starts pacing the office just behind the two chairs.

  “The way he kept looking at me. Eyeing me up and down,” she says. “I knew what he was thinking.”

  “And what was that?” I ask.

  She looks at me. “You know as well as I do.”

  When I give her an expression like I don’t, she says: “He was . . .” Now she has trouble saying it. “He was wondering why someone like me would be married to someone like Nick.”

  I give her another dense look, a little shake of the head, like I don’t get it. I’m curious. I want to hear what comes out of her mouth.

  “I think what Dana means is that the insurance company was critical because of their age difference.” Nathan saves her.

  “That’s it,” she says. “I know that’s what he was thinking. That I was some tawdry gold digger,” she says.

  I’m thinking to myself that I would never use the word “tawdry” to describe Dana.

  “Can you imagine how hurtful that is?” she says. I expect her at any moment to be reaching for the Kleenex.

  Instead she says: “Fine, if they want to play hardball, we’ll accommodate them. Those damages you told them about. The punitive ones. How much do you think we could get?”

  Dana may know nothing about sports cars, but instincts of reprisal and vendetta seem to come naturally. “We can take them to the cleaners,” she tells me. “We’ll sue the hell out of them. Think they can screw with me.” She’s talking to herself now, pacing again—her right forefinger to her bottom lip, the long nail touching a lower front tooth and smearing the red lip gloss a little—contemplating just how far she should have me turn the wheel on the rack once I get the insurance company stretched out.

  Then she stops. She turns this way.

  Sensing that something more serious is coming, Fittipaldi turns in the chair so that he can see her, so that his back is to me now.

  I can tell from Dana’s darting blue eyes that some dark thought has suddenly stimulated them from behind.

  “Are they going to pay her?” she says. The her she is talking about is Margaret.

  “Dana. We need to discuss this in private.”

  “They are, aren’t they? That’s it, isn’t it? Damn it. I knew it. They’ve decided to pay that bitch instead of me.” She looks at Nathan. “Over my dead body,” she says. “I was the one who was married to Nick when he got shot. I was the one putting up with him, putting up with his crap, not her. You are gonna sue them?” She looks at me like suddenly I’m the enemy. “Or did they buy you off too?” she says.

  “Dana!” Fittipaldi, his voice now assuming a tone of command, gets her attention.

  He shakes his head slowly, a signal that maybe she has said too much, gone too far, that she should calm down, watch what she’s saying.

  From the smooth pelt of jaguar to cold steel in less than a minute.

  I say nothing, waiting to see if she’s going to fire up again. But she doesn’t. Instead she stands there looking down at the carpet, back to Nathan and then to me, trying, I suspect, to remember all the little poisonous items that spilled over the glossy bottom lip when the devil took hold. When it’s obvious she’s stopped, I finally step in.

  “Nathan is right,” I tell her. “You need to sit down. Calm down.” She looks at the chair, but she doesn’t move toward it.

  “The carrier has made an offer,”
I tell her.

  It’s as if a pale light flickers on behind her eyes. The steel lips begin to bend toward a smile.

  “But the reason I called you here today, what I have to talk to you about, has nothing to do with the insurance. At least not directly. It’s . . . well . . . it’s much more serious than that.”

  What can be more serious than two million dollars in cash? This seems to freeze her brain cells. The light of hope in her eyes suddenly vanishes. They glass over, so within a couple of seconds after the words leave my lips, Dana’s eyes are two watery blue marbles. She stands there wavering back and forth on limp legs.

  When she finally focuses, she is looking not at me, but at Fittipaldi, who is still turned toward her in his chair. It is fleeting. It lasts only an instant, the expression of dark apprehension that passes over her face like the shadow of a black cloud.

  I can’t see Nathan’s face.

  For a second it looks as if her legs might actually buckle, but Fittipaldi is out of the chair, grabbing her before she does. She stumbles through one step then catches herself, as he settles her again into the other client chair.

  He huddles over her. “She’s not herself,” he says. “She’s been under a tremendous strain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have anything? A drink? Maybe some brandy?”

  “No brandy,” I tell him. “Soft drinks and some wine in the refrigerator in the other room.”

  “Just some water,” she says. “I’ll be all right.” She’s running the back of one hand across her forehead, her eyes still a little glassy. Unless she is awfully good, this is no act. Dana is white as a sheet.

  “If you could get it?” he says.

  I leave to get a glass of water. It takes me a minute or so to find a clean glass in the cupboard of the lunch room, knock some ice from one of the trays up in the freezer area, and fill the glass with water.

  I’m almost back to my office door when I hear Fittipaldi’s voice in hushed, low tones. “Don’t say anything. We’re almost through this. Just stay cool.”

  As he looks up, I’m standing in the doorway with the glass in my hand, smiling like the butler who’s listened at the keyhole.