Be the One

by April Smith

“Keep your voice down,” warns Harvey.

  “I know Joe’s a client and you—”

  “Just keep your voice down. There are rules. Decorum. No writing allowed. No doing business. If they see you using a cell phone, they will stop you.”

  Cassidy casts a look at the killer white-haired waiters dressed in dusty black.

  “Do they let you order a drink?”

  They both have martinis. Ketel 1, double olives.

  Cassidy entwines her fingers around the stem of the glass in a ladylike manner and says more quietly,

  “I appreciate you talking with me about Joe.”

  “Joe is no longer my client.”

  Gone is the hearty host. Harvey is wearing his four-hundred-fifty-dollar-an-hour game face.

  “But you’ve been Joe’s lawyer twenty-two years—!”

  “He put me in an untenable situation.”

  Cassidy takes a quick sip of the drink. With martinis, the chill and delicate bouquet can turn into warm motor oil, fast.

  “He told you about the blackmail.”

  “I can’t discuss what he said.”

  “But he’s not your client anymore.”

  “An attorney cannot do anything or say anything that would be adverse to a present or former client.”

  “Then why are we here?”

  “I think I’ve just explained the rules.”

  Cassidy nods, understanding that she will have to lead in this particular dance.

  “Joe was getting blackmail notes,” she begins. “He didn’t know what to do so he paid. Even though you told him, Never pay a blackmailer.”

  “I might have told him that, I might not.”

  “You said it to me at the party.”

  “I do have a basic attitude about blackmail. I’m going to tell you a secret, Cassidy. Twenty years ago someone tried to blackmail me because I am homosexual—”

  He makes the word sizzle with sarcasm.

  “—and I told that rancid human being, ‘Do your worst. But I’ll get you for extortion.’ I never heard from him again.”

  Harvey’s eyes, behind the glasses, dart once toward the garden.

  “Never pay a blackmailer. If they give you the negative, you can be sure they’ve got twenty prints. That’s nuts. They’ll be back in two months.”

  “But Joe wouldn’t listen.”

  Harvey remains silent.

  The white-haired waiter puts an oval plate of old-fashioned seafood salad in front of Cassidy, pink remoulade and a split hard-boiled egg. Harvey is having fruit.

  “Can I get you anything else, Mr. Weissman?”

  “Yes,” says Harvey. “Lunch.”

  The waiter hides a smile and withdraws.

  Harvey stares at the plate.

  “I’ve been on a diet since the age of three, when they told me it wasn’t baby fat.”

  Cassidy says, “He told you about the accident.”

  “Whatever he told me was adverse to the company and to his partners. Because of attorney-client privilege, I couldn’t tell the others, so I had to resign as his attorney.”

  “You just left him hanging?”

  “No,” says Harvey. His knuckles rap the white tablecloth. “I advised him to hire the best lawyer in the DR, fly down there, and throw himself on their mercy.”

  “Is that what he’s going to do?”

  “I have no idea. He was more worried about his father.”

  “He’s never talked about his father.”

  “They gave him a fancy title, called him an ‘engineer,’ but the truth is, he was a plumber. His dad used to work here.”

  Cassidy looks toward the vaulted ceiling. The acres of air make you feel like a bottom-feeder.

  “Here” Harvey emphasizes, “this club. Joe’s dad came over working in the engine room of a ship, then he got a job fixing pipes at the California Club, where he worked for, I don’t know, thirty, forty years. You didn’t know this?”

  Cassidy shakes her head.

  “Joe goes out of his way not to give this impression, but he’s the son of the hired help. He still lives here.”

  “His father?”

  “No no no, dad and mom live in Glendale. Above us”—Harvey gestures with a melon ball at the end of a fork—“there are floors of suites, like full-service Park Avenue apartments. Members live here. Joe lives here. It’s his primary residence.”

  “So the beach house—”

  “Beach house, smeach house. His legal address is the club.”

  Cassidy looks bewildered.

  “Joe’s parents were uneducated Greek peasants. I don’t know if we can say the word ‘Greek’ out loud.” Harvey looks around with furtive irony. “We couldn’t say ‘Jew’ until 1991. Joe grew up watching the rich guys come through the front door. The thing you have to remember about Joe, he’s an insider who knows what it’s like to be an outsider. He eats with the mayor and his father is proud. He appears at all the right parties, makes generous political contributions, knows all the council members by first name and they take his calls. He doesn’t make a big thing of it, but he’s on the board of directors of the Greek Orthodox church, St. Sophia’s Cathedral. He paid for a new parking lot, five hundred thousand grand. That’s for his dad. Every year, on Father’s Day, he goes out to Glendale and his mother makes a gourmet Greek meal and you gain five pounds—trust me, I’ve been there—and Joe plays five games of backgammon with his father and they have a shot of ouzo. This, to Joe, is what it’s all about. Bring shame on his father? I think Joe would rather be dead. By the way,” says Harvey, “it’s also against the rules to cry.”

  He gives her his blue pocket square, insisting, “Take it, it goes with the whole scene. See? Martinis. Silk? Very nice.”

  “I’m sorry to embarrass you.”

  “Nothing embarrasses me, kid. But I did want to throw your boyfriend through the window.”

  “You know I was in the car.” She waits. “Along with a prospect for the Dodgers named Alberto Cruz—”

  “I don’t know about any car and I don’t care what his name is.”

  “I was drunk. Passed out in the back.”

  “Now you’re telling me you all were drunk—oy vey!” exclaims Harvey, but it is a poor imitation of surprise.

  Cassidy waits. “What did Joe say about me? Forget the legal stuff.”

  “He said he cares about you. Surprised?”

  She shrugs and blots the mascara that has collected in the corners of her eyes with Harvey’s pocket square.

  “He does. It’s this deep ambivalence he has, it’s some kind of mental hang-up, a self-destructive streak. All his life he’s wanted to be accepted by the people he despises. See why I understand this man? Joe will invariably concoct a situation in which he forces you to choose—it’s a test, Am I worthy? Do you love me enough? He did it to me when he told me things he should never have told me, which he knew would create problems: conflict of interest, obstruction of justice … It wasn’t a big topic in law school before Nixon, but now we have to be aware. The more I would become involved, the more I could stumble into possible obstruction. And, I have a duty to his partners. So I had to fire him as a client. Never mind that his company was my second-biggest account.”

  The waiter brings the bill. Harvey signs it.

  “No tipping, either. Did you know the club used to sell its own brand of cigarettes?”

  “All I care about in this equation is Alberto Cruz.”

  “Then it’s easy. Call the police. Tell them what happened. You’re the witness. Cruz is off the hook.”

  “It’s not so easy.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you think I can trust him?”

  “Joe?”

  She nods.

  The waiter brings the bill. Harvey signs it.

  “No tipping, either. Did you know the club used to sell its own brand of cigarettes?”

  “All I care about in this equation is Alberto Cruz.”

  “Then it’s easy. Ca
ll the police. Tell them what happened. You’re the witness. Cruz is off the hook.”

  “It’s not so easy.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you think I can trust him?”

  “Joe?”

  She nods.

  For a moment Harvey concentrates on scraping together a small pile of crumbs.

  “Joe wanted to know his options. I said, Your options are the following: Get a criminal lawyer. Confess to—whoever you need to confess to—and hope she doesn’t become a threat.”

  “A threat?”

  “Lawyers work with logic trees. If this, then that … Okay. I told him, If she is in fact a threat, then your choices are: Pray it will go away. Turn yourself over to the cops. Or kill her.” He waits. “I was kidding.”

  “What did Joe say?”

  “I can’t tell you what he said.”

  Harvey flicks the crumbs so they explode across the table.

  27

  Speed and music. Music and speed. It helps to have the windows down and the radio blasting to match the furor in her heart. It makes no sense, going there, and that feels great, just great, like hitting the drinking fountain with a bat when that bastard David Stohl walked out, over and over until the pipes separated and water geysered weakly in defeat; stupid and great, like doing a backflip, drunk, on a neighbor’s trampoline on the Fourth of July.

  What I love about you, he said, is that you believe it matters.

  She laughs out loud. No, darlin’, no, it freaking doesn’t. Haven’t you proven it to me? That attachment—to another person, to work, to love, to sports teams or ideals—just isn’t possible anymore, at least not until the financing is in place? Maybe the human heart is outdated also, or just too dumb to get it, and it’s absolutely pointless to believe that it has any effect on anyone, anywhere in the world, how one individual chooses to live within the white lines.

  She hasn’t been this angry since her father died.

  The garage door is up, the Bentley parked inside. She steps over a carton with some painting stuff in it, angles past an overturned bag of potting soil and a couple more paint cans rolling loose on the floor, hits the button to close the door. Good, he’s home, she thinks, and we can finish this.

  The rear door to the kitchen is open. A plastic bag from Buy Rite drugstore is on the stainless steel counter.

  “Joe?”

  She notices the cordless phone has fallen on the sandstone floor and replaces it in the cradle.

  A covered roasting pan sits on the stove. She peels the foil-back—lemon chicken that looks as if it has been sitting around for a while—hard and congealed as the now less-than-tender memory of the first night they spent together in this house, when she came back from Vero Beach, the night she’d had a flashback of being attacked in the parking lot by Monroe. Fear had driven them together like an aphrodisiac. Night had come and the square spaces of the house were lit like facets of a lantern on a boat moving out to sea, their love-making locked-together, frantic and close, as if they’d shared a berth on what they had known would be the start of a dangerous crossing; fogbound, cold black water sluicing underneath the belly of the ship.

  Who was that man, who stroked her thighs and hips so tenderly for so long afterward, who wanted to marry her and promised the world? Was he someone who had made an irrevocable mistake, drenched in guilt, scrambling for a way out—or a master manipulator, lying to protect his interests, assuming Cassidy would give it up for him, even give away her kid? Did he love me at all? seems a woefully pathetic question, but as she stalks the crisply aloof house it stuns her that she doesn’t know, is lost, perceptive apparatus crashing down around her like a shattered radio dish—tower, wires, sparks and flame.

  “Joe?”

  In the living room a late afternoon breeze sucks the gauzy white curtains out of the open sliding panels, a sticky after-the-beach breeze that makes you want to take a shower and lie back on the white slip-covered sofa with a pitcher of margaritas.

  “Hey. It’s Cassidy.”

  She looks at the stairs but something stops her from going up. It’s the breeze; forceful, sweeping in through the open kitchen door and out toward the beach, blowing her hair in the same direction as the curtains. That flapping sound—she peers out at the courtyard—is a newspaper that has been—here’s the trail of pages—lifted off the coffee table and swept outside and trapped against the chairs and orange trees, fluttering like a flock of wounded birds.

  The doors have been open for a while.

  He’s gone for a run on the beach.

  She walks out to the terrace and slides into a banquette built into the wall, behind an oval table made of stone. They’d had breakfast there that morning, bagels, tomatoes and feta cheese, which she had thought endearing at the time.

  Above is a twenty-foot-high portico with a roof of open gridwork, so the diffuse afternoon sun is forced into sharp rectangular shafts, hitting the limestone floor in a precise geometry of burning squares.

  This elegant composition in shadow and light brings to mind a keen and merciless people, the Mayan Indians, who, Cassidy had learned on a scuba-diving trip to Cozumel, constructed a pyramid so that at a certain hour of a certain day the steps would cast a zigzag shadow, the feathered serpent-god. She had been spaced on blue agave tequila and Lomotil at the time, but she has not forgotten the story of the snake, and the deadly ball games that took place in the ruined arena—mathematical intelligence and blood sacrifice—a savage passion to control the sun. Inside the pyramid, if you were not too dehydrated to climb a million undulating steps, was the hidden heart of their belief: a small dank chamber that contained a golden lion.

  There is intelligence everywhere you look in Joe Galinis’s borrowed ocean house. Now, in daylight, in the way the open girders frame the sky, the bend to the arms of the slatted aluminum chairs, the house wants to show you what it’s really about, how money has been put to aesthetic purpose, to engage the minds of the most rarefied designers, give them freedom and then possess their ideas. Even the most numbskull San Marino commodities trader, hauled out here for Sunday brunch with the wife and kids, would have to respect the purity of a Richard Meier–style house at the beach.

  The more Cassidy watches the shadows of the orange trees play over the grid of sun, the more she can see the translucent paradoxes in Joe Galinis. He had been dressed for work that morning in tobacco slacks and a cobalt-blue-and-white-striped dress shirt, ribbed silk tie with diamond patterns. In profile he had looked Macedonian, bejeweled.

  But inside his soul was a dark secret chamber where a shining lion had been corroded by shame.

  She takes off the sunglasses. Without the polarizing lenses the marine-white walls jump to a level of incandescence that is painful. As the sun sets, the grid of light is creeping down the wall. This might have been her home, had she surrendered to its measured spaces. She gets up restlessly to unlock the front gates and see if she can spot Joe’s tight, short-torsoed body moving along the beach.

  The phone is ringing.

  She turns back and peers inside through yards of blowing curtains. On the mezzanine above, the Francis Bacon paintings float, disemboweled body parts in fields of gold.

  The phone rings.

  It rings and rings in the blowsy empty house.

  It rings inside the fillings of her teeth.

  “Hello?”

  “Southcoast Security. We have a report your garage door is open, ma’am.”

  “It is? I thought I shut it.”

  “It’s open, ma’am. I have a patrol car outside.”

  “Thank you—”

  “What is your password, please?”

  “I don’t know the password.”

  “Your name?”

  “Cassidy Sanderson. I’m the cleaning lady.”

  She hangs up.

  Twenty-five seconds later two security officers wearing earpieces, nightsticks and .38s enter through the kitchen.

  “Stay where you are, please.
”

  “Don’t shoot. I swear to God I closed the garage door.”

  They don’t answer: burly males with shaved heads, Hispanic, completely without humor.

  “Can I see some photo ID?”

  Cassidy takes out her wallet.

  “Do you live here, ma’am?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see Mr. Galinis.”

  “What is your relationship to Mr. Galinis?”

  “Friend.”

  “Was Mr. Galinis expecting you?”

  “No.”

  “I see.”

  Well, it’s ludicrous. Of course he doesn’t see. She forces herself to choke down complete out-of-control frustration. This is exactly the kind of twisted, inexplicable situation that can get out of hand if you buy into their paranoia.

  Stay cool.

  Stay centered.

  Use what you’ve got.

  “Do you guys, by any chance, follow the Dodgers?”

  No reaction. Then,

  “Yo, Carlos.”

  The second officer has successfully sniffed out the one thing in this windswept room that is out of place—a Polaroid photograph half-stuck under the cabinets, apparently blown across the floor.

  He shows it to his partner who raises his eyebrows and motions to Cassidy.

  “Can you identify this man?”

  She looks at the picture.

  “That’s Joe!”

  “Mr. Galinis?”

  “Joe Galinis, goddamn it!”

  It is Mr. Joe Galinis, shoved against the glass brick wall of the kitchen, his face a sickly Polaroid yellow because somebody’s hand is holding a gun to his head.

  Then, all at once, all three spot the Campbell’s soup can that has been set in the center of the stainless steel counter like a piece of Pop Art, a ransom note tucked underneath.

  $2,000,000 or he dies. We will call you.

  What a loser. Monroe hasn’t even bothered to disguise his first-grade handwriting.

  “Know anything about this?”

  Cassidy, dry-lipped: “It’s complicated.”

  Carlos: “I guess.”

  He looks at her, unsettled now; his close-set eyes so young.

  28

  This is how it went down in the front office: