Saving Grace (What Doesn’t Kill You, #1): A Katie Romantic Mystery
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Chapter Twenty-two
After I quit mewling like a crazy cat woman in front of the whole courtroom and started acting somewhat attorney-like again, I asked the judge for a mistrial.
He actually considered it for about five seconds. Or at least he stayed completely silent for that long. He could have been devising elaborate torture rituals or plotting my death. When he said no, I knew he meant “Hell No Katie Connell And Don’t Ever Darken The Doors Of My Courtroom Again.” I’m empathic like that.
It didn’t improve things for me when Mack and I were walking away from the bench and the prosecutor said, “Bet you wish your client had accepted that plea bargain now.”
Mack almost became the second person I assaulted that day.
Not surprisingly, the jury found everyone’s favorite basketball star guilty and set a land speed record doing it. They gave him twenty years. It didn’t sound like enough to me, but the law constrained their choices. They would have probably sentenced him to death if they could. Luckily another jury would get a chance to add to his sentence later, because he would be charged with several new crimes, including witness tampering and going apeshit in the courtroom while scaring the bejeebers out of Judge Hutchison—better known as criminal contempt of court.
I wondered if his next attorney would try to get him a new trial by arguing inadequate representation, or if Zane would just sue me for assault. Or malpractice. Or both. Best not to think about it.
I had already used my iPhone to pull up the ignominious pictures of myself online, crumpled and weeping on the floor of the courtroom. Let’s just say they didn’t show off my good side. I didn’t know if I could fall any further or feel any worse.
But it wasn’t the verdict or the pictures that had shattered me. I’d come apart at the moment when Nick said, “What have you done, Katie?” I didn’t think all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could ever put Katie together again. I had screwed this trial up. I had disgraced my father’s name. I had made a sham of my mother’s dreams of being a lawyer. Me. I had done that. And Nick had disappeared in the wake of Zane’s apprehension.
At five o’clock, Emily and I slunk back to the office. I hated her humiliation by association to me. Add another gold star for Katie today. The elevator doors opened onto the seventeenth floor and the lobby of the Hailey & Hart offices. I tried to sneak past the front desk, but it didn’t work.
“Party!” Tina chirped when she saw us. “Bill won a huge case today.”
She handed me a party hat that said “Congratulations” on it. Oh, no. Maybe she didn’t know about my trial? Maybe she hadn’t seen my picture?
Tina told us, “Bob’s Irish Bar is open. Everyone’s gathered in the conference room to celebrate.”
Bob’s Irish Bar was a longstanding tradition, named in honor of the firm’s founder, Bob Hailey, who was definitely not Irish and didn’t even work at the firm anymore. The man had loved his Bushmills then, and he still did, I heard, well into his retirement. You would think a law firm would be concerned about the potential for liability if one of their employees had a drunken wreck driving away from the office, but you’d be wrong. Our office looked for any excuse to throw a party.
“Thanks, Tina,” Emily said.
The original Bob’s Irish Bar had centered around Bob’s office, his Irish whiskey, and an actual bar setup he had installed beside his desk. The modern version more closely resembled progressive drinking, where revelers wandered from room to room to see what people were pouring. Today the firm had a cooler of Miller Lite in the main conference room and Cook’s champagne in the ice-filled break room sink. We weren’t shelling out for the good stuff this time, apparently.
Emily and I had to breach the main party areas to make it to our own offices. The PA system was pumping out “We Will Rock You” by Queen. We accepted plastic champagne glasses as we passed by the break room, victorious Amazon warriors returning from battle.
Only we weren’t.
We crept past the conference room. Celebrants spilled out into the hall. At some point, people became aware of who was making the walk of shame through their midst, and I could see them start to whisper. Tina might have missed it, but my humiliation was, no doubt, the talk of the Dallas legal scene. Hell, all of Dallas. I steadied my chin. One foot in front of the other, Katie.
I tried not to be obvious as I searched for Nick. I saw him.
“Emily, I have to try to talk to Nick,” I said.
You’d think Emily would have had enough of me by now.
“I’ll meet you in your office in five minutes,” she said. “Not a minute longer. I’m serious, Katie.”
“I promise,” I said.
I crossed the crowd like a salmon swimming upstream to get to Nick. He watched me approach, let me get ten feet away, then turned his back and left. In front of everyone.
I froze. I was Medusa with a head full of red stone snakes. Maybe I imagined it, but his Obsession cologne stayed in my senses long after he’d left, rooting me to his scent. I stood motionless as people streamed past me toward the drinks, the bathroom, another pod of revelers. Their snippets of conversations boomeranged around the room. My ears caught some of them, but only for a few seconds at a time before the sound spun back in the other direction. I could only imagine what they were saying, what I would have been saying in their shoes.
“See Katie standing over there? God, she’s pathetic.”
“I know. Could she be more obvious?”
“Helloooo, girlfriend, you’re the laughingstock of Dallas!”
Peals of laughter, male and female. I recognized voices, but in the din, I couldn’t place them. I strained to hear as the sounds receded, confusing me further.
“Please tell me we won’t be like her.”
“A dried-up workaholic with a desperate crush on a married private eye? Fat chance.”
“No wonder she drinks so much. Oh my God, and did you hear about her trial today? She was mewing like a cat. It’s on YouTube.”
My brain was playing cruel tricks on my ears, but I somehow knew the words were figments of my imagination, not real. My eyes were on fire with unshed tears. Volcanic lava rushed through the veins over my entire head. I clenched my fists so tightly one of my fingernails snapped in my palm. I didn’t care. I’d started a pivot toward the lobby, away from here, as far away and as fast as I could go, when Emily appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my arm.
“Stop, Katie,” she said.
“Let me go,” I said, pulling hard against her grip. My chest was heaving. “You saw him walk away from me?”
“No. I just saw your face, and I came right over.” She gave my arm a tug. “We’re out of here.”
I didn’t like it, but I let Emily prod me forward. She propelled me out of our offices, down the elevator, into the parking garage, and over to my car, where she insisted on driving me home. I plotted revenge on Nick and my other nameless, faceless enemies while she drove. One of them looked surprisingly like me. I wanted to dismember my foes slowly and boil their bones. My anger dulled quickly, though, and I was still as a corpse by the time we arrived at my place.
Emily had called ahead for a cab to meet her. I walked her to the curb.
“Are you going to be OK?” Emily asked.
I knew she wanted me to say yes. And actually, I kind of was. I was as low as I could ever imagine getting, but I feared that the worst thing now was that I’d live through it. Screw Nick, I thought. Screw everyone. I made one mistake. One. I can run circles around three quarters of the lawyers in town.
“Yeah. I’m over it. I am.” I dug in my purse for a twenty-dollar bill. “You’re a much better friend than I deserve. Let me pay for your cab.”
She did.
“I’ll call you in a little while,” Emily said.
She hugged me hard, then left to return to the office for her own car. I wandered inside, numb, trailing my fingers over the standing marble bust as I passed it in my building lobby. The condominium association aspi
red to a Greco-Roman theme. Not in a papier-mâché way, but in a classy way that said, “I’m old-school elegant.” Them, not me. I rode the elevator, which dinged nine times, then opened.
The hell of it all was that after this, I had to go out with Collin for his birthday. I had to drag my hungover, humiliated ruin of a self back out the door and appear in public during my moment of infamy. With Collin, who was on the side of apple pie and the American way, good not evil. Unlike me.
Time to pull it together. I spruced and spritzed without much hope for a miracle. The lines between my eyebrows get deeper when I’m upset, and I cursed Zane, Sherry, Nick, and myself as I covered up the furrows with Clinique’s Airbrush Concealer. This me would have to do.
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