The Dark

by Andrew Neiderman

  “That’s right,” Charliemae added. “He knew the man who did the killing, too.”

  “That’s quite a story.”

  “It’s true. Now hand over the fifty.”

  Jack started to hand Charliemae his fifty, but held on to it when she grasped it.

  “I told you what I know,” she said. He released the bill and she stepped back.

  “Any of you ever been to see Doctor Jules?”

  “Maybe,” Charliemae said. “What’s it your business?”

  “I just wondered how good he was.”

  Everyone stared. Then the girls backed farther away from the car as the young black man moved to the window.

  “Were you one of his patients, too?” Jack asked, that instinctive little siren sounding at the base of his brain. He kept one hand near his pistol. The young black man leaned in and pointed to his temple.

  “He’s been in here and I feel just fine,” he said, and like magic, the hand he held below the window came up with a snub-nosed revolver clutched in his fingers. “Which ain’t the way you’re going to be feeling,” he said, and fired.

  The bullet shattered Jack’s skull and splattered fragments of bone, scalp, and brain tissue on the passenger-side window. The rapport died and all was quiet again, but the stench of burned gunpowder filled the air. Then the door of the small house opened and Jules Bois stepped out.

  “Derek?”

  “Yeah, Doc?”

  “Everything all right out here?”

  “Just fine now, Doc.”

  The girls laughed.

  “Okay. Theresa, it’s time,” Jules Bois said, and the tall girl smiled, sauntered past the others, and walked toward the small house, still carrying her wrench.

  12

  O’Healies was crowded and lively. It was, after all, TGIF, and the tavern encouraged a celebration of the workweek’s end by reducing its prices and putting out a free hot buffet. All of the attorneys who were here made good incomes—none needed to look for bargains—but the advent of free food and discount prices added to their glee and raised the level of their voices a half dozen decibels.

  By the time Maggie and Phil arrived, the bar was jammed. The CD jukebox was playing, but the music was buried under the din of loud conversation and laughter. Some of the attorneys had already heard about Maggie’s advancement and began buying drinks and toasting before she and Phil made their way toward any of the available tables.

  The long, dark hickory bar was to the right of the entry. There were tables across from it with more tables in the rear, where there were also a half dozen private booths. All of the revelers wanted to be up front where there was more action. The population was mostly young and up-and-coming attorneys, both male and female, as well as paralegals. Some clients had been brought along, the whole crowd mixing in well with O’Healies regulars who were absorbed and soaked in the sea of suits.

  Pulling herself away from the handshakes, kisses, and looks of envy, Maggie went to the pay phone and called Grant’s office again, and once again she was immediately tied in to the answering machine, this time advising the caller of the emergency phone number. She actually debated calling it and having Grant paged. Where was he? Why hadn’t he phoned? She kept her cellular in her purse on a string at her side, and it was the sort that vibrated when it rang, so if she couldn’t hear it, she could certainly feel it.

  Phil had gotten up from the booth and was in a quiet discussion with two attorneys from Beck, Levy and Taylor. From the way Phil was looking at her, Maggie sensed he didn’t want her to hear the topic and imagined it might have something to do with his chances of making a partnership there. When someone you work with gets a promotion, it puts the pressure on you to think more about your own advancement. It was only natural, and no matter what these men said or claimed to believe, it bothered them to see a woman leapfrog over them, she thought. That might even be true for Grant.

  Goodness knows, we’ve had our heavy little discussions about me being too ambitious, she thought. After all, it was her ambition that he blamed for their not having children. Was this why he wasn’t around the day she got her promotion?

  “Did you get him?” Phil shouted toward her.

  “Not yet,” she said, forcing a smile. Phil shook his head and went back to his ménage à trois. Maggie slid into the booth and cupped her drink between her hands. Suddenly she was alone, really alone, even though the tavern was two or three bodies above its fire department limit. She gazed around sadly. Everyone was into his or her thing: unmarried female attorneys were eyeing possible beaus, and the beaus were doing the same; others were expounding on their recent successes, each trying to sound more successful than the other.

  She wasn’t like them; she was married, but where was her husband? Obsessing about his patient, off somewhere involved in himself. She felt tears burn under her eyelids and closed them just as Martin Saperstein entered the tavern, the uproar so loud she had to look up. A wave of admirers rushed up to him, pulling groups from the bar to gather in the circle that had formed. Saperstein represented the Kettleman twins, a nineteen-year-old brother and sister who had plotted the murder of their stepfather and their own mother, claiming she was too beguiled by him to see or even want to see how he had abused them both from ages five until now. It was the number one legal story on the news and the main event on Court TV.

  Saperstein, who looked more like a soap opera star than a criminal trial attorney, played well to the cameras. He had already been on the cover of People and was scheduled to do GQ, the L.A. Times Magazine, and Gents, as well as the lead interview in Playboy. Like some sort of media shark, he fed on the adulation and literally glowed as the center of attention in O’Healies.

  Maggie shook her head and smiled to herself, but her gaze floated from Saperstein to a tall, handsome man who appeared to have accompanied him into the tavern. The distinguished-looking gentleman was even more handsome than Saperstein, Maggie thought, and certainly looked more intelligent. His charcoal Italian-cut suit complemented his strong, firm appearance. He radiated success and confidence and appeared remarkably cool and amused by the hullabaloo surrounding Martin Saperstein. Someone handed him a tumbler of scotch and water on the rocks and he drifted back from the crowd, his eyes finding her.

  She started to look away, but stopped when she saw his smile. It was friendly, calm, with a mature brightness void of the lustful or flirtatious look she was more accustomed to receiving from men. This man looked kind, gentle, and imbued with the sense of relaxation that accompanies a strong sense of self-confidence. In a room full of hungry, insecure ingratiators, this man was refreshing.

  He started toward her. She sat back, sipped her drink, and looked up with surprise and interest when he stopped at her table.

  “If anything illustrates the myopic vision of attorneys in America, it’s the fact that a woman as beautiful as you sits here alone while they jabber about depositions, objections, judicial decisions, and financial settlements,” he said.

  She laughed.

  “You’re not an attorney, Mr. . . .?”

  “Becket, Thomas Becket. Yes, but I’m what you would call an attorney’s attorney.”

  “Defending them against charges of malpractice, overbilling. . .”

  “Even unethical behavior,” he said. Maggie was taken with the way his dark eyes glittered and held her own gaze. Her grandmother used to talk about the power of Rudolph Valentino’s cinematic eyes. In close-ups, he would mesmerize a theater full of women. Looking up at this man, she finally understood what her grandmother meant.

  “May I join you?” he asked, nodding at the seat across from her in the booth.

  Maggie gazed at Phil, who looked even more deeply involved with his conversation.

  “I’m not staying much longer,” she said.

  “Somehow,” he said, sliding in, “I feel a few minutes with you is worth hours with them.” He gestured with his head toward the bar.

  She relaxed her lips into a soft
smile and admitted to herself that even though her feminist friends would consider it blasphemy, she felt good being stroked just because of her femininity. There was a roughness, a coarseness and toughness she had to assume when she dealt in a world mostly governed by men. How many times had she been the only woman in a room? Too often she felt like brushing their eyes off her body as if they were stickers clinging to her breasts, her hips, and her pelvis.

  “I have friends who would say you are making typical male chauvinistic shallow observations,” Maggie replied.

  The man who called himself Thomas Becket laughed. Then, after peering at her over his glass as he sipped his drink, he grew serious.

  “Something’s wrong when a man can’t talk as a man to a woman anymore. Things that are pure and natural in us have been given a bad rap. Everyone is so concerned about his or her identity.”

  “Sounds like something a man would say,” she replied. His eyes widened at the fire that sparked in hers. “For most of our history, only men were permitted a real identity. Women were part of the furniture.”

  “Not true,” he said softly. “Remember how it all began. Man was so incomplete, he had to have woman, and then, after she joined him, she ate of the fruit.”

  “A-huh. Thought you would get around to that quickly.”

  “But,” he continued, “why did Adam eat the fruit?”

  “I forget, but I’m sure you know.”

  “Oh, I do. Once he realized Eve had broken the rules and would be excommunicated from the Garden of Eden, he decided he had to sacrifice himself and eat of the fruit so he would go with her. Now, there’s a man who didn’t care about losing his identity. And,” he said, shrugging, “it’s really been that way ever since.”

  Maggie laughed. He really did have a warm, beautiful smile, and during the few minutes he had been with her, she felt the tension in her body dissipate. She felt like a teenager again, adventurous, virginal. There was that delicious sense of danger.

  “It’s romantic, isn’t it?” he asked. “You’re not one of those women who ridicules romance, are you?”

  “I hope not,” she said. Her drink was finished.

  “Can I get you another drink? I understand you have something to celebrate.”

  “How did you know that?” she asked, sitting back.

  “As I made my way here, someone whispered it to me. A full partner. I’m impressed. I insist you permit me to get you another drink.”

  “I don’t know. I should . . .”

  “Please. Consider it my attempt to get your business, should you ever have need of someone like me. I can write it off, too,” he added with a smile.

  She had to laugh.

  “Okay, I guess I have time for one more.”

  “Oh, we all have time for one more, Maggie.”

  “Wait,” she said as he stood up. “I don’t remember telling you my name.”

  “Didn’t you?” He thought a moment. “Maybe the little bird who whispered in my ear gave me your name, too. I don’t blame you for being concerned,” he added. “ ‘Who steals my purse, steals trash . . . but he who filches from me my good name . . . makes me poor indeed.’ Iago in Othello. One of my favorite literary characters.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember that play.”

  “Be right back,” he said. She sat back. What a charming man and what a nice diversion while she waited for Grant’s call, she thought, and took out her cellular to make sure the battery wasn’t dead. The tiny light blinked. It was working fine. Why hadn’t he called?

  She tapped out their phone number and waited as it rang into the answering machine message.

  “Grant,” she said, imbuing her voice with signs of her frustration and annoyance, “if you missed my message at the office for some reason, call my cellular as soon as you hear this. We have something to celebrate,” she added, but not with the same enthusiasm she had evinced in the first message. He knew what she had to celebrate. He’s deliberately avoiding me, she thought, and felt a mix of rage and sorrow.

  Becket returned, drinks in hand.

  “Thank you,” she said. He noticed the cellular.

  “Trying to reach someone?” he asked.

  “My husband.”

  “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know of your good fortune yet,” Becket said as he slid back into the booth.

  “He’s a psychiatrist and he was tied up with patients. We have yet to talk since my promotion,” she explained, finding her explanation bitter. She sipped her drink. “Are you married?”

  “No. I’m one of those who is still searching for the perfect relationship.”

  “What is the perfect relationship?” she queried, a little more cynically than she had intended. Damn him, she kept thinking. Why doesn’t he call?

  “That’s easy. One in which neither individual is afraid to share his or her most intimate secrets. In other words, total trust.”

  She nodded, pensive, now even a bit melancholy.

  “I hope that’s been true for you,” he said.

  “Somewhat,” she said.

  “Spoken like a good attorney,” he said.

  She stared at him a moment and then she laughed.

  “Don’t you like lawyers?”

  “As a group they are generally my kind of people,” he said. She thought his eyes were absolutely luminous, glittering with glee. “They have taught us how to equivocate, how to rationalize, how to justify our most selfish acts.” He turned to the crowd. “There’s nothing more exciting than finding the exception to the rule, the exculpating detail, the argument that provides reasonable doubt. What would we do without the jury system?” he concluded dryly, and drank.

  “You sound a bit cynical about the people you admire,” she said.

  “Let’s just say I’ve been on both sides and I appreciate what they can do; but I also recognize their limitations.”

  “I couldn’t help but notice Martin Saperstein. Did you come in with him?”

  “No, but I know of him,” Becket said. “I think he could have successfully defended Judas.”

  He laughed.

  “Is that good or bad?” she asked.

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “Whether or not you need him,” Becket said, and she nodded. She drank some more and then checked her watch.

  “I’ve really got to get going.”

  “Where are you going? Home?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  “To celebrate?”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “You shouldn’t waste this happy moment. It’s not fair, Maggie. You’ve worked hard for it, been diligent, dedicated. You should be going to a fine restaurant, listening to music, drinking champagne.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said. It sounded like she was accepting a dare, petulant.

  “Maybe you won’t,” he followed quickly. He looked at his own watch. “Did you try his office?”

  “He’s no longer there.”

  “Is he home?”

  “I’m sure he will be when I arrive,” she replied.

  “And if he isn’t?”

  She smiled.

  “Why are you so persistent, Mr. Becket?”

  “Thomas, please. I’m just worried that you won’t have your well-deserved celebration. Actually,” he said, “I have something to celebrate, too. I won a big settlement today . . . six figures.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Wouldn’t you like to hear about it?”

  “Maybe some other time,” she said, and started to slide out. Sitting here with him was making her nervous. She actually was enjoying it too much and was tempted to stay with him. “Thanks for the drink and the conversation.”

  “It was all my pleasure,” he said.

  “Thank you. Good night,” she said, and headed toward Phil. When she turned back, Becket was gone. She looked toward the bar, but she didn’t see him. She was surprised at her own pang of disappointment. What was it she wanted from this man?r />
  What you want, what you crave, Maggie, is good, intelligent company, someone doting on you, a little romance, a forbidden voice whispered. What you want is a husband who appreciates your accomplishments. He’s a psychiatrist, for Christ’s sake, he should know.

  She started out, thanking people who reached for her to offer their congratulations. Even Martin Saperstein stopped holding court for a moment and leaned toward her to offer his praises, but in a condescending manner. She thanked him coolly and retreated. Closing the door, she left the laughter and loud chatter entombed. She took a deep breath. She should be feeling better than this; she should be feeling ecstatic, she thought, and headed for her automobile, a feeling like a small, tight fist in her stomach.

  When she got in, she tried all the numbers: Grant’s car phone, the house again, even the office, hanging up as soon as the answering service came on line. She sat back, disgusted. Where the hell was he?

  A light tap on the passenger-side window quickly drew her out of her seething thoughts. It was Thomas Becket. She lowered the window.

  “Hi again,” he said. “I was sitting in my car over there and saw you using the phone. Any luck?”

  “Look—” she began, her rage spilling toward him. He raised his hands immediately.

  “I don’t mean to pry. I just told myself, Thomas, you mustn’t let that woman miss a high moment. If you’re free, why don’t we just have dinner together on my expense account? Call it research, if you feel funny about it, but let’s celebrate.”

  Her anger dissipated. His easy tone and soft smile made her feel silly sitting in her car raging.

  “You have to eat anyway,” he continued. “Can you imagine sitting home alone tonight, of all nights? Follow me in your car. I know this little Italian restaurant not far from here. Everything’s homemade, the genuine thing, and they have an accordion player that will bring laughter and tears to your eyes.”

  It did sound good. What did he say, research? Little lies we make to ourselves and others are sometimes the tickets to happiness, she thought. Could she do this? She glanced at her car phone, the dead car phone. It wasn’t fair; it really wasn’t. She had been working so hard for this and she had accomplished a great deal.