Blood Orange (14 page)

She put her arms around him. “Don’t be so down on yourself.
You’re a good man and a good attorney. Even someone like Filmore
deserves a fair trial.”

He lay back on the couch, drawing her down beside him. “I love
you, Danita.”

“Don’t call me that.” She remembered Micah using her full name.

“DanitaDanitaDanita.” He pulled her closer. “Kiss me and IT
shut up.”

Bailey’s abduction had driven Micah from her mind. Now all at
once he seemed to be standing in the room with them, leaning
against the doorjamb, watching David tug down the zipper of her
slacks and slip his hand down the front of her panties.

She pulled away. “I’m tired, David. Let’s go to bed.”

“Come on, Dana. I miss you.”

“I know. I miss you too. But I just can’t do it yet.”

He groaned and sat up. Resting his elbows on his knees, he ran
his fingers back through his hair. She was surprised by how much
gray there was.

“It’s been weeks.”

“Don’t guilt-trip me. Please.”

He said, “When Bailey was gone it made sense. I got that. But
she’s back now. We’ve got our life back. We should be fucking our
brains out to celebrate.”

“I just need a little more time.” She stood up and zipped her pants. Her body ached with fatigue that ran clear through to her
bones. She doubted she had the energy to climb the stairs to bed.
“I’m not ready.”

“Sometimes I feel like … What’s happening, Dana? Where’ve
you gone? Where’s Number One?”

She looked down at him from halfway up the stairs and told the
truth. “I don’t know.”

-n David’s oversized office chair, Marsha Filmore looked like
Alice after too many bites of the cookie.

“I’m sorry,” David said as he stowed his briefcase in the well of
his desk. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

He had been in court all morning on a too-good-to-be-true personal injury case involving a child, a crossing guard, and a San
Diego Gas and Electric truck. David would have liked a break for
lunch between court and this interview, but judge Wellman had
started late, as he often did. Hungover, from the look of his trembling hands, he had embarrassed everyone while he figured out
where he was and why. Incompetence and irresponsibility heated
up David’s stomach acid and made him want to punch someone.
Not the best time to see Marsha Filmore.

“I don’t know why I’m here at all,” she complained. “Frank says
I’ve talked to you enough already.”

David sat down and pressed a button on his phone. “Barb, ask
Allison and Gracie to come in, will you?”

“I have a doctor’s appointment.”

Marsha put her long, bony hands over her stomach. Behind the big knuckle of her ring finger she wore a plain gold band and a diamond solitaire so big David would have guessed it was a good fake
if Filmore had not declared it among his assets.

“In an hour.”

David smiled in a way that made his jaw ache. “No problem.”

“I’ll have to get a taxi,” she said. “There are never any taxis in
San Diego. It’s such a burg.”

“We’ll take care of you, Marsha. When’s the baby due?” He did
not want to begin the serious questions without Gracie and Allison.
“I should remember, but-“

“Men never remember,” she said and suddenly became disconcertingly chatty as if his question had flipped her animation switch.
“Last week I went to see Frank, and he acted like he didn’t even know
I was expecting. He’s so smart, but he forgets the little things.” She
smoothed her hands over her stomach. “Six weeks. Six weeks to go.”

“You’re feeling okay? Everything going okay?”

She gawked at him. “Oh, yeah, sure. Dandy as candy.”

David felt a rush of dislike as powerful as it was sudden. His inability to warm to her, to feel even vaguely empathic, reminded him
of his father’s attitude toward the men he sentenced. Since David
was ten and began spending the school year with his aunt and uncle
in Texas, he had made a hero of his uncle and trained himself to be
like him; but unwanted aspects of Claybourne Cabot still crept into
his personality like enemy mercenaries nosing under the tent. The
judge would have hated Marsha Filmore. His uncle would have recommended tolerance and reminded David that he could not guess
what hells Marsha Filmore had walked through.

In the big wing chair-David wanted his clients and visitors
comfortable, because comfortable people were more likely to speak
freely-Marsha Filmore did not look like the competent business woman she had been before her husband’s arrest. A few months ago
this lank-haired, skinny little woman smelling of nicotine and hairspray had been chief accountant for a chain of local drugstores.
David wondered which woman was the real Marsha Filmore, the
mouse or the manager.

The office door opened, and Gracie stepped in wearing a tiny,
tight skirt and very high heels. David smiled.

“Afternoon, Boss.” Blond, bouncy Allison followed her, similarly dressed. David thought, Thank God for pretty women. He said,
“Let’s get started. When we finish, Allison, you go down with
Marsha, help her get a cab.”

“Right, Boss.”

Since the days he had quarterbacked the Pinewood High School
Patriots, Boss had been his nickname, one he encouraged.

He glanced at the notes he had written that morning at just after
six A.M. in anticipation of this interview. Despite multiple interrogations, he could not shake the sense that there was more he should
know about Frank and Marsha Filmore. The prosecutor, Les Peluso,
would leave nothing to chance.

“I know this is repetitive, Marsha, and going over the same
ground can seem-“

“Pointless. I’ve told you everything I know. Frank didn’t do it.
He never would do such a thing.” She squirmed in the big chair.
“He is a very smart man, you know. Probably smarter than all of you
combined.”

Gracie said gently, “Just tell us again about that morning.”

“He’s not a monster.”

“Of course not,” Gracie said and laid her large hand on Marsha’s
forearm.

Marsha shook it off. “I was in the supermarket the other day, and a woman saw me, recognized me from the television. I’m going
to have to move. Out of town. Everyone knows me. I’m like a
pariah. What about my baby?”

This was the fourth time David had interviewed Marsha
Filmore, and at each meeting she seemed more rattled and uncertain.

“You don’t have to worry about your baby,” David said. “Your
baby’s going to be fine, and we’ll get you somewhere to live.”

“There’s nowhere I can go where I’m not recognized. If I went
to the movies no one’d watch the show.”

Gracie said, “Tell us again what happened that morning.”

Marsha cupped her palms over her face, her fingertips pressing
on her eyelids. “Oh, all right. I was talking to Sandra Calhoun,
hanging over the fence and laughing.” She made a sound into her
hands that was half laugh, half sob. “You go your whole life and you
laugh all the time and you never think about it, and then you realize … Last night I tried to watch a Robin Williams video, that one
where he’s in Vietnam? I barely even smiled.”

“What were you and Sandra laughing about?”

“How should I know? Jesus, the questions you ask. Something
about Mexico, I think. About when Frank and I lived down in
Rosarito Beach.”

David thought he saw Gracie’s pupils widen.

“When was that, Marsha?” she asked.

“God, years ago. In the early nineties.”

“How long did you live there?”

“Why? What do you care about Mexico?”

David leaned forward a little. “I always thought it might be cool
to live in Mexico,” he interjected. “Commute to San Diego. ‘Course
the line at the border would drive me crazy, but I guess it wasn’t so
bad back in the nineties. What took you down there?”

“We lived there. I told you.”

Expectancy feathered up behind David’s ribs.

“It’s gotta be cheaper than here,” Gracie said.

“We had a little house on the beach.” The chatty switch clicked
on again. “It was a good life. We had plenty of room and a nice,
safe, fenced yard.”

“You had a dog, huh?”

“Oh no, never. Frank hates animals.”

Her hands fluttered, and she smiled like a girl on prom night.
“The best thing was the help we could afford. Frank had a man to
drive him to the border every day-traffic irritates him. A man of
his intelligence couldn’t be expected to cope with that confusion
every day. I had a live-in maid to help me with-” Marsha stopped,
looked at David, and then down at her watch. A jewel-studded
Rolex. “If I miss my appointment the doctor makes me pay any,
way.

“It must have been great,” David said, “having live-in help with
the baby.”

From the corner of his eye David saw Allison’s hand pause over
her laptop. Marsha was silent.

“You said you had a live-in to take care of the baby.”

“No, I didn’t. I never said that.”

David laughed. “I think I need my ears checked.”

Gracie said, “So you were talking to Sandra Calhoun that morning. Then what?”

David turned his chair enough to see out the square office window behind his desk. He used to have an unobstructed view of the
bay and Coronado Island, but in recent years construction in the
part of town called Little Italy had filled up most of the gaps between the old two- and three-story buildings, the mom-and-pops
left over from the days when San Diego was a navy town. On a typ ical day he could count three construction cranes and a half dozen
condominium and office buildings in progress. He liked the urban
view and the feel of being at the center of a city that was doing
something, going somewhere.

If there was a baby in Mexico, where was it now?

He listened as Gracie continued to question Marsha Filmore
and made a mental note to send her flowers for stepping in and giving him a chance to gather his thoughts. Against the background of
the women’s voices-Gracie’s low and smooth like a deep river and
Marsha’s like shallow rapids-he let his thoughts drift.

He was certain Marsha had been about to tell them she had a
Mexican maid to help with a baby. When she denied it she looked
caught. Yet Frank had made a big thing about the expected baby
being their longed-for first.

As she was leaving the office Marsha Filmore said, “I read in
People magazine you got your daughter back. I saw the picture. Do
they know who took her?”

Bailey wasn’t a subject he wanted to discuss with this woman.

She stopped at the door. “Why do people-men-do things like
they do?” Her eyes lost focus for a moment. “The man who took
your little girl, did he hurt her? Did he violate her?”

Gracie said quickly, “Taxis are tough to get in this town. Allison?”
She practically shoved Marsha forward.

Marsha shook her off. “You bring a baby into the world now,
you take such a chance.”

Gracie held Marsha by the upper arm and steered her out of the
office. When the door closed behind them, David sank back into his
chair and closed his eyes. He felt his eyelids trembling.

ana wondered if the sharks in the tanks at the Birch Aquarium
(knew they were swimming in a sea the size of a backyard pool.
What went on in their brains and nervous systems? A kind god
would have created them without a sense of space and time.