Dead Aim (18 page)

Marcia looked up from the deer, and she could see Mary O’Connor coming closer. Marcia turned toward Parish, who nodded at Mary.

Mary O’Connor reached to her back, lifted the sweatshirt, and pulled out a pistol, then held it by the barrel, so the grips were toward Marcia. “Do you want to do it?”

Marcia turned, her eyes on Parish. “Yes,” she said. “I should be the one.”

Parish seemed unmoved, unconvinced. He didn’t nod or show her his approval, just looked at his wristwatch. For a second, she hated him. She wanted him to do it. He should do this. No, she knew, he shouldn’t. She took the pistol. She kept her eyes on it so she would not have to see the contemptuous look on O’Connor’s face. She aimed it at the deer’s head just behind the ear, and fired.

The sound of the pistol did not seem loud, and she realized that the rifle shot had made her ears feel stopped. She could see the deer give a reflexive kick, but it was dead. She reversed the pistol and handed it back to O’Connor. “Thanks,” she said, her eyes on O’Connor’s forehead.

O’Connor put the pistol away and pulled her sweatshirt over it again as Emily Lyons came up.

Parish said to Marcia, “It was a fair shot. Any time you put a deer down with the first one, and you don’t have to tramp all over creation tracking it while it bleeds to death, it’s a fair shot.”

“What do we do with it?”

“Right now, we hang it from one of these trees and gut it, then let it bleed out while we walk back to get the pickup truck and drive it
home. Then we’ll butcher it, refrigerate some for dinner tonight, and freeze the rest.”

She stared down at the deer. “It looks bigger up close.”

He stared down. “It isn’t bad.” He seemed to be consciously, willfully evading what she had meant. “This is a pretty good buck for these hills.” He took the pack off his back and produced a nylon rope. “May as well get started. Where’s the best one, Mary?”

“There’s an oak with a good horizontal limb right over there,” she said, pointing.

He tied the rope around the rear hooves and dragged the carcass to the tree, then threw the rope over the limb and hoisted the deer off the ground upside down. He tied the other end of the rope around the trunk to hold it, then produced a long fixed-blade knife from his pack. He looked over his shoulder to be sure Marcia was still watching, then inserted the blade at the groin and, with a slight sawing motion, began the first long incision downward toward the center of the rib cage.

Marcia watched from beside him, because she knew that if she didn’t he would tell her to. The other two women had walked off toward the camp carrying the rifles. She said nothing to Parish, asked nothing because it was all obvious. She knew why she’d had to come out here at dawn and hunt with these three. She knew why they had wanted her to have the feel of killing. Now, as she watched Parish making a slice and then pulling the intestines out of the animal, she knew why it could not have been a rabbit or something. It had needed to be nothing less than a full-grown buck.

M
arcia sat across the table from Michael Parish, drinking the bubbly water. She wanted a real drink—a strong one—but when Parish had ordered water, she’d had no choice. He had not ordered for her, and she could not remember his ever having said anything about alcohol. But she knew that what would get her through this was to do exactly as he did. Her gift for sensing what men expected and yielding to it was quicker, more reliable than her ability to figure out what was really required by the circumstances. She had to put faith in her alertness and in the subtle mimicry she had practiced all her life. They could be counted on because they were a weakness, and took no effort.

Sitting with him was disconcerting. His face was turned toward her, but his eyes kept focusing on a point beyond her left shoulder, as though he were a sly enemy watching someone sneak up behind her and trying to keep her from noticing. His conversation made the feeling stronger, because he was only prodding her into talking, to keep her calm and distracted, while he kept refocusing his eyes on Mary O’Connor, who was sitting alone in a booth thirty feet away.

“Did you come to this restaurant when you worked in Washington?”

“No,” she answered. “It’s a nice place, but most of its business comes because it’s in the hotel. I think I was here maybe twice, just to meet out-of-town clients who were staying here and get them to pretend to read something and then sign it.”

“Pretend to read it?”

She nodded, then realized that he was looking past her again, so she said, “Yes. Nobody can eat a meal and really read a legal document while a lawyer is sitting across the table providing helpful offers to explain anything that’s not clear. If a lawyer really wanted him to understand it, the document would have been sent to him in advance. So they just pretend to read all of it, trying to buy the lawyer’s respect by seeming to read rapidly and understand instantly. But they’re distracted by the food, which is tantalizing, and it’s also threatening because they want to eat it and are afraid it will get cold or the waiter will take it away, but they can’t. They have to listen to what the lawyer is saying so they won’t offend her or make her think they’re stupid. And they’re concerned about how they look.”

“How they look?”

“Sure. Vanity. They’re afraid to spill something on themselves. And do they look important to the strangers around them, reading contracts at lunch, or do they just look crude and commercial?”

“And how they look to the lawyer?”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“When we talked before, you always seemed to resent that you were treated differently from the men,” said Parish. “But it seems to me that what you’re describing is you using your sexual attractiveness to confuse the other party in an agreement.”

Her face flattened. She felt a wave of hot irritation at the nape of her neck. “My using it is different. It’s mine to use. Mine,” she repeated. “Not theirs.”

“When a firm hires a lawyer, aren’t they hiring the whole person?”

He was looking closely at her now. She wished he would look at O’Connor again. “That depends,” she said firmly.

“Education? Grammar and diction?”

“Yes,” she said. “Those things.”

“Manners?”

“Sure, but—”

“Voice?”

She gave him a glare. “Within certain limits. If you had an irritating way of speaking that wasn’t the product of a handicap or something, it probably would be legal not to hire you.”

“And if you have a soft, musical voice that men find pleasant, it would be legal to consider that an asset, wouldn’t it? Surely when you went in front of a judge and jury you used that voice.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is,” Parish insisted. “What about your eyes and your hair? Your complexion?” He smiled. “Your figure?” He seemed to know she was about to interrupt, so he dropped the smile and spoke more quickly and seriously. “Suppose your company did a study to find out a jury’s reactions to a group of lawyers. I’ve heard there are companies that do that kind of research.”

“There are,” she said tersely.

“Well, suppose they did one and found that a jury’s reaction to an attractive woman was more positive than their reaction to an ugly one. Wouldn’t the company be foolish not to hire her and use her in difficult cases?”

“Why are you trying to make me angry? Do you think I’ll fall apart if I’m not?”

“No,” said Parish. “I’m just curious to know what you’re thinking. It’s important to me that I understand you.”

Marcia’s heart gave an odd little flutter at that, and she cursed herself for it.

But he went on. “You are extremely attractive.”

She rolled her eyes and let a breath out through her teeth. “Please.”

“I’m not trying to insult you,” he said. “It’s an advantage—an enormous one—and you’ve shown me that you’re aware of it, at least in certain circumstances. If you can confuse a person at lunch, you can get a client to hire you. You can charm a jury, make a judge want to help you. It would seem to me that it’s a gift, like being born intelligent or healthy or strong. In fact, beauty—sexual attractiveness—is made of those qualities.”

“What’s your point?”

“You have these advantages, but you complain. It would seem more sensible for someone to complain who had been deprived of them.”

Marcia’s eyes narrowed. “If I succeeded, people would think I batted my eyes at a judge. If I was promoted, people would think I slept my way to the next level, or just that my boss hoped I would be grateful for the favor. No matter what I did or didn’t do, I could never get credit for earning it with my work. Is that fair?”

“That’s a false question,” Parish said. “It’s probably possible to figure out which lawyer won a case, even if her side consisted of a team of three or four. But it’s not possible, even for her, to determine exactly how she won: what proportion of her victory was caused by the cold logic of her presentation, what proportion by how appealing she looked while she was giving it. In every instance, it was both.” He paused. “The only place where fairness comes in is whether she—a person—gets rewarded for using what she had to win.”

“But part of the reward should be the respect. You shouldn’t win and then have people feel contempt for you.”

“People don’t feel contempt in that situation. The only negative feeling is jealousy,” he assured her. “The women feel you don’t deserve to have what you’ve been given. The men see that you have powerful magic that’s not available to them.”

“I earned what I have.”

He looked at her, his expression intrigued, but said nothing to contradict her. His eyes refocused, and she knew he was studying Mary O’Connor again. At first Marcia was relieved. But after a time, she
realized her irritation would not let her leave the subject. She needed to deliver a rebuttal.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you why it was unfair. I was interviewed by the senior partners, and they asked difficult questions. I was hired, and was given no special privileges that I know of. I worked for three years, as hard as anyone. By then I thought I had become an important part of the team, a member of a group that valued me because I knew some things that the others didn’t, had experience that was different from theirs, was willing to devote as much effort as anyone did to succeed on a case. It was a shock to learn otherwise. It was a sudden dose of reality that I’d never had before. And do you know what? When the time came, my reaction wasn’t ‘They have it wrong.’ It was ‘Of course.’ It had never happened before, but it felt familiar, as though it had happened a hundred times. I’m bitter, but what I’m bitter about isn’t the world we live in. It’s the loss of the brighter, better, fairer world I imagined and lived in before.”

“What did you learn about the real world?”

“It’s a hard, harsh place.”

“Why?”

“You have to study as hard as I did and work the same hours, but you also have to work to be attractive. And you can’t decline to use it: all you can be is pretty or ugly, not somebody who refuses to be either. And you have to be very calculating about everything you do, including sex. You have to make self-serving decisions about who you will sleep with, but also who you won’t sleep with. And you have to be very careful never to let them know that ‘no’ is permanent, that you won’t ever sleep with them, because then they’ll stop pleasing you and begin to punish you. And …” She let her voice trail off.

When she stopped talking, Parish looked at her sharply. She began again. “I wasn’t prepared. On an impulse, I had an affair with a partner. David. He was cruel to me. I broke it off. He made it clear that I didn’t have that option. I was afraid, but more afraid of giving in to him than of being fired. So he had me fired. When I told them I’d
fight, they produced a file full of fake negative performance evaluations. In the meeting, in front of all the senior partners, one of them said, ‘You’re a disruptive influence. Who you fuck or won’t fuck is taking up billable hours. You’re not good enough as a litigator to make up the lost money. Nobody is.’ ”

Parish was looking past her again. “It’s time.” He stood up and she glanced over her shoulder to see Mary O’Connor put a cell phone into her purse and walk out of the restaurant into the hotel lobby. Marcia turned toward Parish, but he was heading for the door that led through the garden to the street.

She followed. He had done it. He had gotten her to talk through all of the waiting, and had gotten her to talk about her injustice, to make her pick at the sore until she felt the hatred like a stab. She saw Parish come close to Mary on the street, and saw her tell him something. He waved his hand at a cab, and when it stopped, Mary got into it. Parish walked back to join Marcia. “The place is a bar in Georgetown. It’s called Handel’s. Have you been there?”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Never heard of it.”

“Good.” He took her arm and looked at his watch, then conducted her toward the Metro stop. “We’ll take the subway.”

In the Bethesda station, Marcia watched Parish step up to one of the big automatic ticket machines along the wall at the bottom of the long escalator, push the plus and minus buttons until he got the right fare, then slip a bill into the machine, take the tickets, and scoop up his change. She had thought she would be the one to do that, because she was the one who had lived in Washington. But Parish seemed to have been everywhere and to know how all systems worked. He repeated the process. Four tickets? Return, of course. She would not have bothered.