Final Appeal (7 page)

Thanks, El. “Yep, in a vault. They said they’d show me tomorrow.”

Ben presses a button on his computer keyboard. The modem sings a computer song as he logs on to Lexis, the legal research database. “Surprised the government has the money.”

“Safer, what the fuck are you doing?” Artie asks. “Are you working?
Today
?”

“I’m going on Nexis, that okay with you?”

“What’s Nexis?” Eletha asks, as Sarah suddenly busies herself making a full-fledged tea ceremony out of a single bag of Constant Comment. She has to be the one I heard last night, and she should never play poker.

“Anybody gonna answer me? What’s Nexis?” Eletha plops into a chair like a much heavier woman. Her chin falls into her hand. “Forget it. Who gives a shit?”

“Nexis is a database of newspapers,” I say. “It has magazines, newspapers, wire services. Everything.”

“How do you like that?” Ben says, in his own world as he reads his computer screen. “We’re under HOTTOP.
Hightower
and the Chief.”

“Christ, Safer!” Artie says.

“I need a translation,” Eletha says.

“
HOTTOP
stands for hot topics in the news,” I say, the words sour in my mouth. Without thinking twice, I cross to Ben’s computer and press the power switch to
OFF
. The powerful unit crackles in protest, then fizzles out. “Show some respect, Ben. A man is dead.” I feel a wrenching inside my chest and turn my back on Ben’s surprised expression.

“Way to go, Grace!” Artie says, bursting into applause.

“She’s right,” Eletha says. She stands up and smooths out her skirt. “I don’t even know what we’re still doin’ here. We should all go home. The packing can wait.”

“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Sarah says, standing at the coffeemaker. The only sound is the hot water spurting into the glass pot. Sarah removes the pot a little too soon and the last drops dance across the searing griddle like St. Vitus.

“Let’s not get maudlin, please,” Ben says.

Artie looks as if he’s about to snap, then his brow knits in alarm. “Wait a minute. Grace, does Shake and Bake know about Armen?”

“I have no idea.”

“Oh, fuck. I have to get in to see him. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he hears. Where’s the prison?”

“On the second floor, but they won’t let you in.”

“The hell they won’t. He has a right to counsel, doesn’t he? I’m counsel.” Artie bounds over to the coat rack and tears Ben’s jacket from a wooden hanger, leaving it swinging.

“That’s my best jacket, Weiss,” Ben says.

“I know, dude. Thanks.” He yanks the jacket over his chest. “Sar, lend me your briefcase.”

“You really want to do this?” Sarah hands him a flowered canvas briefcase but Artie pushes it back at her.

“Give me a pad instead. Where’d you say they’re taking him, Grace?”

“Courtroom Fourteen-A, before Katzmann. They’re trying to charge him with trespassing on federal property.”

Artie shakes his head. “I tell ya, these kids today, in and out of trouble. Where did I go wrong, Mom?”

“Don’t ask me, pal.”

“I gave him everything. Summers in Montauk, winters in Miami Beach.” He gives the jacket a reckless tug and Ben flinches.

“Will you at least take it easy?” Ben says.

Eletha covers her eyes. “I didn’t see this. This is not happening.”

“How do I look, Mom?” Artie says to me. He sticks out his arms, and the sleeves ride up to his elbows. “Hot?”

“Smokin’.”

“Excellent.” He sticks a legal pad under his arm and runs out of the clerks’ office. I hear the heavy pounding of his feet as he heads for the outer door. My eyes meet Sarah’s, but she looks down into her steaming mug of tea.

“You okay, Sar?” I ask her. Flush her out. Isn’t that what detectives do?

“Sure.” She takes a quick sip of tea, avoiding my gaze. “Who’s
Hightower
been reassigned to, Ben?” she asks.

“What makes you think I know?”

“You know Galanter’s clerks. The buzz-cut boys.”

The telephone rings at Eletha’s desk. “Shit,” she says. “Thing’s been ringing all day.” Before I can offer to get it, she kicks off her heels and is padding to her desk.

Ben flicks on the power switch, animating the machine. “Grace, hate me if you must, but I’m logging on again.”

“Tell us who got
Hightower
, Safer,” Sarah says, but I hold up my hand.

“Sarah, think a minute. Who’s even more conservative than Galanter?”

“Adolf Hitler.”

“On our court, I mean.”

“Judge Foudy.”

“Right. And Galanter would pick somebody to vote with him, now that Armen’s gone. He’d want to stack the deck. Change the result.”

She blinks. “Could he do that?”

“Sure. He’s the chief judge. In an emergency, he picks the panels.”

Ben pounds the keys. “I neither confirm nor deny.”

He doesn’t have to, I know it. Galanter has shifted the majority to himself, blocking Hightower in. No matter which way Robbins goes, it’ll be two votes to one for death. Poor Armen; he didn’t save Hightower’s life after all. I stand up, wanting suddenly to be alone.

“Look at this item,” Ben says, his voice tinged with sarcasm. “What a nice gesture from Senator Susan, and how like a Democrat.”

“What?” Sarah says, and I stop at the doorway.

“From
The Washington Post
. Says here that Susan tried to donate Bernice to a group called Service Dogs for the Handicapped. I can almost hear the wheelchairs plowing into each other, can’t you?” He laughs so hard he coughs:
kack-kack-kack
.

“Very funny,” Sarah says.

“Bernice is gone?” I say, surprised to feel a twinge inside.

“Gone but not forgotten,” Ben says, recovering enough to hit another key. “They didn’t want her, evidently. They only take puppies.”

“So where is she?” I ask from the doorway, only half wanting to know.

Ben hits the key again. “It doesn’t say.”

“I know,” Eletha says. She walks into the room, waving a yellow Post-it on her finger. “They just called.”

“Who did?”

She holds the paper in front of my face. On it is a phone number I don’t recognize. “I voted for Susan, but I’ll never forgive myself.”

9

“S
he’s too big, Mom,” Maddie says, shuddering in her nightgown. “Look at her
teeth
.”

Bernice strains against her red collar, which still says
A. GREGORIAN
; her wagging tail swats my thigh with each beat.

“But I’m holding her, honey. She won’t hurt you, she can’t. Just come over and let her sniff you. She’s all clean now.” I bathed Bernice right after I bathed Maddie, using green flea shampoo they sold me at the dog pound, along with a leash, two steel bowls, and a thirty-dollar trowel for shoveling a megaton of dogshit.

“Rrronononr,”
Bernice grumbles, a guttural noise that makes Maddie’s blue eyes widen in fear.

“What’s that?”

“She’s talking to you, honey. She wants you to love her.”

“But I don’t love her. I don’t even like her.” Maddie tugs anxiously at the end of a damp strand of hair; her hair looks brown when it’s wet, more like my mother’s original russet color than her own blazing red.

“Aw, can’t you just give her a little pat on the head? Her hair’s washed too.” I scratch Bernice’s newly coiffed crown and she looks back gratefully, her tongue lolling out. “See? Look how happy she is to be with us.”

“But why did
we
have to take her?”

“Because nobody else would. They all have apartments that don’t allow pets. We’re the only ones with a house who could have a pet.”

“They could move.”

“No. Now come closer.”

She doesn’t budge. “Why couldn’t you just leave her there? In the dog pound.”

“You know what would happen to her. You saw
Lady and the Tramp
.”

“They don’t do that right away, Mom. They wait about six or five weeks.”

“No, they don’t wait that long.”

“Somebody else could have adopted her.”

“I don’t think anybody would have. You should have seen her in the cage.” I flash on the scene at the pound; Bernice penned by herself, barking frantically next to a streetwise pit bull. “Nobody would have taken her, Maddie. Most people like puppies, not dogs.”

“I like puppies. Little puppies.”

I sigh. I got my second wind when I washed Bernice, but the day’s awful events and my own fatigue are catching up with me.

“It’s not
my
fault, Mom.” Maddie pouts. “She’s scary.”

“I know, you’re being very brave. How about you go up to bed now? You look tired.”

“I’m not tired. You always say I’m tired when I’m not.”

“All right, you’re not tired, but I am. Go up to bed, and I’ll be right up.”

She makes a wide arc around Bernice, then scurries upstairs, and I take the disappointed dog into the kitchen and put her behind an old plastic baby gate. She whimpers behind the fence, but I don’t look back. I reach Maddie’s room just as she turns off the light and hops into bed. “She’s so big, Mom,” she says, a small voice in the dark.

I sit down at the edge of the narrow bunk bed and let my weariness wash over me. I smooth Maddie’s damp bangs back over the uneven part in her hair. It reminds me of Sally Gilpin, and I feel grateful to have my daughter with me, however terrified she is of big dogs. That much is right in the world. “I understand, baby.”

“Where will she sleep?” Maddie says, digging in her mouth with a finger, worrying a loose tooth from its moorings.

A good question, only one of the hundred I haven’t answered. “I have it all figured out.”

“Mom, look,” she says with difficulty, owing to the fist in her mouth. Her eyes glitter in the dim light from the hallway. Huge round eyes, like Sam’s; my color but his shape. Across the bridge of her nose is a constellation of tiny freckles too faint to see in the dark.

“Look at what?”

“Look.” She moves her hand, pointing at one of her front teeth, which has been wrenched to the left.

“Gross, Maddie. It’s not ready. Put it back the way it was, please.”

“Everyone else has their teeth out. My whole class.”

“But you’re younger, remember? Because of when your birthday is.”

“
Duh
, Mom.”

“
Duh
, Mads.”

She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.

“Stop, Maddie.”

“You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”

“Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”

“Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”

“You’ll give yourself an infection.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”

She giggles.

“You think that’s funny?”

She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.

“But you love to be tickled.”

“No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”

I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother. When I gave Maddie the doll at age three, they became inseparable. “You really do look like Madeline, you know?” I say. “Except for the hat.”

“No, I don’t. She looks like me. I look like myself.”

I laugh. “You’re right.” I lean over and give her a quick kiss. Her breath smells of peanut butter. “Did you brush?” I ask, second-rate sleuth that I am.

“I don’t have to brush if I don’t want to.”

“Oh, really? Who said?”

“Daddy. He told me it was
my decision.
” Her tone elides into the adolescent sneer that comes prematurely to six-year-old girls.

“Don’t be fresh.”

“Don’t be fresh. Don’t be fresh. Daddy says you can break the rules sometimes.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” Easy for Sam to say. After his highly suspect charitable deductions, fidelity was the second rule he broke. Sam is a high-powered lawyer who lost interest in me at about the same time I became a mother and quit being a high-powered lawyer myself; ironically, I thought that was just when I was getting interesting.

“Gretchen says that if your tooth comes out too soon, you have to wait a long time for a new tooth to grow.” She twists a hank of Madeline’s yarn hair around her finger.

“Is Gretchen a girl in your class?”

“Gretchen knows about bugs and gerbils. She knows about why it’s a hamster and not a gerbil. She has three teeth out. Madeline likes her.”

“Then she must be nice.”

“She is. She has long hair, really long. Down to here.” She makes a chop at her upper arm. “She wears a jumper.”

Like Madeline. “Do you eat lunch with her?”

“Sometimes. Not usually. Usually I’m alone.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know that much people, so nobody ever sits next to me.”

I try to remember what I read in that parenting book. Talk so your kid will listen, listen so your kid will talk; it’s catchy, but it means nothing. “What can we do about that?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs.

I forget what the book says to do when they shrug. “Would you like to have Gretchen over? Maybe one of the days I’m off from work?”

“She won’t come.”

“You don’t know that unless you ask.”

“But I don’t know her exactly as a best friend, okay?”

“But, honey, that’s how you get to know someone.”

“Mom, I already told you!” She turns away.