Grand Avenue (12 page)

The phone rang. Vicki picked it up before her secretary could answer it. “Chris?” she asked, holding her breath.

“Mrs. Latimer?” the male voice asked in return.

Immediately, Vicki regrouped, refocused. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Bill Pickering.”

Vicki looked warily toward the closed door of her office, lowered her voice to a whisper. “Have you found anything?”

“We might have something in Menorca.”

“Menorca?”

“It’s a small island off the coast of Spain.”

“I know where Menorca is, Mr. Pickering,” Vicki said impatiently. “It’s my mother I’m trying to find. Is she there?” Again Vicki glanced toward the door. Could anyone be listening?

“A woman matching all her particulars has been living there for the last six months under the name Estella Greenaway.”

“Alone?”

“No. She’s living with a man named Eduardo Valasquez, a local artist.”

“Have you spoken to her?”

“Not yet. We”

A sudden commotion outside her office propelled Vicki to her feet. In the next instant, her office door flew open and a tall, muscular man with wild, angry eyes shot toward her desk. His right arm was extended and he was waving a crumpled piece of paper in his hand as if it were a gun. “What the fuck is this?” he screamed.

“I’ll have to get back to you,” Vicki told Bill Pickering, calmly replacing the receiver, tucking short red hair behind her ears.

“I’m sorry, Vicki,” her clearly flustered secretary said from the doorway. “I couldn’t stop him. Should I call security?”

Vicki stared at the imposingly handsome man shaking with rage in front of her, his fist in the air, remnants of the college football hero he once was clinging to the square set of his jaw, the firm cast of his shoulders. “I don’t think that will be necessary. Do you, Paul?” she asked him.

“What’s going on here, Vicki?” the man demanded.

“Why don’t you sit down.” Vicki indicated the chair in front of her desk, as she sank back into her own, watching her short black wool skirt slide up her thigh, making a conscious decision not to pull it down. “Michelle, maybe you’d be good enough to get us some coffee.”

“I don’t want any goddamn coffee.” The man slammed the letter in his hand onto Vicki’s desk, sending the other papers scattering, several of them wafting gently toward the floor. “I want to know what the hell you think you’re doing.”

“Sit down, Paul,” Vicki instructed, her secretary lingering in the open doorway. “It’s okay,” she told the young woman, whose eyes seemed to be looking for a safe place to hide. “Mr. Moore is finished yelling. Aren’t you, Paul?”

Paul Moore said nothing. Instead he kicked at the chair in front of Vicki’s desk until it spun around, then plopped down noisily into it, the leather cushion exhaling a loud whoosh upon contact. In that instant, he looked exactly like the young boy Vicki had sat beside in grades two through six at Western
Elementary School, the same unruly blond hair hovering above restless green eyes, the same forbidding scowl distorting the otherwise pleasing lines of his full lips.

“Two coffees,” Vicki told her secretary. “One black. One double cream, no sugar. I think that’s how Mr. Moore takes it. Am I right?”

“Are you ever wrong?” Paul Moore asked in return.

Vicki smiled, waited until her secretary was out of the room before continuing. “I take it you’re my mystery caller,” she stated, not at all surprised by his visit. She’d been expecting him for several days.

“You want to tell me what the hell is going on?” Paul Moore demanded yet again, clearly as flustered by his own behavior as he was with the reason for his visit.

“Obviously, your sister has informed you.”

“Obviously my sister has informed me,” Paul Moore mimicked, squishing the handwritten letter in his hand into a round ball before hurling it across the room, where it bounced against the window, then dropped silently to the floor. “Obviously my sister has informed me; obviously my sister has informed me,” he repeated, like a record stuck in a groove, the phrase growing more ominous with each repetition. “How could you do this?”

“Your sister has hired me to represent her.”

“You’re suing my mother, for God’s sake!” He banged his fist on Vicki’s desk.

“Paul, this kind of behavior isn’t going to do either of us any good. By all rights, you shouldn’t even be here. I’m sure your lawyer would advise you—”

“Fuck my lawyer!”

Vicki suppressed an untimely smile. I have, she thought, picturing the lanky, sandy-haired attorney who was representing Paul Moore’s family. A week-long interlude several years ago, a pleasant way to while away the time while her husband was in California on business. She bit down on her lower lip, pushed the lanky lawyer into the back recesses of her mind. “You can’t take this personally, Paul.”

“Not take it personally?” Paul Moore was incredulous. “How else am I supposed to take it? You’re tearing my family apart, for God’s sake.”

“It’s not my intention to hurt your family.”

“What else do you think this lawsuit is going to accomplish?”

“Your sister has hired me to represent her in challenging your father’s will. She feels she was deliberately and unfairly overlooked—”

“I know what she feels!” Once again, Paul Moore was on his feet, his hands flailing angrily at the air. “The whole world knows how she feels! Why? Because she’s always telling everyone! Because my sister is a crackpot! Because she always has been! And you know that. Christ, Vicki, you’ve known her since you were four years old.”

“Which is why, when she came to see me last month, I couldn’t just turn my back on her.”

“You could have told her you had a conflict of interest. For God’s sake, Vicki. We were next-door neighbors, classmates, for how long? My mother was always there for you, especially after your mother left.”

Now Vicki was on her feet as well, pulling her skirt
toward her knees. “None of this is relevant,” she said impatiently, picturing her mother, still as young and beautiful as she’d been the day she walked out on her family almost three decades ago, on a beach in Spain cavorting with someone named Eduardo Valasquez.

“This isn’t right,” Paul Moore was muttering. “It isn’t fair. How can you hurt my mother this way?”

“I’m not trying to hurt anyone. I’m merely trying to do my job.” Vicki was amazed at the coldness in her tone. She and Paul had been buddies since childhood. She was friends with his wife. Still, did that give him the right to dredge up the past, to use it against her, as if it were some sort of bargaining chip? What right did he have to make this personal, to talk of fairness? It was the law, for God’s sake. It had nothing to do with fairness.

There was a slight tapping on the door before it opened and Vicki’s secretary proceeded timidly into the room, round shoulders caving toward her flat chest, head down, thin brown hair falling across her face as she deposited the two mugs of hot coffee on the desk and quickly exited the room.

“Look, let’s take five minutes and catch our breath,” Vicki said, her eyes following her secretary out of the office. “Neither one of us can be enjoying this.” She hoped her voice didn’t belie her words. The truth was that she was enjoying herself immensely. This scene was exactly why she’d chosen the law as a career in the first place. Doors bursting open, voices raised in fury, raw nerves jangling, high drama unfolding. The glorious, unmitigated, unscripted chaos of it all.

Why do you want to be a lawyer?
her husband had
asked when she was still dating his son.
It’s so much work, and most of it is so dry and boring
.

Only as dry and boring as the lawyer involved
, Vicki had shot back.

That was the moment he’d fallen in love with her, Jeremy had confided later.

“Adrienne is a nutcase, and you know it,” Paul Moore was saying, still pleading his case.

“Adrienne is a very unhappy woman. She doesn’t want to go to court any more than you do.”

“And that’s why she’s suing?”

“She’s suing for her fair share of her father’s estate. I’m sure she’d be willing to settle out of court.”

“I’m sure she would.”

“Then perhaps you could talk to your mother and your brother and have your attorney get back to us with a reasonable offer.”

“No chance,” Paul Moore said angrily.

“Then you leave us with no options.” Options, Vicki repeated silently, thinking of Chris, glancing toward the phone.

“You’re really going to do this?” Paul Moore began pacing back and forth in front of Vicki’s desk, disrupting the steady flow of steam rising from the two untouched mugs of coffee, causing it to ripple, like smoke rings, in the air. “You’re really going to drag my family through the mud? You’re going to let my sister get on the stand and lie her goddamn head off?”

“I would never allow your sister to lie on the stand.”

Paul Moore stopped dead in his tracks. “What are you saying? That you believe the things she’s been telling you?”

“You know I can’t discuss our conversations.”

“You don’t have to. I know exactly what she’s been saying. I’ve been hearing the same crap out of her mouth all my life: my father never loved her; nothing she did was ever good enough for him; he called her ‘dummy’ because she wasn’t as smart as me or my brother; he didn’t take her seriously, wouldn’t let her into the family business. Forget about the fact she refused to go to college and never showed the slightest interest in the family business. That’s beside the point. That’s irrelevant, as you would say. And let’s not forget that he didn’t approve of her wardrobe, her boyfriends, or her husbands. Doesn’t matter that he was right, that she dressed like a whore, that her boyfriends were a bunch of pathetic losers, and that my father footed the bill for both her divorces. She probably forgot to mention that. Just like I’m sure she’s conveniently forgotten about the hell she put my parents through all those years she was living at home, the horrible lies she told that finally got her kicked out of the house.”

“What kind of lies?”

“Oh, let’s see. Where to begin, where to begin?” Paul Moore sank back down into the waiting chair, lifted the coffee to his lips. “There was the time just after Adrienne turned sixteen that my father caught her out with some lowlife he’d expressly forbidden her to see, caught her in the elevator of a hotel as she and this guy were going up to his room.” Paul shook his head, cool green eyes burning with disbelief. “And is she at all apologetic? Is she at all contrite? No. What’s little Adrienne’s response to being caught red-handed in the
elevator of some out-of-the-way hotel with some scruffy drug dealer? She accuses my father of being at the hotel with a paramour of his own, says this right in front of my mother, mind you, doesn’t give a damn who she hurts. Doesn’t care that my father was at the hotel on business, that the woman was a client in town overnight. None of that matters. And when he punishes her by grounding her for a month, what does she do? She sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night, steals the car, smashes it into a neighbor’s fence. Spends time in Juvenile Hall. Comes home, drops out of school, sits around drinking, doing drugs, telling more lies.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the reason her father hates her isn’t because she’s wasting her life, or that she’s a druggie or an ingrate, but because she’s got his number, because she knows all about his secret life. His women. She’s heard him talking on the phone, arranging secret rendezvous. She knows about the mistress in Dayton, his affair with her old baby-sitter, the pass he made at one of her friends. Lies, lies, and more lies. The real surprise here isn’t that he cut her out of his will, it’s that he didn’t cut her out of his life much sooner than he did.”

Vicki chose her next words carefully. “I think you should think long and hard about settling this case out of court.”

Paul Moore lowered his coffee to the desk without having taken a sip. “And why is that?”

“It’s expensive to go to court, Paul. You know that. Expensive and messy. I think we have a good case. I also think it could get very ugly. I don’t want to see your mother hurt any more than you do.”

“Bullshit!”

“Make your sister an offer, Paul. Don’t let this thing go to trial.”

“What are you trying to tell me? That you found the mystery mistress in Dayton? That you unearthed the phantom baby-sitter?” He laughed, but the laugh was forced, hollow, scared.

“Talk things over with your wife, Paul,” Vicki answered cryptically. “Then get back to me.” She lowered her eyes to her lap, as if signaling the meeting was over.

“What do you mean, talk things over with my wife? She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Joanne has a lot to do with this,” Vicki said evenly, looking Paul Moore straight in the eye. “If this goes to trial, I’ll have to call her as a witness.”

“What are you talking about? What lies has Adrienne been feeding you about my wife? Don’t tell me she’s accused my father of making a play for Joanne!”

“No,” Vicki admitted. “I don’t think Adrienne has any idea about what happened between your father and Joanne.”

For a moment, the air was so still and heavy it felt as if Vicki were standing underwater. There was no motion, no sound, no breath. And then suddenly, Paul was on his feet, and the room was spinning and swirling around her, as if someone had pulled the plug and she were being sucked into a giant vortex. Vicki grabbed hold of her desk, hung on tight, lest she be swept away by the angry current radiating from his eyes.

“My father and Joanne! What kind of sick joke are you playing?”

“It happened a long time ago, just after the two of you were married. Apparently your father had sent you out of town on business.”

“Something happened while I was away?”

“Your father showed up at your apartment. He tried to force himself on your wife. She was able to fend him off, but just barely. Needless to say, she was pretty shaken up by the incident.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not lying.”

“And you know all this because …?”

“Because Joanne told me about it.”

The color drained from Paul Moore’s face in a sudden rush, as if a major artery had been severed and he was rapidly leaking blood. His arms fell limply to his sides, as if the muscles had been cut. His knees buckled visibly beneath crisp navy trousers, and he had to grab the back of his chair to keep from sliding to the floor. For a minute, Vicki was afraid he might faint. “My wife told you?” he repeated, his tongue having trouble with the words, as if they were stuck to an unruly wad of bubble gum.