Kaleidoscope (24 page)

“How is she?”

“Not good,” I said.

“I try to be sympathetic,” Margot said. “But it’s difficult when Louise phones at all hours making threats and telling me Leland’s just confused – that he doesn’t really love me. And of course it’s hard on Leland. Everybody thinks he’s such a hard-ass, but he’s not. This situation with Louise tears him apart.”

“She needs professional help,” I said. “Sage Mackenzie is doing her best, but Louise needs full-time care.”

Margot clasped her hands between her knees and slumped forward. “Louise has the money to do whatever she wants with her life, so she decides to destroy it. Makes a girl ponder, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” I said. “But I’ll have to ponder tomorrow. I’m dead beat.”

Margot straightened and levelled her gaze at me. “You didn’t sign on to chaperone the dance, did you?”

“No, just to help with dinner.”

“Then you’ve discharged your obligation. Go home. I’ll drive the kids back.”

“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll just go in and tell Taylor what’s happening.”

Margot put her arm around my shoulder. “You didn’t get to eat your roast beef,” she said.

I leaned against her. “Every cloud has its silver lining,” I said.

Zack was sitting at the dining room table in his shirtsleeves with a pizza, a beer, and a stack of papers.

When he heard me come in, he turned, pushed his chair forward with one hand, and held on to his slice with the other. “Hey, this is a pleasant surprise,” he said. “I thought you’d hang on till the bitter end.”

“The bitter end came sooner than anticipated,” I said. “Louise showed up.”

Zack winced. “God, I hope it wasn’t a repeat of last year.”

“It wasn’t. Margot headed her off and I sat outside with Louise till Sage picked her up.”

“Have you had anything to eat?”

“No.”

“The pizza’s still warm and there’s cold beer in the fridge.”

I got myself a bottle of Great Western, picked up a slice of pizza, and took a bite. “This is Chimney pizza,” I said. “I didn’t realize they delivered downtown.”

“They don’t. Stavros brought it himself,” Zack said. “He misses having us in the neighbourhood. He thought you and Taylor would be sharing it with me, so he put extra anchovies on your portions.”

The Chimney was the only pizza place in town that knew our preferences. My throat tightened. “Zack, I want our old life back,” I said.

Zack’s face was deeply furrowed and his eyes were weary. “So do I,” he said. “But for a while, you’re going to have to settle for extra anchovies.”

After we’d finished eating, I pushed my chair back. “Time for this day to be over?” I said.

“Boy, is it ever.” Zack tilted his head and winced.

“Muscles tight?” I said.

Zack rubbed the back of his neck. “I think they’ve turned to stone.”

“How about a massage?”

“Let’s make it a twosome – it’s been a while.”

Not long after Zack and I were married we hit upon the idea of nightly massages. We were deeply in love, but the simple intimacies of normal domestic life weren’t simple for us. Nightly massages gave us both pleasure, relaxed us, and gave me a chance to check Zack’s skin for warning signs of pressure ulcers.

That night as I squeezed the massage oil into my hand and began kneading the knotted muscles of Zack’s shoulders, he groaned with pleasure. “Remind me. Why did we stop doing this?”

“Because somebody blew up our house.”

“That’s a pretty lame excuse.”

“It was a trick question. So how was your day?”

Zack sighed. “Shitty. I’m losing my case and I shouldn’t be.”

“You can’t win ’em all,” I said.

“Yeah, but you should be able to win the ones where your guy is innocent.”

I began working the area at the top of Zack’s spine. “You really do believe Cronus is innocent, don’t you?”

“I
know
he’s innocent,” Zack said. “And I’m doing all the right things to prove it, but none of them is working. I can read juries. I can usually spot at least one person who’s soft on conviction. Not this time.”

“But if Cronus is innocent and you’re doing all the right things …?”

“It’s the human factor,” Zack said. “The jury just doesn’t like him. You know how it is. If you’re favourably disposed towards someone, you cut them a little slack. And no one on that jury is favourably disposed towards Cronus. To be honest, I’m not too surprised. There’s something reptilian about him, Joanne – that bullety head and those squinty eyes. I keep waiting for a little forked tongue to dart out at me. Linda shudders every time she looks at him.”

I poured more oil into my hand and began to rub the base of Zack’s spine. Pushing his weight in a wheelchair sixteen hours a day built muscle, and Zack’s upper body was powerful, but his lower spine was incredibly vulnerable. The sight of the patchwork of scars that marked successive failed attempts to restore his ability to walk always made my heart ache. I was gentle when I smoothed oil on his scars, but because Zack had no feeling there, he never knew.

“Except for the fact that he’s reptilian and he knows how to make a living room into an apartment with some insulation and a microwave, you’ve never told me much about Cronus,” I said. “Is Cronus his surname or his given name?”

Zack chortled. “Neither. You’ll like this because it shows that my client is capable of poetry. His birth name is Ronald Mewhort, Junior. The foundations of Cronus’s empire were laid by his father, Ronald Mewhort, Senior. Anyway, Ron Junior went into the family business, but somewhere along the line, he and Ron Senior had a falling out, so Ron Junior screwed dear old dad out of his share of the business and had his name legally changed. He chose the name Cronus after the Titan who came to power by castrating his father.”

I laughed. “Be sure to tell that story in court. It will win the jurors’ hearts.”

Zack sighed. “I’m going to need something. The worst part is I can understand the jurors’ antipathy. Cronus is really a piece of work. He’s a slumlord, but he walks into that courtroom as if he were king of the world. He’s disdainful of the judge, the Crown, the jurors, and the witnesses. When someone makes a statement with which he takes issue, he turns his beady eyes towards the defence table and smirks. Of course, the suggestion that he and his defence team are buddies doesn’t make the jury fond of us.”

“It can’t help that the girlfriend Cronus killed was a police officer,” I said.

“Correction,” Zack said. “The girlfriend Cronus is
alleged
to have killed. He didn’t do it, Joanne. I’ve been through the depositions. I’ve interviewed Cronus a dozen times. And yes, the facts look bad. He was in a relationship with Arden Raeburn. He was in her apartment the night she was shot. The blood and skin under her fingernails were his, the bite marks on her body were made by his teeth, and his semen was in her vagina. But Cronus was scratched up too. The blood and skin under his fingernails belonged to Arden Raeburn and the bite marks on him came from her.”

I began to move my fingers back up Zack’s spine. “What am I missing here?” I said. “It sounds as if there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Cronus assaulted Arden Raeburn.”

“He did assault her, and she assaulted him the way they’d been assaulting each other at least once a week for more than three years. Arden and Cronus were into rough sex: hair pulling, spanking, biting, handcuffs, whipping – the whole nine yards.”

“And this hasn’t come out in court?”

“Just obliquely. When the pathologist was on the stand, I asked him if Arden’s injuries might be consistent with injuries suffered during rough sex. The good doctor agreed that they were, and then he delivered his punch line: ‘All of them except for the bullet through her throat.’ That guy’s a laugh riot.”

“Did the police find the weapon?”

“Yeah, it was in the apartment. It belonged to Arden – a Glock pistol – standard police issue. So Cronus is not going to be saved by the mystery weapon showing up in the real killer’s dumpster. Jo, all we have is the fact that Arden liked it rough, and there’s only one witness to that: Cronus. We’ve interviewed her colleagues, and they agree that Arden often had scratches or bruises, but she was a cop – scratches and
bruises happen in the line of duty. And everyone says Arden was a very private person – we couldn’t find anyone with whom she might have discussed her sex life.”

“So you can’t introduce the one fact that might explain everything.”

“I can, but that would mean having Cronus take the stand. He’s just chomping at the bit to get up there and announce that he and Arden liked their sex rough and that on the night she died they’d never been happier.”

“Does Linda know any of this?”

“Linda knows all of it. She was thrilled when I told her Cronus was pressing me about taking the stand. It was as if she’d been touched by an angel.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“We break our own logjams. I’ll think of something. Now come on, Ms. Shreve. Off with that pyjama top. It’s your turn.”

Zack wasn’t the only one whose muscles had turned to stone. I hadn’t realized how tense I was till Zack finished unknotting me. I was rebuttoning my pyjama top when my BlackBerry began thumping on the nightstand. There was a text from Margot, and the message was simple: “Check your e-mail for photos.”

The first photo was of Margot’s feet. She was wearing her turquoise sneakers. I showed it to Zack. “That’s your law partner,” I said. “She wanted you to know she wasn’t born wearing five-inch heels.”

Zack grinned. The second photo was of Taylor and Declan on the dance floor. They were a handsome couple, but it was impossible not to notice that while Declan’s eyes were on her, Taylor’s were focused somewhere past his shoulder on her own private dream.

Zack was pensive as he looked at the picture. “What do you think is going to happen there?” he said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve given up thinking about what’s going to happen next – it seems as though the universe just keeps pitching fastballs at us.”

Zack’s gaze was penetrating. “This is really getting to you, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said. “The house was one thing, but that child this morning …”

“I hope you know that I feel like shit about all of this.”

“Why, Zack? None of it is your fault.”

“Do you honestly believe our house would have been blown up if I didn’t work for Leland?”

“You’re the one who always says the two most useless words in the language are ‘what if.’ We are where we are, Zack.” I reached up and touched his lips. “And at this moment, where we are is fine with me.”

CHAPTER
13

A restful weekend at the lake had me feeling almost like myself again by Monday morning. Leland and I had an uneventful run, and when I got home, Zack was showered and dressed for the day in one of the exquisite new suits Norine had chosen for him. “You look good enough to eat,” I said.

Zack grinned. “ ‘Had we but world enough and time …’ ”

I went over to the stove and stirred the porridge. “Where did you pick that up?”

“English 100 – the survey course – Beowulf to somebody else.
Had we but world enough and time
is one of the all-time great seduction lines. Every guy who was headed for law, medicine, engineering, or dentistry memorized it. It never failed.”

“Do you remember the rest of the poem?”

“I never needed to. That first line always got me where I wanted to go.” Zack wheeled in next to me and took my hand. “We’re laughing again. So how do we keep the good vibe going?”

“Our doctor would say we should swim twice a day, give each other half an hour of deep massage every night, take
plenty of long walks, avoid stress, sleep eight hours a night, and make love more.”

Zack gave my hand a squeeze. “Henry’s pretty realistic about our lives, Jo. I think he’d just tell us to do the best we can.”

And that’s what I resolved to do. After I had tidied up the breakfast things, the paintings from the old house were delivered, and I called Ed to come over and help me hang them. Scott Plear’s
Firebrand
was instantly at home in the new space. It was a large painting, and its pulsing reds, golds, and yellows were a natural for a living room with a Tuscan feel and a two-storey wall of original warehouse brick. The cool indigos, greens, and blues of Taylor’s first abstract gave an edge to Zack’s and my large but generic bedroom on the main floor. When she was younger Taylor had been passionate about Miranda Jones’s watercolours of geckos. She owned four, and after Ed hung them over her bed on the second floor, the room looked like Taylor’s.

Finally, Ed and I sat with coffee in the living room. Ed looked around and his moon face creased with pleasure. “You know this isn’t half bad,” he said. I had to agree. We spent a pleasant hour chatting and unpacking our collection of Joe Fafard’s miniature bronze horses and cows. Ed arranged them on fanciful glass-topped bronze table that seemed a perfect grazing place. For Zack’s birthday in May, I’d given him a Fafard ceramic sculpture of an old boxer who’d gone one round too many. Zack had placed it on his dresser as a reminder, and after Ed and I said goodbye, I put the old boxer in our new bedroom. Then, because Zack was not the only one who needed to keep his focus, I placed the kaleidoscope that had been my retirement gift on my own dresser.

That evening we ate well, drank a little, and had a leisurely family swim before climbing contentedly into bed.
For the first time in what seemed like ages, I was asleep almost as soon as I sank into Leland’s cottony pillows.

On Tuesday, Margot’s wedding dress arrived, and she took the morning off to indulge in some fizzy girl talk as she tried it on. The dress was exquisite, with a skirt fashioned of layers of draped silk organza petals that flowed with every step Margot took. She looked unbelievably lovely in it, but the bodice was tight and the new fullness in her breasts was evident.

Margot gazed at herself in her bedroom’s full-length mirror. “So what do you think?” she said. “The seamstress said she can’t let it out another quarter of an inch.”