Marine Corpse (7 page)

“As a matter of fact, he’s black.”

“Oh. Well, good.”

I was still standing, and Heather was still curled in the chair in front of the television. I held my hand to her. “I have to leave. Nice to have met you.”

She took my hand and held it. Her grip was firm. “Those notebooks. I am serious about that, you know.”

“My number’s on that card. Call and remind me.”

She nodded. “You can count on it.”

B
EN WOODHOUSE CALLED ME
two days later. “Couple of odds and ends,” he said.

“Such as what?”

“Stu’s condo, for one. The Jewish girl is reluctant to move out.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Stu’s girlfriend. Maybe you met her. She was at the house Sunday.”

“Sure I met her. What about her?”

I heard Ben sigh. “They lived together in a condominium in Sudbury. Now that Stu is gone, naturally the place ought to revert to his family. But the girl indicates she’s not moving. She evidently is prepared to fight this in court.”

I decided not to tell Ben right then that I had recommended a damn good lawyer to her. But it did occur to me that I was Ben’s lawyer, and he was now asking me to demonstrate that I was worth that hefty retainer he paid me. “If the place is in Stu’s name,” I said carefully, “I don’t see what the problem is.”

“That is the problem. Stu put it in her name.”

“Off the top of my head, then, I’d say it’s legally hers.”

“I don’t think this is a matter that will lend itself to top-of-the-head opinions, Brady.” He hesitated. “Actually, between the two of us, that’s perfectly all right with me. It’s Meriam. She wants it back.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know. She never liked Stu’s arrangement. She’s found some way to blame the girl for what happened to Stu. She says he bought the place with Woodhouse money, the place should belong to the Woodhouses. You know Meriam.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do know Meriam. Okay, Ben. I’ll look into it. But unless there’s something there that doesn’t meet the eye, my advice is to forget it.”

“Meriam is very definite about this.”

“I don’t doubt it. What are we talking about here, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?”

“One-sixty-five.”

“Really, Ben…”

“Dammit, Brady. This was a family decision.”

“Sure. Democratic vote.”

“Yes.”

“Well, listen to your attorney for a minute, then, will you? If this place is in her name, and unless there’s something funny about the documentation, then it belongs to her, and no lawyer is going to convince a judge otherwise. Even if you got that particular judge appointed, Ben.”

“That’s not how I play the game, and you know it.”

“Yes, I do. I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. I should tell you something. I spoke with Ms. Kriegel at your little get-together. I recommended a lawyer to her. A friend of mine. A very competent attorney. He will not blow this case.”

“Meriam is certain that Stu put the condo in the girl’s name for tax reasons.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “You better just forget the whole thing.”

“I’ll have to talk to Meriam.”

“Something to think about here, Ben. Are you prepared to face a palimony suit?”

“You wouldn’t allow that.”

“I wouldn’t like it. If this gets to court, I might not be able to prevent it.”

Ben chuckled. “It might be worth it, just to watch Meriam squirm. In any case, you’re our lawyer, and I expect you to give us your best advice on this.”

I told him I thought I already had, and he said to think about it some more, and I told him he better come up with something for me, and he said he’d talk to Meriam about it, and we hung up.

Later that morning Julie buzzed me. “Who is it, dear?” I said into the intercom.

“Don’t call me ‘dear.’ It sounds patronizing.” Her voice hissed.

“Well, bless me, I’m sorry, my good woman.”

“That’s not much better.”

“Julie?”

“Yes?”

“Who’s on the phone, huh?”

“It’s Zerk.”

“Well, good. Put him on.”

“Certainly, sir.” Julie was touchy about some things that generally seemed to elude me.

I hesitated for a moment before I jabbed the button that would connect me with the man on the other end of the line. “Zerk” was Xerxes Garrett, a young attorney with an office on Mass Ave in North Cambridge. During the year that Julie took her maternity leave to have her daughter, Zerk clerked for me and I tutored him for his law boards. When Julie came back to work, I tried to persuade Zerk to stay on as my partner, but he made it clear that he didn’t want to specialize in protecting the legal interests of my wealthy clientele.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he had said, his handsome black face solemn, as if he were afraid he’d hurt my feelings, “but helping rich white dudes get richer just ain’t my idea of a career.”

So he set about to establish the kind of practice he could live with—bringing suit against absentee landlords when the heat went off in Mattapan apartment buildings in January, watchdogging personnel moves in the Boston schools and Cambridge Fire Department, facilitating welfare and food stamp distribution, and testifying before the state legislature on bills that might affect the status of minorities in the Commonwealth.

He helped to coordinate the Jesse Jackson campaign in Massachusetts. He coached a team in the Boston summer basketball league. He negotiated a contract with the Patriots for a big offensive tackle out of Grambling. His career was shaping up.

Now and then I referred a client to him. “Don’t try to work out your honkie guilt on me,” he’d say. “White man’s burden, all that shit. I’m scrapin’ by.”

“I’m just looking for a good attorney,” I’d tell him. And I meant it. He was tough and smart, he knew the law, and he had a sharply honed sense of justice.

I spoke into the telephone. “Hey, Zerk. How you doing?”

Zerk’s laugh was a loud, high-pitched cackle. In bars and restaurants, Zerk’s laugh created instant, awed silence. Rock-and-roll bands stopped playing in mid-bar if Zerk laughed in the building where they were performing. This time he gifted me with an especially hearty one.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“My guy’s suing your guy, and my guy’s gonna win. Hoo hee haw!”

“You’ve talked to Heather, huh?”

“Sure have, old bossman. And I got the facts.” Zerk liked to annoy me by mimicking what he thought I would recognize as black dialect. He pronounced the word “facts” as if it were “facks.”

“But you’re calling me to see if maybe we can’t negotiate a settlement out of court.”

“Only interested in saving you-all some aggravation, tha’s all, massa. Nothing to negotiate.”

“The Woodhouses do not intend to cave in on this, Zerk.”

“Well, goodie! I get to drag them into court. Get to square off against my old mentor. Gonna beat the shit out of you, my man. Ms. Kriegel’s got all the right papers. Plus lots of interesting things to say, if necessary.”

“Like what?”

“Tut-tut. You wanna negotiate, give me something, maybe I’ll give you something. But I got a secret word for the day. Wanna hear it?”

“Sure, Zerk. Whisper it into my ear.”

His whisper nearly ruptured my eardrum. “Palimony!” was the word he screamed into it.

“I already thought of that,” I said primly.

“You thought of it, maybe. What you gonna do about it?”

“I think you and I ought to meet for lunch,” I said.

“I was waiting for that. Locke Ober’s.”

“Jake Wirth’s,” I countered.

“Parker House.”

“Durgin Park.”

“Uh-uh. Parker House is as far as I’m going. You want me to whisper that word again?”

“Okay. The Parker House it is. You got it.”

“Just so there’s no misunderstanding, Counselor, it’s on you.”

“It’s on me,” I said. “Friday okay?”

“I’ll clear off my very busy calendar. One o’clock.”

“See you there,” I said, looking forward to it already.

Heather Kriegel’s condominium was snugged back into the woods off a side road just beyond the Common in Sudbury. It was one of a series of townhouses set close. together but angled strategically to provide maximum privacy. Four condos made up one building, so that each occupied a corner. Curving walkways connected them all. Scattered here and there were the gaunt winter skeletons of apple trees.

Heather’s was the one with the pine cone wreath on the door and the brown Volkswagen Rabbit tucked under the carport. I parked my BMW behind the Rabbit, took the bulky package containing Stu’s notebooks from the seat beside me, and went up to ring her bell. Earlier in the day I had been willingly seduced by the false promise that comes with a touch of January thaw, but now that the sun was sinking in the pale cloudless sky, the air carried a new bite, and I shivered in my fleece-lined parka. I waited several moments, then rang the bell again. I could hear music coming from inside.

The door opened abruptly and Heather Kriegel stood there on the other side of the storm door grinning at me. She had a towel draped around her neck. She wore a pink leotard and black tights with gray and blue striped legwarmers bunched down around her ankles. Her forehead was damp, and wisps of her shaggy black hair stuck to it.

She pushed open the door. “Oh, God, come on in. It’s bitchily cold out there. I’m sorry. I had the music on loud—I always put on the music when I’m exercising, because it helps me forget the pain—and I guess I didn’t hear the bell. Have you been standing there long?”

I smiled at her as I entered into the little flagstone foyer. “Just got here.” I handed the package to her. “These are Stu’s notebooks.”

She took them from me. “It was really nice of you to bring them out here,” she said. “You sure you didn’t make a special trip?”

“It was no problem,” I said evasively.

“Well, for heaven’s sake, come on in. Give me your coat.”

I shrugged off my coat and followed her into what corresponded more or less to a big livingroom. The furniture had been arranged to section it off into several different parts: a sofa and soft chairs around a circular coffee table in front of the fireplace, a dining table centered on an oval braided rug, a desk in a corner by floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and, for lack of a more precise term, a gymnasium, with a rowing machine, a stationary bicycle, and a weight machine. The whole room was filled with the extravagant orchestral strains of Wagner.

“That’s
Die Walküre
, isn’t it?” I asked loudly.

She nodded. “Kinda loud, huh?” She went over to the stereo in the corner near the fireplace and turned down the volume a couple of notches. It was still loud. “Don’t you like Wagner?”

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes I prefer a little Bach counterpoint on a harpsichord, though. Usually, actually.”

“Wagner is more inspiring, exercise-wise. You know about the Valkyries, don’t you?”

“Not really.”

“The handmaidens of the Norse god Odin. They hovered over the battlefield, picking out which of the young warriors would be killed. Then they conducted their souls to Valhalla. Real ballbusters, the Valkyries, flying around up there deciding the fate of the young men. Don’t you love that image? The ancients knew all about how women could get pissed off at men. Great women’s liberation themes in classical mythology, you know. Scylla and Charybdis, the harpies, the sirens. All of them real nut-knockers.”

I smiled. “Nut-knockers.”

“God,” she said. “This place is a mess.” She moved around the room, making little piles of the books, magazines, and newspapers that lay scattered around, and punching up the pillows. I stood there watching her uncertainly.

When she was finished, she picked up the towel and rubbed her hair and face briskly as she came toward me. She seemed completely unaware that, aside from the skin-tight outfit she wore, she was quite naked. I was not unaware of it.

“Stu and I used to work out together,” she said. “He used to kid me about being chubby.”

“You don’t look chubby to me.”

She flexed her arm. “Feel that,” she said. I did. “Hard as a rock, huh? Tell me the truth. Do you think I’m too chubby?”

“You are definitely not chubby.”

She cocked her head at me and nodded solemnly. “Do I embarrass you?”

“Yes,” I said.

She struck a body-builder’s pose for me. “My body is a temple,” she said.

I tapped a Winston ostentatiously from my pack and lit it. “
My
body,” I said, “is a hazardous waste dump.”

“I
do
embarrass you.” She grinned. “Listen. I need a drink. And you undoubtedly would like something toxic.”

“Something that will erode my stomach, yes.”

“Bourbon? Scotch? Let me guess.” She squinted at me. “You’re a Scotch man,” she said. “All Republicans drink Scotch.”

“Wrong on both counts. I’m a Jeffersonian Democrat, and I drink bourbon. Plenty of ice. No water.”

“A Democrat?”

“Well, I hardly ever vote for Democrats in Massachusetts, but that’s an altogether different story. Bourbon I drink everywhere.”

“I hear you,” she grinned.

She disappeared around the corner toward what I assumed was the kitchen. I went to the stereo and studied it for a while before I identified the knob that controlled the volume. I turned it down some more. Then I went back and sat on the sofa by the fire.

She returned in a minute. She had pulled on a big baggy gray sweatshirt with a maroon seal on it that said “Veritas.” Truth. Harvard, naturally. I assumed the sweatshirt had belonged to Stu. She handed me a square glass half-filled with bourbon. She had a glass of pale amber liquid, which she placed on the coffee table.

“Apple juice,” she said. “Gotta wait at least thirty minutes after my workout before I get my beer.”

She retrieved the big shopping bag I had brought that contained Stu’s notebooks, flopped down on the sofa beside me, took a long swig of apple juice, and pulled a notebook from the bag. “I can’t wait to read these,” she said. “I’m really excited about this project.”

“I assume you’re aware that there might be a problem if you choose to publish something with Stu’s name on it.”

She arched her eyebrows at me. “Oh, yes. I mustn’t forget. You are the family attorney as well as Stu’s agent.”