Maximum Security

An old friend. That’s what Harry called her when he broached the subject just moments ago. Would I agree to represent an old friend of his who’s in a bit of a jam?

“Of course I would,” I told him. “But why don’t you represent your old friend yourself?”

I knew his answer before I finished my question. Harry Madigan is uncommonly good at many things, but he’d die of starvation if he had to earn his living playing poker.

He leans forward in his chair by my desk and laughs, knowing I know. “All right,” he says, raising his hands in mock surrender. “She’s an old girlfriend. And I don’t think I should represent her. Not in this case.”

“You want me to represent your girlfriend?” I laugh too, fully expecting him to deliver a punch line.

He frowns. “As you happen to know,” he says, “she’s not my girlfriend. But she was twenty-five years ago. We were law school classmates.”

He must be joking. Just in case, though, I turn to the bookshelf behind my desk and tap a pen against the red spine of the
Massachusetts Lawyers Directory
. “What? Is there a sudden shortage of attorneys in the Commonwealth, Harry?”

“Come on, Marty, we’re not sixteen. We both have pasts. And we’ve both had other relationships.”

I take off my frameless glasses, drop them on top of a file on the cluttered desk, then rub my tired eyes and roll them at him.

Harry gets to his feet, feigns deep concentration, and starts pacing around my small office. He’s six feet tall and built like a linebacker; the room always seems crowded when he stands. His shoulders are broad, his arms muscular, and his hands enormous. His charcoal hair, thick, unruly, and always too long, has gone a paler gray at the temples. Harry can pace all night as far as I’m concerned; I’ll watch.

He stops abruptly, glances sideways at me, and taps an index finger against his forehead, as if coaxing a memory to the surface. “Speaking of relationships,” he says, “if I recall correctly, Attorney Nickerson, you even managed to squeeze in a husband.”

“True. And if Ralph ever needs a lawyer, I’ll be sure to send him straight to you.”

My ex-husband is Ralph Ellis, a nationally acclaimed forensic psychiatrist. He tends to show up in high-profile trials and Harry has seen him many times on TV. The two have never actually met, though. And it’s no secret between Harry and me that he’s not looking forward to the occasion.

He walks to the darkened window, leans against the sill and sighs. “Please,” he says. “She needs a good lawyer. She’s in trouble.”

“You’re serious.”

He bites his lower lip and nods. “I am.”

“What’s her name?”

“Louisa Rawlings.”

Of course it is. Harry’s old girlfriend wouldn’t be a Mary or a Peggy or a Sally. She’d be a Louisa. I’m sorry I asked.

“Rawlings is her married name,” he adds. “She was Coleman when I knew her.”

“How long were you and Louisa Coleman an item?”

“Through law school,” he says.

“All of it?”

“Yep.”

“What happened?”

Harry leaves the windowsill, drops back into the chair by my desk, and falls quiet, drumming his fingers on the armrests. It’s pretty clear that whatever happened wasn’t his idea. “The public defender thing,” he says at last. “It didn’t appeal to her.”

“She didn’t want you doing the dirty work of a public defender?”

He laughs. “It wasn’t the dirty work that bothered her. It was the puny paycheck.”

“But didn’t she know all along that you planned to become a public defender?” It’s always seemed obvious to me that Harry was born with that plan.

“She did,” he says. “But I think she assumed I’d change my mind—come to my senses—by the time we finished law school.” He shrugs. “I didn’t.”

“So she dumped you and married Mr. Rawlings?”

“Nope. She dumped me and married Mr. Powers. She dumped
him
and married Mr. Rawlings.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m the one who introduced her to Glen Powers.” Harry looks away from me and winces, the memory apparently still chafing. “He was a friend of mine; graduated a class ahead of Louisa and me.”

“But your friend had the good sense to pursue a more lucrative career?”

“Bingo,” Harry says. “Trusts and estates.”

“And Mr. Rawlings?”

“
Cha-ching.
Corporate mergers and acquisitions.”

I try to stifle my laughter, but I can’t. “All lawyers? All three of you?”

“What do you mean, all three of us? We weren’t a men’s club, for God’s sake. She married the two of them. She wouldn’t marry me.”

I’m silent for a few seconds, while the implication of his words sinks in. “You asked.”

Harry looks down at his hands and then back at me. “Yeah,” he says, “I did.”

I take the red directory from the bookcase and push it across the desk to him.

“Come on, Marty. That was another lifetime. And she needs help.”

“She’s a lawyer, Harry. Surely someone from her own firm can hook her up with whatever help she needs.”

“She’s never practiced.”

“Never practiced? The woman graduated from Yale Law School and she’s never practiced? What does she do?”

He looks up at the ceiling, as if searching for words. “She marries well,” he says.

Well, of course she does. Why didn’t I think of that?

“Harry, I’m sorry your old flame is in trouble. Really I am. But I’ve been in court all day. It’s late and I’m starving. Are we going to dinner?”

He jumps up from his chair, hustles to the back of mine, and makes a production of holding my suit coat for me.
“Mais oui, madame.”
His French accent is tortured, reminiscent of Pepé le Pew. “Name zee establishment of your choice.”

I look over my shoulder and roll my eyes at him again. We both know we’ll end up at Vinnie’s. The booths are private, the lights are dim, and the food’s the best Italian on Cape Cod. Most important, though, the portions are big enough to keep even Harry happy.

“I’ll tell you more about it while we eat,” he says, pausing to massage my neck and shoulders through my jacket. I close my eyes and lean backward into his big hands. I’d have fallen for Harry even if he weren’t a compulsive masseur. But I’ll never tell him that.

“Why is this your project, Harry? You just said she marries well. Let her husband find her a good lawyer.”

“He can’t.”

“Of course he can. If he’s with a firm large enough to do mergers and acquisitions, he’s well connected.”

Harry turns me around to face him, still holding on to my shoulders. “Herb Rawlings is dead, Marty. He’s somewhere on the ocean floor.”

“Oh.”

“And Louisa’s in a bit of a jam.”

“A jam? The woman’s husband sleeps with the fishes, his life insurance company smells a rat, the police think she’s involved somehow, and you tell me she’s in a bit of a
jam
?”

Harry leans back on his side of the booth, drains his glass of Chianti, and pours another. “Poor word choice?” he asks. “A pickle? Would that be better?”

“Harry, this is serious.”

He sets the glass down, leans across the table, and holds my eyes with his. “I know it is, Marty. If it weren’t, I wouldn’t ask you to get involved.”

“How did
you
get involved? Where did this thing come from?”

“Louisa called the office this morning,” he says. “The cops want her to come in for questioning. She told them she’ll cooperate, but not without a lawyer. They agreed to give her a few days to find one.”

“She’s not in custody?”

“Nope.” Harry’s been attacking his chicken Parmesan as if the restaurant manager allotted him only five minutes to finish. “Right now they’ve got nothing on her,” he says. “Just a mountain of suspicion.”

“And the goal is to keep it that way.”

He points his fork at me. “Bingo.”

One of the many things I love about eating at Vinnie’s with Harry is that I can order a whole cheese pizza—undercooked, the cheese barely melted, the way I like it—knowing not a morsel will go to waste. I slide a steaming slice onto my plate from the platter at the end of our table and wait until he looks up from his food. “Have you two been in touch all this time?”

Harry shakes his head. “I hear about Louisa every once in a while from mutual friends. But I haven’t spoken to her in twenty-five years. Until this morning.”

“How did she find you?”

He laughs and puts his fork down, and I brace myself. When Harry stops eating to tell me something, it’s almost always a bomb-shell. He plants an elbow on the table, chin on his hand. “You’re not going to believe this,” he says, “but she lives in Chatham.”

“Your ex-fiancée lives in Chatham?”

“She’s not my ex-fiancée.”

“No thanks to you.”

Harry sighs and closes his eyes. I know what he’s doing; he’s counting to ten. When he’s done, he retrieves his fork and digs in again. “She and her husband have only lived here about a month. They’ve been vacationing on the Cape each summer, though, since they got married twenty years ago.”

He pauses, his knife and fork still for a moment, a thought apparently dawning. “She didn’t keep Glen Powers around for long,” he says. “I remember talking with him in my office shortly after their divorce. He said Louisa had been up front with him about it. Herb Rawlings could offer her more, she’d told Glen. A bigger house, a more lavish lifestyle, and an even more secure future. Glen was appalled that Louisa would actually admit those were her reasons.”

Harry looks up from his empty fork and arches his bushy eyebrows at me. “He didn’t get a hell of a lot of sympathy from me.”

I return Harry’s stare and, I hope, his sentiment.

He laughs and goes back to his meal. “Herb Rawlings was older than Louisa, by fifteen years or so. When he retired from New York City practice, they sold their house in Greenwich and bought a place on Pleasant Bay. Louisa noticed our sign the day they moved in.”

“So she knew you were here a month ago, but you didn’t know she was in town until this morning?”

He shrugs and mops up his red sauce with the last of the garlic bread. “She changed her name,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“But Chatham isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis. You never ran into her around town?”

He shakes his head again. “I don’t think Louisa and I travel in the same circles.”

“Seems like that’s about to change.”

He takes a slice of pizza from the platter and drops it onto his otherwise clean plate, then leans back against the booth and sighs. “Marty, Louisa is someone I once cared about—a lot. She’s in trouble. And she’s scared; I heard it in her voice. When I told her I’d have to refer her case to another lawyer, she begged me to find the best one I could. That’s why I came to you.”

Time to roll my eyes again.

Harry reaches across the table with the wine bottle and tops off my glass. “Tell me the truth,” he says, his hazel eyes searching mine. “Does it really bother you that I loved someone twenty-five years ago?”

I lift my glass and shake my head. “Of course not. I’m glad you loved someone twenty-five years ago. Louisa Coleman in the past doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m just not sure how I feel about Louisa Rawlings in the present.”

Harry pushes the dishes aside, leans across the table, and takes my hands in his. “You’re my present,” he says, his eyes still locked on mine. “You’re my present and my future. If you have any doubt about that, tell me now, and we’ll drop this whole damned thing. I’ll never mention Louisa Coleman Powers Rawlings again.”

He laughs when he recites all the names, but we both know his question is serious. And he wants a real answer. Knowing I need to give him one, I lean back against the booth and sip my Chianti. He leans back with his glass too, swirls his wine around a few times, and waits.

Harry and I were cautious when we began spending time together. I bore the scars of a failed marriage and the hard-learned lessons of a few relationships that either went south or went nowhere at all. Harry’s heart, too, had been wounded more than once. And both of us knew from the start, I think, that what we had found together was worth protecting.

In the early days, unwilling to acknowledge our feelings too soon, we manufactured reasons to touch each other. When we walked on the beach, Harry always wrapped his sweatshirt around my shoulders and pulled me close, as if I might otherwise get swept away by the ocean wind. We slow-danced a lot, sometimes without music. And then we progressed. We kissed through our dances.

Last winter, the night after Christmas, my son, Luke, went to Boston to spend a few days with his father, and I went to Harry’s place for dinner. Harry and I were exhausted, having just finished a particularly difficult murder trial, and after we ate we curled up on the couch to watch
The Big Chill
on video. We argued, later, about who fell asleep first, but we agreed that neither one of us lasted long enough to see Glenn Close give her husband away.

When I awoke, the first hint of a gray dawn semilit the windows of Harry’s second-floor apartment and large snowflakes drifted down in slow motion outside. The TV screen was black and the logs in the fireplace had burned to embers. I was as warm as I’d ever been, though, tucked between Harry and the soft cushions of the couch, my head nestled in the crook of his shoulder. His arms enclosed me, one hand cradling my hip, the other resting on my waist.

Without thinking, I reached up and ran my fingertips along his jawline and down his neck. I leaned over him, spread the open collar of his flannel shirt, and undid a few more buttons so I could breathe in his scent and press my hand and face against the warmth of his broad chest. He tightened his grip on me then and when I looked up, his eyes were open.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Harry fished my hand out from under his shirt, brought it to his mouth, and kissed each finger before he looked at me. “Yes, you did,” he said.

His answer caught me off guard. I propped myself up on one elbow so I could see into his eyes. And in that moment I knew one thing for sure. He was right.

Harry introduced me to his brand of passion then, a passion so tender it melted my heart. I realized, that morning, what it takes to open up again after love gone wrong has done its damage and left its wreckage behind. It takes a tender passion. And a heart willing to break one more time.

Harry covers my hand with one of his when I set my wineglass down. He reaches across the table with the other, brushes the bangs from my eyes, and then cups the side of my face in his palm the way he always does now. “Well,” he says, half smiling in the candlelight, “any doubts about me?”

I shake my head against his warm hand. “None.”

“You’ll meet with Louisa?”

“Okay,” I tell him. “I will.”

“You know,” he says, his expression thoughtful, “you might find that you like her.”

I lean back against the booth again and retrieve my wineglass. “I’ll meet with her, Harry. But don’t push it.”