Stay (Dunham series #2) (8 page)

They all bounced up and down and squealed yet again.
He supposed that in the world of ten-year-old girls, that was as
good as a yes. Which, in this case, it was, and they knew that as
well as he did. The six of them damn near knocked him on his ass
with their enthusiastic hugs, then they bolted off to tell their
parents that Sensei Eric would grace the hallowed halls of Chouteau
Elementary with his presence come Saturday.

“Dude, you can’t keep this up,” said his partner as
he brushed past Eric with gloves, foot pads, and other assorted
equipment on his way to the back room.

Eric said nothing. His business was going to go down
the tubes if he didn’t change something and fast. “Hey,” he called
finally as he followed Dirk into the back. “What if we changed up
our hours?”

“To what? Sunday between one and one-thirty in the
morning? Because that’s about how much time you seem to have.”

Dirk tossed foot pads in their bin. Once that was
done, they began working together to put the rest of the equipment
away.

“I’ve only been in that office for three months.
Four if you count the interim. It’ll shake out.”

“That’s all it takes for some of these kids’ parents
to get nasty. Too bad you can’t quit your job.”

Eric grunted.

“How did Knox do it?”

“Knox had a bad case of insomnia, that’s how he did
it. Well. Until he started sleeping with Justice, that is; after
that, things started slipping. And
I
don’t have a
photographic memory.”

“How did you do it when Knox was in the
hospital?”

“Dirk, think about that a minute. It was December.
How much does
your
office have to do between Thanksgiving
and New Year’s, especially considering county government pretty
much shut down waiting for news on Knox?”

Dirk stopped what he was doing and looked at Eric as
he wiped the sweat from his dark brown brow. “Point taken. But now
it’s April and you’re drowning and it’s time to figure something
out. It might not matter so much if the economy weren’t kicking our
butts, but it is and these people pay for
you
.”

Eric’s lips pressed together. “You know, maybe
they’re going to have to deal with it. Twelve classes, six classes
each kids and adults—and every one of those people knows where I
work. Why should any reasonable person expect me to teach every
single one of them
and
do my job?”

“Yeah, but we both have staff—and they know that,
too. They expect the bosses to be able to cut and run when they
need to.”

“You’re fully staffed. I have exactly six
attorneys—one of whom is a new grad and another who is moving to
Provo in a month. I should have ten attorneys and I
still
don’t have any secretaries. I just don’t have time, Dirk. I’m too
busy hauling water to dig a well.” He paused, then grumbled, “I
barely have time to kiss Annie goodnight.”

Dirk very pointedly said nothing, which said
everything. Eric sighed. “Well. I
do
have one trick up my
sleeve. If she’ll agree to it.”

“Who?”

“Giselle Kenard. She’s a black belt and she trained
with Mill, same as us.”

Dirk grunted and walked back out to the dojo floor.
“Won’t make a bit of difference, though, if you’re not here—and
that’s the bottom line.”

Eric said nothing. Dirk directed his two oldest
children to start on their dojo chores, then Eric and Dirk went to
take their places in front of the class of adults who were just
finishing up. Their highest-ranking student had taught the entire
class (no one seemed to mind who taught as long as Eric was
actually
in
the building during class), but stepped aside to
allow the owners to close the session. Eric and Dirk dropped into
meditation stance, at which point, so did everyone else. Finally,
they straightened, stood at attention and Eric bellowed, “What
style are we?!”

“Kenpo!” The roar of twenty adults reverberated
through the studio. Eric and Dirk bowed.

Class dismissed. Eric had to get back to work—and he
had a lot of it to get done.

“Oh, hey,” Dirk said once he’d corralled his kids
and locked up, heading out into the chill of an early spring night.
“You going to Simone Whittaker’s funeral?”

“What the hell do you think?”

“You might want to go just to make sure she’s really
dead.”

He’d seriously considered that. “Trust Simone to get
herself killed in a bar brawl in Raytown. Are you going?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” Dirk said. “I might go just
to make LaVon mad, because you know, a black man crashing
that
redneck party . . . ”

“A
Mormon
one. Take your wife with you.
That’d be hilarious.”

“Funny thing is, I’ve defended half those
blockheads.”

“And the other half knows you’ll end up defending
them eventually, too.”

Dirk burst out laughing.

“Speaking of that,” Eric said. “If you do decide to
go, be sure to ask Wilson for a recess on the Blakely case.”

“Yeah, I’m winning and you know it. You’d love that
extra day.”

That was the truth.

“Well,” Dirk said when Eric didn’t answer. His
voice, laced with humor, floated back from the dark as he walked
off to his car, one tired child in his arms and the other dragging
against him. “Tempted as I am, I guess that’s one funeral I’m
not
going to—just so you can’t have your extra day.”

It was, at times, inconvenient to be business
partners with a public defender.

Eric jogged across the street and into the
courthouse, up the stairs, and into the office he’d practically
lived in for the last three months. He dropped in his chair and dug
out a pile of résumés.

He was not having a good time.

Eric had assumed that with no façade to keep up, no
elaborate schemes going on, no FBI making extra work for him, and
no extra legal work to do for Knox, he would have a lighter
schedule than he’d had as executive. Considering his managerial
style and the fact that he’d been managing the prosecutor’s office
since he’d graduated from law school, it should have been a piece
of cake.

Oh, it was a piece of something, all right.

Knox had never had any patience with bureaucratic
paperwork and no compunction about tossing everything in the shred
bin; he’d figured if it was that important, someone would come bug
him until it got done. He could afford to do that: Nobody was going
to walk into Knox Hilliard’s office to tell him to sign this or
that or some other thing—except Eric, which was why Knox had hired
him, only . . . after about a year of trying to manage Knox with
one hand tied behind his back, Eric had finally decided he’d had
enough of Knox’s pigheaded bullshit and had started signing Knox’s
name to everything himself, daring Knox to say a word about it.

Knox had smirked and Eric went about doing his
boss’s job—except for the massive amounts of paperwork Knox hadn’t
bothered to pass along to him at all, thus fell on top of Eric the
minute Knox wasn’t around to field it.

Eric couldn’t count how many times a day in the last
three months someone had come to him for help or a signature, but
ended the conversation with, “Well, that’s not how Knox did
it.”

Of course it wasn’t. Knox hadn’t done it at all.

Eric’s resolve not to allow the office to maintain
its reputation as a trainer of baby litigators proved difficult,
since the law school advisors had disregarded his memo and metro
area attorneys either didn’t believe he wanted to hire experienced
personnel or didn’t believe Knox had not, in fact, been on the
take. More than once he’d heard, “Are you sure there was never
anything crooked going on up there?”

“Not since Knox ousted Nocek, no. Don’t you pay
attention to the news?”

As far as Eric could see, the taint of corruption in
Chouteau County might never go away, no matter what he did.

The Justice McKinley Hilliard test hadn’t worked
completely on the sole attorney he’d managed to hire—a new grad—who
had correctly answered all of Eric’s pointed questions designed to
determine if she could do everything she was given the first day
without help.

Either Eric’s test was flawed or the woman
misunderstood how much work he expected her to get through the
first day; she hadn’t done badly, really, but she hadn’t performed
the way Justice had. As one of her last duties before she left for
good, Justice made sure Eric knew she found his expectations
unreasonable.

“You did not assign me that much work my first
day.”

“I did, too. You have selective amnesia.”

“If
you
had lived through my first eight
weeks in this office, wouldn’t you develop amnesia, too?”

Eric had to concede that point and took a third of
the new attorney’s assigned work off the top. He could breathe a
lot easier when she plowed through it with quality work.

Which also meant Lesley got to pass the “Whittaker
Problem” off on the new person, too—

—until Simone had died Sunday, whose funeral Eric
was only too happy to pay for over his mother’s objections.

“Mom, all the better to plant her as fast as
possible, in a casket she can’t get out of. If I have to hot rivet
that fucker closed myself, I’ll do that, too.”

Eric suspected it was a revenge killing for one of
the men she’d named in her diary, but he didn’t give a fat rat’s
ass if she’d been stabbed on accident, on purpose, or by whom. It
was the Jackson County prosecutor’s problem and Eric was just glad
she was permanently out of his life.

He briefly wondered if Simone’s sister would be at
the wake tonight or the funeral tomorrow, but then dismissed that.
If she hadn’t come back before now, she probably never would, which
was fine with him. He didn’t want to look at her or talk to her,
especially through the filter of his guilt, embarrassment,
regret—whatever it was.

“Gah.”

His phone rang then and he looked at the ID. Annie.
“Hey, baby,” he said when he answered.

“Where are you?”

“Courthouse. Sifting through résumés. Where are
you?”

“In bed, reading. Got a ton of review copies today
and I have about four reviews to write and post. Plus, you have not
serviced me in days. One more day, and I turn from bitch to
überbitch.”

True enough, and Eric had an equally dire need for
some good sex. He looked at his desk and decided work could wait
another day. “Okay, let me—”

“
Mister
Cipriani!”

Eric groaned at the sound of
that
voice from
the doorway.

“Don’t tell me,” Annie said in his ear. “Glenn.”

“Glenn, I was about to go home and fuck my future
First Lady. Can it wait until tomorrow?”

“No. I have a paper to put to bed.”

“Shit, Eric, just talk to the little cocksucker. You
can service me later.”

Eric sighed. “All right. Night.”

“So,” Glenn whined smugly as he settled into the
chair across from Eric’s desk. “Tell me about Simone
Whittaker.”

“Are you going to the wake?”

“Of course. So?”

“And the funeral?”

“Eric!”

“What about her?”

“I want to know who ratted her out and got you off
the hook.”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“You said you were going to be transparent. Simone’s
dead. LaVon’s still not talking. It’s been fifteen years. What
could it hurt?”

Eric pursed his lips and stared at the little toad,
still unable, after all these years, to reconcile himself to
looking at a living, breathing stereotype of the Greasy
Newspaperman.

“You covered Knox for fifteen years,” Eric finally
said. “You were the one who outed him as the most likely suspect in
Parley’s murder. You were the one who broke the story that Knox
kicked Nocek’s ass out.” Glenn preened in his chair. “You were the
one who found all the ‘evidence’ that Knox was on the take, but you
could never prove it. Oh, look. You weren’t any smarter than
anybody else was, but you kept your paper alive off him. Bye bye
Pulitzer for not catching on to the scam.”

Glenn’s smugness turned into irritation. “The FBI
couldn’t do it and they had all the access in the world. Why would
you hold me to a higher standard?”

Eric grunted. “Well, okay. You got me there. But you
have the answer to this problem right under your nose, buried in
your own morgue. All you need is about a week, a shitload of
caffeine, and some better deductive reasoning skills. I’m sure as
hell not doing your job for you, especially on this. Your cash cow
went on his merry way smelling like a rose. You can’t dig any more
dirt up on me because it doesn’t exist. You’ve turned Annie’s life
inside and out and came up with bupkis besides her crazy-ass
mother. You better find something pretty sensational to wank over
or your little rag’s going to die like the rest of newsprint. I’d
politely request that you not reveal this person’s identity just
for his or her own safety, but I highly doubt you can figure it
out.”

The man stood with a huff and went to the door, then
stopped. “You don’t give me enough credit for what I know versus
what I don’t print. I’m a
responsible
journalist. I back up
my facts and then I print them.”

“With a little editorial spin on the side.”

“I know Knox murdered Parley, but I never printed
that because I couldn’t prove it. What I printed was that he was
caught on video at Texaco at 1:17 A.M. on June 9, 1994. I also
printed that the videotape mysteriously disappeared from the
property room, because it did. That’s a fact. I printed it. I can’t
help the conclusions people draw from the
facts
that I
print.”

Eric had to concede that point, too, but that still
didn’t make him any less of a tool.

“Get lost, Glenn.”

The outer office door slammed hard enough to rattle
the glass, but Eric only rolled his eyes and checked the clock:
9:45. It was still civilized to call people at 9:45 at night,
wasn’t it?