The Arraignment (23 page)

“If it’s bad news,” she says, “just tell me.” But she doesn’t wait for an answer. “I get it. They don’t want to pay.” She looks away, having made up her mind that this is it. The sparkle in her eyes is replaced by a look of determination. “I knew it,” she says. “I told you, didn’t I?” This is directed at Fittipaldi.

She is up out of her chair now. He stays seated, looking
at me with a painful expression, like “How did I get in the middle of this?”

“Didn’t I tell you, Nathan?” Before he can answer, she turns back to me. “I told him yesterday the insurance company would screw me over. I knew it when I first saw that man. That . . . that Luther guy. What’s his name?”

“Conover?” I say, “Yes. Conover,” she says. “I knew when he looked at me that he didn’t like me.” The bubbly little pixie is gone. To Dana it is now personal. She starts pacing the office just behind the two chairs.

“The way he kept looking at me. Eyeing me up and down,” she says. “I knew what he was thinking.”

“And what was that?” I ask.

She looks at me. “You know as well as I do.”

When I give her an expression like I don’t, she says: “He was . . .” Now she has trouble saying it. “He was wondering why someone like me would be married to someone like Nick.”

I give her another dense look, a little shake of the head, like I don’t get it. I’m curious. I want to hear what comes out of her mouth.

“I think what Dana means is that the insurance company was critical because of their age difference.” Nathan saves her.

“That’s it,” she says. “I know that’s what he was thinking. That I was some tawdry gold digger,” she says.

I’m thinking to myself that I would never use the word “tawdry” to describe Dana.

“Can you imagine how hurtful that is?” she says. I expect her at any moment to be reaching for the Kleenex.

Instead she says: “Fine, if they want to play hardball, we’ll accommodate them. Those damages you told them about. The punitive ones. How much do you think we could get?”

Dana may know nothing about sports cars, but instincts of reprisal and vendetta seem to come naturally. “We can take them to the cleaners,” she tells me. “We’ll sue the hell
out of them. Think they can screw with me.” She’s talking to herself now, pacing again—her right forefinger to her bottom lip, the long nail touching a lower front tooth and smearing the red lip gloss a little—contemplating just how far she should have me turn the wheel on the rack once I get the insurance company stretched out.

Then she stops. She turns this way.

Sensing that something more serious is coming, Fittipaldi turns in the chair so that he can see her, so that his back is to me now.

I can tell from Dana’s darting blue eyes that some dark thought has suddenly stimulated them from behind.

“Are they going to pay her?” she says. The
her
she is talking about is Margaret.

“Dana. We need to discuss this in private.”

“They are, aren’t they? That’s it, isn’t it? Damn it. I knew it. They’ve decided to pay that bitch instead of me.” She looks at Nathan. “Over my dead body,” she says. “I was the one who was married to Nick when he got shot. I was the one putting up with him, putting up with his crap, not her. You are gonna sue them?” She looks at me like suddenly I’m the enemy. “Or did they buy you off too?” she says.

“Dana!” Fittipaldi, his voice now assuming a tone of command, gets her attention.

He shakes his head slowly, a signal that maybe she has said too much, gone too far, that she should calm down, watch what she’s saying.

From the smooth pelt of jaguar to cold steel in less than a minute.

I say nothing, waiting to see if she’s going to fire up again. But she doesn’t. Instead she stands there looking down at the carpet, back to Nathan and then to me, trying, I suspect, to remember all the little poisonous items that spilled over the glossy bottom lip when the devil took hold. When it’s obvious she’s stopped, I finally step in.

“Nathan is right,” I tell her. “You need to sit down. Calm down.” She looks at the chair, but she doesn’t move toward it.

“The carrier has made an offer,” I tell her.

It’s as if a pale light flickers on behind her eyes. The steel lips begin to bend toward a smile.

“But the reason I called you here today, what I have to talk to you about, has nothing to do with the insurance. At least not directly. It’s . . . well . . . it’s much more serious than that.”

What can be more serious than two million dollars in cash? This seems to freeze her brain cells. The light of hope in her eyes suddenly vanishes. They glass over, so within a couple of seconds after the words leave my lips, Dana’s eyes are two watery blue marbles. She stands there wavering back and forth on limp legs.

When she finally focuses, she is looking not at me, but at Fittipaldi, who is still turned toward her in his chair. It is fleeting. It lasts only an instant, the expression of dark apprehension that passes over her face like the shadow of a black cloud.

I can’t see Nathan’s face.

For a second it looks as if her legs might actually buckle, but Fittipaldi is out of the chair, grabbing her before she does. She stumbles through one step then catches herself, as he settles her again into the other client chair.

He huddles over her. “She’s not herself,” he says. “She’s been under a tremendous strain.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have anything? A drink? Maybe some brandy?”

“No brandy,” I tell him. “Soft drinks and some wine in the refrigerator in the other room.”

“Just some water,” she says. “I’ll be all right.” She’s running the back of one hand across her forehead, her eyes still a little glassy. Unless she is awfully good, this is no act. Dana is white as a sheet.

“If you could get it?” he says.

I leave to get a glass of water. It takes me a minute or so to find a clean glass in the cupboard of the lunch room, knock some ice from one of the trays up in the freezer area, and fill the glass with water.

I’m almost back to my office door when I hear Fittipaldi’s voice in hushed, low tones. “Don’t say anything. We’re almost through this. Just stay cool.”

As he looks up, I’m standing in the doorway with the glass in my hand, smiling like the butler who’s listened at the keyhole.

“Don’t say anything about what?” I ask.

“Oh, we were just talking.” He has one knee on the floor, next to her chair, holding her hand, looking at me, wondering how much I might have heard outside the door.

Dana pulls herself together, sits upright in the chair. She takes a deep breath, now the full-bodied flesh of her former shadow. Color back in her face. I hand her the glass and she sips a little water. She gathers a little condensation with two fingers from around the outside of the glass and wipes it gently across her forehead. Takes some more and hits her neck and chest just above the bodice of her blouse.

Whatever it was that sent her spinning, Nathan has pulled her out of it.

“I don’t know what it was,” she says. “I just felt a little faint.” She sips from the glass again.

“What is it you needed to talk to her about?” Nathan suddenly seems to be in charge. “Is it something that can wait until tomorrow?” he asks. “I think maybe I should get her home.”

“It’s a serious matter,” I tell him. “But if it has to wait one day, I suppose it can.”

“Good,” he says.

“I’ll just have to call and tell them.”

Nathan leans toward me, almost saying it but he doesn’t: “Tell who?”

Dana’s eyes glance up at me, as I pass her and walk to the side of my desk, where I stop and face her. Even in her withered state, she is a bubble of anxiety, filled with questions she doesn’t really want to ask but is unable to resist.

“No.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m feeling better,” she says. “I’d like to know what it is.” She’s holding the icy glass of water to her forehead now.

“It has to do with the law firm,” I tell her. “Rocker, Dusha.”

She looks at me for a full second, then her eyes close and she expels a breath. When she opens her eyes to look at me again, I suspect she knows what I’m talking about. But the sideways glance she shoots toward Nathan causes me to wonder if he does.

To resolve any doubt, I tell her: “They have a few questions regarding some of the accounts that Nick managed before his death.”

“Oh.” Her parched lips open a little, head nodding slowly. “I see. I’m feeling better,” she says. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should discuss this in private. After all, it is business relating to Nick’s firm.” She leans toward Nathan who still has one knee on the floor beside her. “Would you mind?” she says.

Suddenly Fittipaldi is the man standing out in the cold. “Sure.” What else can he say?

“You’re a dear,” she says.

“If you need me, I’ll just be outside the door.”

Probably on his knees with his ear to the wood.

She lets his hand slip slowly out of hers, and he leaves the office, closing the door behind him.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask.

“I’m much better,” she says.

Instead of sitting in the chair behind my desk I move around front and settle one cheek onto the edge of the desk, looking down at her in the chair.

“What was it you thought I was going to tell you?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” I smile. “When you went all light-headed on us and almost flattened my ficus bush behind the chair there.”

She smiles at the little joke I’ve made. “I don’t know. I just suddenly felt faint.”

“You seemed to be feeling just fine a few minutes ago, ready to do battle with the insurance company. Until I told
you that wasn’t why I called you in here. That it was something else, something more serious. What did you think it was?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She looks at the wall in one direction, then the other. Her eyes everywhere but on me.

“But you know why I called you here now, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure.” She offers up a mystified expression, but she’s sweating, the first time I have ever seen Dana perspire. She has the glass to her forehead again, hoping to cover it with condensation, while she licks the gloss off her lips.

“Think about it,” I tell her. “Or maybe we should call Nathan back in?”

“No,” she says.

“I thought so. He doesn’t know about the trust account checks, does he?”

She brings the glass from her forehead to her lap, so that she has something to focus on down low, away from my searching stare. She shakes her head quickly as if this might make the admission less painful.

“Tell me, did you do the checks before or after you started holding hands with Nathan?”

She shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. She doesn’t want to say.

“You thought I was going to tell you that the police wanted to talk to you about Nick’s death, wasn’t that it? I suppose that would tend to move all the blood into someone’s feet. I mean if the news seemed to be coming at you all of a sudden like that, and if you’d been thinking about the possibility for a while.”

She looks up. “Why would they want to talk to me? They already talked to me, right after it happened. I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do. You thought they might be looking at you. Thinking about the youthful widow, married to a man who was married to his job, a lawyer who, according to you, even with the work ethic of a Puritan, wasn’t doing all that well financially. You could see how the cops might be thinking
about all that insurance money and how two million dollars might go a long way to soothe the loss of a loved one.

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” I tell her. “The police and their narrow little minds, always filled with distrust. But I’m afraid that’s a genetic deficiency we will both have to deal with. It’s one of the conditions of employment in the police force. And a real pain in the ass if you’re in my line of work.”

She looks up at me and smiles, the first note that I might be on her side after all.

“Still, anybody with a reasonable mind might wonder about all the ways a young woman such as yourself might find to spend that kind of money. That was it, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure,” she says. “But you’re right about the police. They’re very suspicious about everything. Who knows what goes on in their heads?”

“But, why would they be thinking all those thoughts?”

“I don’t know that they are,” she says. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

“Guess I did, didn’t I? Fine. Let’s talk about something else.”

A look of relief in her eyes, a different direction.

“Let’s talk about what Nathan didn’t want you to tell me.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was standing outside the door with the glass of water?”

This is not the direction she hoped for. “Paul, listen.” Her soothing tone turns to honey, sweet and running fast, like something off a hot stove. “I’m really not up to this right now. I’m not exactly feeling well.”

“Feeling faint again, are we?”

“Well. Just a little,” she says.

“Want to try another subject?” I ask.

She nods.

“Let’s talk about the law firm, Rocker, Dusha. They have a difficult decision to make now. What to do with all those client trust account checks that somebody else wrote,
drawing down Nick’s fees? Unearned fees,” I tell her. “I mean, they may have to service some clients and not get paid, since somebody else already took the money.”

“What else can they do?” she says.

“Well, let’s see.” I rub my chin as if this takes some thinking, which it doesn’t. “I suppose they’d have a handwriting expert examine the signatures on those checks. From what I’m told, it looks like the same signature on all of them. So that won’t be hard. Then they’d go hunting for suspects, get exemplars, signatures from those suspects. Well, you can see where this leads?”

“How would they find suspects?” she says.

“Well, they have the accounts where the checks were deposited. The bank tellers are likely to remember a face, even if somebody else’s social security number was used.”

She just swallows this, making me suspect that perhaps she used disguises.

“But, I don’t think finding the person who did it would be a problem for them. In fact, I think they already know who it is.”