Unfit to Practice (38 page)

28

S
TANDING IN THE HALLWAY
outside the courtroom area and past the elevator banks, Nina decided they had a few minutes before they had to leave, and Paul had disappeared into the rest room. She called Sandy to check in. To her surprise, Wish answered the phone. “Where's Sandy?”

“Oh, uh—” He sounded distracted. “Sorry, there are two people who've been waiting in here for half an hour. What should I do with them?”

“Who are they?”

“I think they need legal representation.” His hand went down over the phone and she heard some muffled conversation. “Yep, that's what it is.”

“Take their names and numbers. Tell them we'll call them to arrange an appointment later on today or tomorrow morning. Then send them home.”

“Okay.”

She waited while he achieved this feat.

Sounding relieved, he came back on the phone. “They were waiting at the door when I got here. Mom left in such a rush she didn't tell me what to do about them.”

“Where is she?”

“Remember that thing where the president came to Tahoe a few years ago and put some money into Indian projects and returned some land?”

“Yes,” Nina said.

“She headed a committee about that. She has also been on the Washoe Tribal Council and is real active in pressuring the government to return tribal homelands in the Tahoe Basin to the Washoe. Plus she and Dad have been doing a lot of work organizing the tribe, helping with zoning problems, helping people to figure out what to do with tribal lands, that type of thing. And of course, you knew she was a member of the Leviathan Land Council when they were persuading the feds to designate an abandoned sulfur mine a Superfund site?”

“Uh. I guess I heard something about that.” But not from Sandy. Anything she had heard, she had read in the papers.

“So she got a call yesterday. Some big shot is in town and wanted to talk to her.”

“What about?”

“A job. They've been after her for a while about it.”

“What? She never said a word to me.”

“They want her to work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs this summer on some huge report the government is doing about, uh, Indian affairs, I guess. Supposed to take months, but you know how those things go on for years.”

Holy—Sandy could leave her? Before she had time to absorb the blow, Wish spoke again.

“Don't worry, Nina. Don't get the wrong idea. She would never leave you high and dry. She just went to tell them no. Oh, and she left a note—something she wanted me to tell you.” He shuffled papers. “Here it is. ‘I talked to that graphologist lady after court when I was up there.' ”

“That's all it says?”

“Uh oh. There seems to be a second part missing. I tossed a bunch of these tiny sticky yellow slips a few minutes ago. Hang on and I'll look.”

“Wish, I'm sorry. I don't have time to wait right now. Tell you what. You call me if you find it, okay?”

“Mom won't like this. She said it was real important.” He shuffled a few more papers. “But I guess it'll have to wait. Nina?”

“Yes?”

“Is Brandy around?”

“Not today, Wish.”

The phone on the other side went down with a clunk. When Wish picked it up, he sounded congested. “I've got a major problem.”

“Brandy?”

“I can't stop thinking about her. There's no future for us because she loves that guy. Maybe someone else will come along like her, someone that—”

“Wish, she's going to marry Bruce—”

“I've been thinking about generosity. Courage. All that stuff. How good people do the right thing even if it costs them. And don't complain or even blow their own horns about it after, you know, except maybe Peter Pan. He was an awful braggart.”

“Is there something I can help you with, Wish?” She didn't have time, but he sounded so woeful.

“Let me talk to Paul, okay? I'll call back when I find that paper Mom wrote.”

Paul had reappeared at her side. She handed the phone to him and went to get her things from the witness waiting room.

“I took your advice,” Wish told Paul. “I told Bruce Ford to get circumcised.”

“You—what?”

“Just think, a girl caring so much that her fiancé wasn't circumcised that she couldn't marry him, but was still too chicken to tell him how he could fix things. She'd leave him first!”

Paul put a hand to his mouth to keep it shut.

“What's funny is, once she broke down and told her sister, she told everybody who would listen. So why not tell him, is what I asked her. But she just couldn't do it. So I did. I gotta tell you, Bruce Ford's her kind of man, completely. He'd do anything to please her, turns out. They definitely belong together. No way would I go through that, not even for someone as foxy as Brandy.”

“It was the right thing to do.”

Wish made an inarticulate sound.

“Wish, I'm sorry. I have to go.” Nina was standing over in front of the metal detector, pointing to her watch. “Nina says thanks for taking care of the office.”

On the way out, they almost collided with Kevin, who was coming out of the state bar's witness waiting room and into the hallway, hustling like a man with a plan.

Nina grabbed Paul's arm, waved good-bye to a surprised Jack, and led him to the stairs. “Let's go. Kevin already caught an elevator.”

They made their way down to the first floor and into the narrow, T-shaped plaza beside the building in record time and scanned for a place to hide. Paul led Nina to a spot behind the fountain, where they had a clear view all the way to a burnished steel sculpture by entry gates that opened onto Spear Street.

“Are you sure it's a good idea to stay so close? What if they see us?” Nina fretted.

“We need to be close in case they leave, Nina. We need to watch them.” Paul adjusted a small earpiece that led to a wire directly into his shirt pocket.

“I never saw a white man's face so red. I'm thinking, I'm hoping he's mad enough that he gives someone a piece of his mind and we hear every word. But even if we do, Paul, it's illegal, listening in like this. We can't use anything we hear in court.”

“We want to know what's going on,” Paul said. “The rest will follow.”

“Oh, no,” she worried as lunchtime pedestrians whizzed past. “I hope he's not too mad.”

“All we said was that there's a change of plans, meet me, essentially.” Paul peered around the fountain. “Kevin's there sitting on one of those concrete benches, puffing on a cigarette,” he said, holding his finger to his ear. “And it's quiet. Reception's good.” Invisible construction efforts involving orange cones had most of the traffic on Spear Street at a dead halt. “I can hear him thinking.”

“If it's Riesner, he's thinking Riesner's going to screw him. If it's Scholl, she's going to turn him in. Did you get your gun back from security when we left court?”

“I did.”

“Because I don't want you to use it.”

“Of course you don't.”

Litter flew in the wind in misty whirlpools. Nina pulled her jacket tighter. “Too much fog. I can hardly see the spot.”

“It could be worse,” Paul said. “It could be raining.”

“No sign of anyone,” Nina said. “Oh, God, Paul. What if nobody comes?”

Paul stood beside her, eyes narrowed, head turning from side to side. “Don't these thousands of people have anything better to do on a March afternoon than wander the town? We should have chosen a spot with fewer than seven thousand people at a time.”

“They would want to meet in a public place. Somewhere close to the court.” The letters had been short and to the point. To recipients Scholl and Riesner, Mrs. Gleb had happily, chuckling and drinking tea all the while, forged two separate notes that said, “I changed my mind. I won't testify. I'll meet you down in the plaza right outside the state bar building at the Spear Street entrance at twelve-fifteen today if you want to know why.” The signature at the bottom, KC, had all the small crabbed character of Kevin's real signature, which Nina had brought her.

To Kevin, she had sent another note: “You won't be testifying. Meet me at twelve-fifteen where the plaza outside the state bar building opens onto Spear Street.” She hadn't signed it.

If there was no conspiracy, there was no reason for anyone to show up, including Kevin. They would all be mystified, and would continue with the process of bringing Nina to her knees.

“Nina, look.” Paul thrashed back and ducked down, pushing her down beside him.

“Ow. I don't see anyone.” She poked her head around the fountain. Leading with his finger, he pointed the way.

“What?”

“Can't you see? It's Jean Scholl, right by that wall, keeping out of sight.”

So it
was
Scholl. She had responded to their forged note. Scholl was behind the whole thing. Nina's thoughts made her shiver. All this because she had crossed the wrong cop in the ordinary course of her business. It seemed incredible, impossible, but here was the living proof.

Simply doing her job was dangerous. Her brother, Matt, had said that more than once.

“See her now?”

“No.”

“Her back is to us, but I'd recognize that rear end anywhere.”

“But, Paul, why is she hiding? Isn't she supposed to be meeting Kevin?”

“Don't know,” he said shortly. She noticed his hand.

“There'll be no shooting here!” she said. “There are too many people! Someone could get hurt!”

“Nina. Nobody gets hurt if they behave. That goes double for you. Now what have we here?”

Kevin Cruz came walking up and looked around. He put his hands in his pockets.

“What's Scholl doing?” Nina asked, rubbing her ankle with her hand.

“Watching. Waiting.”

Kevin checked his watch.

“He came, Paul. That means he expects to meet her. So why is she hanging back?”

Paul started to laugh. He laughed so hard for so long, Nina got worried. “What's the matter with you?” she said.

“It's Scholl,” he finally gasped out. “She's—she's—”

“She's what?”

Suddenly, Kevin shifted his body so that he was facing toward the street, away from them. He tensed with anticipation.

“Someone else is coming,” Nina said.

Jeffrey Riesner strolled into view. Kevin stood up to meet him.

“I don't understand,” Nina said, pulling back. “I thought we were going to pin down who's who in this. They all came. Are they in this together? I'm confused. What do we do now?”

“Nina, take a good long look at Scholl. Look at how she's hiding. Check out the piece she's holding.”

“It's weird all right. She's watching.”

“Nina, she's investigating! She's being a cop!”

“What?”

“She got a suspicious message and decided to check it out. Thatta girl.”

Nina's attention dodged toward the two men, who were engaged in heated debate. She scooched in close to Paul. He took the tiny receiver out of his ear, and they both listened.

“You told me you had that judge in the bag!” they heard Kevin say, his voice rising clearly above the dull background roar of the city. “You said you could get me the kids!”

Riesner's voice was lower, but in intermittent pieces they caught the gist. He wanted to know what the hell Kevin thought he was pulling, switching allegiance at the last minute. “I promise you won't see your kids again until you're drooling and senile, asshole.”

So Riesner was behind it all after all, Nina thought. He was the poison, the thin red snake slithering behind all of them, but the realization gave her no relief, no pleasure.

Apparently, Scholl had heard enough. Stepping out from behind the doorway on Spear Street where she had been hiding, she tucked her gun into a pocket and, holding it out of sight, faced the two men.

“She'll arrest them,” Nina said. “My God, Paul. It's finally over.”

“Maybe.”

“Hello, boys,” Officer Scholl said to Riesner and Cruz. She stood directly in front of them, looking at ease in the middle of a seething crowd of city folk.

“You?” Jeffrey Riesner said. “What brings you here?”

“Curiosity,” she said. “Then I couldn't help overhearing,” Scholl said. “Excuse me for crashing your party, but you two have sure been cooking, and whew, does it smell.”

A hole opened around the three where they stood next to the sculpture. They looked like everyone else, but they were not. They were connected, a unit, and the air around them seemed particularly charged. Those passing drifted uneasily around their fringes.

“I've worked out this much.” Holding her hand very near her body she exposed her gun to Riesner, who reacted with a jump back. “You,” she said to him, “got him”—she pointed at Cruz—“to lie, with the ultimate goal of pulverizing our favorite lady lawyer in return for the custody of his kids. I also have a gnawing suspicion that you stole yourself a key one fine day in court and made immediate use of it. And—” She thought, then put a finger to her chin. “The forgery. Your case last fall—the counterfeiter you defended. I'll bet he could tell me a few things about how he paid a hotshot like you. Tinkering with Reilly's paperwork? Or did he just show you a few tricks of the trade?”

Kevin Cruz stared at Riesner. “You did all that?”

Riesner said, “Why don't you run on back home to Tahoe and write a few tickets, investigate a couple of nasty fender benders. Try to salvage something before you make a complete fool of yourself, Scholl. You have nothing on me. I've got a position in that town and powerful friends. Don't do anything you'll regret later.”

“And you, Kevin,” Scholl said, ignoring him. “What a shame. I'm deeply disappointed in you. He has an excuse. He's a lawyer. It's his business to lie and cheat to get what he wants. But you're an officer of the law. Didn't you tell me after that last time you'd walk a straight line? Didn't you promise me that?”

“Welcome to real life, Jeanie,” Kevin Cruz said.

“What did he tell you? That Judge Milne was an old golf buddy who just needed a little whisper from his pal to give you what you want? Because that's a laugh, let me tell you. Milne's straight.”

“Why did you come here? What is this?” Riesner asked. “Some kind of lame shakedown?”

“Not exactly,” Scholl said.

“What do you want?”