Unfit to Practice (6 page)

“That's a tough one. I keep it on a separate keyring and keep it handy because I use it all day long. I know I used it when I drove to the office yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday, during the day, when it was out in the parking lot, was the Bronco locked?”

“No. The CD player broke six months ago and we just took it out so I've been a little lax about locking up.”

“So. Could you have left your main car key in the Bronco yesterday?”

“It could have fallen just as I got out. You're saying anybody could have been nosing around out there and found the key. But why not steal the truck then and there? Why wait until I drove it home?”

“Okay, then maybe you lost the car key somewhere else while you were running around town. Where were you?”

“At the courthouse. In Paul's Mustang. Passaretti's at the Y. The office. That's it.”

“I'll call the court administrator and get hold of the janitors. I'll call Paul and have him search his car. And the owner of the restaurant. Have him search the place.”

“Yes. Thanks, Sandy.”

Sandy straightened up, turned, and put her hands on her hips. “Guess we'll have to get out the old eighteen-inch ruler another time.”

“Check the library for the files one more time before we give up, will you?” Nina searched her office again. She went down the hall to the bathroom and looked around, or maybe she just went in there to catch her breath, regroup, because it had acted as a haven from turmoil so many times in the past for her. She walked outside to the parking lot, analyzing every step even though by now she was positive the briefcase had gone home with her and the car key was in someone else's pocket.

The files were gone. Might as well quit wasting energy. She felt the cold edge of panic.

Nevertheless, a half hour later Nina was examining the closed files for the third time when Sandy touched her arm and said in a softer tone than usual, “They aren't here.”

Nina sat in one of the orange client chairs. “Well, I'll be doggoned. I will be doggoned. I have been robbed, Sandy.”

“Now what?”

“Soldier on. The Cruz hearing is in exactly”—she squinted at her watch—“one hour and fifteen minutes. Before you do anything else, Sandy, would you please call Kevin and ask him to bring his entire file? He's got copies of all the main stuff. Dog-eared, coffee-stained, scribbled-on, ask him to bring it. I'm going into my office to try to reconstruct my closing argument.”

“You can take my car when you go.”

Nina got up.

“It's an oldie but a goodie,” Sandy said. “Watch out for the transmission, though. It doesn't like shifting gears.”

When she arrived at the courthouse, Nina called Sandy on her mobile phone. “Did you call Kevin Cruz?”

“He'll meet you by the rocks.”

“Good.”

“His wife's lawyer faxed us a supplemental witness list three minutes ago. You know who.”

Sandy had worked for Jeff Riesner once and loathed him so much she refused to say his name. In agreement with Nina about the insidious poison of the man, she even kept some compromising material she had on him in a safe place for self-protection, like an antidote to snake venom.

Nina had been trying not to think about Lisa's attorney. Once again, his routine consisted of violating normal ethical standards, his version of a walk in the park. “He can't do that! The hearing's in an hour. Who's on this list?”

“Just one new witness. I never saw the name before. A woman. Name's Alexandra Peck. I just looked her up in the phone book and checked some Net directories. There are some Pecks in Tahoe, but her name is not listed.”

Nina said, “Oh, boy,” and rubbed her forehead. “This is not good. This is bad.”

“I figured it might be.”

“Does Riesner share even the barest bones of testimony he expects her to give?”

“What you'd expect. Matters relating to the ability of Respondent Kevin Cruz to care for the minor children.”

“I'll talk to Kevin about her before court. Riesner has such diabolical instincts, Sandy. He knows Kevin won't wait another day to get this settled and won't let me ask for a continuance.”

“Who is this witness?” Sandy asked.

“I'll deal with it.”

How could Riesner know about Ali Peck? Had he known for some time? Was he pulling a Riesner special, trying to kill her case with a last-minute, high-voltage shock? Or had he somehow learned about Ali within the past twelve hours, from her client-intake notes? Anything was possible. Riesner had means that put Nina's to shame, and ends that would shame a squid.

A fantasy bloomed in her mind—Riesner following her home in the storm in his sleek black Mercedes, creeping around the Bronco, his dapper Italian loafers squishing through the puddles, stealing her car like a street thug. Almost funny, if you left his face out of the picture.

Or what about Lisa Cruz? She had been very, very angry at Nina in the courtroom the day before. Did she pick up Nina's car keys?

Nina put aside her suspicions. She couldn't find her vehicle right this minute. She needed to move on to a more immediate problem, discussing the unfortunate reappearance of Ali Peck with an overwrought client who was heading into the courtroom to face one of life's decisive moments.

“That man better not be pulling something,” Sandy said, referring to Riesner.

“Our old buddy,” Nina said to Sandy. “Never far from our hearts.”

Sandy's wrathful snort carried over the miles.

4

B
ECAUSE SIXTY-FOOT-TALL FIR
and pine trees towered over the two-story structure, the familiar brown and rustic El Dorado County Courthouse building sat in what seemed like perpetual shade, the better to cast a muted mood over its denizens. In the same building were housed not only the courtrooms and clerks and judges' offices, but also the jail. Next door was the plate-glass window of the South Lake Tahoe Police Department. Across the courtyard another low building held various offices connected with county law enforcement, health, or the judicial system, including the Tahoe offices of the El Dorado County district attorney and the public defender's office.

Locking Sandy's car carefully, Nina tramped across wet grass to reach the mass of granite boulders erected to honor two Tahoe pioneers. Kevin Cruz sat in a tiny patch of sunshine on one of the large rocks smoking a cigarette.

“Hi, Kevin,” Nina said.

“Hi.”

They sat down on the bench and talked, Kevin firing up every two minutes, Nina wondering how to approach the bad news she carried and full of questions for him about Lisa.

Kevin had bulked up since his wife left him six months before. Like Officer Scholl, in perennial cop fashion, he wore impenetrable shades over his eyes. He didn't look good today. He must have been to the barber, because his hair was so aggressively trimmed Nina could see pink scalp under the fair hair. His court clothes, a sport coat and slacks, looked unfinished without his usual nightstick appended. One of those men who look hopelessly phony in a necktie, he had settled for an open shirt under the jacket.

“You were brilliant yesterday,” Kevin was saying again.

“Kevin, there's something you haven't told me. Lisa's got something personal against me.”

“Hey, you got what you needed to get out of her,” he said. “She got mad. She looked bad. She showed what a witch she can be.”

“Kevin. C'mon.”

“Okay, okay.” He stamped out one cigarette on the ground and rummaged for another. “I didn't see any point in telling you,” he started. “Ah, shit. Okay. She holds you responsible for her father's death.”

“What?”

“It's a long story, but I'll give you the short form. Her dad ran a small logging company that did a lot of cutting up near Wright's Lake. Sound familiar?”

“Maybe.”

“Remember Richard Gardener? Client of yours? Guy who lost his leg in a logging accident.”

She remembered.

“You helped his worker's-comp lawyer get him a big award, then you went after the company for shoddy safety practices and won a bunch more. Well, her old man ran the logging company, and that lawsuit wiped him out. He died shortly after it folded, heart attack. She blamed you.”

She remembered the bankruptcy, the notice she had received of the death.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Why did you hire me, Kevin?”

He flushed, embarrassed. “She was always on about how tricky you were in court, how smart-ass. I didn't know you, Nina, I just knew I wanted a damn good lawyer. You fit the bill. I never liked her dad. He was such a sleazeball, and to be honest, it always sounded to me like your guy deserved the money.”

Nina thought about that for a while. Realizing she was in the situation too deep to climb out, she decided to accept it. “It's a big day for your case,” she said finally. “We're winding things up. Are you ready?”

“I'm not ready for any of this. You know, I never hit Lisa, never scared the kids, always supported the family, always came home after my shift. But I know I made mistakes.”

“We have to talk about that,” Nina started, but Kevin rushed on.

“I think you were right yesterday, when you pointed out that her dad's death hit hard. He cherished her and spoiled her. She isn't as close to her mom.” He shrugged. “Who knows why? But she was never a happy person. Since her dad died she's in a permanent state of, I don't know what to call it. Confusion? Despair? She's like a speed freak out to find a cure. She grabs at anything that might give her a moment's peace. Heather and Joey are so confused, they forget how to tie their shoes right.”

“Kevin, listen.”

“But the firefighting will go the way of all her other fads. She's probably already losing interest, talking about throwing it up to train as a nurse. Or an optometrist. Or a dancer. Or a skydiver, maybe.” He sighed. “She'll never be happy. She's a terrible influence. Thank God I'm going to get those kids away from her before she wrecks them.”

“Kevin—” Nina put her hand on his arm.

Reading something in her expression, he shut up.

“They know about Alexandra Peck.”

Only two weeks before, during one of two panicky, weepy, middle-of-the-night phone calls to Nina, Kevin had told Nina a secret. After a big argument with Lisa, she had kicked him out of their bed and he had started sleeping with a seventeen-year-old police cadet.

In one of those programs that are nobly conceived but loaded with hazards, high school students rode around with patrol cops on evening shifts to observe, learn, and assist. Like police officers, they wore uniforms and looked like adults, but these were kids, half of them girls, while the cops they rode with one-on-one were almost all adult men.

Kevin, raised in a small Catholic New Mexico town, had married Lisa at twenty. When he met Alexandra Peck, he didn't know what hit him. “It just happened,” he said, and the shame in his voice over the phone only magnified the banality of his words. “We rode together for three months before I touched her. I fought it for a long time, but—Ali had no compunctions. She said she had fallen in love with me, and God, how that girl came on to me. I was so lonely. Nobody cared about me but her. In the end I couldn't resist.”

Next he would be telling her that the girl was very grown-up for her age. Nina didn't want to hear it. “How did it end?”

“She bolted,” Kevin said, “right after I asked her to marry me.”

“How is she now?”

“I don't know. She dropped out of the program. She lives with her parents, so I don't feel right about calling.”

No, Nina had thought. He wouldn't. As he talked, she thought about affirmative action, about bringing women into male-dominated professions, about human nature, about the victims of this particularly ill-conceived experiment in social engineering. Disgusted and disappointed in her client, she allowed a few cynical thoughts about the naiveté of the police-department human-services staff who had dreamed up this program, but she kept her opinions to herself.

Kevin's confession rearranged the balance of blame for the failure of the marriage, if Nina had cared to think about that, but she was Kevin's advocate, not his judge. Kevin had assured her during that late-night phone call he had been very careful and that no one knew, not Ali's parents, not his chiefs, and especially not Lisa.

Up to now, the story had stayed hidden in Kevin's file, existing only in Nina's scribbled notes on yellow legal paper.

Now Nina put a hand on the cold granite rock and told Kevin that Alexandra Peck had been discovered.

“Of course we can object to the late notice,” she said. “But Kevin, suddenly the case is complicated. The recommendations might change.”

His latest cigarette had burned down his finger. He dropped it.

“There's more.” Steeling herself, Nina told him her Bronco had been stolen the night before and that his file had been inside it. “It's possible—I mean, we have to consider whether whoever took my truck read your file and somehow, for unknown reasons, informed your wife or her lawyer about the contents.”

“Wait a minute. How'd you find out they know about Ali?”

“I got a fax in my office just a short time ago.”

“You think this has something to do with your lost files?”

“I just don't know. It's suspicious. On the other hand, they could have known about her for some time and waited until the last minute to spring it on us.”

“But how else—” Kevin stopped. “Is she going to testify?”

“Yes. She's been subpoenaed. She may be here today.”

“Then they knew about her yesterday, right? Before your files were gone.”

“Possibly. But it's also possible they got her in on very short notice.”

“My God. The kids. We've got to stop her!”

“I will object, but if the judge decides to let her take the stand, I'm afraid we can't,” Nina said. “All we can do is hope she's fair, Kevin, and hope the judge can put the relationship into perspective, as part of who you are.”

“Lisa did it,” he said. “You saw her yesterday. She's pissed at you, and believe me, she doesn't hold back when she's got an issue. She can't stand to be criticized, and you really let her have it. They can't steal my damn file and use it against me, can they?”

“I will object,” Nina said again. “It's wrong. But I have to give you the heads-up.”

“You let them take my file from you?” The news finally reached him.

Nina said, “I don't know who took my truck. I don't know if they found out about Ali from my file.”

“Don't try to defend yourself,” Kevin said. “Don't put a spin on it. Don't give me a song and dance. Jesus!” His mouth contorted. “I'm gonna lose the kids over this! You have to fix this!”

“Listen, Kevin. We can continue the hearing, give ourselves some time to sort this out. If they want to put Ali Peck on the stand on this notice, we have a right to prepare for it. Let's continue the hearing. That's my advice.”

“Continue it? For how long?”

“It depends on the judge's calendar.”

“I waited nine months for this hearing, which is only a temporary-custody hearing anyway. It's almost over. Today's the last day. So you tell me. Can you keep Ali out if we continue the hearing?”

“I don't think so,” Nina said. “The purpose of the continuance would only be to allow us to prepare for her testimony, you see?”

“She'd definitely testify?”

“Yes.”

“We wait God knows how long and then she takes the stand anyway? Why are you suggesting this to me? Object today. Stop it.”

“I can try. But if we don't ask for a continuance—”

“My kids are growing up! A continuance is only going to drive me crazy, you understand, Nina? Nine months I've waited, while Lisa jacked me around on the visits. Ali or no Ali.”

“It's time. We should go. Can you stay calm, Kevin?” Nina didn't feel very calm herself. Riesner's missile had launched and now zoomed through the air toward their flimsy bunker.