Deadlock (16 page)

“Wait.”

Millie looked at him, wondering what he could possibly want.

“You feel up to shooting some hoop?”

|
4

Anne Deveraux flipped open her phone. “This better be good.”

“It is.”

“Ricks?”

“It ain’t Yasser Arafat.”

“Detail me.” Anne shot a cigarette into her mouth. She was sitting on the balcony of her apartment, ripping through the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
via laptop. She wore loose jeans and a gray T-shirt, what she called her Sunday best.

“Our girl went to church with Mom this morning,” Ricks said.

“Big deal.”

“That’s not all.”

“Give it to me.”

“She went back later to meet the guy.”

“The minister?”

“Same one she was talking to before. She went back to the church and met the guy at the front door. Then they go inside.”

“Where is she now?”

“That’s where I left them.”

Anne looked down at the street. From her fifth-floor perch the people looked like dolls. She felt like moving them around. “All right,” she said. “Stay on it. Just don’t stick out like a sore thumb.”

Click.

Anne leaned back in the canvas chair and ran her mind around Dan Ricks. There was nothing to worry about. She knew she could trust him, because he feared her. She knew he feared her because she never entered any relationship without the power to inspire fear.

Except one.

That relationship was not with one of the so-called power guys in D.C. They were really cupcakes when it came right down to it. They would go all soft and crumbly in the face of a woman like Anne. The sex would be great the first night, but after that feelings of inadequacy would creep in under the macho shell, and soon the guy would be goo. One time she’d picked up a lobbyist for a tobacco company, and right as he was fumbling with her buttons she started singing Pat Benatar’s song “Hit Me with Your Best Shot
.
” That was cruel, she knew, but also telling. The guy was out her door within five minutes.

The older power brokers held no allure for her. Guys like Levering. She respected them, of course, but was not interested in trophy status.

She was twenty-eight and beginning to think the single, professional life would be her lot. Not a bad thing. She didn’t want kids. She didn’t even know if she wanted a long-term relationship.

When she met Ambrosi Gallo, though, things changed.

Anne checked her watch, and noted she had three hours to get over to Dulles to catch her flight to New York. She wished it was sooner. She wished she was on the plane right now, the sooner to be in Ambrosi’s arms.

Anne actually lit her cigarette now, and then felt something weird, something in her gut.

She’d always had great instincts. Had to. To survive. When her parents died helicoptering over the Grand Canyon, her step-dad at the stick — that might have messed up any other sixteen-year-old. But Anne had already overcome her stepfather’s abuse, and she chose to get even stronger. Eventually got into Harvard. Made her way into the citadels of power. Her instincts were impeccable.

She took another deep, wonderful drag on her cigarette, and checked out the street again. Same activity. Same going and coming. Same —

Then she saw him. On the corner just below her balcony. The way he was dressed cried out homeless person. But even from five floors up she could read him. He had a scraggly beard, a dark face. His eyes were wide. And he was looking directly at her.

She went cold. Had to be a coincidence. He had to be looking at something else. From down there, he couldn’t zero in on her. She paused a moment, waiting for him to turn away. He didn’t.

So she did. She looked at her laptop again. Took another puff on her cigarette. Told herself to relax.

But she couldn’t relax. She felt the guy’s eyes on her. Angrily, she looked back down at the corner. She was going to give the guy a glare that would melt rock.

But the man was gone.

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5

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Millie said. The sun was hot on the half-court asphalt behind the church. Her ribs and legs were still tender, but here she was. About to shoot a basketball with a Christian minister. If Helen could see her now . . .

“You sure you want to try this?” Jack Holden said.

“Yes,” Millie said. “But no quick moves.”

“I won’t even play defense on you.” He was in his shirtsleeves, the little bead necklace exposed. “A Supreme Court justice lofting them in Santa Lucia? This is historic.”

“How did you know I played?”

“I read a story about you once. Said you liked to play ball after court. I think that is so cool.”

Holden flipped the ball to Millie. The ball felt good in her hands. It had a thin veneer of dirt on it, giving her a good grip. She approached the free-throw line, set herself, and shot. The ball hit the back of the rim and bounced out. But no pain in her ribs.

“Good thing we’ve got all day,” Jack Holden said.

Cheeky fellow,
she thought. “I
do
have other things to attend to, Mr. Holden.”

Holden recovered the ball and passed it to Millie. “More important than b-ball?”

“Amazing, but true,” she said, even as she spun the ball in her hands, readying herself to shoot.

“Tell you how we can make it more interesting,” Holden said. “How about we play a game of Horse? I win, you decide to let the Bible back in public schools.”

It was a joke, obviously, but still cut a little close. “You want to tear down the wall of separation right here?”

“I’ll give you two out of three, how’s that?”

Millie held the ball. “You are not what I expected,” she said.

“Is that a compliment?”

A warm breeze from the desert caressed Millie’s face. “I don’t know yet.”

“Shoot,” he said.

She did. And missed.

Holden ran for the ball, limping slightly, and returned it to her. “Before you make up your mind, I actually have a confession to make.”

Millie waited for him to explain. She was growing more curious about this man by the second.

“I did in fact give my sermon a little extra today when I saw you.”

“Extra?” Millie said.

“Extra oomph,” Holden said. “You know, energy. Like when an actor is out there doing Hamlet and discovers Spielberg is in the audience.”

“It was for my benefit, this oomph?”

“Yep. Before I tell you why, though, I need to tell you the second part of my confession.”

“There’s more?”

“Yeah, the worst part, too. I’m a lawyer.”

Millie tried to keep her face from showing stark surprise. “Well, I won’t hold that against you.” This was getting really interesting. “Where did you go to law school?”

Holden bounced the ball a couple of times. “Yale.”

Another stunner. “Who was your Constitutional law professor?” Millie asked.

“Larry Graebner.”

“Graebner! You’re kidding.”

“Life’s funny, ain’t it?”

More than funny. Incredible. “How on earth did you go from Yale to this?” She hadn’t meant it to sound condescending, though it did.

Holden, if he was at all offended, didn’t show it. Instead, a faraway look came to his eyes, with a tinge of sadness. “It’s kind of a long story.”

She found, suddenly, that she wanted to know what it was. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Not now. We’re about to play Horse.”

“Please,” she said. “I really want to hear it.”

Holden took a deep breath and said, “Okay, but only in the interest of full disclosure. I guess if I’m going to change the course of legal history through basketball, it’s only fair you know where I’m coming from. Let’s grab some shade.”

They walked to a bench under the church eaves. Holden spun the ball in his hands as he talked.

“After Yale I landed with a big-time civil litigation firm in New York. I was, as the saying goes, on top of the world. I had a wife and daughter, an apartment on East 86th. Season tickets for the Knicks. Bought all my suits at Bergdorf’s. And, idiot that I was, I had an affair. With a temp in the office. A nineteen-year-old actress. My wife found out about it and, bam, left me, took my daughter. I tried to find them, but Yolanda, that was my wife’s name, was good at what she did, which was to avoid me.”

He reached into his shirt and held the bead necklace in his hand. “My daughter was six when she made me this. It’s the only thing of hers I have left.”

Millie almost reached out to touch it. The whole story felt ineffably sad.

“Anyway, I dealt with it by using drugs. Cocaine, mostly. It was the eighties, after all. The city was covered in snow. It didn’t take long for the firm to boot me out. You know those stories they tell junior high school kids to keep them off drugs? All true. At least it was in my case. The low point came when a drug dealer shot me, tore a big hole in my leg. I almost bled to death.”

A shadow passed over Holden’s eyes, covering everything for a moment.

“Long and short of it, I got out of the hospital and had serious thoughts about ridding the world of one more loser. Me. Still couldn’t find my daughter. So I had nothing left. I found myself holing up in a thirty-dollar-a-week hotel in Newark called the Nazareth. I kid you not. The Nazareth Hotel. And one night that first week, when I was thinking about the best way to kill myself, some of the guys in the lobby were watching Billy Graham on TV. I sat down to listen. And I got hit with a laser beam, right here.”

Holden pointed to his chest.

“I mean, it was like somebody opened me up and poured hot liquid into me. I know this is a cliché, but he sounded like he was speaking right to me. Like he knew exactly what I needed, down to the letter.”

He paused a moment, seeming to gather fragments of memory. “Next thing I know I’m crying, I mean bawling like a baby. The other guys, old geezers mostly, are asking me if I’m having a heart attack. Funny thing is, that’s exactly what it was. An attack on my heart. And when Billy Graham gave that invitation, I got down on my knees on the cheap linoleum of the Nazareth Hotel and prayed for forgiveness of my sins.”

Millie remembered hearing testimonies as a little girl. For some reason, they never really reached her. They were usually laden with emotion and Millie always filtered them through a sieve of cold objectivity. She could not recall ever being moved.

Now, for some strange and uncomfortable reason, she found she was moved by Holden. He was not embellishing or ranting or spouting preacher-talk. He told his story from a deep place inside him and, through some miracle of human connection, it touched her.

“Skip ahead a few years,” Holden said. “I went into the ministry. Started pastoring a church upstate in Syracuse. Did that for a time, and felt called to rescue work.”

The term sent a chill through Millie.
Rescue
, the anti-abortion term for doing things like shutting down family-planning clinics. She’d written an opinion once denying protesters the right to cross a certain buffer zone near such clinics.

“I ended up in prison,” Holden said. “Now
that
was funny.”

“Funny?” Millie said.

“Big-time Yale lawyer in the joint for pro-life civil disobedience. Larry Graebner must have had a conniption fit.” Holden sighed quietly. “I finally got out and my lawyer had some news for me. He’d located my ex-wife and daughter. Only my daughter was dead.”

Millie’s chest tightened.

“Drug overdose,” Holden said. “Fourteen years old.” Holden looked down at his hands. “So I sued God.”

His tone was even, unemotional, as if he were reciting the facts of some mundane petty theft case. Then he looked up at her. “I wanted to sue God, tell him what I really thought about him. Disprove him. To myself. I was going to walk away from the ministry.”

“What happened?”

“I wrote up an indictment,” Holden said. “I ended up with a huge legal brief against him. It started to work on me a little bit funny. I found myself arguing God’s side, too. Back and forth. I felt like I was in a body-switching move. But I ended up with my faith back. It hasn’t always been easy since then, but I find that brief is sometimes a lifeline for me. And it’s taken on something of a life of its own.”

“How so?”

“I distribute it in the prisons,” Holden said. “I do some chaplain work at the Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, or down at Wayside. I’m told this brief gets spread around on the inside. And mailed out to other prisons across the country.”

“The prisoners really read it?”

“Sure. Most of the prisoners are jailhouse lawyers to one degree or another. This is something I hope will interest them, get them thinking. And maybe . . .”

“Yes?”

“If I reach one person, maybe in a way it’s like reaching my daughter. Or a way to atone for not reaching her. Does that sound crazy?”

“Not at all.”

“Hey,” he said jauntily. “Want to read it?”