Motion for Murder (28 page)

"Nonetheless," Ken said, unruffled. "When I leave the practice on January first, it will be with fond memories of Douglas." His smile wobbled. "Mostly."

I sat up straighter, blinking. "Leave the practice?"

Ken nodded. "I'm sixty-seven years old. The law practice is for younger men."

Wally thrust out his chest and preened.

"It's also for gentlemen," I said, ignoring the Boy Lawyer's evil stare. "The office won't be the same without you."

He patted my hand. "That's kind of you to say."

It was more than kind; it was true. I wasn't sure I could work at Parker, Dennis without Ken Parker. His leaving could only mean Wally was ripe for partnership. The very notion of Dennis and Randall was repulsive enough to make me start compiling my resume.

Janice stormed over to grab a piece of chicken before plundering the buffet table. Donna followed in her wake, letting Wally pawn off the smallest piece. Missy climbed out of the pool, dried herself with exhibitionistic slowness, wrung out her hair, and joined the circle, which by now included everyone but Paige, who hadn't moved. I was beginning to think she was unconscious.

"How'd Doug get a law degree anyway?" Wally apparently had no compunction against speaking ill of the dead.

"I heard it was mail order," Howard said with a snicker. Emily Post wouldn't have been too proud of him, either.

"What made you want to become an attorney?" Ken asked Wally. "Too much jury duty?"

Wally chuckled politely. "I wanted to have a positive impact on peoples' lives." He sounded like he was reading off a Teleprompter. "I wanted to help the aggrieved find justice." He glanced at Howard, who tipped his head meaningfully toward Ken, and Wally said dutifully, "How about you, Ken?"

"I wanted to make a lot of money," Ken said.

"I wanted to become a lawyer." Donna's voice was almost lost in the laughter. "I've always loved the law. My father was a police officer. I
"

"You don't have enough charisma," Wally told her. "You'd never keep a jury's attention."

Donna sat back, red-faced.

Maybe it was the wanton denial of the chicken or his general pomposity, but I couldn't stand for that. "Hey," I began.

And Janice went on the attack, beating me to it. "That's a hell of a thing to say to her. Who do you think you are?"

Wally flushed. His Adam's apple jumped. Sweat would have beaded on his upper lip if he'd had one. It was all I could do not to cheer. Even Paige turned her head and opened one eye.

"If she wants to be a lawyer," Janice said, snapping off each word, "she should be a lawyer."

"Agreed. Agreed." Wally held both hands up in surrender. "Donna's a bright kid. She should go to law school if she wants to."

"Damn right she should," Janice snapped. "She'd be a hell of a lawyer."

"I'm sure she would," Wally said, eager to placate.

I grinned, happy now that I had a blueprint for dealing with Wally: unrestrained aggression.

"How about you?" I asked her, to diffuse the situation. "Did you always want to be a bookkeeper?"

"Hell, no." She took a long drink of lemonade. "Who in their right mind would want to crunch numbers all day long?"

"She wanted to be a veterinarian," Ken said. Janice glanced at him with open surprise. "You said so in your interview," he told her. "In fact, didn't you go to vet school for six months?"

When I got home, I had to cross Ken off my list of suspects. He really was just an old sweet man. With a frighteningly good memory.

"I did." Janice sounded almost wondering. "But I decided medicine's not for me."

Instantly it occurred to me that maybe medicine wasn't, but poison was. Six months of vet school could have given her enough knowledge to use Spanish fly as a method of murder. I'd never known about Janice's first career choice, and it surprised me. She didn't seem warm enough to work with animals. She hardly seemed warm enough to work with ledger sheets. I'd never felt completely comfortable with Janice. Of course, she'd been telling the truth about the computers, and I didn't feel comfortable around most people.

"The first time I witnessed a euthanasia," Janice was saying, "I cried for three weeks. I decided right then and there I didn't have the stomach for that line of work."

Huh. Cried for three weeks and changed her chosen profession. That didn't sound much like a murderer.

"How about you, Howard?" Wally asked. "I'm surprised you didn't go into practice with your father."

Howard shook his head. "He got my brother Frank. That was good enough for him."

"You're still in one of the big three professions," Missy assured him with a smile and a strategic slip of the towel. I blinked. Was Missy hitting on Howard?

"What about you?" he asked her, smiling right back while he ogled. Sap. "I imagine you probably wanted to be a singer or dancer, something like that."

"Not me," she said, and his smile faltered. "I always wanted to meet a rich man and be a kept woman."

The group fell into stunned silence until Missy giggled. I wasn't convinced she'd been kidding, but I laughed along anyway. Paige had turned her face back to the sky, and Howard's cheeks were pale. But officially, camaraderie had been restored.

"To tell you the truth," Wally said to no one in particular, "my family tried to push me into engineering. You know my brother's a chemical engineer." I nodded along with everyone else, although I hadn't known Wally even had a brother. "That's why I majored in chemistry. But the thought of doing that kind of work for the rest of my life…" He shuddered. I almost felt sorry for him. "So I became a lawyer instead," he finished.

"And your parents disowned you," Ken said with a small smile.

Wally shook his head. "Let's just say they hold a dim view of attorneys in general."

And him in particular
was the unspoken completion of that sentence. Now I officially felt sorry for him. Sitting there in his sauce-smeared apron, he looked like a little boy anxious for his parents' approval. Maybe Wally's obnoxiousness was the byproduct of years spent trying to impress his family with his success.

"I'm going to need you for a few hours Monday night," he told me. "I've got to get some things together for the Barrett trial."

"Well, this isn't Monday." Missy reached for my hand. "It's Saturday, and Jamie and I are going swimming." She smiled down at me. "Aren't we?"

"There's no way
" I began, because I'd already planned to bury my swimsuit in Curt's backyard when I got home.

"Oh, I almost forgot." Wally pulled something out of his pocket. "I found this under the kitchen table last week. You're always so well dressed—I knew it must be yours."

Ken shook his head. "I don't think so. Perhaps it belongs to Howard."

"It's not mine," Howard said, slipping an uncertain glance toward Missy, who'd already given up on swimming, covered back up, and was munching on a slice of watermelon.

I craned my neck to see. It was a beautiful mother-of-pearl tie tack, the sort of accessory a lawyer would wear to impress a client or a jury or a mistress. Ken wore them all the time. Howard and Wally never did; they relied on their purported dazzling legal minds and their BMWs to impress the masses. Apparently tie tacks were becoming yet another symbol of the death of gentility. The thought gave me a twinge of nostalgic sadness, thinking of my father in his worn-out suit, showing such pride in the tie tack my mother had given him years ago. But it wasn't just the tie tacks. It was Dougie's death, Ken's retirement, Paige and Hilary's new hobby, Sherri's futile husband search, my own unrequited lust for Curt's legs.

 I cracked open a beer. If I was having any more fun, I'd have to start taking antidepressants.

"It was death," I told Curt on Sunday night. We were sitting on his deck watching fireflies play hide and seek in the yard. Rain was in the forecast, and the air was heavy with humidity. Curt was milking a bottle of beer. I was ignoring a Coke. Ken's barbecue was a day behind me, and my depression was still rampant, weighing down every cell in my body. Guess I wasn't adapting well to all the changes taking place. I was confused and angered by my inability to win the shell game my colleagues were playing. It was starting to feel like even I'd had motive to kill Dougie. He was certainly demanding more of my attention in death than he ever had in life.

I took a sip of Coke. It scraped down my throat while I stared gloomily into the darkness. "Did I tell you Ken's retiring?"

"Three times."

"The place won't be the same without him."

"Right," he said. "When he goes, that'll leave only the wackos. Present company excluded." He frowned. "I think."

If he was looking for a fight, he'd have to work harder than that. "They're not all wackos," I said. "Missy is
"

"Shopping for a guy who's loaded." Curt looked at me. "Sure you don't want to quit that place?"

I shook my head. "Not unless you're giving me a pass on the rent."

He grinned. "We could work it out in other ways."

Whoa. That kind of thinking was what had kept me up all night. It was a tempting idea, but I didn't think it was a good one. I might not respect myself in the morning.

"You know, there are other jobs out there," he said, talking more to his beer than to me. I watched him, noticing the slump of his shoulders, the hang of his head. It was clear something was bothering him. Maybe the same thing that was bothering me. After four years of regarding Curt as a brother, I was suddenly seeing him as a man with great legs attached to a better body. I didn't have great legs, and no one had ever told me I had a great body, but I was the only female living under his roof and maybe that counted for something.

I shook my bottle of Coke a little to watch it fizz. "I'll leave soon," I said. "I'm just not ready yet."

"When will you be ready?"

I glanced at him. "What is this?"

A firefly lit up beside his head. He swatted it away. "I'm worried about you. I don't want you there until the cops can nail this down. It's hard to believe you're safe."

"Wait a minute." I tried to ignore the shiver than ran through me. "You told me it wasn't random. You said because it was the protein powder
"