The Attorney (3 page)

"She's a feminist nut," says Jonah. "Has a problem with men. She has this organization to help wayward women and their children.

Self-appointed crusader," says Jonah. "Only this time she's chewed off more than she can swallow. I'll bury the bitch." As he says this, I can see the vein in the side of his head bulge. For a moment I'm afraid he will blow a major vessel in his brain, keel over on my desk.

"But how can I help you?" I ask.

"I want you to find out where my granddaughter is."

"You need an investigator, not a lawyer."

"Fine. Hire one. Hire the best," he tells me. "But I want you to be in charge. I trust you."

"You'd be paying me, and there isn't much I can do. You need information, and an investigator is the one to get that. You don't hire an electrician to do plumbing."

"You do if there are sizzling wires in the water," says Jonah. "I've already talked to the other lawyer about hiring an investigator. He says I'd be wasting my time. Suade's too careful. She covers her tracks.

Calls from pay phones. Never visits the places where she has the mothers and children holed up. She uses middlemen. It's like an underground railroad."

"If that's what she's doing, what can I do?"

"I need somebody to take her organization apart. Get her into court. Sue her if you have to. She's created these shell corporations.

This is one of them." He holds up the business card with her name on it.

"She has several others. She takes donations from people who believe in her cause. Go after some of them. Dry up her funds. Put pressure on the cops and the courts to force her to talk. I'll pay," he says. "I'll pay whatever you want. Money is no obstacle. All I want is my granddaughter back." I look at Harry. My principal concern at the moment is whether I would be taking the man's money on false pretenses.

"I can't make a commitment," I tell him. "There really is no legal case.

Other than the violation of the court order of custody."

"Then start with that," he says.

"We have no direct evidence that this woman, this Zolanda Suade, was involved."

"You know she was. I know she was."

"That's not evidence," I tell him.

"She came to his house. She made threats," says Harry.

"That might be evidence," I concede. "Still it's Jonah's word against hers."

"I was there," says Mary.

"Yeah. Don't forget Mary," says Harry. Now they're double- learning me.

"We can look into it," Harry adds. "We can at least do that much." Jonah is desperate, and now he's found an ally. Anyone not knowing Harry might be tempted to say that he is merely greedy.

But I know him better. He's a soft touch. He sees Jonah's problem as one with merit. Even if Jonah were financially destitute, Harry would be pitching me to get involved, to tilt at this windmill. The fact that Jonah has money makes it that much easier. "We can look into it," I finally say. There are smiles all around, puffing, and a lot of cigar smoke.

chapter TWO.

it is saturday, a quiet afternoon, ann i am doing up a few dishes in the sink. Through the window I can see Susan and the girls on the patio around the pool.

Coronado is an island only in the collective yearning of its inhabitants.

It is connected to the city of San Diego by a huge arching bridge, which the locals fought for years, and which now spans the harbor to the east.

To the south there is a seven-mile strip of sand known as the Silver Strand that wends its way along the Pacific to the communities of the South Bay and beyond them to the Mexican border.

Sarah and I have joined these refugees from the twenty-first century.

Our house is not large. It sits on j Avenue not far from Alameda, a small white cottage, single story with a quaint roof and white plaster walls, little-pane windows all around. It's a place that says "home" to both Sarah and me. A feeling we are trying to rebuild in a strange new city and without Nikki.

The house is set back from the street behind a high grape-stake fence.

There is a white flagpole with an American flag. This caught Sarah's eye. The privacy of the fence caught mine.

To the south the houses are larger, more expensive, some of them bordering on estates, until you reach Ocean Boulevard, where the houses are mansions. Just a few blocks farther on is the Del Coronado Hotel, a place made famous by Marilyn Monroe as a Florida resort in Some Like It Hot. The place is still hot, and very expensive.

We bought the bungalow because Sarah thought it was cute, something out of the Black Forest, and because she loved the swimming pool. It is a lap design and small.

The only thing smaller today is Susan's bikini, almost enough material for a pirate's eye patch. She is lying on a chaise at the far end of the pool, occasionally sipping iced tea from a tall glass, and reading. She is a voracious reader. She ravaged the morning paper over lunch, and now she is poring through some files from work.

Susan is married to her job.

I drop a glass in the sink. Fortunately, the water keeps it from breaking. My mind is not on the dishes. At the moment my gaze is fixed on Susan. She is athletic, her body tempered like fine steel and tanned; long, sinuous legs and not an ounce of fat. This she beats from herself with a monk's dedication at the gym nearly every day.

Though Susan McKay is nothing if not feminine, she could excel at professional bodybuilding. I have visions of myself on the beach being saved by her from some goon who wants to kick sand in my face.

She is tall, just a couple of inches shorter than I, with a swanlike neck, high cheekbones, and dark hair cut dramatically short and parted on the left in the style of a fashion model.

I have learned from sorry experience that she also possesses the fiery disposition of a Latin that belies the name McKay. The name is the only thing left from her marriage of thirteen years, except for her two daughters. She did not discard the surname out of deference to the kids.

Her maiden name is Montoya. Susan was born in San Diego.

Her family goes back here enough generations that they have lost count.

I am told that a distant ancestor once held a land grant from the king of Spain.

Susan looks over the top of a sheaf of papers and spies me looking at her through the window. She waves, beckoning me to come out.

I make a sign, as if to say, "In a moment." She smiles, an infectious flash of even white teeth.

I can hear the giggling kids in the pool. I take the dish towel off my shoulder and lay it on the sink next to the wet dishes draining in one of those metal racks, and head for the living room and the French doors leading out onto the patio. As I open the door the volume explodes, laughing children and splashing water.

"Daddy, are you coming in?" Sarah is hugging the edge of the pool, her hair shimmering and wet, beads of water running over the freckles around her nose.

"No. He's going to put some lotion on my back," says Susan.

She is already lowering the top of the chaise lounge and positioning herself to lie facedown.

"Then are you going to come swimming? Pleeease." Sarah is persistent.

"In a minute," I tell her. "You guys have fun. Right now there is something I have to do for Susan."

"Don't make it sound like such a chore." Susan gives me a wicked smile, and pulls on the string holding up the top of her bikini from behind her back. She holds it in place with one hand as she lies facedown.

Her body has a golden tone to it that is only partly genetic. We are in the balmy latitudes, above the tropics, not far from perpetual sun.

I sit on the edge of the chaise near her knees, spread some Australian Gold on my hands and warm it with friction. Then I begin to apply it to her shoulders and the upper part of her back.

"Mmm." She offers some sensuous moves, pressing the front of her body into the soft cushion of the chaise. "I thought you were never going to come out. I come over to play and you hide in the house."

"I wanted to get the dishes done."

"The dishes can wait. Your current assignment is to do this for the rest of the day." She gives me a little hip bump as she says it.

Susan and I met through a mutual friend three years ago. I had been tagged by the Capital City Bar Association to coordinate a criminal law symposium, two hundred sweating lawyers in a hot hotel ballroom eking out continuing-education credits in order to keep their tickets punched to practice law: a program that has since died under the heel of judicial review.

One of the items on the symposium's agenda was child abuse, its prevention and detection. Susan was the speaker. Another lawyer, an associate in my office, introduced me to her, and the rest, as they say, is history.

She was in the capital testifying on some legislation, fighting with lawmakers to get more money for kids. That night we met over dinner to discuss the symposium's agenda, and somewhere between cocktails and salad I found myself lost in the depth of her gaze and the music of her voice. I was smitten as I have not been since my days of youthful dalliance.

There was something in the chemistry that defied definition, as if I'd been sapped by some sensuous blackjack, candlelight and the deep sparkle of those Latin eyes, the passion with which she spoke of her job, a quest to save children abandoned and abused. It gave purpose to her life, focus and commitment that make those of us who are floaters, mere survivors, envious.

Susan is first and foremost a woman who knows what she is about. She is direct and at times can be intimidating. My initial reaction was a kind of affection born of admiration, with a component of sexual energy that loomed just under the surface.

She gives me a sideways glance through heavy-lidded eyes as if she is drifting off. I spread the lotion down her back.

"That's wonderful. You have magical fingers."

"What are you reading?" I ask.

"Documents in the Patterson case. What else?" Susan's job has been made markedly more difficult in the last few months by a burgeoning scandal within her office. Politicians are taking a close look at some of the practices used by her investigators to question young children in cases of alleged abuse.

"They want to tie our hands behind our backs," says Susan.

The use of anatomically correct dolls and suggestive questions to five-year-olds, some of them on videotape, has opened a Pandora's box of political and legal problems.

A dozen criminal defendants, some of them now in prison, have mounted a defense grounded on the charge that Children's Protective Services, GPS, has engaged in a witch-hunt, that it has tampered with the testimony of children to create public hysteria, this to justify budget increases and the public's perception of the department as a law enforcement agency.

Butch Patterson, a twice-convicted molester, is the lead defendant in these appeals. Susan is livid.

"This WAPUS, short for 'walking piece of human sewage," " says Susan,

"has a record the length of the Milky Way." She slaps the folder on the chaise beneath her head. "I'd kill to be able to show it to you," she tells me.

She cannot, because the file contains confidential criminal history information that is protected by law. For a public official charged with possession of the documents to reveal them is a felony under state law.

She could lose her job in a heartbeat, and probably face jail.

"Can you believe," she says, "that there are courses taught at the university, paid for by taxpayers, in which the likes of Patterson are referred to as political prisoners. Phi Beta Kappas telling us they should be released, turned loose so they molest again."

"Constitutional right. Pursuit of happiness," I tell her.

"Don't joke about this."

"Sorry."

"Now the state attorney general wants to get involved," she says. "He's supposed to be representing us. Instead he wants to see documents and videotapes from my office. This is not why I got into child welfare,"

she says.

"You got into it to work with kids."

"So why am I spending all my time on my knees pleading with politicians who want to grandstand? Show up at the scene of every tragedy and wring their hands."

"That's just like working with children," I tell her.

She laughs. "You're right. Oh, right there," she says as she wiggles her bottom and the small of her back.

I press my fingers into the desired area and massage. "There are other jobs, you know."

"No." Susan doesn't say another word, but turns her head on the chaise to the other side, away from me, a signal chat this line of conversation is at an end.

I am spreading Australian Gold toward the line other bikini bottom in the narrow hollow of her back, tawny skin like brown satin.

"Nice bathing suit," I tell her.

"You like it?"

"Uh-huh."

"I had to buy a new one," she says. "Two of my spare suits got ripped off in the house thing." Susan is talking about the burglary of her home the previous February.

"I think it was kids," she says. "Who else would take Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie and two bathing suits?"

"Some horny male burglar who likes to cross-dress," I tell her.

"One of your clients?" she asks.

"I'll check around." She laughs.

Susan is also missing a television set, a laptop computer that she used for work, some other electronics, and credit cards. We are still battling with her insurance company, filing claims though Susan has insisted on dealing with the credit cards and the credit-reporting agencies herself, a sign of her independence. I told her she was lucky.

There are people who will clean out your house and end up stealing your identity. You can spend the rest of your days fending off bench warrants for arrests on traffic tickets they get using your name, then failing to appear in court.

"I've wanted to talk to you for a couple of days," I tell her.

"What about?"

"I have a problem. Maybe you could help me with it." Deftly, without looking or moving her body off the chaise, she slides her hand along my thigh, scraping her fingernails gently on my flesh moving toward the open pant-leg of my bathing suit.