Unfit to Practice (24 page)

“What about all those lawyers that flood the courts by filing trivial legal cases?” Paul asked. “You hear a lot about them.”

“We already know you have a low opinion of lawyers,” Jack said. “Maybe if you'd gone on to law school yourself you wouldn't have that attitude. I told Nina where that jaundiced attitude comes from.”

Paul said, “You did, eh?” He fixed Jack with a stare. Nina looked back and forth.

“About time she knew, buddy.”

“Don't call me buddy right now, McIntyre. I'm wishing you had never horned in. You're useless. Are you gonna charge her six hundred bucks for this dinner?”

“You'd love it if she gave it up. Admit it.”

Paul said, “I sleep with one, I work for them, and I still talk to you, though I'm starting to wonder why. I have no chip. I got lucky and didn't get in. It's a lousy profession. It's a guaranteed heart attack by age fifty. So I will be blunt and I will say that if Nina gets drummed out of the corps, she may end up happier and healthier.” He wiped tomato sauce off his lips with his napkin, not looking at Nina.

“You don't care if I get disbarred?” Nina said, floored. “Don't you know how much I love—” She choked up. “Don't you understand that it's everything to me?”

“Anyway, this is the last supper. You're terminated, McIntyre.” Paul still wouldn't look at her.

“My job is never over until every single person involved in the file theft is dead of old age,” Jack said, “whereas you ought to hit the road, head home to your dying business, and give Nina a break from all this. I'm advising Nina of that. Nina, I want you to go home, take in a movie or something. Rest, babe. I think you squeaked through.”

“Thanks,” Nina said. She smiled and Jack smiled back at her.

“The next time I take you to dinner we won't even talk law,” he said.

“No reason for a next time, then,” Paul said.

Nina paid the bill, the only decision that evening Paul and Jack didn't dispute.

19

P
AUL KISSED
N
INA GOOD-BYE
and gave Jack the finger as he climbed back into his Mustang for the long drive back to Carmel. He drove fast to the highway, started to take a right at the exit to go west, then changed his mind and swerved into the left lane, making a left instead.

He headed east, driving all the way back to South Lake Tahoe thinking he might catch a glimpse of Nina's Bronco, but he never did. The night was beautiful, and the drive up and down the mountains into the wavery blue, black, silvery town stirred him, as it always did. In Meyers, he cut through on the Trail to avoid traffic, then booked himself back into a room at Caesars with the flirt at the front desk, who had no rooms unreserved for the weekend but found one anyway.

He didn't call Nina. He had work to do the next morning, and he didn't want any discussion or argument about how he would do it. He wanted to know who stole her files. Someone was after her, and he wanted to know who. He wanted to know whatever there was to know.

Sunday morning, showered, shaved, and fed, Paul hit the Yellow Pages. Lisa Cruz was listed, which he took as a good sign. Pioneer Trail led straight behind the casinos a mile or so to Woodbine Road. He took a right, checked out the street, then pulled back onto the Trail and parked out of sight around the corner. Pulling a clipboard with a pencil tied to it from the floor, he got out of the car and locked it.

Lisa Cruz lived a few houses down from Pioneer Trail in a neat cabin with a porch trimmed in blue. He knocked on the door of the house next to her cabin, then on the door beyond her cabin, then up and down the block, talking with her neighbors. He saw no sign of Lisa or her kids.

“I'm from the city,” he said, waving his clipboard officiously and making meaningless check marks when a friendly door opened here and there. “We're going to be doing some road work on Pioneer Trail next week and just wanted to let you folks know in advance so you won't be too inconvenienced.” Actually, this might not even be a lie. Road work on the Trail happened during the dry weather in preparation for winter every year. He was probably doing them all a favor, reminding them. “Work on the potholes and drainage. You should be getting a notice in the mail about this. 'Course, you know how the city is about this stuff. Schedules change, so don't bet the ranch on it.” He scratched his head and shared a laugh. Then he squeezed out any gossip worth squeezing.

After speaking with four people on that block who seemed to know what they were talking about, and two with strong feelings in the various matters, he walked around the corner to Lisa's mother's street to encourage further tattle.

Before hitting the police station, he called ahead to make sure he could chat with his buddy, Sergeant Cheney. Cheney answered the phone.

“You again?” Cheney asked.

“Did you get my message?” Paul asked.

“Yeah. I got that guy's record for you, and now you gotta quit compromising my integrity. No more favors.”

“How about a burger at Heidi's? My treat.”

“Now you mention it,” Cheney said, “I'm hungry and you owe me.”

They arranged to meet at the restaurant at one o'clock. Paul arrived early, picked a corner booth, and sipped coffee, enjoying the spirited racket of the happy weekend crowd. Cheney arrived late by fifteen minutes.

“You're skinnier every time I see you,” Paul said, standing to greet him.

“Don't try to butter me up,” the sergeant said, pleased.

He really did look better as time went on. His smooth caramel skin glowed with health. Cheney, somewhere in his fifties, had a much younger wife he worked hard to keep happy. “Don't tell my wife but I switched to a diet where you drink these disgusting drinks instead of eating real food.”

“Sounds hard,” Paul said.

Cheney picked up his menu. “Nah. Much easier not to eat than eat the crap she wants me to eat.”

They ordered. While they waited for their food, Cheney filled Paul in on Cody Stinson's record.

Their order arrived, Paul's a thick sandwich, Cheney's a salad. Cheney proceeded to eat most of Paul's sandwich.

“Man, there's nothing like a little bacon fat to get my mouth drooling and my insides moving.”

“Good. When you're finished, I'd sure like help figuring out Officer Jean Scholl and Jeffrey Riesner.”

Cheney crumpled his napkin and set it on the table. “I knew this was going to cost me.” He licked a blob of mayonnaise off his finger. “I guess this means you've heard the rumbles.”

“Yeah,” Paul lied. “What I want to know is, what's your take on all this?”

Sunday went well, mainly because Nina and Bob spent most of the day at Matt's house helping him to put some new asphalt shingles on the roof before the winter weather arrived in full. She was doing what she could to make something up to Matt. After the incident at the women's shelter, Matt had called her. The idea of his pregnant wife with her rifle fired up and ready to take out a dangerous criminal type had brought back all his fears about Nina's law practice. He asked her again to keep his family away from her clients.

Matt would be pleased if she left the law. She hadn't paid much attention to these attitudes of Paul's and Matt's in the past, but the lost files had spotlighted just how difficult the past few years had been. During her first homicide case up here, she had been shot; she tried not to think about that, but she carried the scar. She had been threatened and so had Bob. The man she loved more than she loved herself, her husband of only a few weeks, had been killed by someone she had trusted.

She had landed in a challenging town, doing criminal-defense work. And she had wanted the challenge. Now she had the reputation and the respect she sought, but at such a cost.

So when they stopped at four and Matt and Bob sat down to rest and watch TV in the living room, Nina took Andrea out back. She respected Andrea as the most well-balanced person she knew, and the wisest.

“I wonder if I'm relieving suffering, or causing it. I'm confused, Andrea.”

“You do good work, Nina,” Andrea said. “You help people in trouble and you don't get much support. I'm proud of you. Don't forget that.”

Nina kicked at a stone that had fallen off Matt's rock wall. Squirrels ran along the top, chittering. “It's all I ever wanted to be. I don't have any other identity.”

“Now, there you're wrong. You're a mother, a householder, a person full of promise, and you're young yet. What are you, thirty-four? Five? If you had to change jobs, you could go back to college.”

“And study what?”

“Well, psychology for instance. You could be a counselor. Or a teacher.”

“I am a counselor. I counsel people, I plan their lives, I defend them when they're attacked, I help them order their business affairs, I speak for them, I take care of their problems. This work is so broad in scope—I never get bored, that's for sure.”

“I know it's hard. The responsibility is killing,” Andrea said. “I just want to say that I admire you. Now don't turn away. Let it sink in. Accept it. I admire you. A lot of people admire you. Are you listening?”

But she wanted to know what to do with her life. She felt so troubled by what was happening, she had lost her touchstones. “That wasn't what I was getting at.”

Andrea laughed. “But that's what you got.”

“We're bummed that it's come to this,” Brandy said, frowning, hands in her silk trouser pockets.

“We're very unhappy,” Angel agreed, even her hair subdued. She looked like Annie Lennox. Sweet dreams were not made of this, however.

“What has it come to?” Nina asked, knowing she did not want to hear the answer. Monday morning often went haywire as the weekend's buildup piled in. Sandy tapped in the next room. Messages sat in sorted piles on the desk. Forty-seven other cases called to her from the file cabinet. Meanwhile Brandy and Angel blocked the doorway to the inner office.

“Ladies, take a seat,” Nina said. “What's on your mind this morning?”

They came in and sat down. “It wasn't my idea,” Brandy said. “And Angel's husband, Sam, thinks it stinks, too. We want you to know that.”

“No question. It stinks,” Angel agreed.

A knock on the door interrupted them. Nina got up to answer and found Sandy there.

“Nina, Paul's on the phone. Will you take the call?”

Nina apologized to the two women, closed the door halfway behind her, stepped into the reception area, and picked up the phone.

“I'm sorry to butt in like this. I understand you're busy.”

“It's a bad time,” she said. “Something's up with Angel and Brandy. I'm in the middle of it.”

He hesitated. “I can call back.”

“No. Tell me, what's going on?” she asked. Sandy licked an envelope slowly. Then her hands took their stations, hovering over the keyboard, unwilling to break into the conversation.

“Listen, Nina, I've got several things to tell you but since you're busy, we'll discuss those later. But I want to say—things went frosty at that dinner. I shouldn't have said what I said about you practicing law.”

“It's okay. I'm taking a poll, actually.”

“The condo in Carmel is always waiting for you.” He paused. “You are so dear to me.”

Nina glanced back through the crack in the door into her office, where the two women were engaged in a frantic, whispered debate. “Paul, I'm sorry. I can't think about that right now. I can't even talk anymore.”

“No problem,” he said. “I'll check in later.”

“Okay.” She put the phone down.

Sandy's fingers resumed their customary tapping. Nina walked back inside her office.

“We've been beating around the bush,” Angel said, taking charge, “but now, here goes.”

Brandy stood up suddenly and went over to the window. She put a hand on the ledge but never once looked outside. She looked at Angel, at the desk, at the file cabinets, at the framed documents on the wall. She looked everywhere except at Nina. “I told Bruce the whole story, beginning to end, about what happened at the campground, about seeing Cody Stinson, about meeting him in the woods and Angel getting knocked over and me getting grabbed—”

“He was upset,” Angel added unnecessarily. “First off, he hated that she was here without him, and second, Cody Stinson went to see him and scared him good.”

“I really don't want you to get the wrong idea about us,” Brandy said. “We're not vindictive or vengeful people.”

“Not at all,” Angel said. “None of us are.”

“So when Bruce showed up at Angel's on Sunday with this letter, we were surprised.”

“Shocked, you mean.”

Nina got the drift, and drifted away. She looked out the window at Mount Tallac, crowned with white. Then she turned her attention to the lake, the ancient, sacred lake. She considered the hill of beans that was her life, insignificant beside those two regal natural features, and felt a stab of sorrow, because petty or not, it was her hill, her life, and she had loved everything about it. Now along came a letter from a lawyer and it would explode and she could do nothing to stop it. Subterranean terror. Fractures in her beautiful geography.

Maybe the women had some inkling of the full effect of their revelation, and maybe not, but at last Brandy managed to say what they had come to say.

“Bruce wrote a complaint to the California State Bar about you. And I signed it,” Brandy said, standing up.

“So did I,” Angel admitted, also rising.

“We thought it would be really low not to bring it to you personally and say that—”

“We're awfully sorry.”

Nina couldn't trust herself to speak, so she didn't speak. She kept her back to them, trying to control a quiver that had started up around her shoulders and threatened to take over her body.

“Sorry,” they said again in unison, and left.

No sooner had the two women wandered out than the phone rang.

“I am in conference,” Nina said to Sandy. Closing the door, she leaned against it, hyperventilating. Only two things in the world could inspire this level of dread. The other was an IRS audit. The audit was definitely a remote second to a complaint to the state bar. Eyes closed, she took the blow. When she started to feel like she couldn't stand it, she leaned over and let her arms hang and made herself breathe. She had had a panic attack once before and she was afraid it might happen again. Be cool, be cool, she told herself.

Call Jack, call Paul, call—

A knock. “Phone,” Sandy said. “They said it's important.”

“Not now.”

“Urgent.”

“Who is it?”

“Heritage Life. The adjuster in the Vang case, Marilyn Rose. She says she has to talk to you. Something about the check.”

Like a ninety-year-old in ill health, Nina leaned on the desk as she went around it and sank into her chair. She rubbed her face and somehow put Bruce Ford aside.

“Hi, Marilyn,” she said. “How are you?”

“Hoping you didn't send that check to the Vangs yet.”

“Why not?”

“Well, did you?”

“Over the weekend.”

“Well, then we're both in deep shit,” Marilyn said rapidly. “Now I'm definitely going to get canned, and I owe it all to you. I trusted you. I liked you. You're going to get a letter and by God you'd better have an explanation or my ass will be out on the street, and I've got a mortgage and a sick husband and two kids and if that sounds like I'm scared shitless, well, Counselor, I am in fact scared shitless. It hurts me, it does, the way you used me, and it amazes me that I could misjudge another human being the way I misjudged you. My supervisor is sitting in her office right now writing up a report to three vice presidents in our company, and I'll be spending all evening groveling on their carpets. I'll be applying for employment opportunities at Hooters with this job market. But by God, Nina, you're going down with me. You are. I'm not going down alone. I can't believe a fellow woman would do this to me—”

Nina held the phone away from her ear and rubbed her temples, where the headache drummed. Sandy watched from the door. “Get on the other line,” she mouthed.

She listened again. Marilyn said, “I'm so horribly disappointed,” and burst into tears.